Jokers, Demagogues, and Flatterers in Democracies
The examples of retired Canadian Lt. Gen. Michel Maisonneuve and his opposites
Canada’s conservative newspaper, National Post, published on November 17, 2022, excerpts from a speech given on November 9 by retired Lt. General Michel Maisonneuve at an event in Ottawa in which he was presented with the top defence honour, the Vimy Award. The speech, as reported, was well received by the audience and the publisher of National Post decided that it deserved a wider circulation among Canadians in thinking about how to restore Canada to what it was once before, a country deservingly respected around the world for its contributions in war and peace, in science, arts, and sports. Canada, in other words, as the good general given his meritorious service said that “once we were great” and it was time, once more, to make Canada “great again.”
There can be no quarrel with the general’s sentiments. Canada is a modest country, despite the list of achievements the general mentioned in his speech in Ottawa. This was what he said, “We stopped the Americans in 1812, we gave the world Billy Bishop, Alexander Graham Bell, and Lucy Maud Montgomery. We isolated insulin, invented the zipper and the snowblower. In World War One we mobilized 620,000 troops. We were victorious at Vimy Ridge. In World War Two we were brave enough to land at Dieppe, and we secured our beach on D-Day. The Devil’s Brigade remains the template for special forces the world over. Our small country boasted the world’s third largest navy at the end of that conflict.”
There was more in Maisonneuve’s list. We do, however, get reminded of our achievements from the perspective of a retired military officer, since our modesty as a national characteristic forbids us to gloat over them as the greatest in history, such as Maisonneuve mentions in defeating the Russian hockey team on ice during the Soviet era in 1972. Canada’s fortune, or misfortune, depending on perspectives is to share the continent with a giant republic turned into an empire that never sleeps nor misses the beat to remind the rest of the world it is the greatest in all the things it does whatever they be from landing man on the moon, waging wars, building skyscrapers, or hustling gullible folks on ponzi schemes of acquiring instant wealth.
[Read here Maisonneuve’s speech: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-speech-by-a-general-attacking-cancel-culture-and-green-policies-that-caused-an-uproar ]
It seemed to me, on reading the excerpts of Maisonneuve’s speech, that he got carried away by his sentiments to make Canada great again in listing qualities needed to rescue the country from the clutches of mediocre and sub-mediocre leaders who have been busy sinking it. In a democracy such as ours – a democracy no different from any, as Aristotle cautioned his readers, that being democracy is the perversion of constitutional government based on the supremacy of the rule of law since citizens cannot be uniformly enlightened for the common good of all – it is not expected that a man or a woman in military uniform gets promoted to a flag officer’s rank, as was Maisonneuve, for possessing a keen mind for philosophy, history, or critical thought on abstract matters. In democracies an individual is cheered, running for public office is elected, and awarded for service when that individual speaks and acts in accordance with the sentiments of the people. It cannot be otherwise, for a democracy is intolerant of individuals in the public square who might question the consensus or sentiments of the people fed on a diet of journalistic chaff.
Maisonneuve’s speech in quality was consistent with his rank of a flag officer as lieutenant general in a democracy. And so, when in speaking of the sort of leadership needed to make Canada great again his choice of such a leader as an example was one with which the Canadian mainstream corporate media, the mainstream political parties, and all the elected members in the parliament in Ottawa would agree and applaud. He said, “A great leader can take a seemingly insurmountable objective and make it possible to achieve in the hearts and minds of their followers. Thankfully these leaders still do exist in today’s world and there is no better example than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” And then, his fulsome praise of Zelenskyy done, Maisonneuve toasted his version of the great leader in subtext no different from the one, Justin Trudeau, who presently sits as the prime minister of Canada by calling out, “God speed Mr. President and Slava Ukraini.”
Canada, a democracy, is not alone in awe of Zelenskyy as is the awestruck Maisonneuve. At least one-half of the United States currently as post-republican and post-constitutional democracy is similarly driven in awe of Zelenskky in funding him with armaments and money that exceed by substantive numbers the annual defence expenditure of the Russian Federation. Then there are the member states of NATO that was inaugurated as a defence pact in April 1949 against the designs of an expansionist former Soviet Union – we in western democracies were so informed – in awe of Zelenskyy. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the defence pact became an offensive alliance against the post-Soviet Russian Federation and, accordingly, has been providing military and financial support to Zelenskyy in his role as the leader of Ukraine in a US-led NATO-driven proxy war against Russia since at least 2014 when a US supported coup in Kiev removed an elected President Viktor Yanukovych from office and replaced him with a pro-NATO Petro Poroshenko as president.
It would not do for Maisonneuve to call out Zelenskyy as America’s newest welfare queen. This is what Candace Owens, a conservative commentator who happens to be black, witty, and defiantly outspoken, remarked about Zelenskky on Tucker Carlson’s prime time television show on Fox News the day after the Biden administration made an ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021. Here is the full quote of what Ms. Owens said:
We left one money-laundering operation in which we gave 50 billion of American taxpayers’hard-earned money and we jumped right into the next one. And how much money did we give Ukraine so far? 50 billion dollars! But that’s not enough for this welfare queen. He wants to keep it coming. And that’s what he is: President Zelensky is America’s welfare queen.
[Read the whole article here: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/11/daniel-mcadams/conservative-candace-owens-crashes-ukraine-war-party/ ]
Nor could Maisonneuve have said what Maurice Richards recently wrote:
Joe Biden, the military-industrial-congressional complex, State Department neocons, the War Party comprised of all Democrats and many corporate Republicans, and Western globalist elites have the United States and NATO in a Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. The warmongers are obsessed with destroying Russia. To achieve it, they are determined to fight to the last Ukrainian.
In eight months, Congress has wasted $69 billion of American taxpayer money to fund their proxy war. That’s about $8 billion more than Russia’s entire annual military budget. And to the delight of the American arms industry, there is no end in sight. Biden is soon expected to request another $50 billion.
[Read the whole article here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/18/its-time-to-speak-the-truth-about-ukraine/ ]
What we have in Canada, in the Anglo-American sphere of democracies, in NATO-stans and in the European Union as dependencies of the unipolar American hegemon, is Maisonneuve and those like him in the public square reading prepared scripts of the mainstream corporate media and regurgitating the message by which the citizens of democracies are daily fed their required chaff so they may remain sufficiently ignorant, docile, and easily manipulable. Maisonneuve and his likes are demagogues in democracies, as Aristotle discussed, since in a democracy, which is a perversion of constitutional government, the “decrees of the populace correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other.”
Maurice Richards is a retired American police officer whose last service was as the chief of the Martinsburg Police Department in West Virginia. But unlike Maisonneuve, Richards has refused to be a demagogue earning public applause in flaterring the Biden administration over its Ukraine policy. He is willing to take the risk in calling out the sleaze, corruption, and the evil of warmongers by doing his research on the record of Zelenskyy and the history of Ukraine.
In a previous article, Richards discussed in detail about Nazis in Ukraine and why Ukraine is not a democracy even in a perverted form. Maisonneuve’s Zelenskyy, on the contrary, is the deceptive Jewish face of a Ukraine run by neo-Nazis with a long and despicable history of support provided to them by the CIA.
[Read the whole article here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/25/nazis-in-ukraine/ ]
The support for Zelenskyy’s Ukraine has been sold by the collective West to their taxpaying citizens based on lies, disinformation, and vilification of those who question and strive to expose the war propaganda against Russia. As Richards has written, “The war in Ukraine is not in the interest of the American people; Biden’s sanctions on Russia are destroying our economy; the billions wasted on this war are taxpayer dollars that should have been spent fixing problems here at home; the Zelenskyy government is a corrupt, de facto Nazi regime; and the proxy war against Russia is pushing us towards nuclear destruction.”
What is frightening and, therefore, should be of greatest concern to everyone is nuclear war ignited deliberately or accidentally by an escalation of the war in Ukraine. In the nuclear age the collective West has wilfully set aside the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis of sixty years ago, which is that there is no basis for a “just war” when the enemies are armed with nuclear weapons. Conventional wars, on the other hand, are oxygen for the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in his “farewell address” when leaving the White House at the end of his presidency in January 1961. The NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine is additionally a massive laundering operation of taxpayer dollars to the military-industrial and congressional complex, a gift to Zelenskyy and his neo-Nazi gang of grifters in Kiev that keep on laundering the gift back to the American ruling class in Washington and similarly to the ruling classes of the collective West.
But what about the Ukraine war that would be the graveyard of the Russian Federation and its leadership under Vladimir Putin? According to the same mainstream corporate media that Maisonneuve, Canada’s retired lieutenant general, reads to toast Zelenskyy as an exemplar of his version of great leaders, Putin’s Russia should have months ago run out of war material, the Russian army defeated, and Moscow surrendered to the terms set forth by Kiev run by Zelenskyy.
The facts on the ground and over the air in Ukraine are, however, dramatically different from the propaganda of the western mainstream corporate media. Maisonneuve and his type of flag officers in the collective West are demagogues engaged in flattering the citizenry of democracies with fake news in the service of their overlords and as employees of the military-industrial and congressional complex. There are, contrary to Maisonneuve and his type, retired military officers who persist in informing and educating the chaff-fed citizenry of the collective West about the war gaslighted by the US-led NATO that has wrecked Ukraine, and that this war should never have been provoked with NATO’s further eastward expansion threatening to cross Moscow’s redline by accepting Ukraine as a member state, and greenlighting Kiev’s neo-Nazi racial policy of harassment and murder of ethnic Russians in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2014 coup. This is a history that has been censored in the West so as to promote the narrative that the war was brought about by a revanchist Russia invading Ukraine to regain lost territories of the former Soviet Union.
Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor of the US Army, and retired Major Scott Ritter of the US Marine Corps and UN weapon inspector, are two former military officers among others who have spoken out against the Ukraine war and the vilification of Russia. They have shared their experiences as soldiers in combat, as students and scholars of military history, battlefield tactics and strategy, and knowledge of American politics and government, when discussing in the alternate media platforms the course of the Ukraine war and its eventual outcome, the defeat of Ukraine and its NATO overlords.
Here are two recent videos that I have selected from many of Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter available on the internet. In these videos they are speaking with European investigative reporters: Macgregor with Glenn Dissen of Norway, and Ritter with Ania K. of Poland. Both are serious individuals who in knowing the horrors of war are devotees and counsellors of peace, peacemaking and peacekeeping. They are worth your time if you listen to them.
(The comment below was sent to my personal email by Dominique. I have copied Dominique's email and pasted it here, where it belongs).
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Thank you for this Salim!
You do a wonderful job at inviting the reader to see both the corruption of the current narrative on Ukraine but also to plant the seed of the dangerous and erroneous nature of the lay person’s ideal of democracy. Far too often when I hear even those in the freedom movement talk about a return to democracy and democratic principles what I hear is a naive and misunderstood belief that democracy is the gateway to a freer happier life. Most people do not understand Aristotle's criticism of democracy and that our classical philosophical tradition warns that it is the handmaiden to tyranny as an antidote to the chaos of mob rule. I realize that the use of the term is often for the purpose inspiring the masses to pay attention to the state of affairs, educate themselves, and work toward positive change. However few take the time to actually learn and understand what is going on and what is at stake. The fact, as I see it, is that there are few people who are truly interested in understanding the responsibility, hard work, and sacrifice that leadership entails and far too quickly get enamoured with the perks and power of it. Once ensnared in this part of the political world so called leaders show who they truly are and show that their intent is not, if it ever was, to lead but rather to control so that they can be in charge and reap the rewards of power. I don’t mean to seem cynical as I have great hope in God’s plan but I have not seen many who are willing to submit to it or even willing to try to open their minds to it (as imperfect as our interpretation of His plan can be). In the end true humility is not a virtue sought after nor encouraged among current political players.
So what are we to do? What are our options? For most these days it is to accept the lesser of the evils and pray and work at trying to manipulate the manipulators. But as Chris Deburg cautions us in “Spanish train” when the saint attempts to play the devil’s game the devil always wins! The lesser of evils is still evil…
Pax et libertas,
Dominique
Odd that the media only saw fit to rail against Maisonneuve's criticism of "cancel culture" while leaving his support for a "de facto Nazi regime" as an unquestioned non-entity. Blinkered thinking all around?