Satyagraha, in addition to being my least favorite of Philip Glass’ early operas, is Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance to political repression. We’re seeing an excellent example of it being deployed up in Canada, as the trucker protest against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates continues.
Here’s an example of the philosophy in action:
BREAKING – several RCMP vehicles attempt to block intersection at HWY 15 & 4 ave in Surrey B.C. to prevent traffic towards PAC HWY border crossing.
A group of protesters swarm police and sit down in front of police vehicles forcing them to back away. https://t.co/x3XzAmaWS5 pic.twitter.com/rJqC0545q2
— brevner.eth (@MattBrevner) February 13, 2022
Veterans have reportedly joined the protest, forming lines between police and truckers.
Canada: Veterans have formed a line between the police and the truckers at Ambassador Bridge. 💪🏻#United #AmbassadorBridgeBlockade pic.twitter.com/1ryH9ahNBi
— Not2nightjosephine (@Not2nightjosep1) February 13, 2022
Evidently the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario has been cleared but access to the bridge is still blocked.
The primary roadblock to solving the crisis remains Justin Trudeau.
Instead of treating the truckers as fellow citizens who have a valid, or at least reasonable, complaint about a relatively unimportant policy that the government vacillated on prior to its implementation, the establishment and center-left in Canada have reacted to them with outrage and contempt.
They are agents of malign foreign influence or white nationalists. They must be fought on the beaches and the landing fields.
Snip.
Justin Trudeau speaks as if an enemy horde has descended that must be resisted in another Battle of Maldon. “I want to be very clear — we are not intimidated by those who hurl abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless,” he said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.”
In this, he engaged in classic nutpicking, focusing on a few instances of misbehavior to tar the entire group. It’d be hard to come up with a better expression of the high-handedness that has characterized pro-restriction officeholders and public-health experts during the pandemic than Trudeau’s sneering attitude toward the protestors.
Canada has been a relative monolith on Covid. Conservative officeholders have been broadly willing to go along with lockdowns and mandates. There has been no Ron DeSantis. Nor is there any conservative alternative media in Canada (with a few exceptions) to give a platform to dissenters from the Covid orthodoxy — the positive coverage of the truckers, for instance, has mostly been emanating from the United States.
Surely, this is why the truckers have taken on such an outsized significance.
In representing such a high-profile break from the Covid consensus, they have given conservative politicians permission — or affirmatively pressured them — to begin to back off restrictions. Already, the conservative leader who lost to Trudeau last year and is a relatively conciliatory figure has been dumped and will likely be replaced by a more combative alternative. Alberta and Saskatchewan have moved this week to lift various Covid restrictions.
The truckers are another sign of the class inversion in advanced Western countries. The Left continues to shed working-class voters and gain college-educated voters and the well-coiffed Trudeau, fully attuned to haut progressive sensibilities, is the perfect paladin for the upper-middle class. On the other hand, the right is doing the opposite and sees blue-collar virtue in the truckers to whom it once would have felt no natural connection.
One hopes that, on the ground, the whole episode doesn’t have an ugly end.
Trudeau should give the truckers their victory on the vaccination mandate. His government, which already backed off on it once only to re-embrace it, can easily back off again. It’s not as though this was a law passed by parliament. It’s a unilateral, arbitrary rule of the sort that proliferated throughout the pandemic. And no one can seriously believe Canada is going to suffer a renewed Covid surge based on roughly 10 percent of its truckers not being vaccinated.
The idea Trudeau should give in only works if you assume that he’s actually working for the best interests of Canada and Canadians. The stubborn resistance to a return to normalcy on the part of left-wing politicians across the globe suggest that another agenda is at work.
Liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose diet seems to incorporate ever-more redpills these days, says Trudeau is starting to sound like you-know-who:
Joined by entrepreneur @VivekGRamaswamy and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, @billmaher ripped Canada’s Justin Trudeau last night on his show for his recent comments about the Freedom Convoy pic.twitter.com/u47EIStOY0
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 12, 2022
Fact check: Trudeau was never a cool guy.
Will the Canadian political establishment force Trudeau to blink, or is he going to push the crisis to bloodshed to make truckers bend their knees to the state?
Just saw this pic.twitter.com/4FQuAeMQ4G
— JMQ (@jmquinn31419) February 11, 2022
Tags: Bill Maher, Canada, Canadian Trucker Protest, coronavirus, Justin Trudeau, Regulation, satyagraha, video
Castro’s bastard sounds increasingly desperate. Perhaps — like Macbeth and the ghost of Banquo — he looks for the place in history reserved for him, and finds it occupied…by Nicolae Ceausescu.
Might be giving Fidelito too much credit, though. The Thane of Glamis and Cawdor, for his manifest flaws, was ten times the man Trudeau could ever dream of being.
Justin Trudeau is so pathetic, he tried to intimidate people by threatening their pets.
This man also did blackface.
Why is the media still supporting this idiot?