(Situatedness: I'm a settler Canadian of Scottish, Irish and French descent, granted an Ontario birth certificate at birth)

Over the decades I have come to believe that Orwell’s warnings were never headed because most countries and individuals would believe that the message was for “them” and about “over there”, and never anything about themselves.

I don’t believe the Anglosphere Empire is headquartered in Britain any more (or “Airstrip One”), and is not centralized within a human, but centralized within shared ideologies that this empire wishes to impose onto an increasing percentage of the planet.

I recently wrote about the connection between the growing Anglosphere and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four: r.flora.ca/p/worst-futu…

This is where I strongly diverge from what Bob Rae spoke about in the latter part of his article: I do not see the Dominion of Canada as a “middle power”, but a proud longstanding minor member of the Empire of Empires.

The Dominion government has consistently promoted the myth that it doesn’t have a history of colonialism or empire. If you look at an 1867 map of “Canada” – which encapsulates the south of the 49’th parallel majority (nearly 70%) of Canada’s population – you clearly see what became the Dominant Center of Canada’s empire, and you can finally recognize that the northward and westward expansion from there was all Canada’ settler-colonial Empire expansion. Britain didn’t pre-colonize that land, or pre-build it as part of the British Empire, as much as the Dominion government wants to push the blame to other parts of its ongoing Anglosphere allies. There are legitimate reasons why the settler and indigenous populations of what some consider Northern and Western Canada consider themselves as subordinate peripheries of Empire — because they are.

It isn’t merely one empire, but an empire of empires held together by common ideologies that those of us born on this continent were indoctrinated by a differently faced “Big Brother” to consider “natural” or “human nature”, rather than narrow ideologies that grew up within the unique history of Western Europe and was spread to other places via the (in order of size and related violence) British, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and German empires. While a German Empire lost a recent war and is still pointed to as a villain, and the Eastern European Russian empire which was an allie during both world wars is pointed to as a villain, the other empires (and their peripheries like Canada, co-colonial loyalty to the British and French empires) have never been the heroes.

Those countries that have been harmed by these Empires over centuries would do well to avoid ties with the Dominion of Canada. Like other parts of the Anglosphere Empires who seem to only understand allies of convenience, it would only be a matter of time before Canada would turn on them as the Dominion has for so many other inconvenient treaty allies.

What does being a Canadian mean to me?

r.flora.ca/p/canadian