The Gathering Storm in the West

[Kamaji]

The Gathering Storm in the West

Few are listening any more to the clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens and all the toxic hypocrisies they embody.

By Victor Davis Hanson
February 20, 2022

Canada is now governed by absurdism, and it is symptomatic of an ailing Western elite.

Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week invoked martial law to arrest and financially destroy truckers on the charge that their largely peaceful protests are “dismantling the Canadian economy” that had already been dismantled for two years under some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world. The trucker “sect,” Trudeau added, is guilty of felonious “unacceptable views.” But his rhetoric still cannot square the circle of demonizing vital workers while conceding he cannot run his country without them.

He has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the law’s 34-year history, even as the highly infectious Omicron variant wanes after spreading natural immunity and yet proving relatively mild in its effects. Trudeau has neither science nor good governance on his side, especially given how civil the protests have been. The truckers, who more or less work in solitary cabs, are better informed about the “science” and are themselves mostly vaccinated. 

Whether by accident or intent, the truckers have now become iconic of far larger issues. Their resistance to government vaccination mandates transcends them. And so, they are playing the role of the proverbial straw that may break the back of a once compliant Canadian citizenry, burdened by over two years of masks, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates.

They are Howard Beales yelling, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” or the iconic Tunisian peddler Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation prompted the Arab Spring, or Tank Man who stood erect in Tiananmen as an oncoming tank finally swerved around him. The truckers are saying to the Canadian people, “Watch and we will kindly show you why you always privately suspected that this prime minister and his ilk were frauds.” As in the case of earlier exasperated rebels, we do not know the exact consequences that will follow, only that the leaders who targeted the dissidents will likely end up worse than their targets.

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Source:  https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/20/the-gathering-storm-in-the-west/

[Smokin Joe]

Good piece. Years ago, I looked at a couple of elected officials and I just couldn't see why they, of all people, had any power.

Oh, there was the usual entourage of lackeys toadying up to these big fish from a small pond.

I had conversed with Nobel Prize winners, decorated veterans who earned those decorations, grown up in a VFD family and had been in fire/rescue myself, and was singularly unimpressed by the thin veneer of importance these people presented, a facade as convincing as a two story false front on a one story shed. All you had to do, I suppose, was view it all from the right angle to see how little was often there. Once in a rare while there would be the wonderful surprise that from any angle, there was substance there, and a real leader, but that has been the exception, not the rule.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much...

Kipling, IF

Never applied so much as with politics.

[DB]