Radio War Nerd EP #513 — The Great White Oaf, feat. Dan Boeckner

There was significant opposition in Quebec, and even from elected Quebec Liberal MP's, to Canadian participation in the Boer war; perhaps some of the French language press reflected this.

With all due respect to the Yale professors who are fighting fascism by fleeing to Canada, I offer this song from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":Brave Sir Robin ran away. Bravely ran away, away! When danger reared its ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled. Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about And gallantly he chickened out. Bravely taking to his feet He beat a very brave retreat, Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!

Maybe it’s not war enough and I should check a different podcast but I would like to know more about this Nayib Bukele bastard whose dad converted to Islam but is so right wing he’s making Guantanamo 2 for Trump right now

not that the US is in the business of making rational decisions around the borders of it's empire recently, but even if there was an invasion of Canada it seems pretty straightforward to me that direct control of the northern reaches would only hurt the US economically. If Canada is annexed you lose a guaranteed 25-35% currency margin, an already extant free trade agreement (which is not the case in Canada currently - no free trade agreement between provinces and territories but every province and territory has a free trade agreement with the US!). So much of Canadian equity is already held by US interests, and the entire domestic economy is more or less designed around shipping raw material to the US... annexation would be like a stock split at a multinational where the existing holders of Canadian equity end up with a devalued holding and then the (now violently disenfranchised?) Canadian equity holders get transferred ownership to a now intra-US business board that has to jointly pay for a mass administrative update? Canada basically belongs to the US already, why spend the time and effort for a logo change

Canadian psyops over here like "there's so many wolves roaming around, you might call it a wolf parade"

Trump just wants the oil (sands). He'll push for some deal. Meanwhile, in terms of inflating asset bubbles, the business lobbies in western countries have been hard for mass immigration post COVID, raising housing demand. This has caused far right groups to gain strength and allow conservatives to look good when they dogwhistle reductions.

I don’t really think Carney is at fault for the housing bubble. It’s really just due to Canada not having a real economy for 20+ years and the money is going to go somewhere (and Canada’s private business sector is a joke)

I know this was something of a joke episode for you guys and Dan is a funny guy, but this was essentially just a man who doesn't live in Canada, who only lived in BC & Montreal, who admitted he barely follows Canadian politics, talking out of his ass for an hour forty. I doubt this man ever spent more than a gig's measure in any rural community; probably doesn't speak French, know any indigenous people, or know any immigrants. In fact he probably hasn't had a real conversation with a fellow Canadian who wasn't his close friend or family in years. Not everything he said was off-base: Canadian sovereignty was destroyed long ago by politicians, but that's not some incredible insight, and his understanding of history is deeply in question. It seemed like the American hosts knew more about Canadian history than this burn out

This was a bit inside baseball for me. Working class Canadians are "oafs"? Or did I miss something

In reference to how the First World War is remembered in Canada, it depends on what generation you were born I think. When we still had veterans from that conflict walking around, it was understood that it was all a great waste of lives, because a bunch of cousins couldn’t get along. As an school student, I was taught it CAUSED the Second World War, and now that that’s all settled, we can focus on the the United Nations and creating peace. Canadian civilians were very proud of the blue Helmets (although it hasn’t really recovered after the Somalia affair). First World War veterans would talk to us at school and they would NEVER talk about bullshit like freedom or the flag….just about how awful it was. Then they all died, and September 11th happened….the war in Iraq…the Canadian Conservative movement did whatever it could to promote war. The Canadian Legion became some kind of pro-war, support the troops, bulwark of patriotic talking points. They succeeded in a lawsuit against peace activists who were making white poppies in remembrance of civilians killed during war to be worn beside the red ones (these white poppies were around almost as long as the red ones) So ya, I feel it’s changed a lot at least where I grew up (east coast). Now that the veterans are gone, we can forget the “never again” stuff and focus on what really matters….for Flag and Country! Especially when Harper was PM

Looking at the tariffs' effects, the U.S. just nuked Germany and South Korea from orbit. I can't say I'm saddened. The best time to enact the Morgenthau Plan was 1945. The second-best time is to keep up the job Biden began in 2022.

the canadian contigent of people who are okay with joining the US, in my experience that goes pretty far back, I think it's bascially 80% economic, like, our gas is more expensive because of taxes, so is our consumer goods for a myriad of reasons, the jobs pay better, the businesses are stronger, the big engineering, tech, corpo entertainment jobs just do better down there. In that sense it would just save a lot of those guys a lot of hassle to have to formally migrate. The same type of people who would take any occasion to go do shopping down in Burlington or Seattle or Buffalo

Also, an RWN discussion of Infinite Jest just ain’t gonna happen folks.

Fun episode: I agree with some of the criticism. The significant point is that annexation happened sometime ago, and the anti-American type of CDN nationalism Dan refers to is the Great White North Lost Cause.

In terms of Canadian nationalism a major part of that was public health care. While it’s in shambles now it was always brought up as a key example of how Canada is different than the states. In the early 2000s there was a national campaign to vote for the “greatest Canadian” and Tommy Douglas won. Weird that Dan doesn’t even mention this.

As a lapsed Canadian (& a leftist one) I'm delighted to hear this conversation; insightful & hilarious. When I last lived there in the 70s, elections were enlivened by the Rhinoceros Party: a group of people who ran spoof candidates to send up the whole thing. Their defence budget was $25, for a phone number in Ottawa with a recorded message: "We surrender."

I think Boeckner is totally wrong about which “oaf overseers” would support a US take over. A guy like Andrew Coyne- who IS an idiot and Canada is in such a bad position because it’s spent several decades listening too much to guys like him — is from this old Anglo-Tory anti-American tradition. He would not happily give up a privileged position in Canada to be a servant in the US. Collaborators would be the people he mentioned originally: upwardly mobile oafs, exactly the core Trump supporting group in the Us

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/military-propaganda-exercise-that-caused-panic-about-wolves-on-the-loose-lacked-oversight-investigation-finds

So much of this conversation had me thinking about Infinite Jest. The names for the northern territories (Canada) - the Quebecois deliberate amputee separatists.

Canadian here - a correction needs to be made about Dan's comments on the Boer War. While English Canada supported the Boer War (broadly) it fiercely divided French Canada and was an extremely divisive issue at the time. Look up Henri Bourassa for information.

The thing with the f-35 is that Canada needs a new jet now. We’be been using ancient fighters since the 80s, and we’ve been kicking the “new jet” can down the road for years now. The f-35 is the only jet that fits the bill.

Dan's a nice guy but doesn't have the chops to address what's going on in Canada either today or historically. Yves Engler could talk Canadian foreign policy in great detail and historically, too. David Pugiliese is Canada's premiere defence reporter at the Ottawa Citizen who has been targeted for exposing the Ukrainian-Canadian Nazis as well as corruption, contracting and deployments of Canadian military. Gabriel Haythornthwaite could address Canadian domestic politics - his May 2022 assessment of the so-called Freedom convoy in Ottawa was deeply prescient about the annexation threat and has a stellar analysis of the domestic Canadian forces behind it (search his name on youtube for one of his recorded talks on this). Jeremy Appel has great insights into Alberta's political establishment. Andrew Stevens and Emily Eaton are Saksatchewan-based experts on the western canadian petro-state and co-edited a book published last year called Unjust Transition. Sam Gindin could talk at length on Canadian political economy, and how Canadian elites and turned to continentalism and the American Empire with "free trade" in the 80s. A decade ago he wrote a major book on American imperialism with the late pre-eminent Canadian Marxist scholar Leo Panitch. This episode was unfortuantely far below the calibre of RWN interviews on the politics of other countries.

He was a professor at Uvic? Im so bummed out I missed him. I'm studying there now

in canada is vimy treated like gallipoli is in australia? like with phony reverence/bitterness?

Gotta watch Canadian bacon with John candy

We used to joke about it in the CAF and all of us agreed that a US invasion of Canada would last about 2-3 weeks.

I think a lot of the really rabid anti-China attitudes started popping up around the Huawei conflict and the arrest of the two Michaels (who turned out to be CSIS agents smuggling amphetamines.) At least thats when my mom decided she would boycott Chinese products. Of course it was always simmering under the surface before that though.

About an hour into the episode and this is such a boring dud. The entire framing around collaboration and resistance is so unserious and stupid. So if the Quebecois are the main force of resistance it would stand to reason that Manitoba would also be a vector of resistance because of the Francophone population here. So I guess Saint Boniface would be turned into the Warsaw ghetto in this scenario? The fuck are we even talking about here. Also the whole oaf thesis is at best half baked and explains exactly zero about Canadian domestic politics. For instance Ford is referencing as a leading “oaf” yet the Ontario conservatives have a long standing agreement with the Federal liberals not to attack each other. This is mainly because of the massive EV subsidies the Federal government is pumping into Ontario. In the last several federal elections Ford gave zero help to the Federal conservatives because of this. Boeckner seems like a good guy but come on you can do better than this.

Keep going, you’re doing great! 🌟

When you guys talked about “militarized icebreakers,” I just imagined them getting turned into lead boxes that they’d use to ram into aircraft carriers. Like 2500 years of innovations in naval warfare just brings us back to Salamis Also, I went to Peking University (go Peking ducks!) If Jason Stanley wants some references I could probably hook him up

Great ep, no notes.

fucking hell you guys mentioned Surrey and I just got pulled back twenty years into a room playing halo 2 with a bloke from Vancouver as he tried to explain Surrey to his Aussie mates.

Speaking of nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers, there's actually a quite good horror video game called Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (made in 2008 by Ukrainian developers) about a doomed Arktika-class icebreaker. The ship collides with an iceberg and damage to its reactor causes a fracture in time and mutates the crew into weird monsters. So in another timeline, who knows what happened to the alternate Mark Ames aboard that ship he toured... Apparently the plot of Cryostasis references a Gorky short story called the Flaming Heart of Danko, but I'm not familiar with it.

Oafs are in control trust the plan.

I think the real reason Jason Stanley fled America is because he looks like a douchebag...

You keep mispronouncing “OTAN” in this episode… ​ ​ ​ ​ (This is a joke about Gaullism.)

Quite astonishing that we had a discussion about a US invasion of Canada, and Quebecois resistance, without a nod to the wheelchair assassins of Infinite Jest!

As a current ivy leagues some of the teachers are insanely stupid

Release the bottlemen archives!!! There are so many episodes I want to re-listen to!! Thanks for your understanding.

Thank you guys for having Dan Boeckner on, a person that strangely doesnt include himself in the quisling category... Also Russel Williams was the CFB of Trenton Air Force base. Canadas LARGEST air force base and the was the lifeline for all of Canadas troops and equipment transported for the GWOT. Extremely important position that seems to be given to people like Russel Williams. His successor Leif Dahl was recently arrested for trying to hunt ducks in this depressing concrete canal (think LA river) in the middle of a town next to the air force base with rifles from the base. Literally firing wildly at these poor ducks in a tiny aluminum boat in the middle of town.

John *thinks about traveling* The universe, “okay break this guy’s leg again”

Oafs having a renaissance rn love that for them

"The Ukraine of North America" Um . . . what?

The oaf breakdown makes me proud to be Canadian

it takes a damn carney to run this circus 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Manne Franks

The oafs are always the first to go