Diplomacy — The Art of a Gentleman/Woman/Mx.

Shadow Mask
Jul 10, 2017 · 38 min read

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“You stole our land.”

“I know, my ancestors did, but.. I was born here, so.. I have nowhere else to call home. I like it here, I’d rather try to work this out and share this place if we can.”

“.. I see. Well.. this is complicated, then.”


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I’ll try to get straight to the point with this one, even if there’s still a brief history lesson involved. Like usual, we won’t be getting into much detail until the present day, there’s plenty of material to research if you’re interested, I’m just using what I’ve learned so far to decide what a suiting course of action might be for the future. For our look at what lead us here, we’ll keep things macroscopic, or.. from a distance, like a bird’s eye view of the map, and just analyse the pattern of European explorers spreading to the Americas, and how this process left us in the awkward position of the children of these conflicts growing up together here in the same countries, and.. still practising this conflict in some ways. Perhaps not as consistently as before, but this conflict is still alive and well in our world here today, and for what it’s worth, it’s forced us to acknowledge that this isn’t just something that happens in far away lands overseas, but also right here at home in our back yards. For those who have been living under a rock on Mars, Canada is essentially close to a brink of civil war, and I’m not trying to be dramatic or insight chaos, I’m trying to do the opposite, and help prevent something like that from happening. So.. let’s just get started, shall we?

Before we begin, I’ll also acknowledge that I have no aboriginal heritage myself, and that my knowledge of their cultural affairs before we arrived here is almost non existent. This study will therefor be fairly “Euroccentric” in nature, since my heritage is closer to Latin, which is also among the first Europeans to have arrived to settle here in the Americas, even before the British, French, or many others who followed us. Hopefully, this can still offer some insight both to local natives who might not know much about us, as well as other European descended individuals here who might be in a similar situation, simply lacking a more thorough understanding of how and why we ended up here in the first place. The short answer is that we were trying to get away from Europe, and find a new place to live, but of course there’s always more to the story, so let’s just start by looking at a few key points that lead up to the modern day here, and where our near future might take us.

My only request here is that anyone who’s serious about finally dealing with this issue must first dismount from any bandwagons that you might be sitting on. This is a long, hard, narrow road to walk, and you’ll need to do it on foot, as an individual. I don’t care if you’re just a spiteful asshole who wants everyone to die, or just a person who’s vicariously waiting for “someone” to deliver retribution to your enemies, this is a lot more personal than any of us would like to admit. The only way that we can actually communicate these ideas is to do so independently of whatever convoluted ideas are already being pressured on people, specifically younger, more ignorant, and impressionable individuals who might jump on one or the other bandwagon for purely social reasons, without any real idea of what it is, or what it might represent. I don’t usually play the “Buzz Killington” card, but I feel that I need to for this study, so keep it in mind as this unfolds.

First, a snapshot of life in Europe just before Christopher Columbus confirmed that a massive continent was sitting on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. Before this, the closest thing we knew of was a myth about a place called “Atlantis”, a country off the west coast of Europe that supposedly sank in some sort of seismic disaster, but that’s not the target of our study here, just a reference point for what common knowledge of the Atlantic was before the next mark on our timeline. At this point in time, right up to the 1600’s AD / Common Era, modern technologies were already becoming common, things like gunpowder rifles and cannons, advanced naval technology (ships large/sturdy enough for long distance / long term voyages), and architecture that’s still standing in many places around the world. Even the style of “white picket fence” houses that we build today in our local suburbs are essentially still “Colonial Ranches”, the same floor plan that a manor from a first world European nation would have had at this time, just built from different materials.

In fact, the only technologies that we didn’t have yet, that would define our modern world today, would be the ability to harness electricity, or any sort of “engine”. Even steam engines were still in their infancy, trains weren’t quite a common idea yet, but people were already working on the technology, it was just a matter of time before the Iron Horse replaced the organic one. In the meantime, most people were just using horses and wagons as their method of transport, and or a boat, if they lived near water. Wood was still the primary fuel resource, for fires, forges, kitchens, or just heating a home, and by this point, Europe was well past the Black Death (Plague) and the Crusades that had marked the darker periods of our recent history before then. Europe was already experiencing something of a revival of it’s economy during the Renaissance (roughly translated to “renewal”), since the continent was finally free of war, and mass famine and disease for the first time since the old Roman Empire had collapsed nearly a 1000 years before that. Life was better than ever in Europe during the Renaissance. Even if there was still a class of peasants, the first real “middle class” was emerging there between the extremely rich, and the dirt poor. Before this, only a “noble” could break this glass ceiling, you needed to be an extension of a royal family, or at least one of their servants, a Knight, Errant, Squire, or something similar, but now, the idea of personal industry was finally starting to emerge among this middle class of.. healthier peasants, essentially.

With better food, better tools, and no more plague, the average farmer, miner, lumberjack, fisherman, craftsman, etcetera, actually had some free time and money to play around with, and what we would think of as a “corporation” today was already becoming common, in the form of “guilds”, which still exist today as worker unions. In many cases, the two are combined, a company will hire a union for it’s employees, and this method of business had already been going on since the Crusades at the turn of the previous millennium. By the Renaissance, guilds were quite common, and as usual, it’s not as convoluted as it sounds. All this meant was that you could hire a guild to perform a service, instead of individuals, or royal families. If you need a resource like wood, you could either go cut some trees down, or try to buy it from a local market, but for building big ships, you need a lumberjack guild that can go cut down a hundred trees for you. Same with food to feed your sailors, or gunsmiths to make your weapons, whatever trade was needed, there was a guild for it. Yes, even “Stonemasons”, and if you’re wondering why they became so powerful, take a wild guess. They were the guys that you called to build the biggest, best, baddest ass castle around, if you could afford it. They raked it in for centuries, until cannons made stone walls obsolete. Not entirely, but their invincible nature crumbled quickly at the thunderous impact of even a small cannon, and so as soon as gunpowder became common there, the castle began to fade into history, in favor of wooden Forts that could deflect cannon balls, at least better than a stone wall could.

Anyway, you probably know by now that I won’t be dragging anything too crazy into my study here, the Stonemasons can take their seat at the point in history when the gunsmith kicked them off their throne. I’m sure they have rich descendants around today, possibly even one’s who influenced other events, I’m sure some of them did continue to build things other than walls and castles after the cannon became a standard, but their glory days ended with the Crusades, and again, we’re staying macroscopic for this part of our study. So.. let’s get to the interesting part. One day during your life in Rennasaunce Europe, a ship sails into port on the western seaboard, and.. a drunk sailor wanders off the ship, telling you that they found Atlantis, and it’s a lot bigger than they thought, even bigger than Europe. Naturally.. you might be skeptical at first.

The official report hit soon enough, once the King/Queen of Spain (they went through both during this time) heard about the “new world”, that became their primary industry. Before we jump across the Atlantic to observe what happened next, our final look at Europe here for now has one other important detail. You see, “colonization” was already an industry in Europe, just look at a world map and see how many tiny islands all over the world have a (UK), (FR), (US), tag on them, indicating that it’s a colony of that country, even today. Even before the US was a country, Europe was already colonizing everywhere they could find, primarily India, Africa, and eventually Australia and China. Due to the inherent power of their Navy, the British had the most success in this before America was discovered from that side, their colonies in South Africa and Australia both thrive today as their own countries, much like we do in some ways. Hong Kong was eventually returned to China through some tedious diplomacy quite recently by our standards, and their colony in India, the “British East India Company” was destroyed shortly after it began during the early colonial period, by it’s own employees, in a violent uprising that kicked the British out of India, but still left a mark of British culture, which lingers there today. Being Hindu “pacifists” and all, it was an especially dramatic event for them, but many would argue a turn for the better.

This is one reason that the natives here in North America were called “Indians” by the early British explorers, not even because they thought it was part of India, but because it was essentially just their slang word for “native” or “local”, of whichever colony they were in at the time. My point here is that the British were already busy managing several large colonies when America was discovered, and the other major powers of Europe at the time followed suit in a distant 2nd, 3rd, etcetera. Spain and France were the main competition, but also the Portuguese, Dutch, Germans (Prussians), and Russians, which would simply manage “colonies” as extensions of their border of land back in Europe and Asia. Really, their “original” border is simply what they kept after Genghis Khan died, that’s why Russia is so big now, the great Khan conquered it right before the Renaissance then the locals held onto that much into the modern day. They weren’t all Mongolian, but no one else wanted to go there yet, so.. that was becoming a country too, and the game of colonization was already well at play when the Spanish started devoting almost all of their colonization efforts to the new world in America, before anyone else caught on.

It didn’t take long for news to spread, but the Spanish hit the shores here first in large numbers, mostly in the Caribbean, and northern east coast of South America. This is where “Pirates of the Caribbean” began in real life, and continued well into the 1800’s. Of course piracy was always a thing, before and after this, but the classic “Buccaneers” that we’re familiar with today were essentially just any pirate who made their life’s career out of pirating this one central shipping lane during the colonization, between North and South America, and Europe to the east. The Caribbean was the heart of the action for centuries, the first real colonization here from modern Europe, both officially, and “unofficially” in the form of pirate gangs. You might be wondering why the Caribbean was so valuable, and there might be several reasons, but the obvious one’s make it clear enough. Not only a central location for landing and launching from, but also an oasis for the people who found it. A rich landscape that could feed the sailors after their long trip, and provide an ideal base of operations to work from. A comfortable home on an island just off the coast of the new world, which was being explored for the first time by these same groups, first to the south, to confirm a growing rumour of “El Dorado”, a city of gold, in what we now know to have been the heart of the Aztec empire that existed there before the Spanish landed.

Before any wars could even start in “America” as we know it today, South America was already in a state of war before we even arrived. The local native tribes there at the time were all being bullied by the Aztecs, the big dogs on the block, and they didn’t seem to realise how dangerous this new threat of Spanish explorers from Europe was. It was still a small number of people arriving to begin with, so it’s understandable why the Aztecs weren’t immediately threatened by us, even if we had superior weapons, they also had some advanced technology of their own in other areas, and a huge army that was in the middle of a successful conquest. Not to mention that the Aztecs themselves were a particularly violent culture, even off the battlefield, things like ritual sacrifice were common among them, so if anything, they scared us more than we scared them, until more ships continued to arrive from Spain and our numbers increased beyond a few hundred people.

From what I can tell, the Spanish started the actual fighting, and it wasn’t even really their government giving a direct order to fight, or sending armies or anything, it was just the dozens of ships and hundreds of sailors and pirates that had already landed there, and more than that already on their way. The order to “colonize” was to conduct business, attempt to trade and or gather resources to send back to Europe, including slaves of course, that was usually the idea behind this sort of thing, but once the fight broke out in South America, it didn’t stop until the Aztecs were completely destroyed, then many of the smaller tribes after them. The Spanish conquistadors exterminated nearly the entire native population of South and Central America within a few centuries. Disease was also a big factor here of course, the ocean acts as a natural barrier for most life forms, and so the natives here had no tolerance to our diseases. We’d already experienced a plague not too long before that, and so we had a slight advantage in our immune systems, which allowed enough people to survive long enough to carry things like the common cold, and even smallpox over to the new world here. While this was eventually used as a weapon against other tribes later on, the first cases were likely accidental, since we were still in an early stage of studying disease ourselves at the time. It wasn’t quite as obvious until we saw the effect that it had on such an isolated population. To top it off, this early conquest of South America was also a process of assimilation, quite directly. Modern South American, and Central American nations, and even Mexico descend from a mix of Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and the natives that had once lived in those areas, primarily Aztec, but many smaller tribes as well in different regions.

Anyway, during this conquest of South America, all of the gold, and other valuable gems that the Aztecs had been hoarding from their previous conquest fell into the hands of both pirates, and conquistadors. This is where all that “pirate treasure” came from, or.. most of it. The conquistadors were hauling it back to Spain from the fallen Aztec empire, and the pirates were trying to steal as much as they could in the process. Some ships would even bury half of their treasure on a small island, then deliver the other half, and keep hoarding a cut of each trip as a retirement fund. The bank wasn’t quite available yet, but it soon would be once all that gold made it back to Spain, and soon the rest of Europe. I won’t get much into banks with this either, but this is essentially where they started to flourish, when the nobles in Europe had more gold than they wanted to hide in their house after it started flooding in from South America. Even if half of it was stolen, or sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, enough made it back that everyone else noticed. Soon enough, the other nations of Europe began to send their own explorations, but not so much to South America. Between the large Spanish navy, and the pirate gangs, it wasn’t worth the trouble, so they went to North America instead, hoping to find another gold mine, or something similar. Of course some of their ships did explore the southern portion of North America, and so the Caribbean as well, that was still the nexus of all of this new exploration on both sides, bringing in the more familiar British and French pirates that we’ve seen in the movies. The British Navy even began to train / hire “Privateers”, ships ordered to hunt pirates specifically, as a means of protecting their new explorations. Some of these privateers even became pirates themselves, but enough of them held a loose border that prevented too much piracy from reaching the shores north of the Caribbean. Instead, these different nations began colonizing, establishing new colonies along the east coast, and then expanding further inland.

This of course is where we hit the sensitive spot, for all of us living here at least. It’s common enough knowledge that this process wasn’t a smooth one, and that the natives here suffered a fate similar to the Aztecs, but.. with some notable differences. For one, they survived, they didn’t just “vanish” like all those mysterious tribes from South America. Enough of them endured into the modern day that we’re still fighting, just.. mostly on the internet now, but not entirely. Before we move on, let’s just look at the more obvious factors in how this colonization varied from the one that took place in South America. Basically, it wasn’t just 1 or 2 countries this time, it was closer to 10, all competing for a slice of the new, and seemingly final pie. Also, the natives that were living here when we arrived weren’t in such a heated state of conflict with each other, they seemed a lot more.. civilized than the Aztecs did (I’ll acknowledge that our own practice of slavery was also very uncivilized, and so it’s no wonder why our conflict with the Aztecs was so immediately violent).

The natives living up here in North America did have some smaller wars between tribes at times, but nothing quite as devastating or one sided as what the Aztecs were doing to the south. Up here, it was more like skirmishes, involving small groups of people at a time, and not very frequently, as opposed to a large mob conquering an entire country in a matter of years, at least politically. The Aztec empire fell apart almost instantly when they fell under invasion from conquistadors, their rigid power structure shattered without their King/Chief, but society for the natives up here was much more.. well, American, really. A more free society, at least, less bound by extreme religions or a violent dictatorship like South America was. I doubt that it was perfect here before we arrived, people still fight over things, but we also brought our own conflicts between each other when we arrived, we were already competing for colonies here, and all over the world when we met the people living here.

It’s worth noting that most of the people who arrived here from Europe were essentially peasants, the lower middle class of laborers from the old monarchies back in Europe, who for the most part, were just desperate to get out and find a new place to live, anywhere really. Coming here was like the opportunity to start a new life, almost a romantic fantasy for a common peasant back in Europe when they began to hear about it. Of course some of the new colonists were wealthier individuals, and not just the ship captains that brought us here. Some of us who had more influence did intend to build more than just a new house here, as we can clearly see today, it just took some time, but not that much in the grand scope of history. Naturally, some of us were more or less civil than others when meeting the locals, but the initial reaction seemed peaceful enough overall, it didn’t become violent quite as immediately as it did with the Aztecs down south.

Keep in mind that since there was more direct competition this time between different flags on different ships arriving, a traditional conquest didn’t exactly happen like it did with the Spanish. It wasn’t an organized invasion or conquest this time, it was.. a game of Monopoly, primarily for land, then whatever that land was worth, and so on. In fact, one of the first real “agendas” once we arrived was simply to map the distance to the other end of the continent, with the help of hired locals of course, and.. basically just to explore as far inland as possible to find whatever was beyond it. Most people assumed that another ocean lay beyond, simply because we’d seen part of it near Central America, but no one from our side really knew until explorers began to plant flags on the west coast here, just so that we knew how big this new world really was. Much bigger than Europe, almost as big as Russia, and much more fertile.

Some of the early contact between the new explorers and natives who already lived here wasn’t violent, in fact some of them seemed to trade and cooperate peacefully, on reasonable terms at least, before even more explorers began to arrive, and the colonization became too large for any one person to stop. The local native tribes weren’t quite organized enough to rally a mass resistance, even though some did fight back against some of the more aggressive colonies, to some degree of success, but the sheer scope of the colonization was too large, like trying to stop a flood with a bucket. Each colony that was driven out was replaced by 10 more somewhere else, and it didn’t take long before even the local tribes had trouble finding a place to settle. They already had portable housing technology, but all of the ideal settlements were being colonized one by one. It’s important to understand this context, simply because of how this “invasion” began. Yes, the motives of each person who landed here is ambiguous at best, but looking at the grand scope of it, it was clearly a slower, and less direct process than usual. Less obvious I should say, and so the response was slower than it might have normally been. Some of our colonies were quite content to live in one small town, but not all of them of course, specifically the British, French, and Spanish, who continued to expand colonies across most of North America at a much faster rate than their other rivals there, who never quite made it beyond a few major cities on the east coast.

Since these early European settlers weren’t immediately hostile, and some were even friendly, the locals didn’t feel a need to “fight them off” right away, but I’m sure it was an awkward transition as more and more land was gobbled up on the growing Monopoly board. Specifically the industrial revolution, which gobbled up entire forests, mountains, lakes and rivers, and built Iron Horses (trains) across the country in several areas, then more to follow. Keep in mind that this was happening all over the world, not just here, but of course things that happen here tend to concern us the most, as with any region and it’s local populace. Since we’re locals now, we might as well know how that happened if we hope to avoid having this get worse. We’re almost at the present day, so let’s see what happened next, only a few centuries before now.

Eventually, the colonies here began to revolt against their parent nations, refusing to pay taxes or tribute to their old monarchies back in Europe, they stopped sending local resources back, and were attempting to declare a state of “independence” in what everyone was calling America by then. Canada was already a British colony, the largest and most successful one yet, and was still loyal to their crown, but as for those just south of here.. the US was soon to become it’s own country with it’s own flag, and it’s own constitution. A “Federal Republic”, governed by it’s own elected citizens, and it’s own set of laws, though many of their early laws were still biblical in nature, derived from the Catholic church, and it’s several sub sects that had followed to the new world. Our laws may have changed a bit since then, but our foundation for law here is still based on the bible, if you’re wondering why some laws seem.. strange.

Anyway, no one back in Europe was happy to hear about this new country in America, at least among the upper class, but the British especially didn’t feel like losing another colony after what had happened to their old company in India. The British Navy was still the strongest in the western world, being an island nation that was dependant on the sea for many things, including a border, and so they were able to “investigate” this matter first, especially since they already had a large colony here in Canada, a place to land their ships before moving south. It’s worth noting that the first US president, George Washington, was Colonel Washington of the British Navy when he arrived there shortly before, and was soon promoted to General before he chose to abandon the crown and act as General of this new country here instead.

This event is significant not only because it made the colonization here that much more official, the local natives knew that this problem wasn’t going to go away any time soon, but to make matters worse, a good century of war was soon to follow here, both in the British attempting to destroy this new country right after it was created, and in the civil war that took place in the US shortly after that, between the United States of America in the north, and the growing American Confederacy of the south, which could be thought of in modern terms as the Democrats trying to kick the Republicans out of America. It didn’t really work, they’re still here of course, but it did force a more neutral political environment when their civil war ended. Between their government, I should say. The “war” ended when the Confederacy surrendered, but the Confederates are still alive and well, as we’ll soon discuss. To top it off, the US was also involved in a brief, but violent war with the fledgling nation of Mexico during this time of it’s earliest history, over territories in what is now the southern US. “Remember the Alamo” is part of their earliest writings, and this conflict is also quite prevalent today.

These wars all dragged the local natives into them along the sidelines, in various ways. Some tribes were attacked directly for their land or resources, or for slaves, while others were hired or conscripted to help fight the British, or the Confederacy. Remember, since Canada was still waving a British flag through this period of time, we were still part of “Britain” during the invasion of the US and their civil war that followed, politically, and socially. Quebec was still “French”, but falling further and further from France, just like we were from England. Some people here might have been disgruntled with the crown, especially the local natives, who arguably suffered greater atrocities up here than in the US, but in terms of the upper class, we were still part of Britain, and at war with the US through most of it. We even burned down the white house, DC isn’t that far from the border, but they just built a new one, and the British stopped sending us reinforcements before too long, so we didn’t have the numbers to keep attacking them. Our colony was really just a base of operations for them, again, a place to land ships, and a place to house troops and supplies during the colonization, and retaliation against the US for their defiance of their crown, as well as a rich source of natural resources here in itself. The British had far superior military technology at the time, wielding short range ballistic rockets made of wood, and high powered mortar cannons that fired bombs, rather than just cannonballs, not to mention a superior naval force, but they couldn’t quite push inland past the east coast, their navy was only an advantage at sea, or near a coastline.

At the time, the local natives were smart enough to realise that we weren’t an organized mob, each flag was in competition with the other, and neither one had the power to make all the others go away. Basically, even if one colony agreed to move, the rest would need to be convinced as well, and there was already a war going on on several fronts here over this stretch of time since we landed here leading up to the last century. Since the local tribes were each governed independently as well, each one had to decide how to deal with it. They didn’t have a king that ruled every tribe who could make this decision for all of them, each one had to either move, or.. pick a side in this war that had landed on their doorstep. Quite a few of them did essentially “join the US”, becoming recognized citizens, soldiers, even heroes in the earliest history of this new country, but it was a small number compared to how many got trampled by this colonization, and the wars that followed.

That period of war ended with the end of the civil war in the US, which finally meant peace for most people living here, but of course this wasn’t the end of the conflict between the new mashup of cultures that were left in it’s wake. To make things even more complicated.. Kaiser Wilhelm, also known as “The Kaiser”, along with a few others, tried to conquer Europe shortly after this. If you’re asking who that is, then you should probably know if you’ve ever complained about Hitler before. “The Great War”, or WW1 as we call it now started essentially only a single person’s lifetime after the civil war in the US ended, and so it was still fresh in our minds here, and we were both still recovering from it when we heard about what was happening back in Europe since the US had separated from it. Even if it was happening on the other side of the world, it would still effect things here at home as well, so let’s take a brief look at what happened, and how things changed here because of it.

Not just Germany, but also the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and the Austria-Hungarian Empire all rallied together to attempt to overthrow Europe while it was still weakened trying to colonize the new world. Before they could recover from fighting the US, the British now faced an even larger army right on their back doorstep, and it was already trampling across Europe, throwing France, Italy, and Spain off the hill of power, and leaving Britain essentially alone to stop it. Irony, I suppose. Russia was one of the only countries left there that wasn’t part of this uprising, and they were already being attacked themselves, and so they agreed to help fight this new threat with the British, but they were even less prepared for a war than Britain was. They had soldiers, but none of the fancy technology that Britain had, they were still using horses, bows and axes for the most part. France offered what little army it had left to help as well, but it seemed hopeless, and so.. where else did they have to turn to but “America”, and of course Canada as well? Britain was already conscripting soldiers from all of it’s colonies, so Canada got the same order as well to aid the crown in it’s fight for the homeland, and while we’d already taken some steps to achieve independence here, we hadn’t quite “declared” it yet. Our sovereignty was still in question, even among ourselves really, not just people back in Europe.

This is basically how Canada became it’s own country, even if it was more complicated on paper, this was the “declaration” that we made. Sending a small army of soldiers from our colony here, with their own, new flag (the red maple leaf) to go assist our new allies in this war, rather than fighting for Britain directly with one of their flags. It might seem petty, but many things are, and it still worked, everyone knew that we were a different country after WW1 ended, meaning that all of North America had fallen out of the hands of it’s parent nations back in Europe, which were all devastated by the great war, except for Britain, but it still crippled their economy, and their military for a short time. The US was barely involved in WW1 beyond a political level, they offered some support in the way of supplies, and helped to form the League of Nations (LON, which would soon become the UN / United Nations), initially created as a means of responding to global threats faster than we did with WW1, which took the whole western world by surprise. The idea was to cut that lag time down, and make our “Alliance” more official, so that if someone did try to conquer Europe again, or.. anywhere, really, the allies would be able to quickly discuss what to do about it.

This can also be seen as a way of more efficiently managing the practice of colonization. The uglier side of the coin, you could say. With naval technology steadily improving, now featuring submarines, and steel plated warships with gas engines, the likelihood of another war breaking out over a distant colony was much higher, so this League of Nations was also trying to avoid having their own games of Monopoly interfere with one another’s, in addition to protecting their homes back in Europe, and now in North America as well. Basically, a place where the players, as well as Generals, could meet and discuss business, before the US pioneered their own version of Monopoly, the game that we still play today. This is another detail that would require a lot more time to dissect, so for now, it’s just another reference point for the next step into our modern era. The industrial revolution was already in full effect before this happened, this just gave our new industries here more freedom to expand, and more attention from European investors, who soon realized that things like the New York Stock Exchange were an easier way to make money than the old Dutch bank in Switzerland. Of course people still use them, very wealthy people, but our own banks started digging into the economies here even more firmly after the Great War, which gives us clear enough motive for how things went from there. The “big boom” of the 1920’s was just starting, and cash was the easiest way for a person to become rich, even more than gold was before that.

The final point worth mentioning here about how things shifted after the Great War was one of the new “global laws” created by the LON/UN that had been created. These laws weren’t exactly absolute, since.. there was no real way to globally police them, they were more like agreements between nations that were involved, and commonly agreed upon reasons for intervention in times of crisis. One of these laws was designed to “deal with Europe” after it was essentially destroyed by the Great War. The war itself permenantly changed the power structure of the modern world, Europe was no longer the king of the hill, but this new “Alliance” was, who’s most powerful nations didn’t reside in Europe anymore. Suddenly, Europe was a liability, and they wanted to make it harder for someone to start a World War like that again.

One of these new international laws made after WW1 was called “self determination”, and this also helps answer questions like “why is Russia so big, and everyone in Europe has such a tiny country?” Those tiny countries in Europe all became “self determined” after the great war, or.. most of them did. People still get touchy about their specific European heritage, but these are more like nationalities, based on a majority of people who lived there at the time. Sub cultures, mostly Latin, Nordic, or Celtic in origin, but also several other smaller influences, even from northern Africa and the middle east. This new law was designed to allow a local population to determine their own government, basically to create their own country, but only if their specific race was the majority of that population. Keep in mind that modern medicine was just inventing microscopes around this time, we didn’t have DNA testing yet, it would have been a matter of appearance, languages, and whatever documentation could be provided.

There might be different reasons for doing this, but in a tactical sense, this seemed to be more of a military decision, to prevent people like the Kaiser from rallying such large armies so quickly. In the Great War, three different countries made up about half the population of Europe, and not everyone living in Germany was German, or Hungarian or Austrian in that new empire, and most people still think that an Ottoman is a piece of furniture. These were just masses of land that had been claimed, and everyone living there was subject to the whims of their governments. This is true for any place, but this could be seen as one of the earliest acts of “globalization”, trying to create some sort of world order, even if it’s still flawed in it’s own way. I’m not here to judge how bad it is, just to explore our options.

Basically, this was just cutting down the size of the old countries that tried to conquer Europe, making Germany, Austria, and Hungary much smaller countries as a result, because each area that they’d conquered soon became a self determined country of their own, even if the local populations had very similar cultures, the people living there were happy to take advantage of this new law. Turkey even needed to do this just to hang on to what they have now, because the Ottoman Empire wasn’t a “country” anymore, it was another chapter of history. There was even an additional law created at this time that specifically prevented any alliances or unions between Austrians or Hungarians. One of the first laws of the new world police, preventing those two from having parties.

With that footnote in place, lets look back to North America, and analyse why the natives that lived here weren’t able to take advantage of this same law. Technically, they should have been able to create their own countries based on their populations, the same way that the small countries in Europe legally broke away from their parent nations, but several clerical stipulations prevented that from happening here. For one, the native population here was much lower than it was when we arrived, and ours was much higher, so.. we were already the majority across the board, but that’s not the only reason. The other obvious one would be that.. no one really told them about it. The few that might have known weren’t able to tell them all fast enough, and by the time anyone might have said something, there was already another World War happening in Europe. WW2 is already well known to most people today, more so than any piece of history, so I won’t bother getting into detail with it, it’s just another reference point for us, another roadblock that changed things here back home.

It’s fair enough to say that a majority of people in our government simply wouldn’t have been willing to hand over any of the land that we’d claimed, even if they tried to make it seem legal. Many early documents even specify that the local natives didn’t qualify as “citizens”, or even humans, much like how ancient Greece only considered you a citizen if you were Greek. In our case, crimes against the local natives weren’t really crimes, and to this day, they’re still subject to rampant victimization, from each other, and us, and of course many of them don’t have access to the same things we do. To be fair, we can’t really rely on the police here either, but in their case, it’s just easier to get away with killing them. To use a simplistic metaphor, imagine that Hitler won WW2, and that the remaining Jews were now living in reservations, and still being victimized. That’s.. essentially what happened here, you could even argue that our governments were worse than Nazis in many ways, since Hitler was just a crazy person who everyone said “Yavo” to. His officers didn’t stop him, and neither did ours. I also think that his “reason” for exterminating specific bloodlines, my own included, was.. because of the new “self determination” law. They can’t “self determine” a new country if they’re dead, right? It’s.. diabolical.

Again, our situation back home unfolded a little differently. More slowly, with more elbow room and bigger rugs to sweep a mess under. Germany is a fairly small country in comparison, it’s no bigger than BC, so hiding concentration camps wouldn’t have been easy, but they still pulled it off, on top of a massive war machine, a booming economy, and housing for millions of people. Perhaps for a terrible reason, but the method worked, it was efficient, so.. apply that to a much larger, wealthier pair of nations here back home. You might be thinking it’s “just America”, or “fuck Canada”, but that’s just another distraction. Hoping for people in Europe to agree with one argument or the other is about as pointless as the Pope telling us to be nice, or us telling China to give back Tibet, or conquer North Korea. Unless you want to become the world police yourself, then it’s up to the locals to figure out their own problems before calling Team America, and yes, I would call Team America before Team Canada if it really came down to it, and so would you.

As harsh as our Spartan neighbours to the south can be, it was actually easier for a native to become a citizen there sooner than it was here, their constitution didn’t stipulate a racial bias, and so anyone could become a citizen, as long as they could prove their identity. In addition to the obvious language barrier, the need to understand English to deal with our courts, the matter of identification was the real barrier at first in many cases, the local natives didn’t keep the same type of birth records that we did, or medical records, so on, and the matter of identifying individuals was a problem until more modern technologies became more common. In the meantime, you would have needed some friends and family to vouch for you in a courtroom, but it was still possible. Up here, however, there is no constitution. People don’t even know what “liberty” means, it’s disgraceful. The law here is entirely one sided, and.. flexible, the court can essentially do whatever they want. Our “charter of rights and freedoms” is little more than lip service, it has no legal bearing. In the US, the constitution IS the law, every law has to be constitutional, whereas here, the charter is just one of many laws, all of which are subject to change, or even omittence.

It might not be obvious up here, since “order” is still the watchword of any modern court. If people are willing to cooperate with certain terms, or can afford a good lawyer, then you can often get the law to work in your favor, but not always. Since the locals natives here weren’t even included as “people” on our already flimsy charter, it took a while before most of them had access to.. any of the territories that we’d settled. The reason that most of us live right along the border is simply due to the climate up here, it’s too cold for most people to go north, so we live where it’s not snowing. The west coast in particular seems to have an ideal climate, the mildest one available in our border, but of course when it came time to finally recognize these natives here as “humans”, we gave them the shittiest places on our map. The US was already opening Indian Casinos to help bridge the awkward gaps between their economies while we were still drawing borders for places like Iqaluit, one of the most desolate landscapes on Earth. We’d evolved slightly beyond the concentration camp method, we weren’t quite “exterminating” them anymore, now it’s more of a matter of keeping them out of sight, because it’s harder to ignore people in today’s modern age. It’s much easier for them to voice their opinions now, and it’s been less than a single person’s lifetime since we were killing them off directly here at home, so we’re obviously stuck in an awkward situation ourselves.

Today, the natives here are finally citizens, they even have a unique form of ID that identifies them as being aboriginal. This “status card” also allows them to purchase certain regulated items in our market at a discount, avoiding certain taxes as a form of restitution. Depending on where they shop, they can buy booze, cigarettes and gasoline for nearly half of it’s retail price, which.. I’ll try not to speculate on too much. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a discount on those things, but obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that, and it doesn’t quite fix the problem. It’s a nice gesture in itself, something that could be used to smooth over a diplomatic negotiation, even a “peace offering”, but that alone doesn’t resolve a conflict, it’s just.. lip service. What’s more, it’s only created more animosity, since local European descended youth are also struggling in a failing economy where this seems like an unfair discount, among other things.

This animosity works in many ways, even ranging to native locals who don’t want to be part of our government, they’d prefer if we just left. The problem with that is that “we” aren’t a “we”, we’re a bunch of different people, each with our own history, and our own agenda. I have several aboriginal friends, ex girlfriends, etcetera, who I had no problem dealing with on a personal level, outside of the same problems that I’ve faced with.. anyone, really. I can vouch for the fact that they are indeed humans, so we need to try to find a logical middle ground for us, and our children to work with, otherwise this conflict may very well never end until something dramatic like a civil war does take place. We all know that kids aren’t racist, not until their parents start programming them to hate or fear specific people. A classroom full of kids tend to get along fine regardless of race, we’re the one’s who freak out about it, even for kids not understanding what racism is, because.. they don’t fucking care. We need to learn from this example, otherwise, we’re stupider than a kindergarten class.

My point here is that.. it is technically possible. If we want to, we could use the age old magic of brainwashing and propaganda to.. quite instantly turn the next generation of kids into.. you know, considerate people. The anti-asshole program, to counteract the cycles of abuse that have been handed down to us from our parents, and so on. Before anyone panics, I’m also opposed to any sort of Neo Nazi, PC thug Care Bears, everyone fucking smile or we’ll shoot you type of thing, all I mean by this is getting rid of segregation between groups, since.. I thought that’s what the whole “civil rights movement” was about. I know it happened in evil America, but you know what, it was a pretty fucking good idea, regardless of what clown was giving speeches from the white house at the time. The practical effect was that black kids could go to the school with white kids, and from that, we got fuckin’ Eminem and D12. It might sound funny, but this is what influences culture, not a Ben Stein clone giving dry lectures from a podium. This is how black and white people finally feel comfortable living and working together, by seeing real examples of it, and not vague orders that keep changing every day. Today, native kids are allowed in public schools, but many go to segregated schools, simply because their parents can’t afford to move off of a reserve. This alone perpetuates a culture of.. take a guess, segregation. You’re “different” than me, because.. we went to different schools, and psychologically, that is a huge difference in behaviour, regardless of who’s more civil. The difference between a person who went to a public or private school, or even homeschooling, are all quite defined, and so any such segregation has a similar effect. Combine that with already existing, quite prominent animosity that’s still lingering, and of course many fucking goofs who still find amusement in bullying people for no logical reason, and they so look for excuses like racial difference to start fights, we’re still spinning our tires in a mud pit, and slowly sinking amidst many other problems. So.. what comes next after “panic”? Well…

Consider a hypothetical scenario, in which we “give back some land”, without the added insult to injury of giving them the least valuable part of our map. Keep in mind that segregation is exactly what we’re trying to avoid here, not to mention further animosity, or the probability of a civil war. I’ll just play the role of negotiator in this diplomatic proposal, and you decide if it would be more or less reasonable than what’s already been offered.

Let’s say we could “split Canada in half”, vertically, rather than horizontally. East and west, bordered between Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I don’t think that I really need to ask, you guys can just have the west side, unless you REALLY want the east coast. I know, this sounds insane, so welcome to my personal mental asylum, you already checked into it, so just take your medicine and try to relax while you’re here. First, I have some conditions for this proposal, unfortunately I can’t just “give you land”, because it’s not mine to give. It belongs to the people who live there, which is.. all of us now, even your cat or your dog, unless you’re comfortable with me opening a new German kennel next door. What I’m offering.. is your own “state” within our federal government, such as it is. What that means is.. you can elect your own chief instead of a prime minister now, and the old British government back east would have to work with you if they wanted access to the rich resource base here. Another key condition would be.. no segregation, at least where possible until upgrades can be installed in things like school systems. Natives can still live and work in the east, and vice versa, we’re not kicking all the white people out of western Canada, or natives out of the east, we’re already one country with different provinces, and so having two states in addition to that isn’t really that crazy, at least in my opinion. That would also eliminate the problem of citizenship, we’d still be Kanatian, just.. from the east or western state. The cadre of jesters can keep running their cirque de soleil in Ottawa, and we can make a better state over here, together.

Condition 3.. no dictatorships. I’m sorry, I don’t care how holy your chief is, he’s a human like anyone else, and we’re not risking another “Kaiser” showing up on our back doorstep. I realise that this sounds hypocritical, our own House of Commons is close enough, but if we want to show them up and be the better half of Kanata, then yes, we do need to shove a stick up our ass / sit on our new flagpole just to make that point, at least in the short term. So long as this new state is still a republic, a real republic.. then we could show every republic in the world how well the system can work, if we do things like prevent our markets from interfering with basic needs. Depending on how this new chief approached the situation, it could improve things for all of us, not just one side or the other.

In a practical sense, this just means that the chief is more of a spokesperson than a traditional “king” or “queen”. They represent the state, and help manage it’s affairs. They vote within their council, but it’s not the only vote, some sort of elected council or senate has to be part of this decision making process. Technically, these positions should be available to anyone within that republic, we can’t segregate our economy or military either, and so the initial vote for a chief would essentially be an act of emergency control, even martial law. With no constitution, that should be as simple as signing a document in a courthouse.

There are quite a few details that would need to be worked out, how to manage national security, police, etcetera, but the point here is to give these natives a fair, equal share in government, since it’s all we can really offer without becoming Kaisers ourselves. The sad reality of this situation is that none of us were really responsible for starting this, all of the real culprits are already dead, yet the conflict continues, and the matter of who to blame is becoming more and more vague, creating even more animosity among everyone involved, really. No one wants to be blamed for something that they weren’t directly responsible for, and some don’t even want to be accountable for what they did do.

This idea is still a work in progress, but it’s the best place I could think to start without resorting to a real civil war, or dictatorship that would simply collapse again. Really, it could give more freedom to all of us, if we set a better example of how to use our own civil liberties. The US may have reserved their right to make their own laws and standards, but obviously too many of them made some bad decisions, and the rest have to pay for it. In our case.. it would be quite simple, if we could agree on it. Less people to manage, plenty of space to use, and less legal interference in terms of our structure of government. Of course, the current government here would just say “go fuck yourself”, in a diplomatic, RCMP fashion of course, but that can only last for so long. The military isn’t stupid, they know that they have to hide under a radar of plausible deniability, and so we still have some freedom as to how we approach this. Another obvious obstacle might be that these native tribes are still somewhat divided themselves, even picking a chief, or a council of elders could take a lot of effort, but it’s still worth considering, since it wouldn’t force any locals to leave/be kicked out of their homes again.

I’ve already heard about people who want the western US and Canada to separate into it’s own country, years before now, and so this might be a more practical idea than some people think. Again, we might not even need to create a new country, even just a new state could make a big difference to begin with, since everything from laws to economic concerns could be managed more locally, rather than just from DC or Ottawa. I might come back to this topic later, but for now, just consider how much this idea would really change your day to day life. Everyone already hates every politician anyway, so would it really make a difference? Even if you hated the new chief, your life would be exactly the same, apart from the fact that we might finally make a tangible step toward a civil rights movement of our own regarding local natives. As antiquated as it might sound today, we haven’t quite gotten there yet, so.. I do think that it would be necessary before any other major changes could be put into place to recover the already sinking ship that we’ve built here in the new world.

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The Chuan Chronicle

Be the change you want to tell: reader-generated stories, news, arts & culture on Salt Spring Island

Shadow Mask

Written by

Author and amateur scientist.

The Chuan Chronicle

Be the change you want to tell: reader-generated stories, news, arts & culture on Salt Spring Island

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