Let us be blunt: if Quebec has the right to establish its independence by a referendum, then the Crimea does, too —along with the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk) and Taiwan and everyone else, everywhere else. If not, we're back to the phony sovereignty (and even phonier empire-building) of the Napoleonic wars. How, after all, was Poland supposed to establish its independence during the reign of Napoleon? And Haiti? Oh no, let's not give ourselves nightmares by talking about Poland and Haiti.
It just so happens that the American military directly ruled Haiti from 1915 to 1934 —but why not 1935, I ask you? Do you suppose they were driven out by overwhelming force? The Americans conquered and ruled the Philippines from 1899 to 1946 —but why not 1996, I ask you? The American colonization of Afghanistan was over in the blink of an eye by contrast! What kind of empire is this that is perpetually giving up its conquests without a fight? Napoleon was defeated in Haiti: not the Americans. Nor were the Americans defeated in Afghanistan or the Philippines: after a certain point, as if staggering aimlessly, they simply wandered away. Many of "the finest minds" amongst the morons at the Hoover Institution will explain to you that America has never been an empire at all, putting great emphasis on the very aimlessness of this staggering.
The philosophical shallowness of this principle is so astonishing that it is rarely written down in textbooks, and can never be set out for discussion on university chalkboards: the morality of the Vietnam War is questioned in terms of how and why it began, never in terms of how and why it ended.
Suddenly, democracy didn't matter anymore —and so the American war for democracy in Vietnam ended. This is the same "formula for peace" demonstrated so recently in Afghanistan, and that the pious believers in Neoliberalism now hope will resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: if we could just resign ourselves to accepting Ukraine as a Russian satellite state with a government as pseudo-democratic as that of Belarus, none of these people would need to die. And please allow me to add, in parallel: if there were no difference between men and bees, nobody would need to vote to choose the queen, and there would be a perfect equality in the distribution of hexagons and honey. The cruelest word in the English language is two letters long: if.
Meanwhile, inexplicably, democracy continues to matter in South Korea and Taiwan, so these remain outposts of the American Empire, armed to fight for the very same freedom that the rest of the world isn't supposed to believe is worth fighting for. Quebec, for example, is not supposed to believe that their freedom is worth fighting for —nor Scotland. That would be very inconvenient. Democracy in Myanmar: inconvenient. Democracy in Vietnam: very inconvenient indeed —embarrassing, even. Democracy in Hong Kong: the less said the better.
And what if the indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada decided that their sovereignty didn't matter any less than the independence of Crimea or Luhansk? This would be the apogee of inconvenience for an empire that recognizes sovereignty everywhere except as a limit to its own authority: just as Cuba is recognized as having sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay, numerous indigenous tribes are recognized as sovereign within the United States —but they cannot oppose the will of whoever rules in Washington in even the slightest way imaginable. It would be even more inconvenient if referendums counted the votes of indigenous people as somewhat more important than inhabitants whose ancestors had arrived relatively recently, as has been the central problem in the history of democracy in Fiji, a cautionary tale of multiculturalism-gone-wrong that is absolutely never mentioned in the English language news: the indigenous people of Sakhalin island might feel somewhat differently about the island's fate than the average Russian engineer who only arrived to work in the gasoline industry after receiving an education in Moscow. Ah, yes, and how should this catuskoti be applied to Israel? Unthinkable —change the subject immediately. First you mention the history of Haiti, now this. Dinner is ruined.
Comparisons to Thucydides (and the war between Athens and Sparta) became unfashionable as soon as they became salient: the rationale for the Spartan Empire was neither democracy nor tyranny, but instead the promise of "autonomy" —including (but not limited to) the meaning of "having one's own laws" under Spartan protection. On the level of propaganda, this was contrasted to having local democracy paired with the Athenian legal system; how much freedom any subordinate city-state might actually have if its residents chose to believe the Spartan propaganda (rather than the Athenian) is another question entirely. Autonomy, in this ancient sense, is so unfashionable as to be inconceivable, along with women wearing any kind of fabric that conceals the shape of the vulva at the gym: just as inevitably as all mankind must adjust to the unexpected sight of "the glute bridge" being performed in skin tight spandex, we must all adjust to living in a world ruled neither by treaties nor declarations of war, where overt hostilities between empires are perpetual beneath an almost translucent layer of spandex stretched thin. In this century, there is no autonomy for anyone —and no possibility of legal or moral repercussions for assassinations, targeted drone strikes, missile volleys, or even outright wars. What America does to Iran they can do to anyone, anywhere, at any time —and, of course, the Iranian Empire is even worse, no better.
In 1599, there was a referendum on Philippine independence. Not in 1899. The American Empire has been very centrally built on the denial of this principle —the Quebec principle— that is so fundamental to Canada's evanescent existence. About the only thing the Americans have in common with the Taliban is their opposition to allowing the Afghan people any kind of referendum to decide their own destiny —preferring, instead, to rule and be ruled by the sword. Neither in the year 2001 nor in the year 2014 did the people of Afghanistan have any choice about being colonized by the American military; did they have any more or less choice when they were conquered by the Taliban (again) in 2021?
For Russia, the consequences of a consistent commitment to the principle (that political independence requires neither more nor less than a referendum) would not be entirely convenient: they could lose control of any number of territories that might want at least as much independence as Belarus already enjoys, if not quite so much independence as Poland. Is anyone here old enough to remember a referendum in Chechnya in 1991? No, me neither. Along with all "the lessons of history" that the left wing wants to lecture me about, it is forgotten. Forgetting is the better part of wisdom; knowing is misery, I assure you.
Today, many people live with the mistaken idea that the Canadian and American Empires are morally identical, after all, they are built atop one and the same graveyard of palpably absent indigenous people, and they have one and the same tradition of bowdlerizing the philosophies of Athens and Rome to come up with excuses for imitating British parliamentary democracy no matter how little it may resemble the earlier examples of Athens and Rome. In fact, the moral basis of the Canadian Empire is entirely different, and I would say "profoundly different" if there were anything profound about it: Newfoundland joined via a referendum and so, by the same mechanism, we accept that they can leave again at any time. So too for Quebec. Newfoundland's unification was decided on the second ballot by only 52%, so we can't even pretend that the referendum needs to be overwhelming to be decisive. So too for the Cree and Ojibwe and the Inuit: if they genuinely decide they can survive without subvention from the federal tax system, they can "go it alone". The Canadian ideology is one of disintegration opposed only by inertia and shared social services: Canada has no reason to exist, and we know it. That is precisely why Donald Trump's unmasked imperialism is irresistible to us: it is the temptation of a better tomorrow that no political leader in Canada has dared to offer the electorate for more than a hundred years. It opens the door to Florida and Hollywood and New York as never before: suddenly, we turn our faces toward an infinite horizon that is simultaneously exotic and familiar —very different from Romania joining the EU in 2007 and surveying their new frontiers. A Romanian seeking his or her fortune in Paris would have a great deal to be afraid of; there is no such trepidation for a Canadian looking south.
The left wing has no interest in debating the morality of the American Empire because they would prefer to dismiss it entirely, without any depth of thought: human beings do not determine things to be good or bad when they are presumed not to exist at all —nor (dangerously) if the presumption is half a step removed, that these things ought not to exist at all. We have no sincere interest in debating the morality of the flat earth hypothesis, for example, and we give no consideration whatsoever to the ethical implications of "young earth creationism": these things either do not exist, or else ought not to exist, from our self-important perspective. For something to be moral or immoral it must first make sense, rather than being dismissed as nonsense; the left wing dismisses the American Empire as just that, nonsense. Conversely, the right wing is motivated to delve deeply into the morality of the empire but they find themselves incapable of thinking it through because their whole worldview remains so tragically and ineluctably Christian. America is not Christendom: even when Americans find themselves at war with the Islamic State, they are not fighting for Christianity, but merely against Islam. When Americans find themselves at war with the Chinese and the Russians, it is even more difficult to define what it is they're fighting for —certainly not democracy.
If you cannot define victory, do not fight the war: this was the obvious lesson to be drawn from the idiocy of Obama and Bush, yet we now find ourselves —as never before— fighting in more and more "inconceivable" wars. There is no doubt, in praxis, that the people of Greenland would benefit enormously from being annexed by the United States of America. The people of Canada would, too, and yet we are staring at an advantage in praxis without a principle. The philosophical poverty of the American Empire is so profound that when the mask comes off we can only laugh at its face laid bare: what could be more absurd than Canada and Greenland joining the American Empire? What could be more absurd than regarding the United States of America as —morally— no different from the Russian Empire of Vladimir Putin? Communism is dead in one place and Democracy is dead in the other: what is it, now, that they are conquering the world for? The inability to articulate an American philosophy entails the inability to administer an empire, here, there, everywhere: from Afghanistan to Greenland.
If membership in the Athenian Empire means democracy, with limited autonomy, there's a rationale for the Athenian Empire. If subordination to Sparta, instead, means autonomy, with limited democracy, there's a rationale for it, too. There was a time when the Russian Empire meant Communism. There never was a time when the American Empire meant democracy: that's the tragedy of Afghanistan and Haiti and the Philippines, too.
Donald Trump's deepest wish is to be taken seriously: that nobody should laugh at him. Even when he is offering something that would drastically improve life for each and every citizen of Greenland and Canada, we are indeed laughing at him, in reply. The idea that being incorporated into the American Empire is superior to local independence is utterly absurd —and yet absolutely true. North Korea would be better off today if it had been ruled by Japan, continuously, and therefore never became separated from the South: this is equally unthinkable, equally true. Or do you suppose, in one such parallel universe, that South Korea would nevertheless have been separated off by a peaceful referendum, instead of war? If there were a parallel universe in which the United States (then called the 13 colonies) had never been separated from Canada, would they have ever considered the option of partitioning north and south (dividing Sault Ste. Marie and Niagara Falls) by a peaceful referendum?
With Canada or North Korea, equally, we must ask: if independence wouldn't be worth having though a referendum, why would unification through a referendum be worth opposing?
