Why Canada Is Having A Diplomatic Crisis With India

One powerful ethnic group influencing national policy against a nation not deemed all that important for the nation? Seems quasi-functional to me.

Try living in a nation where a single man can shut down the entire government just because he thinks doing so will stall his criminal trial. Now that’s fucked up.

I’m starting to see videos about how Canada’s been planning for trying to maintain with a FUBAR superpower on its main border.

I have often heard the saying that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
I have also seen attempts to craft an operational and functional definition of terrorism which would permit dispassionate analysis beyond the reach of the saying noted above.

The best approach to such a definition that I have seen is the concept that terrorism is the pursuit of actions designed to scare a target or outrage a target or offend a target into doing something against the target’s own long-term self-interests when the pursuer of those actions is not strong enough to make the target take those actions by plain brute force.

So the spectacular bombings and stuff carried out by Begin and his Irgun against British positions and personnel in British Mandate Palestine were not designed to force the British forces out by brute force because Irgun was not strong enough to achieve a brute-force force-out of British forces. The attacks were designed to enrage the British forces into attacking many or all the proto-Israeli Jews in British Palestine Mandate, in order to get all those ordinary proto-Israeli Jews to hate Britain ( or hate it more than before) and add their own violence to Irgun violence against British forces, in order to create a spiral of making the British Palestine Mandate ungovernable.

The mainstream proto-Israeli Jewish leadership in British Mandate Palestine got out ahead of Irgun by assisting the British authorities in finding and arresting all possible
prosecutable Irgun operatives within the borders of British Mandate Palestine.

Or so I have read.

Likewise, we could call 9/11 a terrorist attack, or maybe an enrage-ist attack, designed to enrage America into actions which al Quaeda was not strong enough to force America into by pure brute force. And it worked.

( By the way, the anthrax attacks of a few days later were domestic terrorism by American operatives against American government figures and facilities designed to terrorise and terrify the Senate into passing the so-called Patriot Act. Since no intelligence community propagandists were dumm enough to think that the anthrax attacks could be blaimed on al Quaeda or Taliban or “Muslims”, they have tried to memory-hole the anthrax attacks altogether and hope nobody remembers them or discusses them at all. Those anthrax attacks were operational terrorism in action).

@Capelin
Give me a break. We’re not talking about people losing their jobs or bank accounts, just not being able to pick a vacation destination. And if they can afford trips to India they’re not THAT common. Won’t somebody please think of the people who might have to go to Bamff or Hawaii instead? The horror!

Justin Trudeau is a bought and paid for oil company tool, who once in a while takes a short bit of time off. But he doesn’t grovel enough to suit them so they back Conservatives anyway. China? Pffft. Stupid nonsense.

Soredemos

I’ve really lost patience with the entire genre of immigrant who never lets the old country go and is essentially just a parasite trying to direct their new host countries into pursuing some odd world revanchist grudge.

I see your point; particularly when they were (very often) part of the caste or class (very often, upper caste or class) that had created the problems in their countries which in turn caused the turmoil that caused them to flee, and thus not representative of the majority of the people ‘back home’. Cuban expats are the classic example, Polish expats another (virulently anti-Russian who somehow forget that it was the Russians who saved Poland from the Nazis, who had literally planned to exterminate the entire Polish nation and culture). The American Irish helped fund the IRA’s attacks in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, as I recall, making the US a “supporter of terrorism” by its own criteria.

I think you once replied similarly about Vietnamese expats, and yes, some of the ones here do oppose the current regime and actually there were some arrests in Vietnam of US expats years back accused being part of a US-hosted group which was trying to undermine the current regime, supported by Vietnamese-Americans. My impression however is that most have accepted the status quo, though they ‘don’t like Hanoi”, as one of them growled at me. There are tensions within Vietnam too, between Southerners and Northerners dating back to that war, which I sometimes think provides a useful analogy to the US’s own Civil War dating back 150 years ago.

I’ll second what Sorodemos said about old revanchists demanding you support their outmoded wars or jihads of several decades back. Canada’s clearly full of Nazi swastika lovers, see the Vice Premier Chrystia Freeland’s Monument to the Victims of Communism. (Which directly lists SS officers & troops as “victims”!) I live here in northern Minnesota and a short time back had to step away from an outdoor gardening group I was associated with at the Unitarian Church ‘coz an insane older Finnish American dude harassed me about not being down with the latest Neocon Crusade, the usual (brainwashed) Why do you love Putin so much taunts. The little bit of discussion we had before I stepped away, he said that the Finns opposed Russia back in the WW II era and that was “good”, also told me “Most Russians are bad people” though I doubt he knows many, if any!! I told him about living in Nicaragua for 4 months in 1983-84 when Contras were killing, raping, burning down peoples crops, etc. & why I could never support the Empire after seeing its victims face to face (including meeting a 30-some year old Chilean who had a prosthesis for half of one leg because of whatever torture the Pinochet regime did to him in prison.) What happened in Latin America 40 years ago was of no interest to him, I guess he writes “those people” off for being brown-skinned and deserving to be a slave/ oppressed class because “we whites” are better!! (Same attitude to Palestinians, I’m sure, in fact I directly called him out on that in an email explaining why he’d harassed me out, he didn’t deign to respond to that point.) I’m pretty confident that the Gandhi quote, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” (which doesn’t mean I’m a pacifist, we’re ALL entitled to self defense against predators) is legit and applies here. PS– thank you to Capelin for calling out PLG’s Kick down attitude toward Sikhs & other immigrants in Canada. I expect folks at “the Daily Kos”, MSDNC or Fox to shit all over the ordinary folks just trying to survive. A little disappointed to see that kind of arrogant rancor (perhaps even hate?) on display at this website. Oh yeah, support the demagogues like Trudeau, they’re so amusing & so much fun . . . They’ll amuse us to death one day.

I have long held that real foreign policy is done in secret and announced later, and that any foreign policy posturing in the media is entirely for domestic consumption.