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The Left is Destroying Western Civilization


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14 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

They’re invited now.  Imagine how the US would feel about Canada becoming a  military and security extension of China. Oh wait…

Ukraine is not invited and has never been invited to join NATO. And it's not like Ukraine brings much to NATO anyway but trouble. How would a Ukraine in NATO be more dangerous to the Russians? Their military was crap until Russia started attacking them and NATO started arming and training them.

The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is a paranoid delusion. But if it wanted to it has countries right next to Russia already, notably Estonia and Latvia, and soon Finland.

Edited by I am Groot
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14 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

They’re invited now.  Imagine how the US would feel about Canada becoming a  military and security extension of China. Oh wait…

Canada is tearing itself apart in its attempt to leverage America by joining with the Chinese Communists

it always was a delusional plan

none the less, like Ukraine, Canada is now drifting into no man's land

between two Hegemons caught in Thucydides Trap

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26 minutes ago, I am Groot said:

The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is a paranoid delusion.

it's not about invasion

the conflict is over the collapse of Mutual Vulnerability

NATO, led by America, is exceeding the threshold where the Russians are able to keep up

the Russians increasingly could not inflict Mutually Assured Destruction by Unacceptable Losses

as America & NATO inexorably expand our Counterforce capabilities

Preemptive First Strike weapons

such as Tactical Trident & B-21 Rader,

backed by global Ballistic Missile Defense

this forces the Russian's hand, strategically, within the context of the "MAD" Balance of Terror

they have to do something to check the exponentially increasing NATO Counterforce dominance

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15 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

They’re invited now.  Imagine how the US would feel about Canada becoming a  military and security extension of China. Oh wait…

It's a wonder we haven't been carpet bombed back into the stone age just on general principles.

BTW shouldn't you be out freedom fighting or something?

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42 minutes ago, I am Groot said:

 But if it wanted to it has countries right next to Russia already, notably Estonia and Latvia, and soon Finland.

the threat is all to Russian naval bases

the Black Sea Fleet at Crimea, the Baltic Sea Fleet at Kaliningrad,  the Northern Sea Fleet at Murmansk

Cold War is a maritime conflict

he who rules the waves rules the world

the main reason the Russian army is so poorly equipped in Ukraine

is that most of the money has to go to pay for Russia's nuclear submarines

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2 hours ago, I am Groot said:

Ukraine is not invited and has never been invited to join NATO. And it's not like Ukraine brings much to NATO anyway but trouble. How would a Ukraine in NATO be more dangerous to the Russians? Their military was crap until Russia started attacking them and NATO started arming and training them.

The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is a paranoid delusion. But if it wanted to it has countries right next to Russia already, notably Estonia and Latvia, and soon Finland.

It’s more complicated than that.  There are millions of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.  Eastern Ukraine was called NovoRossia from the time of Catherine the Great.  The Crimea used to be part of Russia.  Would the US be okay with Nova Scotia becoming a Chinese or Russian protectorate?   Look, Ukraine for Ukrainians.  Let regional referendums decide in the east.

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1 hour ago, Zeitgeist said:

It’s more complicated than that.  There are millions of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

most of them are choosing to fight against the Kremlin apparently

as there is no more Russian city in Ukraine than Kharkiv

yet they threw Putin back at the gates in a battle straight out of the Second World War

this insane total war of annihilation is in fact driving ethnic Russians in Ukraine towards the West

even the Russians in Russia have no hatred of Ukrainians, everybody in Russia has friends in Ukraine

they only reason they can be incited to fight

is that Putin has convinced them that America is the real enemy

that is the play, this is revanchism against America for the Soviet self inflicted defeat in the First Cold War

Ukraine is just a proxy

you know how this works, Zeitgeist

the Liberals play the same card in Canada

Iron Curtain against the Declaration of Independence

who was going to overthrow Justin Trudeau ?

not Putin, Trudeau said it was the Republicans

which,  God willing, will come to pass in the end

Trudeau is Putin, Putin is Trudeau

may all these tyrants fall, in the face of American Freedom

the shot heard round the world, glory, glory, hallelujah

Edited by Dougie93
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So here is another example of how the Left is destroying Canada.

From the Globe and Mail, a leftist reporter speaks happily about how the teaching of history in Canadian schoolrooms now focuses on grievances and abuses, encouraging separate ethnic groups to look at only their own grievance history and wallow in being victims while hating the evil oppressor majority. It's important to indoctrinate children with the information that Canada is a terrible country, after all.

Canadian history was overdue for a rewrite

Charlotte Gray is a biographer and historian who won the Pierre Berton Award in 2003.

The Governor-General of Canada usually chooses her words with careful, unsmiling deliberation. But her anger at the way that Canadian history has, until recently, been taught in our schools was unmistakable.

“It has been uneven and it is unfair,” Mary Simon said. “This country is so diverse, but for the longest time our history didn’t reflect the richness of that diversity. Indigenous people were misrepresented. This was racism presented as fact – as history – something to teach children.”

Last November, I met Ms. Simon in the Citadelle, the head of state’s official residence in Quebec City. Outside the window, way below the 18th century stone ramparts, the wide St. Lawrence River glimmered in the winter sunlight. Generations of Canadian children learned in school how European explorers – first the French, then the English – laboriously made their way up that river to claim for their monarchs this “empty” patch of a vast continent that they had recently discovered.

The story evolved, according to their textbooks, as Canada unshackled itself from European empires and established first a federation of “two founding peoples,” then complete independence. High-minded statesmen replaced the swashbuckling adventurers, and established “peace, order and good government” (POGG) for the settler society. It was a grand narrative, designed to explain how the modern state grew and to build a sense of nationalism.

Except that it was often based on dubious scholarship and, as the Governor-General pointed out, it excluded so many other stories: “We have glossed over and denied events or policies or truths that are hard to face,” she said. The histories of Indigenous peoples, non-European immigrants and women were invisible.

Ms. Simon, who grew up in the Arctic with an Inuk mother and a father of English origin, was an adult, slowly emerging as a forceful Northern voice in constitutional debates, before she realized the ignorance of most Canadians about life beyond the strip of settlement near the U.S. border.

“I was always astonished at how non-Indigenous people had no knowledge of Indigenous people. They just lumped us all together as ‘Aboriginal people.’ They didn’t know anything about who we were, or our lives, or what residential schools were.”

However, that was Canada up to the late 20th century. Ms. Simon’s presence in the Citadelle, as Canada’s first Indigenous head of state, symbolizes the way that this country is struggling to make its history and its politics more inclusive. Today, the Governor-General speaks frequently and forcefully about the need to “seek out the truth of our history,” as she put it in the Queen’s University Tom Courchene Lecture last year.

But if the demolition of the old self-serving narrative of Canadian history, focused on all those POGG white guys, was overdue, what are students in public and high schools across the country learning in its stead? While scholars within universities argue about historicism versus presentism, and angry crowds pull down statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, what is happening in classrooms?

I had heard some answers to such questions earlier in the day, at the presentation of the prestigious Governor-General’s History Awards to 13 teachers in the Citadelle’s ballroom. The teachers had been selected by Canada’s National History Society, the Winnipeg-based organization that wants citizens today to understand their country’s past better. The range of these teachers’ projects was astonishing for anybody who had not set foot in a history classroom in the past 15 years.

For example, Cynthia Bettio, who taught a class of Grade 10 high achievers in a large Richmond Hill, Ont., high school, explained with pride, “In my classroom, we don’t just learn history, we do history.” The curriculum required the class to study Canadian history from 1914 to the present day, and Ms. Bettio designed a course in which those years were seen from the perspective of traditionally under-represented groups, including Indigenous people, racialized communities and women.

The students, a large number from non-European backgrounds who typify urban diversity in today’s Canada, learned what questions to ask of any historical narrative, and how to assess and evaluate different sources. Ms. Bettio told me that she “really wanted to ensure that my students could see themselves in the history of the country they call their own.”

For example, Sikh students realized that there were events in the past that were relevant to their community, such as the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. Students whose families had fled the war in Syria glimpsed parallels with that conflict and what happened in Holland during the Second World War. Ms. Bettio described how “they saw the connections between past events and the realities they have as Canadians.” By the end of the year, the students had learned to think about the ethical dimensions of what has happened in the past, and how events are remembered.

More than a 1,000 kilometres away, in the small Manitoba town of Hartney (population 462), teachers Carla Cooke and Tracey Salamondra had taken an entirely different approach to the same challenge: Showing their Grade 11 students “how to do history.” Rural teenagers rarely see themselves reflected in large, national narratives, but their teachers developed a course that had little to do with Confederation or the Charter of Rights and everything to do, in Ms. Salamondra’s words, with “history that exists outside the textbooks and the cities.”

These teenagers were invited to produce interpretive panels for a trail through a local park. They visited the local museum to do artifact research, scoured online newspaper archives, conducted interviews with local historians and volunteers, and constructed a narrative about Prairie settlement. Ms. Salamondra stopped worrying that her students could not afford to attend well-publicized school trips to the Vimy battleground and enjoyed seeing how enthusiasm for a local history project spread through the whole school.

“When kids know their community,” Ms. Salamondra said, “they know part of themselves.” The students also realized how one-sided historical accounts can be. They noticed that their local museum had disproportionally few Indigenous artifacts and sources.

The teachers I met in Quebec City came from seven of Canada’s 10 provinces, and were as likely to work in small elementary schools as high schools. In Halifax, for example, a group of 22 students in Grade 1 chose to research a little-known Black doctor, Dr. Clement Ligoure, who had played a key role in helping the injured after the 1917 Halifax Explosion. Their teacher, Natasha Camacho, showed them how to find materials in local museums and archives.

“They were thrilled to discover for themselves that Dr. Ligoure lived and practised just a few steps from their school,” she said.

The class, which included five Black students, reported their findings in writing and art projects, and produced a documentary. They were shocked to learn that their families and neighbours had not heard of this important figure, because he seldom appears in most accounts of the 1917 disaster. They sent petitions to the mayor requesting a heritage plaque in front of Dr. Ligoure’s house; this gave them “a sense of their own agency,” Ms. Camacho said. Even six-year-olds can reshape history.

Luisa Fracassi, who teaches in an east end Toronto school where nine out of 10 students come from minority groups, developed a course for her Grade 10 history class that she called “Immigrant Voices” and involved changes in Canadian immigration policy from the 1960s. The students participated in two virtual tours of the Pier 21 Museum in Halifax, on Jewish and Asian immigration, looking at primary sources such as photos and letters.

Next, they attended a workshop on how to conduct oral history interviews. Then each student conducted one, often with a grandparent, which they then had to transcribe and shape into a story. Ms. Fracassi explained how the project helped students see how their stories connected them “to the broader history of Canadian immigration.”

These days, there is little Canadian history in Canadian classrooms – only one mandatory high-school course in most provinces, and no compulsory courses elsewhere. That gives teachers only a small window to instill an interest in our collective past. And most teachers are facing students who have already learned not to take anything on trust, and who frequently come from families who have been in this country for less than two or three generations.

So the past two decades have seen a revolution in history teaching in schools, as educators rewrote the curriculum so it might resonate with today’s students. The focus today is on acquisition of history skills, rather than assimilation of facts, so students can see how to “do” history for themselves. Layered on top of this is the new attention to Indigenous history – one of the “calls to action” in the 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Many of the educators in Quebec City had put the spotlight on Indigenous history. Barbara Giroux’s Grade 1 class in Ottawa had tracked news stories about Indigenous people today, then formulated the question, “Do all Canadian children have the same rights? If not, why not?” Jen Maxwell’s Grade 12 class in Abbotsford, B.C., researched the TRC’s 94 calls to action, then developed their own ideas about how to take concrete action on those calls.

In Winnipeg, elementary teacher Jacqueline Cleave’s students explored the TRC’s calls to action, then researched the issues of colonization they address through meetings with Indigenous elders and visits to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. The book that the students produced, featuring the calls to action in child-friendly language, is now in local schools and libraries.

In some cases, students themselves selected their topic. In Manitoba, a group of students at Winnipeg’s Westwood Collegiate came up with a project on the Holocaust, then educator Kelly Hiebert organized an extracurricular history society to help them pursue it. The teenagers produced a documentary featuring interviews with nine Holocaust survivors in the city about the hatred and antisemitism they had encountered in Europe and Canada.

But before they embarked on the interviews, the students had consulted historians and educators including officials at the United States Holocaust Museum. Production of the video involved a specially composed soundtrack, plus archival film interspersed through the interviews. The documentary, titled, Truth Against Distortion: Survivors Speak Out Against the Rise of Hate, has been entered into several film festivals, widely distributed, and is available on YouTube.

“A big part of the documentary was the parallels between the past and Canada today,” Mr. Hiebert explained. The students themselves were unsettled by the passionate media debates about mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Making the documentary, he said, showed them “how history has to be told truthfully, with evidence from experts and primary sources, not just websites and Twitter. They became very critical consumers of social media.”

The teachers knew that their approaches were controversial. I heard several of their anecdotes about angry parents asking, “When are you going to stop this propaganda?” or “When are you going to start teaching proper history?” The various projects might get students to engage with history, but even some of the teachers’ own colleagues asked why there was no overarching theme to explain the “big picture” of this country – the historical development of today’s Canada that might give students a coherent sense of national identity.

Rose Fine-Meyer, a curriculum expert at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and one of the National History Society’s judges for the awards, is as impatient as the Governor-General with that argument: “The old ‘master narrative’ of Canadian history was always a false construct,” she said. “Why do you need a dominant narrative? There is no single story – except our interrelationship with each other on this land.”

Civics and social-studies classes teach how government works and the requirements of citizenship. Today’s history classes highlight a diverse, multicultural and fragmented history, in which Jacques Cartier, Mackenzie King or Lester Pearson may or may not have walk-on parts. The best teachers, in Ms. Fine-Meyer’s view, introduced the craft of the history profession to their students, then encouraged them to take those skills outside the classroom and use them in hands-on experiences to explore multiple and diverse perspectives on their topic.

At the Governor-General’s History Awards ceremony, Ms. Simon encouraged the teachers to keep building “platforms for inclusivity,” and for addressing head on “inequality, diversity and inclusion.” She said that those who bemoaned “what they call a ‘rewriting’ of history or questioning historical figures from our country’s past” were missing the point. “We are telling a fuller history.”

It is certainly a larger history, and I would be happy to see any child taught by the teachers I met. But it is also a radically different approach to history than the one I absorbed in my own education, during which teachers drew on the past to shape national pride and literary skills.

Today’s history educators in Canada put the emphasis on “critical thinking skills”: They teach students to gather, analyze, interpret and assess diverse historical evidence. These are skills essential for an informed citizenry in the age of social media, conspiracy theories and polarized politics. The narratives I was taught certainly had a propaganda element, but the Canadian history being taught today has abandoned any attempt at a modern, integrated narrative that encompasses a far wider range of experiences.

Perhaps such a narrative is impossible in a sprawling, diverse country like Canada, with a demographic churn that transforms communities from one generation to the next. Yet there are distinct, common values that have persisted and evolved through the years – support for gun control, bodily autonomy, compromise rather than conflict, health care as a common good. The roots of those shared values, which make Canada the country it is, lie in the past – back to Confederation and beyond.

 

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22 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

It’s more complicated than that.  There are millions of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.  Eastern Ukraine was called NovoRossia from the time of Catherine the Great.  The Crimea used to be part of Russia.  Would the US be okay with Nova Scotia becoming a Chinese or Russian protectorate?   Look, Ukraine for Ukrainians.  Let regional referendums decide in the east.

They wouldn't be but they wouldn't' invade over it either. Letting the east vote in an honest vote to stay or go would have been a reasonable idea before the invasion but in practical terms it's pretty much off the table now.

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25 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

They wouldn't be but they wouldn't' invade over it either. Letting the east vote in an honest vote to stay or go would have been a reasonable idea before the invasion but in practical terms it's pretty much off the table now.

I think it depends.  If the Canadian federal government allowed or encouraged a foreign takeover of Canada by, for example, China, that wouldn’t be okay with the Canadian public. Wouldn’t it be important for NATO to ensure that such an undermining of the sovereignty of a NATO member be prevented?  I find it interesting that Trudeau is so soft on China yet claims to be a defender of democracy in Ukraine.  Proxy war in Ukraine seems like a convenient distraction from Canadian domestic issues.

Edited by Zeitgeist
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11 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

I think it depends.  If the Canadian federal government allowed or encouraged a foreign takeover of Canada by, for example, China, that wouldn’t be okay with the Canadian public. Wouldn’t it be important for NATO to ensure that such an undermining of the sovereignty of a NATO member be prevented?  I find it interesting that Trudeau is so soft on China yet claims to be a defender of democracy in Ukraine.  Proxy war in Ukraine seems like a convenient distraction from Canadian domestic issues.

Well you're making it very complex -  now you're suggesting that a foriegn nation seized control against the will of the people. The 'how' of that is important.

The us could petition for canada to be removed from nato and that would be their more likely avenue.

But how they would address the specific issue is highly questionable - it would depend a little on how china came to manage to take over canada without the people being ok with it.

As to trudeau - he doesn't give a flying fig about democracy. He's under pressure from the other nato leaders to chip in and the public opinion at least in the beginning favoured helping ukraine. It gave him a chance to look tough as well, just like he 'orderd the balloon to be shot down"  when in reality the americans said "Ima shoot that balloon, is that ok with you?"

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On 3/5/2023 at 10:29 AM, I am Groot said:

Ukraine is not invited and has never been invited to join NATO. And it's not like Ukraine brings much to NATO anyway but trouble. How would a Ukraine in NATO be more dangerous to the Russians? Their military was crap until Russia started attacking them and NATO started arming and training them.

The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is a paranoid delusion. But if it wanted to it has countries right next to Russia already, notably Estonia and Latvia, and soon Finland.

Yanukovych was democratically elected, as determined by outside observers at the time. It was his ouster, led by the USA and NATO, that made the whole house of cards come down.

Because he would not sign on to the Ukraine- EU Association Agreement and did not play along with the globalists.

Edited by OftenWrong
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46 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:

Yanukovych was democratically elected, as determined by outside observers at the time. It was his ouster, led by the USA and NATO, that made the whole house of cards come down.

Because he would not sign on to the Ukraine- EU Association Agreement and did not play along with the globalists.

That’s the main problem: Both Russia and NATO/EU are manipulating Ukraine’s domestic affairs, so it’s disingenuous for us to say Ukrainians must decide Ukraine’s affairs and Russia must bud out when we’re doing similar things.  The “Ukraine joining NATO” carrot is provocative of Russia, which might be fine if this was just about keeping Russia out of Ukraine, but NATO membership actually triggers our immediate declaration of war against Russia.

Again, let the occupied territories have referendums observed by multiple parties.  Keep the matter of joining alliances out of the discussion until the people in the regions of Ukraine decide their fate.  We may see new borders as a result of referendums, which is fine as long as the decisions are made democratically by Ukrainians.

Edited by Zeitgeist
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