Can Canada and the USA Find the Middle Way?

At the end of WW ll both Canada and the USA made bad choices haunting our existence to this day; both could have chosen the middle way and rejected it.

To find The Middle Way is to find an essential equilibrium

As the multipolar world emerges countries worldwide have to assess and act on what their place will be in it.

Canada and the USA, two countries, the first a colony of the latter—an empire in decline. Each in their own right, blind to the middle way.

The end of WW ll was one of the most important pivot points in world history. The greatest war ever had been fought. A new era was dawning and every country on earth had important choices to make. Some had to start rebuilding from the ground up. Others benefited from the war, and still others were paralyzed in poverty and under development. There were great potentials to be pursued and great vulnerabilities to be exploited .

Today we are at another momentous pivot point. We are at this one because nations are as fallible as the leaders that run them. Bad choices made almost a hundred years ago, come back to haunt us with a new intensity that gathers momentum proportionate to the amount time they have spent pushed under the carpets in the halls of power. Too much of what is happening in the world now is a direct manifestation of mistakes made back then.

Whether it is our personal lives a or the chessboard of geopolitics mistakes made reverberate through history, lingering in the shadows poised to re-emerge with a renewed virulence.

We think we can ignore history but it is the final arbiter of our every action and reaction. When we slander history we slander ourselves and the legacy it passes to us.

At the same time it must be said there are powerful unrelenting forces determined we are ignorant of history as it is the true definition of who and what we are. Without a knowledge of history we are zombified amnesiacs wandering in the wastelands of endless wars and chaos. we are too easily manipulated by tyrants, false prophets and hideous ideologies.

One of the ruinous fractures in Western societies is the chasm that exists between the truths of history and the nefarious political and geopolitical agendas the agents of chaos pursue with their fascist agendas.

They are burning the books like never before as they try to incinerate the truths of their crimes.

The collective West has spent the last hundred years slandering history to pursue empire leaving a huge chasm between political agendas and the truths of history. The existence of this chasm has to be reconciled and warfare doesn’t get the job done. Warfare in these times is Pyrrhic and ruinous to all.

The West is in a position where powerful persons and entities are calling the shots. There is too much power concentrated in too few hands and too many of the power brokers are unelected and unaccountable for their actions and policies. Politicians at every level in the West are acolytes to the vested interests controlling them. Democracy has been suspended. Hybrid warfare has enslaved Western populations with no regard for future outcomes and the costs to our society.

Where equilibrium is sacrificed to the chaos of war the costs run out of control and can be terminal, especially so in these times.

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At the end of WW ll both Canada and the USA made blunders that haunting existence today, both could have chosen the middle way and rejected it.

Then as now there is a huge disparity in the populations of the two countries, with the US having roughly ten times the population of Canada. It was easy to conclude the US was ideally situated to become a major world power, just how major was yet to be defined. Canada was poised to be a progressive middle power and exemplar for the rest of the world; but its geopolitical proximity to the US was both promising and threatening.

The USA consumed by arrogant triumphalism saw no middle way and proceeded to become the warfare state declaring war on the world, as did the The Dulles Brothers— two of the most power bureaucrats in the history of the world as they laid the ground work for what the US has become today. They set the ship of state on a course where powerful bureaucrats, vested interests and ideologues would rule over elected legislatures and presidents. It was then and is a rolling coup d’etat to this day.

In 1945 Canada was a former British colony and fledgling democracy with a population of 12 million people. We were faced with the choice of being a modern democracy or American colony. To be a modern democracy required a thrust of intention and adopting a middle way, given we live in the shadow of the empire. We quickly opted for colonial status and riding the coat tails of the empire, and the devolution of our democracy to where we are now the replete colony. We are an echo chamber of the empire next door, where the middle way may no longer be an option.

Where America was enslaved to the exigencies of being an empire and the violence that goes with it; Canada was colonized to America and its wars becoming the empire’s apprentice.

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The concept of the Middle Way of course comes to us from Buddhism, not a religion but an ethical way of living our lives in harmony with ourselves and others. Needless to say this applies to us as individuals as well as to nations of the world. For the collective West we are a long way from adopting a Middle Way; We are barbarous Philistinic societies determined to put ourselves in the ditch. We are led by self-serving false prophets and charlatans.

The Buddhist middle way is akin to our classic liberalism— a Middle Way— and democracy as a way of implementing it. We like to boast we are disciples of social democracy when have abandoned both socialism and democracy to the tyrannies of war and fascism. We lay claim to being exceptional; but only in the most negative and delusional sense.

As we abandon democracy and socialism we reject the Middle Way.

When we choose “hard power” over “soft power” is another rejection.

Refusing reciprocity, rapprochement and detente are others.

Following false prophets another.

War, of course, is the ultimate rejection, psychotic episodes, where we fall into the grimy pit of barbarism.

The Middle Way only comes to us when we know ourselves and our histories, and our roots. Where these are taken from us we exist as zombified amnesiacs at war with others and ourselves. We are so vulnerable to being divided and conquered.

As we externalize our own short comings on to others, through racism, bigotry, scapegoating and war these are the hollowing of our societies. Externalizing our shortcomings on to others is childish devilry.

Only conscious societies pursuing virtue will achieve freedom and success.

Seeing past the tumult is a challenge in itself. As East and West must mentor each other the Middle Way is a beacon to lead us forward.

The Middle Way is there for the taking, but do we have the intrepid fortitude, foresight and leadership to pursue it?

The beacons are there for us to find.

Afterword

“One of the things I am going to do over these five chapters is describe that hijacking. The end result will be the portrait of a society addicted to ideologies — a civilization tightly held at this moment in the embrace of a dominant ideology: corporatism. The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good. Corporatism is an ideology which claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don’t.”—

Saul, John Ralston; Saul, John Ralston. The Unconscious Civilization (The CBC Massey Lectures) (p. 2). House of Anansi Press Inc. Kindle Edition.

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Seeing the world as it is, open in new tab to see full picture

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