In December 2008, Canadians witnessed, not only an embarrassing example of the embedded flaws in our British-inspired Parliamentary system, but more fundamentally, they saw, many for the first time, the exercise of power over our country’s internal affairs by Canada’s sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II.
Illusions held by most Canadians regarding the “symbolic” nature of the monarchy began falling by the wayside. Questions also arose as to the real independence ofCanada within the Commonwealth (the Empire under financial globalization).In November of that year the financial system had entered a new accelerated phase of collapse, and a first $700 billion bailout for U.S. banks passed the United States Congress. That very same month an unannounced, disguised, $64 billion bailout of the Canadian banking system occurred!
We are living through a tumultuous economic period that requires inspired leadership and an historical model of the stature of a Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In Canada, a lack of leadership in dealing with the economic crisis was compounded by the three opposition parties hastily putting together a plan to form an alternative Canadian coalition government… if the Queen’s representative, the Governor General, would of course, kindly give her ascent! The Liberals, according to this arrangement, were to govern the country with the support of the NDP and Bloc Québécois.
In the following two days, Canadian citizens watched while one group was pitifully begging the Queen’s Governor General to allow them to take over the nation, while the other group was begging this unelected royal appendage, to let them stay in power.
At that time, the overthrow of the Conservative government did not proceed as planned, and the Conservatives were permitted to remain in power for another year, while Michael Ignatieff became the new head of the Liberal Party of Canada in the interim, breaking off all ties with his former coalition allies.
We are now in early 2010 and time is certainly running out for Michael Ignatieff to assume his assigned role as the knight on a white horse who shall come to the rescue of the nation already deep into the onslaught of a global economic meltdown. Prime Minister Harper’s government has proven itself ineffective in combating the high rate of unemployment and has mainly opted for austerity rather than producing our way out of this economic meltdown.
First on the chopping block is Atomic Energy Canada Limited which is scheduled to be auctioned off to foreign interests. This folly would penalize Canadians 1) by cutting them off from the only truly efficient energy source, 2) by dismantling the scientific and technological knowledge required to get to the next stage which is thermonuclear fusion energy, and 3) by preventing the qualitative transformation of the Canadian economy into a future advanced isotope economy.
The Canadian population, up to this very recent period, has had to suffer the injury of more and more frequent ‘horse trading’ sessions on the floor of the House of Commons amidst the ever present blackmail threats to force yet another national election. And now, the government is adding insult to injury with its decision to prorogue Parliament.
It would do well for all Canadians to understand that it is quite feasible to step outside this political chessboard and its set piece tactics and think strategically, as a Franklin Roosevelt would, as he constantly educated his fellow citizens during his speeches and famous fireside chats during the Great Depression and throughout the course of World War II; or as Lyndon LaRouche is known to do today—by exposing the inner workings of the present day globalized financial British Empire and how to defeat it by organizing a political dynamic which would 1) bring together a Four Power Alliance (of Russia, India, China and the United States) to defeat the monetarist imperial power which has chosen the financial district of London as a base from which its tentacles reach out internationally and, 2) get other sovereign nation-states interested in joining the initiating Four Power Alliance in order to form a new world-wide credit system as set out in the LaRouche Plan.
It is with this perspective in our mind’s eye that we must judge the leadership qualities and moral character of Michael Ignatieff. If he were to be elected Prime Minister of Canada, he would immediately be confronted with the challenge of getting Canada to break with British monetarist policies and join a new and exciting Pacific Basin oriented political dynamic.
Who is Michael Ignatieff?
It is therefore well worth examining if Michael Ignatieff’s principles and intentions are truly as noble as they are summarily portrayed in his self-promoting book “True Patriot Love”?(1)
Is he truly a Canadian patriot who, in the midst of an onrushing global financial meltdown, felt impelled to return to his endangered homeland to pull it out of economic turbulence and propel it into an era of genuine prosperity by getting Canada to eventually join a community of principle of nations desiring to establish a more just new world economic order?
In looking into Ignatieff’s philosophy, opinions, public statements and policies, one is immediately struck by the fact that he is a master at taking every side to most every issue.
On policy questions Ignatieff seems to be for infrastructure, for long-term investments, for cleaner tar sands, for high-speed rail between Quebec City and Vancouver, along with a four-lane highway; all fine proposals but his widely known advocacy for a carbon tax, and for a green economy contradict his ability to realize the above proposals.
Ignatieff references the Roosevelt New Deal example when discussing Canadian development projects or extensions to the Canadian unemployment insurance program. Yet when one examines how he intends to finance these FDR policies, all one finds is discussions of more free markets, more taxes and the elimination of all national protectionist measures (2) –the very antithesis of Roosevelt’s policies.
Ignatieff uses rhetoric in the same vein as Barack Obama and has taken a leaf from Obama’s presidential campaign by staying as far away as possible from committing to any tangible policy for which he would be held accountable later. Ignatieff’s bipartisan magic even surprised his liberal entourage when he received a standing ovation after he had spoken at the very conservative Fraser Institute.
He is self-portrayed as a pacifist-intellectual, and yet, he is also a frantic supporter of military interventions into small nations. He has singled out in his published writings the cases of Kosovo, (1996), Algeria, (1999) and Iraq (2002).
He swiftly defends his viewpoint by taking both the “for” and “against” side on every issue, as witnessed by his support of Cheney’s torture policies which he now defends as having done so with “right principles”. When questioned on one particular incident of indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon in 2006, which killed 56 civilians, he responded coldly with; “This is the kind of dirty war you’re in when you have to do this and I’m not losing sleep about that.” A week later, when confronted again on his statement, Ignatieff denied the statement and chastised Israel saying that it should be “punished for war crimes”.
Today, he is the leading liberal advocate of Steven Harper’s expanded militarization of Afghanistan. Ignatieff was a leading architect in the 2004 policy for a UN supranational police force “The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Protocol”. His commitment to a necessary imperialism is sophistically presented in his recent book ‘Empire Lite’ and Times article ‘The Burden’.
It is within this context that the ‘nature of the beast’ becomes clear. The character of a man who takes both sides to every issue is that he is either confused or a liar. In the case of Mr. Ignatieff, we can presume he will not admit to confusion.
What clearly emerges is a world view that parallels the oligarchical mindset: where nations are often broken-up into smaller ‘sovereign’ entities who are at the mercy of an overreaching international structure controlled ultimately by British imperial finance.
Such a world dictatorship, with a liberal face, has to rely on key components which are already deployed in several instances such as: 1-private international criminal courts (such as the ICC), 2-militarized private police forces operating outside the constraints of sovereign nations, 3-increased private control of national finances to impose austerity 4-reducing subject nations to accept genocidal levels of ‘conditionalities’ in order to refinance inflated debts, on top of 5- an international carbon taxing body, as proposed and rejected (for now) at Copenhagen, that would police and prohibit the development of new science and technology for industrial production.
In this brave new world run by a technocratic Malthusian elite, personal and collective freedoms are to be severely curtailed on a ‘voluntary’ basis by inducing irrational fears among the population through 1) the control of so-called ‘Islamic’ terrorism which is for the most part run out of Londonistan and 2) the acceptance of depopulation and deindustrialization policies under the guise of saving the planet from man-made (read industries) global warming!
Family Baggage
Michael Ignatieff’s conspicuous family history was highlighted by Ignatieff himself during his short meteoric rise through the highest echelons of Canadian politics.
Even earlier, in a 1993 interview(3), Ignatieff expressed pride in a radio host’s acknowledgement of his title “Count”, a title he inherited from his Great Grandfather Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev.
One can imagine a private discussion among two elder British aristocrats in a London private club
-‘’Good genes, good blood line, Russian nobility…’’.
–‘’…Most important, that family has rendered faithful, high-level services to the Empire, while a Minister to the Tsar’’
-‘’…We must not forget the maternal side: his great-grandfather was Sir George Parkin who ran the Rhodes Trust in London for over two decades. Only Canadian ever to be entrusted with that sensitive position, I do say. The family married into the Masseys, his great-aunt was the wife of one our most effective Governor General up there. Both Parkin and later Massey were key in setting up and recruiting the first two generations of members to our Round Table Movement in the Dominion…’’
-‘’…I’ll pass the chaps’ pedigree on to the relevant people in the City…’’
Nikolai Pavlovich’s notoriety, for our current interest here, comes from the key role he played in the formation of the Okhrana (the Russia secret police). It was this institution which was instrumental in fomenting the 1905 Russian Revolution, and the later 1918 Bolshevik Revolution (4) on behalf of the British. At the turn of the century, Russia was specifically targeted for chaos by the British Empire as a response to the Russian followers of Abraham Lincoln’s policies, like Prime Minister Sergei Witte (5) and the great scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev (6). Those policies most strongly defining the fight were the Trans-Siberian rail project, national banking and ‘American System’ protectionism. The prospect of a Russian-US collaborative effort to build the great Bering Strait Tunnel-rail network stems from this time in history, and is still an ongoing threat to the British imperial stranglehold today.
While Ignatieff’s grandfather Paul Ignatiev went on to become the Education Minister under Tsar Nicholas II, the second major revolution was sparked, and Paul Ignatieff’s career in Russia was soon terminated. It is interesting to note though that Ignatieff’s grandfather was one of but a small handful of tsarist figures permitted to escape death at that point. The family promptly migrated to Canada.
Before looking at Michael Ignatieff’s father, it is necessary that we first briefly set the stage of post war British geopolitics. The Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine for organizing the post World War II “Balance of Power’’ was designed by the British to destroy all cooperation between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. As after the British-instigated American Civil War, the primary targets were again victims of British manipulations which took the form of a Cold War (7).
After being granted a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford in 1940, Michael Ignatieff’s father, George Ignatieff, quickly rose to become a leading international figure: Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, Permanent Representative to NATO, President of the United Nations Security Council.
Prime Minister John Turner, in 1984, appointed George Ignatieff Disarmament Ambassador. From this position, George Ignatieff became instrumental in destroying President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)(8), conceptually developed by Lyndon LaRouche to defeat the Cold War MAD strategy and to set in motion a new era of American-U.S.S.R. scientific and economic cooperation for world development.
George Ignatieff was a strong proponent 1) of consolidating a global UN police force, 2) of advocating the Russell idea of world government and 3) of implementing global prohibitions on nuclear energy development. While not hereditary, this oligarchical mindset has tragically been passed on from father to son.
His home and native land:
“My final journey took me back to consider the braying national identity of my adopted country- the British Isles” –Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging.
While born in Canada in 1949, Michael Ignatieff’s anglophilia brought him to live and teach in Britain for over 20 years.
In 1979, Michael Ignatieff’s service to the Empire originated from academia: research fellow at Cambridge and, from there, teaching posts at the London School of Economics and Oxford.
The book he co-authored in 1983 with Itsvan Hont called Wealth and Virtue, recounts his fascination with such British imperial thinkers as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill et al. On commenting on his work, Ignatieff has said that his time studying Adam Smith had made him a devout free market advocate.
In those early years, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had set off a major wave of destruction of the real physical economy still being felt today. Her administration’s policy of ‘saving the economy’ involved destroying between 3 and 5 million jobs, liberalizing and deregulating global markets, cracking down on unions and implementing Friedmanite economic policies which soon led to the rapid cartelization of world economies. These policies created the conditions for the Maastricht Treaty and the Euro dictatorship.
Early on Ignatieff declared his allegiance to this process, when as a journalist, he attacked the striking UK miners who were defying the budget cuts, and sided with Thatcher in declaring that the miners were “acting against the national interest” of Britain (9).
Ignatieff is known to have broken all ties with old acquaintances at this point, in order to begin his new integration into the higher social caste of London.(9)
Opportunities opened up immediately for Ignatieff, whereby weekly political columns were offered to him by major dailies across the UK, followed by book contracts, elite club memberships, Pulitzer prizes, lecture tours and an image shaping makeover as an intellectual rock star. Throughout the 1990s, he was made a celebrity television personality on the BBC, and was featured as cover boy for numerous magazines, including the British GQ.
The Behaviorist Connection
In 2000, Michael Ignatieff returned back to North America to work as Director of the Carr Institute on Human Rights at Harvard University. During this time at Harvard (2000-2005), Ignatieff became close friends with Samantha Powers, Cass Sunstein and then-President Laurence Summers.
All three figures now occupy, around narcissistic President Obama, leading positions in the White House as members of the now infamous inner circle of behaviorist economists pushing fascist policies on America on behalf of British imperial financial aims. (11)
In April of 2009, during his first visit with Obama, a closed door dinner was held with Ignatieff as guest of honor (12), and the same above mentioned behaviorist economists who do not believe in defending the United States Constitution, but rather in ‘behavior modification’(13) of a population as a governing principle.
It was understood by all present that this British-Canadian scholar would soon be given the helm of Canada’s ship of state.
This affinity of minds between Ignatieff and President Obama’s closest behaviorist entourage is best illustrated by the very close relationship that exists between US National Economic Director Larry Summers, who along with his wife have spent a few holidays vacationing with the Ignatieffs at Michael Ignatieff’s estate in the South of France, as have National Security Council member Samantha Powers and U.S Regulatory czar Cass Sunstein.
Which Way for Canada?
Nearly 30 years ago, Lyndon LaRouche presented a lasting gift to Canadians when he wrote his “Draft Constitution for the Commonwealth of Canada” (14).
This 1981 undertaking by LaRouche intersected a situation in the country where Canadians appeared increasingly predisposed to establishing a sovereign constitutional order for Canada.
The political situation has certainly changed over the course of these three decades, but the rigorous, historically-grounded arguments in favor of a republican constitutional order are as valid today as they were then in 1981.
More importantly, for the urgent task confronting us today, what Lyndon LaRouche wrote in his letter of transmittal to Canadians, dated September 5, 1981, still stands as a blueprint for defining the true mission of Canada and understanding the ‘mass strike’(15) phenomena now sweeping the United States which, like the southern winds flowing through Canada, should soon warm the spirit of patriotic Canadians.
LaRouche wrote:
“…These are greatly troubled times. The credible perils of nuclear warfare, vast genocide of peoples, and moral anarchy and degradation pose today a greater peril to mankind generally than can be compared with any peril confronted since the so-called “New Dark Age” of fourteenth-century Europe. In these times, all mankind cries out implicitly for new beacons of hope of a better, more secure order in mankind’s affairs.
“It is within the power of the people of Canada to fashion themselves into such a beacon of hope, to establish a living example which other people and nations may emulate in some fashion appropriate to their own problems, development and other circumstances.
“In the past, each emergence of some great new nation, each admirable re-ordering of the affairs of a nation, has been an efficient beacon of hope for other nations and peoples witnessing such accomplishments. If it is true that great and good ideas are the unique source of all important accomplishments of mankind, it is the example of employment of such an idea by some people which has proven repeatedly the indispensable magnifier of the power of communicating such an idea to nations and people generally.”
The great classical 19th century poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller(16) expressed our dual responsibility best when he affirmed that “man is greater than his destiny” and that “he is both, at the same time, a patriot of one’s nation, but also a world citizen”.
LaRouche often refers to Percy B. Shelley(17), the republican English poet, when discussing the ‘mass strike’ phenomena now occurring in the United States:
“…Shelley writes appropriately of moments of history in which a people experiences a greatly increased capacity for imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. In such rare intervals a great people rises for a time above preoccupation with the immediately personal and local concerns of the ephemeral mortal lives of each, and locates its most immediate sense of self-interest in the condition of the world as a whole”.
The present strategic mission for Canada is to orient towards the Pacific-Indian Oceans Basins in a constructive manner such that our “Pacific Gateway” policy increases in commercial volume but also increases in a qualitative political strategic mode with the goal of acting in a supportive role, and perhaps a go-between mode to get the three Asian giants (Russia, China, India) to join a soon to be renewed rooseveltian United States in LaRouche’s Four Power Alliance.
This is what Canada must orient to in 2010.
This is what Canadian patriotism, rigorously defined, should mean.
Which way for Canada, then?
–The British path detailed in True Patriot Love, the path of the Queen’s Knight?
or
–The “American System” path opened by Schiller, Shelley, Roosevelt and LaRouche?
–30—
Footnotes:
(1)It’s not in the interest of either this side of the border or that side of the border. This doesn’t end well if we go down the protectionist road. We need to say very clearly and very intently with the Americans: Let’s pull back now!” -Ignatieff July 15, 2009 speaking to FCM meeting in B.
(2)http://www.committeerepubliccanada.ca/PutLaRouchePlanToSaveTheWorldEconomyOnTheAgenda.htm
(3) Radio Canada show l’Heure G; Jan 9, 1991
(4) Ignatievs and the Russian Okrahna:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3237cheney_permwar.html
(5) “The welfare of Your Empire is based on national labor. The increase of its productivity and the discovery of new fields for Russian enterprise will always serve as the most reliable way for making the entire nation more prosperous. We have to develop mass-production industries, widely dispersed and variegated. We must give the country such industrial perfection as has been reached by the United States of America, which firmly basis its prosperity on two pillars—agriculture and industry.”
– 1899 memo from Minister of Finance Witte to Tsar Nicholas II
(6) Dmitri Mendeleyev not only discovered the harmonic ordering principle shaping the Periodic table of elements, but also served as Russian Minister of Weights and Measures, and Chairman of the Committee on the Protective Tarrif as a close ally to Sergei Witte. He wrote in his 1891 Tarrif report: “It must be understood, that the economic doctrines of the “nationalists” and the “historical school” have long since broken free-tradism at the roots, and that contemporary economic science should, for clarity, be called “anti-free trade.” This must, absolutely must be known by anyone who would speak on economic questions in the name of science”.
(7) -Lord Bertrand Russell (architect of Mutually Assured Destruction), wrote in the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists July 1947:
“If we are to preserve the peace of the world beyond the time when America ceases to have a monopoly of the bomb–which is not very distant–it must be done by having the bomb completely controlled by some one authority, and it cannot then be a national one. The period during which it can be a national authority is necessarily brief, and if the control does not pass straight from a national authority to an international authority, then we shall inevitably get an atomic war. I entirely agree that controlling atomic energy alone is not enough, and that ultimately we must have an international authority which can prevent war. But it is a step, and the machinery that is required in the one case is similar to the machinery needed in the other.
…When I speak of an international government, I mean one that really governs, not an amiable facade like the League of Nations or a pretentious sham like the United Nations under its present constitution. An international government … must have the only atomic bombs, the only plant for producing them, the only air force, the only battleships, and, generally, whatever is necessary to make it irresistible.”
(8) A brief history of the SDI: https://www.larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=9196
(9) New Statesman, Dec 1984
(10) Being Michael Ignatieff Michael Valpy From Saturday’s Globe and Mail, 25-08-2006
(11) The behaviorists behind Obama: http://www.larouchepac.com/node/9925
(13) Lyndon LaRouche—January 23, 2010: [unproofed work in progress]:
In “We Are A Republic Not A Democracy”: “…That modern A.D. 1529-1763, process leading into the birth of modern British imperialism, has been the historical backdrop which must be adopted as the reference needed to situate the origins of that system of Paolo Sarpi (b.1552-d.1623) which became known by such names as “behaviorism,” a system which was based upon the prevalent, categorical rejection of any principled standard of truthfulness, as this rejection was argued by Adam Smith in his 1759 “Theory of Moral Sentiments”, as the British monetarist tradition, to the present day. The result has been, that the reigning body of so-called Liberal “popular opinion” in much of the world today, is, more often than not, a system of the sophistry imposed as a blending of induced popular stupidities and official lies.”
(14)http://www.committeerepubliccanada.ca/PDF/A%20Draft%20Constitution.pdf
(15)http://www.committeerepubliccanada.ca/PDF/MassStrikeIsOpportunity.pdf
(16) http://www.committeerepubliccanada.ca/WhatIsandtoWhatEndDoWeStudyUniversalHistory.htm
(17) http://www.committeerepubliccanada.ca/ADefenceofPoetry.htm