On the 23^rd of April, 1917, one of the most bizarre dramas of the First World War took place. Norwegian schooner Royal was transporting timber, destined for the coal mines of England. Off the coast of Denmark, the Royal’s crew saw the German Navy airship L23 descending towards them like an apparition from an H.G. Wells novel.

L23’s commander, Kapitanleutnant Ludwig Bockholt, ordered the vessel to halt by dropping a bomb in front of it. Once stopped, Bockholt dispatched a prize crew to the vessel, and Royal was sailed back to Germany as a prize of war. It was and will probably remain the only time that an airship has ever captured a ship on the high seas.

The capture of Royal was a strange, and unique event in history, but it was entirely insignificant for the conduct of the war. A schooner full of timber was not worth the risk to a hydrogen filled airship. Orders went out to ensure such a performance never repeated.1

This historical oddity may have been insignificant in itself, but it was a tiny part of the much larger commerce campaign of the First World War. From 1914-19192 major blockading actions by the great powers targeted one another’s industry, and indeed, the very means of national survival. The Royal was captured because she was carrying pit props, the timber supporting structures required in coal mines. They are not war material, but they are essential in the creation of war material, and as such they were considered contraband.

When the frontlines in a war are stalemated, moving too slowly to see decisive results, nations adapt their tactics. Very few nations have ever committed to a long war deliberately; the majority think they will win quickly and be home by Christmas.

This was certainly true of the First World War. The Central Powers had intended that the war be ended by 1914, leaving little role for the Royal Navy blockade effort. But once the Schlieffen Plan failed, and the troops dug in for the winter of 1914-15, the warring nations soon changed tack. With the battlefield stagnant, the powers went to war on the nations themselves, not just their armies.

Since the end of the Second World War, economic warfare has been something of an oddity itself. It is used of course; for example during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), both sides actively targeted oil, the economic lifeblood of the region. There are also the notorious and admittedly effective sanctions that the US and other governments leverage against regimes they dislike.

These examples are, however, limited cases. What we are seeing in the world today is anything but.

Subscribe now

“The bomber will always get through”

In the period between the First and Second World Wars, the Royal Air Force (RAF) doctrine for bombers followed a simple precept: the bomber will always get through. The fate of Bomber Command in 1940 proved this to be a suicidal axiom. Today, however, with the development of modern technology it has become more true than it was before.

Armed conflicts follow trends. No rule is universal, but patterns develop based on the confluence of technology, goals, and ideology. What we see in armed conflicts today is a simultaneously effective defense, and a near unstoppable drone offense. On land, the defender is blessed with many advantages. In the air, it is the attacker who rules.

In the past several weeks, Ukraine has been pounded by long range Russian weapons. Likewise, throughout the summer, Ukraine has been conducting a drone campaign targeting the logistics companies Ozon and Wildberries, and Russian petrol, oil and lubricant (POL) production facilities. Civilian gas stations are targets to both sides. In the Black Sea, both sides have been sinking merchant ships carrying grain, natural gas, and other export products. The situation has become so serious that Türkiye has announced the intent to close the Dardanelles to shipping.

The two sides have employed every manner of defense against drones, but nothing thus far has successfully countered them. So far, the best defense against these weapons seems to be covering a potential target in mesh to detonate the drone away from the target. Similarly, Russia has been leaning on long range ballistic missiles, and like drones, these are proving incredibly difficult to intercept.

The same lesson at longer range can be seen in the US-Iran War. Both sides have the ability to strike each other at will, yet neither can defend itself. This has created a situation where the relevant powers and their primary supporters are stuck in a form of mutually assured destruction. Neither side can escalate enough to destroy the other because they know the response will be equally catastrophic. For all Trump’s perpetual bluster, his senior officials seem to be aware of this.

Attacking the means to fight

Attrition warfare is one of the most atrocious ideas the human species has ever conceived. The concept is simple: force one side to fight until they quite literally run out of humans to place in uniform or run out of uniforms and arms to give them. What General Erich von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, referred to during the Battle of Verdun as “bleeding France white.”

Falkenhayn was not unique; all the major combatants in the First World War had similar goals and tactics. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that the Battle of the Somme (July 1- Nov 18, 1916) was in fact an attritional victory for the allies in spite of their 600,000+ casualties.

During and after the First World War, efforts by all combatants were made to ensure such an attritional conflict never occurred again. One such way is to attack not the army itself, but the means by which a nation fights. As noted in the case of the L23 and Royal, the means to make war might not be weapons, but rather the economy of the enemy itself. Coal makes power, power makes factories work, factories make munitions.

During the Second World War, all the primary combatant nations in Europe were scarred by their experiences in the First World War. France, Britain, the USSR and Germany all were desperate to avoid the bloodletting in the trenches they had experienced, and in trying to avoid it, created a conflict that was even worse. To be sure, there was no shortage of indiscriminate bombing during the Great War, and an enormous blockade effort, but 1939-45 saw a expanded efforts by all combatants to demolish the enemy’s ability to fight.

This was especially true of the UK and USA. The UK from 1940-42,3 was effectively on its own. With no means to get at the German foe, the RAF resorted to large scale bombing of factories, and civilian housing surrounding them. The ‘de-housing’ campaign by the RAF was explicitly targeted towards factory workers and their families.

The USAAF was a little more discriminate with its strategic bombing. Daylight raids meant the crews were able to target more specific sites like the ball bearings plant at Schweinfurt, railroads, and the German synthetic oil industry.

It is remarkable in hindsight just how little damage to the German economy the Allied bombing efforts managed. It wasn’t through lack of trying; day and night, Allied bombers pulverized German cities. The reality, however, is that you can drop a lot of explosives on an urban area without causing any damage whatever to the industrial life of that area. Indeed, post-war investigations found that most industrial sites were repaired at remarkable speed. Civilian homes and infrastructure might have been ruined, but production was often back up to peak after a few weeks.

It seems surprising today that the UK would take part in such a campaign. Not for moral reasons but practical, they witnessed enough German bombing in the World Wars to know its ineffectiveness. The reason is rooted once again, in the Somme and Passchendaele. After the nightmare of the Western Front, any method, be it blockade, or aerial bombing, seemed better than a return to the trenches. Strategic bombing represented a way to get at the enemy, and specifically, at the enemies’ means to fight.

The Material Battle

A used in the Battle of Verdun and the Somme was the battle of material, or Materialschlacht. The battle of material is an economic one. The battlefield for such a struggle is not contained to the trenches, but the factories, towns, powerplants and infrastructure of a nation. It is the battle of output.

In the First World War it was shell output that first caused crisis. Throughout late 1914 and much of 1915, battles were shaped by the ability of an army to procure artillery shells. In a period where the infantry were learning they couldn’t advance without major artillery support, that support was not always forthcoming. 1915 was a disastrous year in which artillery supplies often meant debilitating reductions in shells-per-gun, and in Russia, soldiers were sent to the front without rifles.4

The Materialschlacht accounts not only for the damage inflicted upon one nation by another, but also the efficiency of a nation’s industry. It is the world where cheap, easily manufactured products made from easily procured materials are king.

The drone and the Tactical Ballistic Missile (TBM) are the winners of the material battle.

It is remarkable that of all the conflicts the USA with all its industrial might seems incapable of winning, it is the material battle with Iran, and the proxy-material battle with Russia.

The MIM-104 Patriot missile system is one of the most famous and effective air defense platforms available. It is the premier air defense platform. Where the American Empire goes, so goes the MIM-104. In 2026, it’s name is also synonymous with it’s defeat in the material battle.

Air defense missiles, and interceptor drones, are proving disproportionately expensive. TBMs has been in service since the German V2 missiles of World War II. In spite of 80 years of research and development, there has been no successful counter developed. That’s not to say you cannot stop a TBM. Far from it. The problem with drones and TBMs is the material battle. The attacking weapon system is much cheaper and easier to build than the interceptor needed to negate it.

Simply; you can’t stop them all, and it costs you more to do so than it costs them to launch them. You need more interceptors than they have missiles, and each interceptor costs more than each missile, and takes longer to manufacture. Simple arithmetic.

Taking Stock

What does this mean practically?

The age of limited conflicts wherein nations engaged in battle between small forces of professional soldiers and large bodies of insurgents is becoming the exception. What we see in Iran-US fighting, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, is a conscious shift toward large scale warfare targeting not only the enemy’s military, but the entirety of the enemy nation. We haven’t seen a deliberate shift like this5 since the lead up to the Second World War.

We see this in the current CAF budget too. The push toward major strategic assets like HIMARS and F-35s isn’t just the CAF kowtowing to the US Military Industrial Complex (there’s plenty of that), but a statement of intent. Built into the planning of armed force in Canada, is the idea that we will end up in a major force-on-force engagement. Everywhere, nations that are rearming are doing so by building not just military forces, but industrial infrastructure. Not more troops, but more ammunition.

Forgotten amongst the discussion of broader targeting of infrastructure, industry and the means to fight, is the legality of doing so. As I have already mentioned, the idea of a War Crime is in fact, in the eyes of the beholder, not the eyes of the law. Simply; this shift ignores the established legal norms, if they were ever respected in the first place.

The new style of warfare involves enormous expenditures of weaponry. It creates gigantic areas of no-man’s-land where drones can deny the enemy safety but cannot ensure their own side’s safety. TBMs can smash bases and fortified positions with relative impunity. The modern army is a very difficult thing to kill. Sure, you can kill it’s soldiers, blow up it’s trucks, and demolish the infrastructure it relies on, but as Russia and Ukraine have learned to their cost, you can’t dislodge it very easily.

The war-hungry nations of the world are learning this and they are adapting to the new reality.

Ian, Aug 29, 2026

Details have been coming out all week about the peace deal being made between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. There is a lot more to be learned before we can say with any degree of certainty what will transpire. Israel is refusing to withdraw from Lebanon, which is one of the terms defined by Iran as a necessary pre-condition to further negotiations. We also don’t know if Israel will sabotage this ceasefire as it has repeatedly in this conflict, and its history more generally.

What is apparent is that the Iranian and American governments appear to believe it to be true. Numerous reports of ship movements and reopening of ports to opposing vessels indicates that regardless of the potential of collapse, the two sides to appear to desire this ceasefire take place and are taking concrete actions in that direction.

Subscribe now

The US has been very coy about the details surrounding the peace, and Iran has not. While this could be anything from communications incompetence, or the Iranian Government hyping the agreement, the most likely scenario is that at minimum, the agreement as stated by the Iranian Government represents a broad, if maximalist, understanding of the agreement. It is as follows (per Mehr News Agency):

· $12b of Iranian frozen assets unfrozen before negotiations, with another $12b within 60 days of the final negotiations.

· Oil and petrochemical sanctions suspended.

· Full naval blockade lifted in 30 days.

· US commits to non-interference in Iranian affairs, withdrawal of forces from around Iran, and no new sanctions or force deployments during negotiations.

· An immediate ceasefire is required on all fronts, including Lebanon.

· The Strait of Hormuz reopens within 30 days under Iranian supervision.

· Iran reaffirms its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment not to produce nuclear weapons.

· A 60-day window is set to negotiate a final deal covering nuclear issues and full sanctions removal.

· The U.S. and Allies (I read Israel and Gulf States) must also present reconstruction plans worth at least $300b.

· Iran’s missile program and support for resistance groups is removed from the agenda entirely.

· No final negotiations are to begin until $12b is released, oil sanctions are suspended, and blockade is lifted.

· A supervisory mechanism will oversee implementation, with any final agreement approved by UN Security Council resolution.

Without hyperbole, if this is even half true, this represents nothing short of a catastrophic defeat for the United States. The strategic and financial implications outweigh the cost in blood.

In terms of casualty figures, the US and Israel have come off disproportionately light compared to Lebanon and Iran. 56 US and allied soldiers (15 US, 32 Israel, 3 KSA, 3 UAE, 4 Kuwait), have been killed in the conflict, and approximately 2000 wounded. Casualties on the resistance side in the thousands killed, with Israeli strikes in Lebanon being especially gruesome.

This disproportionality is a byproduct of the enormous disproportionality of means involved. The Iranian Revolutionary Air Force and Navy wasn’t credible before this war and is largely destroyed. It also is a product of geography; the United States is untouchable to Iran, whereas all of Iran is under the guns and missiles of US forces.

The casualty figures also demonstrates the methodology of the two sides. The Iranians, with two very much more powerful, nuclear armed foes, had to be far more restrained in their strikes. Yes, there were civilian casualties, especially in Israel, but these are a drop in the bucket next to the systematic violence perpetrated by Israel, and to a lesser degree, the USA. The Israeli campaign in Southern Lebanon can easily be categorized as ethnic cleansing. The US strikes in Iran were grossly illegal, and in a just world, the leadership of both Israel and the USA would be in the dock at the Hague right now.

Materiel losses on both sides were heavy. In Iran and Lebanon, these were horrific, but once again, expected. The strikes on both nation’s military and civilian infrastructure was brutal and widespread. As already stated, the Iranian Revolutionary Navy and Air Force were shattered. No accounting, or geo-strategic considerations should obscure the fact that the Lebanese and Iranian civilians overwhelmingly suffered the greatest during this conflict.

In terms of material and financial losses however, the Iranian forces inflicted one of the greatest defeats to a hegemonic opponent by a lesser power in history.

The US lost no less than 50 aircraft in this campaign, with many more damaged. Not only is this a possible undercount, as damaged aircraft are sometimes deemed uneconomical to repair, but the type of aircraft tells a story.

Six KC-135 Stratotankers and one E-3 Sentry were damaged by Iranian missile strikes, and a KC-46 Pegasus and another E-3 Sentry were destroyed. These are all high value strategic assets. The very fact they were on the ground in range of Iranian missiles, and clearly insufficiently protected from strikes, is staggering. Cost estimates on a single E-3 range from a quarter to half a billion dollars each, and Boeing stopped making them in 1992.

Clearly, by their aircraft disposition, the United States was not expecting this type of response from Iran, and judging by the losses, they made insufficient efforts to ameliorate the risks once it became clear that the Iranians would fight back. The same can be said of the US losses in high value radars, many of which were targeted in the opening waves of the Iranian strikes.

These are just some examples of a catastrophic, systemic failure across the entire American geo-strategic plan for this campaign. It is clear by what transpired that at no point did the US think of Iran as posing any type of credible threat. The results demonstrated quite the opposite.

The stipulation in the peace plan that appears to be all but agreed upon is the Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz in future. This represents one of the greatest losses of American hegemony since 1942, and likely ever. US geo-strategic goals have been laser focused on the control of the Persian Gulf since the 1950s. This concession goes further than conditions before the US strikes. Quite literally: the American Empire has ceded control of one of the most important pieces of strategic geography on the planet in a war of aggression they started.

Then there’s the reparations.

JD Vance was interviewed on this subject, and unable to deny the existence of major reparations to Iran in the form of a reconstruction fund. Once again, perhaps that number will change but its existence does not appear in be doubt.

The bloated US “defense” budget is today, around $960b. It will likely be over a trillion next year. Thus what appears to have been agreed to is a reparations figure so staggering it represents 1/3 of entire US military budget. Can the US Government afford that? Of course. Will they pay? That remains open to debate.

The toxicity of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal poisoned US politics for years. It still does or at least did until this deal. Even taking into account political opportunism, blatant racism and the cult-status Trump holds, $300b of reparations is a lot of money for the US House and Senate to allocate funds to.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this will poison US political discourse if they do pay and could undermine the desiccated husk of US credibility on the world stage if they don’t. The very idea that the US electorate will willingly swallow this agreement when they come to understand it seems far fetched, and given Trump’s cratering popularity domestically, it could become a very difficult moment for the regime. Do we think that as inflation ravages savings and people struggle to eat, the people will be happy to see the enemy they were told by FOX and CNN hate for 40 years being gifted $300b of their taxes?

The Vietnam War was a humiliating defeat for the United States. Afghanistan was a debacle. What both of these defeats have in common, however, is the absence of broader implications. The Americans went home defeated, and the war ended.

This isn’t one of those moments.

The American Empire has lost control of the most important energy conduit on the planet and completely undermined its own position among the energy producing nations of the entire Middle East. It has exposed deep and pervasive rot in its enormous and all-powerful military apparatus. It has destabilized their own economy and that of much of Asia and Oceania. The enemy it attacked is now stronger, self assured, and so confident the they are now demanding reparations from the nation that was once a world hegemon.

Remember this moment.

We’re told that after the war the Nazis vanished without a trace
But battalions of fascists still dream of a master race

On September 10, 2025, a single shot rang out at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah and the fascist media influencer Charlie Kirk was struck in the throat and killed. The alleged shooter is accused of having shot Kirk over his persistent hate speech against the Trans community. Kirk was in the middle of blaming gangs (read People of Colour) for school shootings when he was gunned down by a white Mormon man from Utah (allegedly).

As ye sow, so shall ye reap (Galatians 6:7-9).

I waited for quite a while before writing about Kirk. In life and in his death he is almost meaningless. Truly, this isn’t about Charlie Kirk, his life, or his death. He doesn’t rate his own article. He was irrelevant before his body got cold; consigned violently to the dustbin of history. What we saw on the day the Nazi1 died was a lesson about fascism.

In the wake of the shooting, every kind of analysis came out. The right said this was a declaration of war against the patriots. The Centrists said that political violence is unforgivable and mourned the dead fascist. The few Leftists,2 and more bold Centrists who spoke out, were fired from their jobs. Most of these firings weren’t over endorsements of the assassination, merely statements about who Charlie Kirk actually was. Kirk quotes were enough to get people suspended from social media.

Many claimed this was the Reichstag Fire moment. But it wasn’t. As it turned out the United States of America needed no Reichstag Fire.

Subscribe now

The Reichstag Fire Decree

The history books, they tell of their defeat in ‘45
But they all came out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died

On February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler took office, a fire gutted the Reichstag. The Nazi regime, still struggling to take firm control over the now unhoused Parliament, used this fire as a pretext to suspend all civil liberties and declare a police state. The Reichstag Fire Decree would form the basis of the Nazi dictatorship until its death.

A Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was accused by the regime of starting the fire. The legal proceedings for the fire itself didn’t go well for the newly created Third Reich. The accused stood with four Bulgarian communists, including the future Chairman of the Bulgarian Council of Ministers, Georgi Dimitrov. Even with the full weight of the Nazi-state bearing down on the case, the regime was unable to procure a conviction for anyone but van der Lubbe, who was found guilty, and sentenced to the guillotine in 1934.

At the time and for quite a while after the war, it was assumed that the fire was started by Hermann Goring and some accomplices with the approval of Adolf Hitler. William Shierer, quoting German General Fritz Halder in ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’ wrote:

‘On the occasion of a lunch on the Führer’s birthday in 1943, the people around the Führer turned the conversation to the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears how Göring broke into the conversation and shouted: “The only one who really knows about the Reichstag building is I, for I set fire to it.’”

Van der Lubbe was for a long time assumed to be a fall guy for the deed, and as a foreign communist, he was an easy target for the German officials, even if they had failed to prove a wider conspiracy.

One of the ironies of history is the fact that most historians today, including Max Hastings and Benjamin Carter Hett, believe the Reichstag Fire was indeed started by van der Lubbe, and simply exploited by the regime. I believe that we will never truly know, but in this instance, as in most, I defer to the historians.

Similar rumors swirl around the death of Charlie Kirk. There have been every manner of conspiracy theories, from the idea that Nick Fuentes, a Nazi3 influencer, had him killed or that his own wife, Erika, could take the reins of Kirk’s media organization, Turning Point USA.

The most likely answer is often the most simple. A Nazi regime bent on destroying Communism would cause communists some consternation. The same can be said of Kirk. To paraphrase the band Bodycount: talk shit, get shot.4

The Embrace of Fascism

They say the prisoner at Spandau was a symbol of defeat

Whilst Hess remained imprisoned and the fascists, they were beat

The Reichstag Fire Decree addressed a very specific problem in what was fast becoming Nazi-Germany: government paralysis. To be sure, the Nazis used it to impose totalitarian power upon Germany, but at its core, they needed it because they were unable to maintain a majority in the Reichstag. They got their majority by rewriting the law, and expelling every leftist in the Reichstag, turning it from a parliament to a rubber-stamp assembly.

In the Nazi regime, the totalitarian order was necessary to combat their enemies, perceived or otherwise. Germany had fought a brief civil war in 1919, and the opposition parties were self confident, strong and highly motivated. To be sure, the KDP (German Communist Party) had briefly backed the Nazi ascension to power, but that made little difference in Nazi objectives once they had power.

Is totalitarian power of this kind required in the United States of America? No.

To be clear, the USA is already a fascist police state, and as I have already noted, significant parts of that pre-date the rise of Trump. In terms of oppression of the individual (white American) by the state, however, the United States is much freer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Speech isn’t censored, the right to an attorney and trial by peers exist, and there are elections.

Fascism in 2026 comes not through the truncheon, but through isolation. You don’t need to beat someone’s head in when you can simply threaten their livelihood. What is a beating by cops next to your family going hungry?

The fascist state simply isn’t threatened by speech. Someone with an internet connection is free to scream into that void that screams back, social media, but they are not free to act. It’s the freedom to dream of guillotines while being a good little worker.

The fascist state isn’t threatened by opposition parties either. Right now, there is some (!) controversy, because the Maine Democrats are running an actual Nazi against Susan Collins. Graham Plantner, domestic abusing former Blackwater mercenary who spent two decades with a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest, is being sold as a progressive to the ever-guileless Americans. With an opposition like that, who needs friends?5

“Enjoy The Camps”

So the promise of an Aryan world would never materialize

So why did they all come out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died?

For those who have the misfortune of spending time with “normie” liberal Americans on the internet, you’ll see one take above all others: “enjoy the camps.”

That is the inevitable response addressed to anyone who refused to support the Democratic Party in the last elections. It is staggering to still witness this argument, expanded upon ad nauseum by people who fundamentally don’t see Palestinians as real people. They consider the genocide that their party, the Democrats, did as a “purity” issue, something that shouldn’t overshadow the good work the “opposition” to Trump does.

A ringing endorsement of genocide if ever there was one. Would you think a German in 1946 saying that people focused too hard on one purity issue, the Holocaust, was anything but a Nazi?

The sad, dark truth is that in the United States, fascism has been fully digested, embraced, and codified. The moment where massed peaceful resistance could have worked has evaporated. It has been replaced with narrow-minded, genocidal electoralism. That would be one thing if their democracy meant anything at all, but we don’t need to indulge that fantasy because they believe it still.

The blatant criminality of this regime means that in order to willfully transfer power, they would essentially be exposing themselves to extreme legal liability. The entire functioning of this regime is criminal. Trump has been promising pardons to anyone near the White House, though they would be tough to uphold in court if such a circumstance ever developed. I don’t believe that it is realistic to think that the regime that tried to overthrow the government last time they were obligated to transfer power will do so willingly. If it does actually occur, it can only be surmised that the regime they transfer power to will protect them and maintain their accomplishments, as Biden did for Trump and Ford for Nixon.

The American people have absorbed possessing a network of concentration camps without much more than a murmur. DC is under military occupation. ICE killed Americans in the streets, and while Minneapolis stood its ground, the country watched. They have swallowed hook, line and sinker, the genocide of Palestinians. When Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled for the sin of his criticizing Paramount, his parent company, for settling a suit with Trump, what happened? People boldly declared they would watch the hell out of the final episode to show those people at Paramount the ratings they’re missing out on. Bold stuff. Basically D-Day II.

Media Appeasement

The world is riddled with maggots; the maggots are getting fat

They’re making a tasty meal of all the bosses and bureaucrats

We can not and should not expect radical action from the US population. American fascism seems here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. The governments of the world appeared to acknowledge that the day the Nazi died. There was a tribute to him made in the Canadian Parliament, led by MP Rachael Thomas and joined in by many prominent Liberal figures including Dominic Leblanc and Chrystia Freeland. One Canadian MP, Tamara Jansen even recently had a grandchild named for Kirk.

It went further. Journalists like Rachel Gilmore6 who criticized Kirk’s rhetoric were threatened. American fascism is so entrenched in Canadian politics that pointing out Charlie Kirk said that he would force his daughter to carry a baby to term if it was conceived by rape, merits threats of rape and murder to the reporter who quotes it.

Therein lies the media’s appeasement in this moment. Some stood, most fell. To outlets like CBC Kirk was “U.S. right-wing activist and commentator” or a “popular conservative activist,” and that was cutting edge. The media ecosystem of Canada as well as the US was cowed into submission. Let’s not even begin to describe the US media’s graceless efforts to fellate the corpse. In Canada, Parliament set the tone.

In 2026, form and manners take precedence over truth. Perhaps it always did, but it is obvious now. We saw a desperate and undignified struggle to say that there’s no place in the world for political violence in a world where political violence is omnipresent. Thou shalt not kill, unless the person is there illegally, right? Or are we still pretending the death toll at those camps is what the US regime admits? We must enjoy freedom of speech to all, unless that freedom questions why we mourn a dead fascist. Kirk had kids you know? Just like Josef Goebbels.

The media environment we occupy is incapable of coming to grips with what we are witnessing unfold in the USA (and UK). This is reinforced by our politicians. If fascism in the USA looked like goose-stepping Nazis in black Hugo Boss unforms, then perhaps they would, but instead fascism comes with a red hat, and claims that Kirk and his ilk are “just asking questions.”

The media appeasement of violent right-wing ideology is such that even when Marlyn Gladu, a known Convoy supporter, crossed the floor to the Liberal Party and there was barely a murmur of discontent. Somehow clapping for a dead fascist is decorum, criticizing one is beyond the pale, and supporting the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Canadian government is a “controversial opinion,” that can be reconciled behind closed doors.

Lines

They’re taking over the boardrooms, and they’re fat and full of pride

And they all came out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died

Nothing happens in a bubble. When one reads of events in history, you read a clear line, from point A to point B. This is true for contemporary events as it is for historical, if you can see the lines. The lines I could see years ago that once would get me awarded a tinfoil hat and an involuntary psych hold are now glowing and obvious to many.

If I wrote about every time Western (capitalist) media varnished a fascist while disparaging anyone to the left of Mussolini, then I’d need to publish it in hard cover. What we see in this series of events are treads, and practices. What are those trends and practices that we saw the Day the Nazi Died?

Fascism in 2026’s form.

As George Jackson said in ‘Blood in My Eye;’ “we can never have a complete definition of fascism because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditional ruling class.”

This is so. Fascism is not something that looks similar to its prior iteration. We see this among the historical fascists; Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Japanese Kokkashugi were widely different from each other in many respects. There is no foundational text to fascism; it responds to conditions.

Fascism in 2026 is no different. As I write this, activists are attempting to surround the houses of immigrants in Northern Ireland to protect them from lynch mobs. The British Government is leading the charge in that form of kinder, gentler fascism we see today. It’s less criminally proscribed to attack a house of an immigrant nurse in Belfast than it is to attend a sit-in for Gaza. The scenes of cops arresting seniors in wheelchairs for demanding an end the blockade for terrorism cannot be forgotten when one looks at the scenes this week in Belfast. The lines are visible if you care to look.

The Western political and journalistic establishment is failing in this moment because it can’t, or won’t, see the forest from the trees. It looks at the way individuals bend institutions to their will, and it says that the individual doing that is wrong. When the Nazi died, he died a “conservative” because society is waiting for jackbooted stormtroopers before it says “fascist.”

They refuse to see the lines.

The algorithmic void

So if you meet with these historians, I’ll tell you what to say

Tell them that the Nazis never really went away

The establishment can’t see the lines because some lines are unnecessary. In the 1930s and 40s, fascism needed a heavy hand. In the case of Germany, this was in part owing to the fact that the Weimer Republic, flawed as it may have been, was one of the most progressive states in Europe. That oppression was necessary to end the life of a vibrant, if crisis-wracked, Republic.

In the digital age, so much of what we do and say is controlled already. You are reading this because you are allowed the privilege of reading it by a private corporation. What you are reading is not free speech at all, but privileged speech. The individual’s speech can be taken away at any time, with no appeal. If Substack doesn’t like this article, (and they may well not) I can be de-platformed with no real recourse. It happens all the time, on every platform.

The right to speech may still exist, but not the right to be heard. I can scream into a void, or I can sit in silence. To the state, it makes precisely no difference whatsoever. I have no platform of value, no thousands of readers. If I did, and they considered me a threat, they could just change an algorithm or two to make sure I don’t get that reach anymore. The capitalist billionaire class already controls the vital means of communication. Social media is an essential part of today’s communications infrastructure but it’s entirely outside of any form of democratic control. Bluesky bans Palestinians for existing on their site. Twitter and Substack promote Nazi accounts. Meta pays Alberta separatists.

By moving away from places our rights extend to, we have for all intents and purposes, lost those rights. Social media, far from being a place of subversion and dissent, is a safety valve for the state and capitalism. Every time someone posts a guillotine meme, they’re not telling their neighbor about a guillotine. Every time someone says “that shouldn’t happen” on a website, they aren’t organizing in real time. The modern authorities know this; if social media was a threat to a regime, they’d switch it off. They know what we don’t see: that you’re less of a hazard to them running your mouth than you are touching grass.

The freedom of expression doesn’t mean anyone has to hear you. Your expression is inert.

Their newest move is the assault on information as we know it. AI is poisoning the very utility of the internet. Not only can the corporations control what you see, they now control the very concept of truth and falsehood. This requires no input from government, no heavy-handed oppression, and no real energy on their part. They can simply make information itself a paid-for commodity and render that which we don’t pay for unusable. A scorched-earth policy for knowledge.

It’s already happening. Try “Googling” something and see what happens. It’s AI slop and promoted products. Deepfakes are already so effective that any manner of video involving a person can be created out of thin air. A character assassination by AI is possible right now, if it hasn’t happened already. The very concept of reality is under assault, and the forces of evil are carrying the day.

Fait accompli

They’re out there burning houses down and peddling racist lies

And we’ll never rest again until every Nazi dies

So what changed the Day the Nazi Died?

Nothing. The Reichstag burned years ago. You’re looking at fascism’s new form. The police state already exists. The means of communication and production are held by the capitalist class, and they are entrenched in such a way as to make them unassailable. The very free exchange of knowledge the internet was heralded to bring has been poisoned, and made into a profit-seeking enterprise. As I wrote this article, the world got its first Trillionaire.

All the lines led here. It can get worse of course, and it can get better, but the country that ours is inseparably connected to, and the one that we used to be kin to, have both fallen.

It’s been visible since the Day the Nazi Died.

I took back my hand and I showed him the door
No dollar of mine would I part with this day
For fueling the engine of a bloody cruel war
In my forefathers’ home far away

- Stan Rogers, ‘House of Orange’

This week, the Latvian Foreign Minister Braže told the press that Canada was investing €64 million for the development of military infrastructure in Latvia. This includes accommodations, bases, helipads, and military basing infrastructure. This latest round of spending increases Canada’s investments into the defense of Latvia to €315 million. Operation Reassurance, the mission under whose auspices these investments are taking place, is the Canada contribution to the “Eastern Flank” of NATO.

These investments come as Canada massively expands the CAF in terms of personnel, funding and equipment; a generational increase in military spending. Canada is not alone, most of the nations constituting NATO have greatly increased their military funding in recent years, with the goal being 5% of GDP. It could be one of the largest rearming schemes in history. Certainly in recent history.

The goal is simple: deter Russian aggression. The question, unasked and unanswered remains the same: is that a realistic goal?

No, but not for the reason you might think.

Subscribe now

European NATO vs Russia

“To secure lasting peace in Ukraine and Europe, we must deter and fortify. For over a decade, Canadian troops have played an indispensable role in deterring Russian aggression on NATO’s Eastern Flank and fortifying our shared defence. Canadians can be proud that our troops will continue to lead Operation REASSURANCE in this critical mission – for greater security, stability, and prosperity in Europe and around the world.”

- Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada

There are people in the world today that still earnestly believe even now that Donald Trump is a Russian asset based on the Russiagate scandal. Undoubtedly Trump, a wildly corrupt narcissistic rapist pedophile, is compromised by the intelligence services of many nations, likely including Russia, but that’s not the same as being an asset,1 and his behavior is not consistent with him being one.

There is an internet theory that he attacked Iran in order to help Russia by forcing the removal of sanctions on its petroleum products. It says a lot about the state of propaganda is such that people believe that attacking Russia’s primary ally is somehow helping Russia. The fact also that Trump still funds the Ukrainian military heavily indicates that despite the rhetoric, the USA remains far more anti-Russia than our war-poisoned press might believe. But let us for now indulge the idea that in the event of an attack against NATO, the USA will not join the fight.

The European Union is enormously powerful entity. Fourth ranked in the world in terms of spending, extremely well trained, with a large industrial and population base, the Bundeswehr (German: Federal Defense Forces) is probably the best military in the world. Behind Germany the UK2, Ukraine,3 France, Italy, Poland and Spain are all ranked in the top 15 militaries in terms of funding.

Let’s look at funding specifics. Per the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2025 Russia spent $190b4 on the military in 2025, 7.5% of its GDP. This is a regime that is funding its military significantly above the 5% benchmark NATO uses and can be interpreted as a semi-mobilized economy.

During this same period, Germany spent $114b, 2.5% of its GDP. Thus with a completely unmobilized economy, Germany’s defense budget is approximately two thirds that of Russia, a nation that has been fighting a war in Ukraine for four years. If Germany mobilized its economy to the same degree that Russia currently has (7.5%), its military spending would be upwards of $350b!

Add to the “Eastern Flank” Poland ($46b), Finland ($8.1b), Romania ($9.7b) and Ukraine ($84b) and you see clearly an enormous mismatch in means. In simple terms: the militaries of central and eastern Europe where the “threat” of Russian invasion is most pronounced, are materially and qualitatively superior to Russian military. In terms of nuclear weapons, the French and UK both have the complete nuclear triad, meaning that the NATO/EU nuclear deterrent is fully functional.

Large modern wars are human resource hogs. Frontal warfare is incredibly bloody; the Ukrainian and Russian armies have been shredded, and in the Middle East, the IDF has hemorrhaged in Gaza and Lebanon. A war takes more than warm bodies to put into uniform. Modern military hardware requires a strong high-tech sector, automotive and machine part manufacture, aviation production and management, and so many other high-tech industrial jobs. It requires an enormous logistics tail to put one soldier onto the battlefield, and even more if one is fighting abroad. Every single non-professional soldier is a breadwinner lost to the economy. In this contest of populations, like every other, it is the EU that is superior.

The Russian population in 2025 was 146 million. As we have seen in Ukraine, the Russian military is still heavily reliant on volunteer soldiers as they have not formally declared war and cannot legally5 use conscripts in Ukraine. This has caused Russia to heavily recruit foreign nationals, offer clemency or parole to prisoners who enlist, and to employ predatory recruitment tactics targeting debtors. On the other side of the border, the population of the EU stands at 450 million. These millions of Europeans are part of an economy worth $23 trillion, vs the Russian $7.5 trillion.

This is not to say that Russia is a paper bear; Ukraine will likely lose territory whenever and however the war with Russia ends. Ukraine’s economy is fully mobilized (40% military spending per GDP), a significant portion of its population is under occupation, and many more have fled the country. In spite of all this, the Russian Army is forced to fight a brutal, grinding attrition war in which thousands of troops on both sides die for insignificant objectives. A blood-soaked nightmare for all involved, but hardly a new blitzkrieg. The bear is anemic.

Indeed, developments in drone warfare and other long range weapon systems have enormously slowed warfare. Innovations like fiber-optic guided drones have had the effect that barbed wire and machine guns did 110 years ago. The attacker now needs overwhelming superiority beyond even that of 1914-18 in order to advance any significant distance. The recent deployment of a small number of fiber-optic drones in Lebanon by Hezbollah have cause casualties and the IDF to slow its operations dramatically. This is the nature of war in 2026, and it is completely at odds with NATO’s fears.

There isn’t going to be an armoured Russian thrust through the Polish Suwałki Gap, like there was not a Soviet thrust through the Fulda Gap during the Cold War. At least during the 1980s, the USSR was a force to be reckoned with. Now, the power disparity is enormous and grossly favours Europe in every way. Russia is a powerful nation, but one that faces as its rival, two entirely hostile continents united under a single military alliance.

Pourquoi mourir pour Dantzig?

And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

- Winston Churchill

Hindsight is kind to the Allies in World War II. Most of them anyway. The scenes of the Death Camps, the rapacious conquering of so much of Europe by the Nazis, the mass-murder and rape of Chinese civilians in Nanking. The very horror of World War II can make participation in it seem inherently reasonable and self-justifying. While this may be true of that conflict, it stands out for its uniqueness.

This is the dynamic that poisons discourse about war today. The fact is that we participated through reflex in what retrospectively was a righteous cause. But that wasn’t so self-evident in 1939. Canada joined the war because the UK joined the war and fought the good fight as a loyal ally, friend and junior partner. For other nations, participation was not a given, nor was it lightly done.

“Why die for Danzig,” was a French anti-war slogan Marcel Déat, a French former socialist who would become a prominent fascist collaborator under the German occupation. Hindsight belies the obvious fact that the slogan itself is sound. After a gruesome war that caused the deaths of a million and a half Frenchmen just a few decades before, the French were understandably less than keen to see another generation die in the trenches. Not an inherently unreasonable position to hold.

Europe stands alone in the genesis of what we call World Wars today. Indeed, the “world” has always included Europe. Ironically, it can well be argued that World War II broke out in China in 1937, two years before the panzers crossed into Poland, but the definition of a world war has never not included Europe. Perhaps it’s only a “world war” if it comes from Europe, otherwise it’s just sparkling mass-slaughter.

In both world wars, as Churchill alluded to above, the New World came to the rescue of the old. This is not to subscribe to the American-centric ideas of the World Wars, and who was responsible for winning them, but it is not an exaggeration to say that in both wars, American involvement was decisive. But while the Americans were fence sitting, Canadians were dying. That usually causes derision from those who still identify war as a kind of sport, but why should it? Why should it be anything but positive to show reluctance to kill and die?

Canada’s participation in World War I was mandatory, as Canada was not fully independent, but in theory Canada chose to participate from the get-go in World War II. In both conflicts it took Canada a considerable amount of time to get troops trained, equipped and deployed abroad. Eight months in the case of World War I, and two years (on land) in the case of World War II.

The Canadian contribution to both conflicts was large and impressive, but entirely subordinated to other powers, namely the British. 61,000 Canadians died in the trenches of the Great War. Another 44,000 during the Second World War. Besides a nice memorial in France at Vimy, and the feeling of inherent righteousness from being the winners, what did we get for our 105,000 strong mountain of dead?

The Transaction of Warfare

“War is the highest expression of true culture.”

- Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849-1930)

It sounds crass to wonder who benefits from Europe’s blood-tax, but at some point, we have to ask. War, in Canadian eyes, is a righteous thing one does for the good of the collective, right? As long as we ignore the fact we demolished Libya and invaded Manitoba, we tell ourselves we only take part when there is no other choice, and when the enemy is supremely evil. Our glorious civilization versus their brutal regimes.

But war, like so many other things, is transactional. Unless you’re a consummate War Pig, one does not enter the fray without a reason to do so. Not only that; one should not enter the fray without a reason to do so. It doesn’t make one a mercenary to decide not to do something horrible and expensive for no reason. We pay soldiers, and most wouldn’t be soldiers without money. A nation fights for its national interests. What is our interest in Eastern Europe?

Our interest in Eastern Europe is psychological. Canada, being a nation of immigrants, has a large population of Eastern European diaspora, and naturally they feel a connection to and protectiveness for their respective family homelands. But besides sentimentalism, what is our interest there? Not very much at all.

NATO aficionados would say that we have an obligation to fight if it comes to it because we signed on the dotted line next to the NATO agreements. True, if one thinks of national agreements as binding documents, but are they? We were content to violate the NATO charter at will when we didn’t feel like funding the CAF, so why start caring now? The world-police aren’t going to busify6 Canada and send it to the front. What do we owe the alliance that dragged us to Afghanistan, lied about why we were there, and gave up when the going got hard? Do we owe the butchers of Libya more blood?

When it comes to national interests, Canada has very few as regards Russia. The North-West Passage may one day become viable, but it is a shallow, icy passage and Russia has in the North-East Passage a superior and more usable channel already. The Anemic Bear lost its Navy’s flagship in a land war. Are we really so pathetic that we’re afraid of a mythical enemy? There are no air-fleets of bombers flying over the Pole, there are no icebreaking landing craft coming to disgorge an invading army. There is no Red Dawn, just hopeless paranoia.

There is no horde, be it the Russian Army, Muslim immigrants or any other persecution complex-based geopolitical enemy coming for Europe either. It’s been a few centuries since Ögedei Khan’s Mongol armies sat just outside Vienna, and at this point, I don’t think he’s coming back. It is not our problem if Europe isn’t over it yet.

We don’t owe Europe more blood. From Vimy to the Somme, to Passchendaele, Ypres, Normandy, Dieppe, the Scheldt, the Reichswald, Ortona, the bloody skies and blazing oceans, haven’t we bled enough yet? Haven’t they? We helped Europe end their experiment in assembly line death factories. We participated when they fired chemical agents at each other so that someone’s child or father or brother could die drowning from the inside while corrosive gas destroys his lungs. Enough!

Righteous Isolationism

Are WE to blame because Hitler built himself a great hair- trigger war machine that crushes everything in front of it? Are WE responsible that England and France did not build a machine to stop him? Are WE culpable in any way because Hitler started before the other side was ready? Provided Britain and France really want to stop Hitler, are WE to make up for their failure to prepare to do so by sticking out OUR necks?

- General (ret) Smedley D Butler in ‘War is a Racket.’

Isolationism got made into a dirty word by retrospect, another example of the Second World War’s exceptions made into a rule. Anytime one objects to military spending, one hears nothing but “what about Putin,” and “that’s appeasement” but these are concepts without meaning when thrown about by internet-denizens who will never ever join the military.

What about Putin? He’s a shit. He’s not invited to my birthday party. What do you want?

Russia is not being appeased. Appeasement in 1938 meant giving to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, Memel and Austria without a fight. Putin in Ukraine most assuredly has a fight on his hands. If fighting a war that is so bloody it’s depopulating the villages of rural Russia, and forcing the Ukrainians to conscript grandfathers is somehow “appeasement,” then we have lost all touch with the very meaning of the word.

How much does not minding our damn buisness have to cost us? It sounds simplistic, but where does our responsibility lie? Do my nephews and nieces need to risk being conscripted because Putin is a bad man? Do my friend’s children have to be fed to Russian drones because of the elementary school language curriculum of eastern Ukraine?

We are not a superpower. If we had the means to be one, I would not aspire that Canada be a superpower. Where did we find this audacity to decide what is best for others? People today still justify causing a famine in Afghanistan because NATO got bored of trying to win that war. Does giving a little girl a chance to be educated just to have her starved to death make us seem coherent enough to decide what’s right for others?

Isolationism in this context is one of refusing an aggressive foreign policy. I do not aspire for Canada to become a hermit nation, not at all. We are a prosperous country (so far) with resources, technology and expertise that can help the world. We have room for refugees, and the money to ensure they thrive if we so choose. Norman Bethune volunteered in conflicts, providing trauma surgery and blood banks to soldiers and civilians in the Spanish and Chinese Republics. Sir Fredrick Banting,7 discovered how to manufacture insulin, a discovery that continues to save the lives of millions of lives around the world. He then went on to research G-Forces, cancer treatments and call out the Hudson’s Bay Company for spreading influenza in Inuit communities.

We choose our heroes, and we choose our legacies. We can choose to be a friend of Europe without engaging in each of their activities and opinions. We can decide to trade, economically and culturally, with this vibrant, democratic and prosperous Union without engaging in their antagonisms. We can choose to be free. Free from the ethnic and cultural hatreds of another continent and another people. We don’t have to sacrifice our civil service, post office, public broadcaster and the lives of Canadian children for a bellicose continent that needs no assistance from us.

Ian, May 24, 2026.

But no penny of mine will I add to the fray
Remember the Boyne they will cry out in vain
For I’ve given my heart to the place I was born
And forgiven the whole House of Orange
King Billy and the whole House of Orange

- Stan Rogers, ‘House of Orange’

“These poor lads had no idea of infantry… They couldn’t properly load a Bren magazine, knew nothing whatsoever about grenades… some of them had thrown exactly one No. 36 grenade without ever learning how to clean, arm, or worse, disarm, or really make them ready for throwing. The PIAT was a complete mystery. Only a couple had ever seen a two-inch mortar. They gave me heart failure ten times a day, but I really couldn’t blame them.”

Lieutenant Cecil Law, South Saskatchewan Regiment, before the 1944 Battle of the Scheldt Estuary. Quoted by Mark Zuehlke in ‘Terrible Victory, First Canadian Army and the Scheldt Estuary Campaign.’

Since the earliest days of human history, rulers have encountered a problem: how do you get people to fight for a cause? This has been a particular problem for the Canadian Military in much of its history. It would not be hyperbole to say that the CAF’s only military engagement wherein it didn’t suffer from at least one personnel crisis was the Red River Rebellion of 1869-70.

I’ve already touched on the conscription aspect of this discussion, and while it looms still, I do not believe it can occur until an armed conflict. The CAF will try other methods of mass mobilization.

A report came out recently discussing the drop in passing rate though Basic Military Qualification (BMQ), better know as Basic Training. The problems outlined in the leaked report show a much deeper problem than a drop in candidacy. That alone is not a crisis. Indeed, BMQ is one of the least important pieces of training, but this report underlines one of the ways the CAF is transforming, and indeed, Canadian society as a whole.

Boot

“Twentynine Platoon! Form up,” came the booming voice of Sergent MacDougal. The exhausted, shivering trainees did so, running the prescribed clockwise path of the encampment we all lived in. Assemble we did, along the gravel road next to the two chemical toilets.

“Alright TROOPS, listen up,” the five foot, barrel chested Sergeant with a voice like a foghorn with no observable neck instructed. “The honey wagon is here TROOPS, and you WILL respect it.” Behind him, the shit-sucker truck pulled up and a confused looking civilian contractor began emptying the toilets. “Ateeeen-CHUN!”

The troops came to rigid attention, eyes fixed straight ahead, shivering, waiting for the next instruction. Then the smell hit.

“The Honey Wagon brings happiness and joy to the troops wherever it goes,” proclaimed the paratrooper as the troops started to gag. “Stay the fuck at attention fuckface! YOU WILL RESPECT THE FUCKING HONEY WAGON!”

- An experience from the author’s BMQ

Known to the US and thus Canadian popular culture invariably as bootcamp. BMQ, or just “Basic” to soldiers, is the foundation of any military member’s experience. It is Schrodinger’s military training: simultaneously essential, and worthless.

Mine started on a cold February day in 2007. Like most CAF soldiers, it started at the “Mega,” an enormous, 12 story building in Saint-Jean sur Richelieu, Québec. As was the story for most of my CAF career, the training I received in that large grey monolith was close to useless (I do still use my sewing skills). The point, however, was never to train.

BMQ taught my course resilience and the ability to follow instructions while under duress. Our Platoon Warrant Officer smelled of alcohol most days. My section Sergent was a Rwanda and Afghan Veteran who carried two different long bladed knives at all times and smoked like a chimney. Many course mates followed suit, a cigarette break being the one time one could relax.

A lot has changed since 2007. A friend who went through BMQ a month after me told me the guy giving them a briefing on life insurance told them to wait one full year before committing suicide, as the policy wouldn’t pay out otherwise. My first week’s suicide prevention course was a Master Corporal medic who told us about the last guy who tried to kill himself, but “jumped out of the fourth floor like a pussy,” and just broke his legs, and that “real men swan-dive from the 12^th floor,” so that coroner needs to clean up the mess and not him.

Other gems from my platoon staff included “do I need to teach you the same lesson over again, or should I tattoo it on my cock and fuck it into you,” and “how the fuck do you expect to kill the enemy without your boot bands?” Often, we would return to our bunks to find voluntary release (VR) papers with our names filled out already and placed on our beds, awaiting just a signature and a moment of weakness. Sometimes they were accompanied by applications for Tim Hortons and MacDonald’s.

We cleaned rifles, did parade drill, practiced bayonet fighting and learned how to tie knots. My section commander even took us to the washroom and taught us how to shave. The lessons may have been less than applicable to real life, but the ethos was real enough. When you graduated, you felt like a soldier, even if the rest of your career disabused you of that notion.

It was a surreal time, and not one that most made it through. The figures are foggy now, but of the starting course, under half graduated. Several dropped out due to gastrointestinal problems, some suffered injuries, some quit to be home with their families. Nobody failed. It was entirely attrition through injury and quitting.

We felt better for it. I was glad when people quit. It meant they didn’t deserve to pass. It meant that when I was at war, as we were all told we would be, I knew the person next to me suffered what I suffered and could take at least that. It wasn’t hard per se, it was formative.

I still feel better for it: I’m glad I never served with anyone who couldn’t hack it. The mental conditioning worked, and that is the point of BMQ.

2026

“Over the last few years, the federal government has sought to boost military recruiting by relaxing several policies related to pre-existing medical conditions and has stopped doing aptitude tests.”

- CBC

To the say the times have changed since 2007 would be an understatement of the ages. This is certainly true of BMQ. The report mentioned about noting a drop in pass rates indicates a drop from 85% to 77%. Hardly the BMQ I experienced, but nostalgia has no place in military training, and my concerns are not nostalgic.

Change is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember like it was yesterday being formed as a brigade into a hollow square in Wainwright Alberta and being bawled out by the Brigade Commander. It was 2015, and the reports of pervasive sexual harassment had been made public. I was profoundly embarrassed but far from shocked. Indeed, the rape-culture attitudes, the degrading opinions of women generally, the sexual exploitation of women in the CAF was known to anyone who dared inquire.

Cultural change in the CAF was long overdue, and it is good that it has occurred to the degree it has. Militaries reflect the society they represent, and they should therefore be truly representative. The balance is that a military must also be able to fight, kill, and be killed.

The quote from World War II at the beginning of this piece is instructive. The Canadian Army wasn’t just lacking in soldiers but lacking in infantry. The Army had trained lots of support staff to accommodate the casualties that, early in the war, were caused by German air superiority. By 1944, Canadians were most likely to encounter the Luftwaffe as ground troops. The infantry therefore took a beating far above what was expected, and casualties were such that non-infantry soldiers were sent to rifle battalions.

Now in 2026, the Russo-Ukrainian War is in its fourth year, and it is not an understatement to say this conflict has completely changed the face of warfare. The fundamentals have remained the same since one caveman brained the other with a rock, but the details are changing. Fiber-optic drones are able to reach well over 20km beyond the front lines in search of targets. Wirelessly controlled drones and loitering munitions are even longer ranged. Who is and who is not a front-line soldier has changed radically.

Recently, a Ukrainian corps commander was dismissed after one of his brigades leaked photos of their emaciated men who had been starving in their positions, forced to drink rainwater and scrounge for food. Investigations will be forthcoming I hope, but the underlying problem is that drone warfare has extended so far back into the rear areas that supply, medical, and logistics supports were likely unable to get through. A siege without encirclement.

Combat in Ukraine is often small units maneuvering independently using personal initiative, or defense from fixed positions. Both requires a degree of autonomy not previously seen in war. This is the reality of war in 2026. The days of CAF counter-insurgency are over, and conventional warfare in which the frontlines extend for miles is the reality that must be addressed. Are these issues being addressed?

De-professionalization

“While the total number of PRBs (Personnel Review Boards) is driven in part by the increase in recruiting and basic training tempo, the increasing PRB ratio directly reflects that more candidates are struggling to performance or conduct standards required to pass basic training.”

- Leaked CAF document: ‘Initial Observations- Impact of Changes to CAF Recruiting Policies at Basic Training Over 2025.’

Creating or enlarging a military formation is not a straightforward process. There are very few cases, such as the Canadian Army in 1914, in which whole formations are made up of inexperienced personnel. Usually, a cadre of experienced NCOs and officers is taken from another formation to act as a backbone for the new or enlarged formation. This is sensible, but every time one does this, the high-quality leadership in the military is consequently thinned out. It is therefore inevitable that when a military expands such as the CAF is, its quality drops.

This is normal, and by no means permanent. Growing pains are a normal part of military growth. Combined with a lowering of standards there is a real risk of a deep cut in the professionalism of the military. The lack of basic aptitude testing in recruitment has, according to the above quoted document, caused PRBs due to academic issues to more than triple.

The lack aptitude testing is alarming to anyone who remembers who got into the military when they were doing aptitude testing. It is not unreasonable for a military to decide based on ones application that someone is manifestly unsound for the military. Instead, as quoted in the document, “In general, CFLRS (Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School) has experienced a notable increase in candidates who are unable to learn in a military environment. This includes a wide variety of educational backgrounds including both high school and university graduates who may have benefited from increased learning support resources available in civilian education that cannot be provided in a military training environment. These candidates have been unable to learn basic practical skills such as drill and weapons and several candidates have been unable to read without assistance.”

Growing pains are one thing, but in the high-tech world of 2026 war fighting, the CAF is currently recruiting people who can’t read. Perhaps if the pass rate was what I remember it to be, this wouldn’t be cause for concern, but in an era in which a 77% pass rate is a news story, a problem is not hard to identify.

My concerns are made worse by my own experiences. At no point in my entire military career did I feel even adequately trained for what I was doing. Far from feeling like a self-conscious professional, when I arrived in Afghanistan, I realized with crystal clear certainty that I had no idea what I was doing. That feeling did not go away: my comrades and I made it up as we went along. This is not a military that, in my experience, can afford de-professionalization.

Foreign Recruitment

Since the earliest days of armed conflict, nations have recruited foreign nationals into their armed forces. The CAF has done this for a long time, with soldiers enlisted after spending at least three years in Canada as a Permanent Resident (PR). This is good for a country such as Canada for whom immigration is such a part of its identity and demographic.

Several militaries in the world today have foreign legions, units specifically made up of foreign nationals for whom citizenship is often the prize. Spain, France, UK, Ukraine and Russia all have foreign legions and recruitment. These volunteers are seen as legally distinct from mercenaries, though in terms of filling gaps in human resources, they fulfill a similar role.

As noted in the CFLRS document and CAF policy, the recruitment of foreign nationals into the CAF has been greatly increased. The report notes that one French-language course was comprised of 83% non-citizens, and concurrent English platoon was 30%. The document goes onto say there were problems with the pass-rate of these PR soldiers, and that the French course in question was “plagued with allegations of racism.” It goes on to outline issues associated with soldiers not understanding either official language sufficiently, or culture shock associated with recruits that had not even been in Canada, let alone the military, for more than three months.

The document also cites a lack of realistic expectations among the PR recruits. “A surprising number of permanent resident candidates believed they would simply go home after basic training or had no family care plan beyond the duration of basic training.” To me this is not a matter of “realistic expectations,” as it is the CAF recruiter’s job to tell recruits what to expect. This isn’t a policy of open and diverse recruitment; this is entrapment.

What is also notable about this recruitment policy is that it extends to officers too. This is unusual because in the overwhelming majority of nations, officer ranks are citizen-only, including in foreign legions. With less experience in the matter of officer leadership, I asked Drew Ash, a former CAF artillery officer about this issue.

“Loyalty to Canada is something that is integral to the discharge of duties as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. In the Profession of Arms, the concept of unlimited liability effectively holds that at any time, one may be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice in the defence of Canada. Officers hold the distinction of being placed in situations wherein they may have to order one of their subordinates to do so.

This is no small matter and represents the highest trust our country can have in our leaders. As such, Canadian soldiers, sailors, and aviators deserve to be led by Canadian officers. It is not that permanent residents lack the professionalism or abilities required to carry out the tasks of officership. Rather, it is that it is not the individual officer giving the orders, they are a representation of our nation giving the order to seize a trench, to charge an enemy position, to expose oneself to unimaginable danger as an extension of Canadian interests. It is a matter of the moral authority.”

This is an important issue, and not one readily available to the outside observer. The entire purpose of an officer corps is to act as a backbone of leadership within the military hierarchy, but also to act as the government’s representative in the military. It’s why throughout history the separation of officers and soldiers is so important: the officer, by their position and holding of a commission, is the government.

Especially in conflicts such as we see today, operations in the military require individual initiative and small unit leadership. Contrast Drew’s statement with the statement from the CFLRS document in which it states that “Permanent Resident officer candidates in particular are more likely to imagine a CAF officer position as a public service job rather than a military occupation,” and you see a crisis in leadership developing.

Unnecessary Militarism

All this would be concerning enough without the context in which it is occurring. If we had no intention of actually using this bloated semi-professional military, then it would just be a normal waste of money, but it’s not.

The first and foremost issue is that life in the military is inherently dangerous. The CAF tried to kill me more often than the Taliban could dare dream. Realistic training is dangerous because war is dangerous and there isn’t much of a way around that. It is therefore incumbent upon the non-military member in support of this expansion to think long and hard about what a military is actually for.

Lately, the Canadian public, enthralled for some unfathomable reason by our most conservative PM in memory, has been all in on the NATO 5% of GDP military budget target. As an Afghan War veteran, one who well remembers being in a real war with shoddy and broken equipment because of decades of underfunding, it’s more than a little aggravating that Canadian liberals have become fanatically pro-CAF now that there is no war.

It must be made clear: Canada is not at war.

It seems like we are, to be sure. The world is a scary place right now, but make no mistake, this is peacetime for Canada and must remain so. Could a war involving Canada break out? Yes, of course. Should the CAF be ready for such a conflict? To a point.

The CAF should be competent, well trained and professional so that in the event a war actually occurs, we can then expand the CAF into a large enough fighting force. We are not a world hegemon. We do not and should not aspire to be one. Sacrificing government services like the CBC and Canada Post could be justified if our troops were fighting and dying in a far away land, but they aren’t. They’re training, working out, and probably engaging the services of Latvian sex workers.

Nobody expects Canada to be the Johnny-on-the-spot world police. When Canada joined World War II, it didn’t significantly engage the enemy on land for two years. If a war is big enough that Canadian soldiers must cross an ocean to fight it, then it can wait until the CAF is ready.

What is the CAF for?

Mark Carney’s statement on the recent CUSMA negotiations, in which he states that “Canada remains open to deeper [economic] integration,” tells us something about the nature of our relationship with the USA. It tells me that the pipe-dream that Carney is enlarging the CAF to defend us from the Americans is what we always thought it was: pure fantasy. The military isn’t for defense, and it never has been. If it was, are our best fighting units in Latvia right now?

There comes a point when encouraging the same behaviors over and over again places the onus on yourself, and this is certainly the case for our role in Europe and NATO. After two world wars in one century, and the now omnipresent threat of a third, it’s fair to ask if we need to keep indulging that continent.

Canada cannot, will not, and should not be the arbiter, however small, in the European hobby of genocidal violence. Since 1900, Canadians have expended blood and treasure for wars in Russia, Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Germany, France, former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and the UK. 67,000 Canadians died from 1914-18 because an Austrian Archduke got shot by a Yugoslav nationalist. If after the formation of NATO, the EU, the UN and so many other institutions, Europe still cannot keep itself from butchering each other, then we won’t make the difference either.

And it’s not necessary! The USSR is long dead, and the Polish and German armies alone could probably stop the Russian Army dead in its tracks. The air forces of European NATO nations are comfortably superior to the Russian Air Force, and the Russian Navy is incapable of surviving a land war in Ukraine. France and the UK both have substantial nuclear weapon stocks. Call me an isolationist, but all these ‘what about Putin,’ arguments ring hollow when you realize that it doesn’t have to be our problem and isn’t a problem anyone needs help with.

The incoherence of the CAF expansion comes into focus with the recent revelation that DND wants to hire additional public servants after the government has so recently cut public service positions. The numbers cited by Chief of Defense Staff General Carignan are laughable. The plan to make 300,000 supplementary reserve soldiers, initially out of civil servants, is a mockery of the very concept of reality itself, and the call to quadruple the Reserves that cannot currently staff the positions they have is inane.

What is the actual purpose of this? What could possibly be gained by Canadians who aren’t employed in the weapons industry?

Oh… There it is…

Ian, May 14 2026

On the windy morning of May 20^th, 1631, Imperial Hapsburg troops under the command of Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, began the final assault on the German city of Magdeburg. The final assault, led without orders by Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim, overwhelmed the defenses and broke into the city. What followed shook Europe to its core.

It’s impossible to say today exactly what happened next. The soldiers were enraged. They went wild, plundering, murdering, and raping. Soon fire took hold. Set by the defenders in a final act of martyrdom, by assaulting soldiers in hot blood, or an accident of war, it is impossible to know. Of the population of 30,000, a mere 5,000 were left in the city when the troops withdrew.

Tilly desperately tried to regain control of his soldiers. According to C.V. Wedgewood, he sent priests among the soldiers to convince them to release the women they had kidnapped or at least marry their victims. For the city known to have a wooden statue of the Virgin at the gate, the event was oft referred to as “the marriage of Magdeburg.”

After the siege, and for the rest of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), Anti-Imperial1 forces held up the city as a martyr. When in a killing mood, they would give their surrendering enemies “Magdeburg Quarter,” meaning no quarter would be given.

The sack of Magdeburg was a war crime, though the term didn’t exist in 1631. But what is a war crime? War is organized murder so how can one murder be a crime when another wins someone a medal for bravery? At its core, the rules of war are a paradox; simultaneously irrelevant yet vital. Often given little but scant lip service to yet nevertheless acting as a necessary guardrail against outright barbarism.

International law is not based on one document, but rather a mosaic of laws, and this is very much true for the Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Much of these are based on the four Geneva Conventions, Hauge Conventions and the UN Charter, but many nations also add their own interpretations to the law above and beyond the standard of international law.

However, before all the documents, diplomatic agreements, and treaties, war as it is known, has always been governed. The LOAC may be new, but the concept is as old as human conceptions of war.

Subscribe now

Tempering Violence

“An obsolete idea that war is a game with rules.”

President Richard M Nixon, quoted by C. Ward and Ken Burns, the Vietnam War

Through almost all of human history, civilian populations feared the coming of an army. Murder, theft, destruction, rape, and kidnapping were, and always have been, the lot of those suffering occupation in any point in human history. Ubiquitous as it may be, just how much of these types of violence are inflicted depends very much on the era and culture of the combatants.

Thus what a war crime is depends very much on who you are, when you are. Enslaving or killing captured warriors and civilians alike was routine in the ancient world. It’s pointless, if entertaining, to wonder what a woad-painted Briton using a severed Roman head as a weapon, would think of the ethics of bombing a school with an F-35. A war crime is an act of military violence outside of the norms of the period.

Waging wars in periods of unrestrained violence has led since time immemorial, to codes of military conduct, either by the armies themselves or society at large. The Chivalric Codes of Medieval Europe, the set of rules and regulations governing behavior by knights, was one such example. They were self consciously introduced and encouraged by rulers and clergy as a means to curb the violent excesses of the warrior class.

Was it universally effective? No, of course not; history is full of tales of grotesque acts of violence in the period. But it can be argued it helped temper or at least channel the energies of the nobility, helped by the relief valve that was the butchery associated with the Crusades.

Particular events too, stand out in history as abhorrent, or beyond the line of reasonable conduct for the period. During the Renaissance, armies routinely pillaged and inflicted wanton cruelty, yet as noted above, the Sack of Magdeburg became infamous. Propaganda, an omnipresent feature in war crimes, was a factor, but the outrageous excess of Magdeburg made it stand out. In a period where waterboarding with liquid shit was known as “the Swedish drink,” the sack of Magdeburg was a crime seen as beyond the pale.

It was after the horrors of the US Civil War that codifying the treatment of Prisoners of War (POW), began. Camps like Andersonville and Elmira were infamous for their death rates. The industrial nature of this and other conflicts made the codification of the LOAC a vital necessity, and by the First World War, real, albeit voluntary, laws and common practices existed in the form of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.2

It was not until the wake of the Second World War that the notion of broad enforcement of international law upon a defeated victim became the ideal. Indeed, many of the Nuremburg trials were hamstrung in retrospect by the fact many of the laws used to prosecute the Nazis were victor’s justice and not laws at all when the crimes were being committed. The Holocaust was legal, and Germans used that argument to decidedly varying degrees of effectiveness. Prosecutions for acts such as genocide in post-war West Germany were in fact hampered by the need to apply real law.3 The Yugoslavs, meanwhile, just dumped all the Nazis they got their hands on into mine shafts followed by grenades. How one deals with fascism varies with experience and expedience.

There are many types of war crimes through many different periods, and though they are legally similar, they must be seen as distinct in causation. I am no legal scholar. The purpose here is not to assign blame, and it is certainly not to exonerate, but understanding the types and contexts of war criminality is key for the understanding of their situational distinctions.

Casualties of War

Friendly fire isn’t

- Infantry adage quoted on a wall at Land Force Central Area Training Centre Meaford

There are many things that happen in war that are just plain mistakes. In many conflicts, these are the majority of war crimes. They can be caused by indifference to civilian casualties, but no attention to civilian casualties can ever fully mitigate this. Bullets, bombs and shells cannot be recalled, and when one is in combat, it can be easy to make snap decisions that cost lives.

Not to say all civilian casualties in a war are criminal. In attacking a legal target such as a military base, a combatant might kill or injure civilian employees and bystanders. This is tragic, but impossible to mitigate. The way to avoid such casualties is not to start wars. There are contextual limitations inherent in this; the Israeli conduct in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon being an example of this process being systematically and deliberately exploited.

Civilians casualties often vary greatly with the speed of armies. When battle takes place quickly, over wide areas, more soldiers are in the position of making snap combat-decisions in the presence of civilians, and thus more wrong decisions are made. When the frontlines are stationary/slow, such as on the Western Front, casualties from civilians caught in the crossfire diminish drastically.

There are also cases in which acts that appear at first to be criminal are in fact, the gruesome realities of war. On March 4 2026, the US Navy submarine USS Charlotte torpedoed and suck the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena with the loss of 104 crewmen. Iran subsequently claimed the Dena was not carrying any ammunition. This is not a crime.4 There is no legal obligation for the attacking party to ascertain if the weapons of the opposing force have ammunition in their magazines.

Fear

“I think war is a dangerous place.”

George W Bush

If there’s one thing I remember from the town of Panjwayi Bazaar, it is the eyes of its residents. Our convoy rolled slowly through the bustling town, past its market stalls, through the narrow, bumpy streets of the cinderblock town. As the convoy drove, standing in the back hatch, I could feel every single resident’s eyes lock on me and stare into my soul, watching as we drove away. As the man in Kevlar and ceramic plate armour, with a carbine, surrounded by the armour of my vehicle, and accompanied by so many comrades, I was feeling profoundly vulnerable. It’s not, in retrospect, a profound observation to say it was I, armoured and armed, who was the inflictor of fear, far more than I was its victim. Indeed, in that cold December in Afghanistan, I realized I was an occupier.

It is also not a profound observation to point out that war is frightening. Most military training is conducted under various forms of duress because of this; you have to be able to focus under the most intensive pressures. But in war, nobody has sufficient courage all the time, and fear is contagious.

Fear can take more than one form. It can be immediate; as the fear I described above was. Threat to life, here and now. It can be pervasive. A fear that one lives with daily when death is around.

I am not a legal scholar, nor am psychologist, but the tales of panicking soldiers going wild and killing defenseless people are as old as war itself. This has been seen in conventional warfare, but it might be more infamous because of what happens in counter-insurgency. Fear and revenge mix, the desire to strike back at an enemy that you can’t see but has hurt your friends, that might hurt you next. Countless massacres of civilians have occurred because soldiers panicked and shot, or because soldiers, terrified by an event, only saw enemies.

Fear is one of the greatest motivators for murder, and when combined with war, a condition in which the perpetrator can be easily inured to violence, it creates the ideal conditions for murder. Pervasive and immediate fear can also cause a collapse of discipline.

Indiscipline, revenge and the loss of control

“Our soldiers went berserk, and from that point on during the attack they took no prisoners and left no one alive in a trench or foxhole. I did not try to stop them, nor did an other officer, because they would have killed us too if we had. They were out of their minds with fury.”

- Siegfried Knappe, in ‘Soldat, Reflections of a German Soldier 1936-1949’

Discipline is a key distinction and identifier of a military. The ability for a military formation of any type to exist and work on the battlefield relies upon it collectively following instruction. In modern times, those orders come from officers (FN elected officers), people who have been entrusted with a commission as a functionary of the state. The ability of a military to follow its instructions under duress are the key measure of any such force.

War crimes, as they are defined by context, are abhorred by military commanders. This is not out of moral reservations, but practical concerns. The sack of Magdeburg cost Tilly’s army vital supplies, fodder and funds, and it galvanized Protestant support against the Imperial cause. As noted above, he attempted to halt the sack and mitigate the damage, albeit far too late. He lost control, and it cost him; his army was crushed at the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631), and he was mortally wounded at the Battle of Rain (1632), dying of infection fifteen days after being shot.

A war crime occurred in my old area of operation. Six months after I left Afghanistan, a US Army Staff Sergeant named Robert Bales from the unit I worked with. In “revenge” for a roadside bombing, he left his FOB and proceeded to kill 16 Afghan Civilians. It was an act the Taliban said was done by “sick-minded American savages committed the blood-soaked and inhumane crime.”

If you want to win a war, don’t prove the Taliban correct.

Indeed, war crimes are often disastrous for one’s own cause. When the Army of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front launched the so-called ‘Tet Offensive’ in 1968, it wasn’t just the fighting that seized headlines in the USA, but a war crime. The infamous ‘Saigon Execution,’ a photograph taken by Eddie Adams that showed South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong captain, Nguyễn Văn Lém, the latter dressed in civilian clothes. It has been alleged that Loan was taking revenge for the murder of a friend’s family by Lém. This is impossible to prove or disprove, but it highlights both the impulsivity and fear associated with the commission of war crimes, and also their dire consequences for the side that commits them. Loan died in the USA, having fled the fall of South Vietnam.

Thus war crimes, while being morally abhorrent, are also self-defeating. For proof, one needs to look no further than the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022-present). Both sides have used drones to attack civilian targets, both sides have been accused of using chemical weapons, and both sides have engaged in abuse of POWs and civilians. This has included summary executions, torture, mutilation, sexual assault and humiliation. How much this is an aberration, vs how much of this can be ascribed to the fact every soldier has the ability to record on a smartphone is unclear, but what is clear is that these atrocities have only galvanized the warring parties.

What is also clear is that in large part, the war crimes we’re seeing in that conflict are crimes of indiscipline. While clearly pervasive on both sides,5 these appear to be the acts of callous, enraged or indifferent soldiers as opposed to expressly ordered abuses. Not all war crimes in this conflict or others are, however, crimes of passion.

“Just Following Orders”

Up to this point, I have presented instances that for lack of a better description, could be considered excuses (they are not). There have been a myriad of reasons why someone has done the unforgivable or that they are not representative of the whole. Sometimes, however, there are no possible mitigations.

The most obvious case of willful and deliberate war crimes in the world today is the conduct of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). In numerous cases since its founding, the IDF has been credibly accused of serious war crimes including genocide and the murder of POWs, but it is their recent assault on Gaza and Lebanon that has seen formal accusations brought against Israeli leadership.

As quoted by the UNHCR: “The report found that the institutionalized mistreatment of Palestinian detainees, a longstanding characteristic of the occupation, took place under direct orders from the Israeli Minister in charge of the prison system, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and was fueled by Israeli government statements inciting violence and retribution.”

Amnesty International has documented such crimes as the willful murder of children by the IDF, stating “The combination of air strikes on medical facilities and Israel’s blocking of essential aid deliveries, including medical necessities for reproductive healthcare, had a devastating effect on the health of pregnant and breastfeeding women and on newborns and infants.”

Israel is by no means unique; genocide is all too common in world history, and when genocide is government policy, then it requires armed force to execute it. Nazi Germany is the oft-used go-to for discussion of genocidal warfare, but many others exist. For example, during the Russian Civil War, the coming of the White Armies of all their various allegiances6 was nearly synonymous with the coming of pogroms.7

There are other cases in which state sponsored criminality exists but is not genocidal (FN genocide as a concept). The Austro-Hungarian armies in Serbia during the First World War committed countless atrocities against Serbs, as did the Germans in Belgium. These cases, often taking the form of summary execution of hostages or accused dissidents, fell comfortably outside the norms of the period and were reviled in Allied nations, though not prosecuted. Another example of this would be the targeted killings of civilians in sovereign nations by drone strikes conducted by the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden regimes.

These are just a few examples of systemic, ordered violence. Cases in which the criminality, legally established or otherwise, is clear to those outside of the perpetrating regime, explicitly ordered by the state, and carried out by the state’s forces. The one thing that has always constrained this type of violence in armed conflicts is and has always been; reciprocity.

Reciprocal logic

“Do not count the days; do not count the miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German – that is your mother’s prayer. Kill the German – that is the cry of your Russian Earth. Kill the German. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.

Ilya Ehrenburg, quoted by Anthony Beevor in ‘Fall of Berlin 1945’

On the 19^th of August 1942, 1,946 Canadians went into German captivity as POWs after the disastrous Dieppe Raid. The Canadians carried orders to bind German prisoners they captured to prevent sabotage, and this order fell into German hands. After demands of an apology from the UK failed, the Canadian POWs were tied up in reprisal. A back and forth, mediated and reported by the Red Cross ensued in which German POWs in Canada were likewise shackled. The maneuvering lasted for over a year before all prisoners on both sides of the Atlantic were kept unshackled.

This is one of the more clear examples, but in war response in kind is a mitigating factor in conduct. It creates a self-interest factor in the awareness that conduct given will be responded to in kind. The notable lack of chemical warfare in the Second World War8 can be traced directly to the mutual unwillingness of most parties to engage in it, and those who did to strictly limit it. No party wanted to risk opening the floodgates when they knew the other party could respond in kind.

Reciprocity can also be an aggravating factor. During the Second World War, the armies of Japan, Germany, China and the Soviet Union engaged in the routine execution of prisoners. Indeed, very few prisoners at all were taken on in the Pacific Campaign, Sino-Japanese War inclusive. The United States did not share in the mistreatment of POWs once they got to camps, but in the case of Japanese POWs, many did not survive capture.

In many of these cases, especially in the Axis, concepts off racial superiority, explicitly caused wanton murder. This caused a spiral revenge in which participants frequently felt no need to conduct themselves better than what they witnessed the other side doing. As noted in the Ehrenburg quote above, revenge for the wrongs done to the Soviet Union was responded to viciously.9

All branches of the German war machine in the Second World War committed war crimes, but it is notable that units that fought on the Eastern Front and then travelled West to fight the Western Allies were observably more brutal in their conduct towards prisoners and civilians alike. This is partially explained by the proportion of these units being the more indoctrinated Waffen-SS units, but it also demonstrates the normalizing effect that sustained, brutal conduct had on these troops, and the permissive environment for criminality that occurred.

This is painting with an extremely broad brush. Many different kinds of conduct occurred on all fronts of this vast conflict, and the many historians I quote here have far better resources and depth of writing to explain these in detail. These crimes, those ordered by the state, are profoundly evil. Often, however, war crimes don’t fit into the conveniently ordered world of good and evil.

Grey zones, insurgents, and technicalities

“Shit... charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?”

Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Codified law, as we see it today, runs into problems when armed conflict is involved. The problem therein is that law cannot have obvious grey areas and function effectively. Differentiating state-sponsored murder from the regular kind can be tough.

An example of this in Canada is the case of Captain Robert Semrau. Semrau was accused of murdering a severely wounded Insurgent in Afghanistan in December 2008. He described in testimony that, “the wounds appeared too severe for any type of treatment in situ,” and that “he was 98 percent dead.” Unable to procure aid in time for the man, it was alleged Semrau shot him. In 2010, he was found not guilty of second-degree murder, but guilty of Disgraceful Conduct and released from the CAF.

The Semrau case highlights the grey areas in war criminality. That he, and many other soldiers have, killed is not in doubt. Indeed, many are lauded for killing. Was his act one of mercy or expedience? Both, probably. The bizarre reality is that legally speaking, the helicopter gunner that a blew the man in half with a chaingun did nothing wrong, but Semrau, by giving the dying man the coup de gras, did. Legally, he should have abandoned the man to the less-than-tender-care of the Afghan National Army unit that he was mentoring and let him bleed out in agony.

Insurgencies create many problems as pertains war law, the first of which being their lack of protections under international law. For all practical purposes, insurgents are criminals, and in a war such as the one Canada fought in Afghanistan, that is the paradigm that was used. The delegitimization of enemies is nothing new, but in the case of the Global War on Terror, it served a specific purpose. It allowed ‘insurgents’ to be considered outside the LOAC. This meant that, in practice, the Afghan Police or Army in the case of this example, were the ones to deal with prisoners taken by the coalition. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would zip tie and blindfold detainees and hand them over to the Afghan Government. The systemic abuse of prisoners was well documented.10

The insurgent has much more leeway when it comes to war crimes than does the conventional military, though in part this has more to do with their extra-legal status. Since 1945, most wars fought, especially by the superpowers, have been against far poorer nations who often lack the barest necessities for survival themselves. When French Union soldiers were captured by the Vietminh, they suffered terribly from jungle diseases, malaria and dysentery.11 So too did their captors, who themselves had no bug nets, quinine, or treatments for malaria. With French aircraft roving above, the prison camps were generally placed far out of the way in the North Vietnamese highlands, and in consequence of which, the marches to the camps were brutal and lethal. This is not to say that the Viet Minh did not commit war crimes,12 but some must be seen as a crime necessitated by circumstance.

The same is true of the Austro-Hungarian POW camps in the First World War. They tried to provide for their prisoners, but the Entente blockade13 was such that malnutrition was a fact of life in Austria-Hungary, and one shared with the POWs.14 In a blockade that may have cause hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in Germany and even more in Austria Hungary, it is hardly surprising that the prisoners went hungry too.

Command Responsibility: the Yamashita Standard

“My command was as big as MacArthur’s or Lord Louis Mountbatten’s. How could I tell if some of my soldiers misbehaved themselves? It was impossible for any man in my position to control every action of his subordinate commanders, let alone the deeds of individual soldiers. The charges are completely new to me. If they had happened, and I had known about them, I would have punished the wrongdoers severely. But in war someone has to lose. What I am really being charged with is losing the war. It could have happened to General MacArthur, you know.”

- General Tomoyuki Yamashita at his war crimes trial in Tokyo.

A core feature of the LOAC, is ‘Command Responsibility.’ This is places the onus on a war crime both on the immediate perpetrating commanders, and their superiors. A key part of this doctrine, the ‘Yamashita Standard,’ was established at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, better known as the “Tokyo Trials.” These were analogous to the Nuremburg Trials in Germany.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried for the crimes of the troops under his command in the Philippines, which included but not limited to the torture and murder of POWs and Philippine Civilians. His defense was that these troops were either were not under his direct command, such as the Kempeitai15 and Imperial Navy personnel, or were acting in violation of his instructions. Yamashita was hanged 23 February 1946.

An important factor in understanding command responsibility is that culpability is shared, and therefore not mutually exclusive. Rather, it generally is ascribed to situational authority and, for lack of a better description, “where the buck stops.” Who made the decision to commit this crime? Therefore, though it is not normal, a General can be tried for crimes under their responsibility while sharing that responsibility with a lower-echelon commander who gave the immediate orders. Depending on the criminality of the orders, pervasiveness of crime and other factors, the command responsibility can diminish or increase with distance.

An attempt to use the Yamashita Standard was applied to Captain Ernest Medina, Americal Division, for ordering the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. His defense, that his troops were out of control and that he was unaware of the massacre until after the fact was accepted, and he was acquitted. This in spite of being the company commander of a platoon that killed 507 civilians.

Command Responsibility is always a hazy legal argument, and one that throughout the attempts to enforce the LOAC, has often failed. As was the case at My Lai, wherein the key defendant, Lieutenant William Calley Jr served only three years of house arrest, enforcement of the LOAC becomes a far greater problem than identifying violations.

Enforcement

The majority of war crimes go unpunished. There are a myriad of overlapping reasons for this, from ‘victor’s justice,’ to perceptions of the victims. Indeed, in many cases, the perpetrators of war crimes are not doing anything illegal as far as their state is concerned. Bluntly: people feel more sympathy for their soldiers than they do for the people they killed. This was very much the case with above mentioned William Calley Jr. When President Nixon ordered him to house arrest, “Gallup found that 83% of respondents favored the president’s action.” (C. Ward and Ken Burns, the Vietnam War)

Today, the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials are often upheld as examples of the applicability and uses of the LOAC, but the fact is that these were nations that had been quite literally bombed into submission, and in the case of Germany, invaded. These are not examples of an outraged population or government decrying the actions of their military, but examples of a population that supported their military and now are forced to witness the trials. This is an important distinction, and the far-ranging accountability associated with those trials can only occur in a condition of complete overthrow of the regime that committed them.

As to the accountability itself, that is more dubious. Many, indeed most, of the war criminals of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan were never tried at all. Many who were ended up having their often-harsh sentences reduced to short, almost meaningless terms. SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer was sentenced to death by a Canadian court for ordering the murder of 48 Canadian POWs in Normandy. His sentence was commuted to life in prison, then in 1950 he was allowed to return to Germany and was released in 1954. Meyer is just one example, many who faced long prison sentences were released early.

Also dubious was the actual legal procedure. There is a reasonable argument to say these trials were victor’s justice, however deserved it was. Since that point, however, these trials have become formative in the legal standard upheld today. Landmark cases both of justice, and enforcement of justice, but sadly, these trials are the exceptions. The selectivity of these charges are the inherent problem.

Selective Justice

“ICC [International Criminal Court] was built for Africa and thugs like Putin not for democracies such as Israel and United States”

- U.S. Senator for South Carolina Lindsey Graham

The obvious selectivity of justice inherent to war criminality undermines the entire perception of it. We need only look at the quote the ever-odious Senator from South Carolina, and the conduct of Israel in Gaza to which the quote refers. Compare the reaction to Israel’s genocide, and to the indefensible, brutal, but non-genocidal 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the contrast is stark.

To be clear, any war crimes should be investigated, and those committing them should be held accountable, but it’s easy to see the bias and selective prosecution at work. The attempts to have Israeli action called genocidal by the UN and other organizations was at best slow, and at worst deliberately obtuse. That it happened was good, and it should be a politically acknowledged fact that Israel is committing genocide, but the fact it took this long and that still nations including Canada are arming and supporting Israel is something history will look upon with revulsion.

The selectivity is even more stark when one sees how we treat those associated to “terrorism.” The concept of terrorism, like war criminality, is at best foggy, especially in the aftermath of the Global War on Terror. In that conflict, anyone from drug smugglers to people defending their homes could be labeled as a terrorist and thus criminalized. The illegal detention of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay by the United States is one of many egregious examples.

Khadr was 15 when he was captured by US Special Forces having allegedly thrown a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer, a medic.16 Khadr was tried, among other things, for supporting terrorism and for killing a medic, based on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an act published five years after Khadr’s capture. He was forced to sign a plea deal and was released to Canadian custody and eventually freedom in on March 25, 2019.

The trials were blatantly illegitimate, alleged to include likely falsified information, and ignored was the fact that as a 15-year-old, Khadr was a child soldier.17 Rather than treat him as the victim, as one would do with a child, they chose to criminalize him and ruin his life under the vomit-inducing pretext that it was Khadr that was the war criminal.

Selective indeed.

The collapse and necessity of war-law

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

- Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos.

I wish I took PM Caney’s speech at face value, because he was absolutely correct. It is a shame that he welcomed the US coup of Venezuela earlier that month.

Nice speech though.

In the year 2026, it is no longer a hot take that international law is collapsing. American conduct in the Caribbean, the aforementioned Israeli genocide in Gaza, the war of aggression against Iran, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the genocidal violence of the Sudanese Civil War are the context of the collapse of international law, but not the reason.

The real reason is that collectively, the world stopped believing in them.

No, this isn’t the movie ‘Elf,’ wherein Santa’s sleigh flies with the power of belief, but it’s perhaps less different than one would like to admit.

Most national militaries, be they signatories or otherwise on the multitude of charters that are the LOAC, generally make considerable efforts to constrain their soldiers, at least theoretically in line with the LOAC. For all the reasons mentioned above; indiscipline, bad press, causes revenge, self defeating, and many others, a military and the state it belongs to have a vested interest in not committing crimes.

War crimes still happen, indeed constantly, but when they do we know them to be war crimes. The stigma, both internal and external to the combatant nation, while different in every case, is not generally insignificant. Nobody thinks they’re the “bad guys,” and governments take great pains to ensure they are not perceived as such. Simply: if someone knows something is a crime, they are less likely to do it. Governments will commit crimes, but it will be the crimes they feel they can afford to accept the blow to credibility associated with doing so. A war crime can serve any number of purposes in the short or long term, and they happen daily, justified as “necessary targeted killings,” or some other vile obfuscation. A war crime that achieves no purpose is an embarrassment.

And that is the danger. The embarrassment was the one real, tangible thing that war crimes had keeping them in check.

War law is fundamentally similar to the medieval codes of chivalry, complete with their own art, be it romantic tales of chivalric poets, or ‘Judgment at Nuremberg (1961),’ starring Spencer Tracy and Bert Lancaster. It exists through belief in a collective norm and reinforces that belief through shame. Sometimes, the shame is sufficient, or the deed so heinous as to warrant a trial, and that is good; the belief requires the occasional human sacrifice of a guilty man (FN). But make no mistake, these are not the majority. They are not even a significant minority.

That is why knowing what is and is not a war crime is so important. It’s quite literally our job to believe.

Ian, May 8, 2026.

Sources

Wedgewood, C.V, ‘The Thirty Years War’

Semrau, Robert, ‘The Taliban Don’t Wave’

Beevor, Anthony, ‘The Fall of Berlin 1945’

Ward, Geoffrey C. & Burns, Ken, ‘The Vietnam War’

Browning, Christopher, ‘Ordinary Men’

Knappe, Siegfried, ‘Soldat, Reflections of a German Soldier 1936-1949’

American Society for International Law

Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War | OHCHR

Protected persons: Prisoners of war and detainees | ICRC

IHL Treaties - Hague Convention (IV) on War on Land and its Annexed Regulations, 1907

Human rights in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory Amnesty International

UN Commission finds war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israeli attacks on Gaza health facilities and treatment of detainees, hostages | OHCHR

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

The world is in crisis. As I write, the ceasefire that stands between Donald Trump and his genocidal ambitions in Iran hangs by a thread. Across the Middle East, columns of smoke have marked the deaths of not only human beings, but the planet’s very ability to support human life.

But it is not crisis that I am thinking of in this moment. The crisis I focus on today is far more abstract, yet pertinent: how will we get around after fossil fuels? Today the dying empire fights wars for them, but make no mistake, the days of the petrodollar, and gasoline-based economy are dying.

There are some easy answers of course. Electric cars are already normal on the roads today. Green energy options like wind and solar power are already commonplace. The green future is already upon us, at least technologically. The problem is convenience.

The turbojet may well rank as one of the most important and destructive technologies of the twentieth century. With one piece of technology you get fast movement through the air at reasonable levels of maintenance at low cost-per milage. All it requires is a plentiful and constant supply of fossil fuel. The world got smaller, trips that took days now take hours. With raw power came convenience.

Now, as fuel prices skyrocket, and the planet keeps getting hotter, it is more clear than ever that the status quo is killing us.

Subscribe now

A Buoyant Past

Human flight has been around a lot longer than the 1903 Kittyhawk flight by the Wright Brothers. On 21 November 1783,1 the first humans, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, and François Laurent d’Arlandes, took to the air in a Montgolfier hot air balloon. Early flight experiments from the eighteenth century until the late 1800s, however, were hamstrung by a lack of suitable means of control.

There were two problems: the first was that the balloon was a vehicle suspended in a medium, the air. Whereas a sailing ship is a vehicle that is conveyed by one medium (water) while propelled by another (air). Without the interaction of two mediums, there was no way to propel the balloon but for some kind of engine. The other problem was weight. In order that a vehicle, be buoyant, it must be light, yet to be propelled, it must be able to lift the engine. There were experiments with steam powered dirigibles2 but none were able to attain a sufficient power-to-weight ratio.

The free powered flight by an airship was done by the airship La France on August 9, 1884. The vessel was electric and powered by a zinc-chlorine flow battery. It was revolutionary for its day, but ultimately the technology was insufficiently developed for the period. The airship was waiting for the internal combustion engine (ICE).

The inventor of what today is considered the first modern, rigid airship was count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. The ICE and lightweight alloys like aluminium and duralumin together allowed for a breakthrough in the design of airships and it was Zeppelin who saw the opportunity. The Count had believed in lighter than air flight since 1863 when he, visiting the USA during the Civil War, was able to fly in a tethered balloon, but his military career, and state of technology, put a hold on any experimentation in airships until after he retired from the Württembergian3 Army in 1891.

Count Zeppelin believed for his entire life the utility of the airship was military in nature. There are arguments to be made elsewhere that there was a limited period of utility for military airships, but that is a discussion outside the scope of this article. It is ironic that the Zeppelin’s true legacy is the project he sneered at as pedestrian: DELAG.

Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft (DELAG), or the German Airship Travel Company was an offshoot of Zeppelin’s parent company, Lufshiffbau Zeppelin. It was the world’s first airline, and the safest. From 1909 to 1914 the company operated seven airships before all were commandeered by the German Military with the outbreak of the First World War.4 After the war, the Luftshiffbau Zeppelin struggled financially, but managed still to produce three airships for DELAG as well as exporting an airship to the US Navy. The company existed until 1935 when it was reorganized and nationalized by the Nazis. During the entire period of civil airship operation by the Luftshiffbau Zeppelin, not one passenger was seriously injured.

This is not to say there weren’t accidents; there were many. Most of the pre-1914 Zeppelins5 were written off in accidents, but in an era when flying in cloth winged aeroplanes was looked upon as near-suicidal, this is a impressive achievement.

In 1935 DELAG was reorganized and incorporated into a government-civil venture with Lufthansa, becoming Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei (DZR), or the German Zeppelin Airship Company. DZR inherited an impressive safety culture from DELAG, and from 1935-1937, ran a safe, reliable trans-Atlantic service with LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, and LZ-129 Hindenburg.

The May 6, 1937, Hindenburg Disaster is seen today as a decisive and violent end of the airship era, but seen in its context, this is not the case. It wasn’t the end of DZR. Reichminister Herman Goring was not a fan of rigid airships, but in the wake of the disaster, he felt compelled to greenlight the LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin, a modified sister-ship of the Hindenburg. Both vessels had been designed for the use of helium lifting gas, but the US Government was unwilling to sell the precious gas to Nazi Germany. DZR was confident in the use of hydrogen, but after the Hindenburg, it was decided to never fly the Graf Zeppelin with passengers for reasons of safety. She was broken up for scrap in 1940 after conducting some propaganda and Electronic Intelligence flights.

The Hindenburg Disaster was not the end of German experimentation with airships but it did mark the end of German civil airship ventures. Other nations had tried, they all failed by 1937. Each of these had been plagued by disaster, and some not even of their own making.

The most tantalizing prospect besides DELAG/DZR for civil airship transport was the UK’s 1924 Imperial Airship Scheme. Born of a desire to connect the far-flung reaches of the British Empire, the plan was to build two airships as working prototypes for the service, acting as proof-of-concept for future designs. The project was split between a private venture by the Airship Guarantee Company, a Vickers subsidiary, and by the government run Royal Airship Works. They would become R100 and R101, the so-called “Capitalist Airship,” and “Socialist Airship,” respectively.

R100 was designed by Barnes Wallis, the eccentric aircraft designer who would invent and build the “Bouncing Bomb” of World War II fame. The R100 was comfortable, modern, and technologically unremarkable. The two airships were the largest ever built in Britain, and R100 was designed conservatively, reflecting its prototype-state. This airship would fly transatlantic to Montreal and back in July-August 1930, making it the only rigid airship to visit Canada. Its career was short, made shorter by a problematic outer cover that for R101, would prove disastrous.

R101 was groundbreaking in every way. Comfortable accommodations, power-actuated control surfaces, specially built diesel engines,6 and an asbestos-lined, sheet aluminium smoking room. The designers, ambitious as they were, had never designed a craft like this before. The British airship program had taken an enormous blow when much of their experienced personnel and design staff were killed when the badly-under engineered R387 broke apart in mid air and exploded with the loss of most abord. It was this accident that led the design team for R101 to build much of the vessel’s frame out of stainless steel.

The problems with this revolutionary airship began immediately. Like R100, her cover was flawed. It was so fragile one could punch a hole through it with a finger and much had to be replaced or patched. Furthermore, she was simply too heavy, and modifications to her features, removal of the powered control surfaces, and the addition of an extra bay for more gas cells could only get the R101 so far. When she left on her maiden voyage to India, she was grossly overweight and could barely fly higher than she was long.

The overweight airship flew sideways, crabwalking nose first into a storm on the night of October 4/5, 1930, intent on her destination of Ismailia, Egypt. There were no survivors from the crew in command of the R101 to tell what happened when after 0200, the ship nosed down and crashed into a French hillside, killing all but eight of the 46 men aboard, two of whom died of injures. It is likely that the weak cover gave way, exposing the thin forward gas bags to the weather, which collapsed one after another, causing an irrecoverable dive. The crash of R101 killed the Imperial Airship Scheme’s founder, Lord Thompson of Cardington, and with it any desire to see the project seen through. The R100 never flew again.

The Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation (GZC) was a joint venture with Luftshiffbau-Zeppelin in founded in 1924, headquartered in Akron Ohio. The Goodyear Company had been building blimps since the First World War, and by establishing this partnership, ventured into larger, rigid airship construction. The plan was first to build a pair of airships for the US Navy, the aircraft carrying USS Akron and USS Macon. Once these enormous, helium inflated airships proved their abilities, GZC would begin construction of mail and passenger vessels. They would connect Hawaii, California and the East Coast with fast, and convenient passenger service.

It was not to be. On April 4, 1933, USS Akron crashed in a storm off the coast of New Jersey, and all but three of the 76 men aboard were lost. Her sistership, the USS Macon flew until February 12, 1935, when during a fleet exercise off Point Sur California, the ship suffered a catastrophic structural failure at the base of one of her fins and crashed into the Pacific. Fortunately, only two men were lost with the Macon, but as she slipped under the waves of the Pacific Ocean, so too did DZR’s dream of a transcontinental airship service.

“Soviet Airships Must Fly Over The Land Of The Soviets,” proclaimed a Soviet poster featuring Lenin. The Soviet airship program was not nearly so well funded or organized as the other programs, but it was significant. The program had existed since the first flight of Krasnaya Zvezda on January 3, 1921. Their biggest break came in 1932 when the USSR enlisted the services of Italian airship designer Umberto Nobile. Nobile, an airship designer, pilot, and General in the Italian Air Force had been scapegoated for the 1929 loss of the Italia, a semi-rigid airship that he was using to explore the high Arctic. Nobile, as commander of the airship Norge during the 1926 Amundson-Ellsworth-Nobile expedition to the North Pole may have been the first people to ever reach that final undiscovered part of the world.8

The crowning achievement for the Soviet airship program was the SSSR-V6-OSOAVIAKhIM. This awkwardly acronym’ed vessel was a development of Nobile’s previous N-1/N-2 class of airships, the Norge and Italia. This was a modest airship used for exploration and experimentation, not civil transport, and in general Soviet airships were small, but they had some notable achievements. The first woman to command an airship was Vera Mityagina, at the controls of the SSSR-V1, and with an all-female crew.

The SSSR-V6 was lost when it crashed into a mountain in fog, near Murmansk, North-West Russia, with the loss of most of its crew, including the husband of Vera Mityagina, Sergey Demin. The crash ruined the enthusiasm in the Soviet Union for airships, but work did continue. The airship Pobeda (Victory) flew until it crashed in 1947, and the final passenger airship service in the Soviet Union came to an end in 1950.

Thus not one, but four airship crashes destroyed four different schemes to connect the world with airships, but there was more at work than the just the grisly ending of these ventures.

The early aeroplane had no more an impressive safety record than the airship, and through much of the airship’s life, was notably worse. True, more fatalities could occur on an airship, but this was a period in which planes crashed ever year in the hundreds.

The great advantage airships granted was cargo capacity and range. Airships offered a trip faster than by train or ship, with a much longer range than an aircraft, safer, and though they were not faster than aeroplanes, they made up time by needing fewer refueling stops. The cargo load of such vessels was considerable. With a useful lift9 of over 200,000kg, a vessel the size of the Hindenburg could pick up an entire Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet.

Once constructed and operational, making money through passenger and mail fares was indeed lucrative, but not sufficiently to turn a profit in the case of DELAG, or tempt investors in the many other projects. One airship was an enormous, financially draining project to design and construct. Few nations could afford them, and those that could, with the exception of Germany, built only a handful. They required large crews to operate, even larger crews to land, as well as large landing and handling facilities. Enormous new sheds, plumbed with lifting gas lines were required just to start a project such as this. The economic problems associated with this kind of overhead crippled airship development when they had the edge technologically, and when that waned, there was little argument left to save them.

Airships had possessed a significant technological head start on heavier-than-air craft, but the gap shrunk year by year. By the end of the Great War, aircraft were gaining range, size and reliability at a rate airships were not. By the time of the Hindenburg Disaster, it had been competing not with cloth and plywood biplanes, but with sleek, all metal monoplanes. The massive, four engine Boeing B-17 bomber, the aircraft that would help flatten much of Nazi Germany, first flew the year before.

Thus Hindenburg Disaster was not the death of the rigid airship industry, but rather the coup-de-gras. Economically unviable, with few real advantages over aeroplanes of the day, the airship died out in most of its many forms. Its only legacy for the latter half of the Twentieth Century were blimps in niche military uses and civilian blimps flying over sports fields and traffic jams.

Now in the Twenty-First Century, our world faces new crises, some radically different from those of the past, and others, depressingly similar.

Inconvenient Transportation

The Climate Crisis is now well underway worldwide. It can be felt, seen, and borne witness to. There is no reason to indulge the deliberately ignorant anymore. Greenhouse gasses are killing our very ability to exist on this planet, and one of the worst causes of these is air travel. Enormous numbers of people, according to the FAA, nearly 10 million daily in the USA alone along with tons upon tons of freight carried by aircraft, the overwhelming majority of which are jet powered. Those millions of people all have places they need to go, and the climate crisis will not be made less dire by simply asking consumers to fly less.

There is no straightforward argument for the airship in the modern era to compete with jet aircraft; it’s not a fair comparison point. The airship is far slower, more expensive, harder to operate, sensitive to weather, and huge. It can’t compete for the same precise reasons that the airships of old failed to compete; uneconomical, impractical, and excessive overhead. The only reason one puts forth the airship as a solution is the climate crisis, and the Strait of Hormuz Crisis.

There will come a point in our collective lifetimes where the consumption and use of fossil fuels for fuel is no longer feasible. We will hit Peak Oil.10 Likely the industry will remain for specific roles, and the production of synthetic products, but that point where oil becomes no longer viable fast approaches. Gas guzzling turbojets won’t be able to function in a world where fuel prices cost a mint. A solution will be needed, that is a given. The airship is the solution.

The modern electrical generation capacity from solar, wind, and hydrogen fuel cells is such that the ICE is no longer required for airship operation. Historically, one of the main limiters for airships was the fact that as they travelled, they lightened. This was due to fuel burn, and to compensate, they were required to vent lifting gas. There were attempted solutions to this problem, the Akron-Class used passive water collection from the engine exhausts, the Graf Zeppelin used Blau gas in its engines, a liquid natural gas derivative that has the near to the same density as air. None of these solutions come close to the elegant simplicity of the electric motor. La France was ahead of its time.

The climate crisis provides another, less in-your-face problem that the airship solves: damage to infrastructure. Anyone who has lived through the overlapping climate change disasters of the 2000’s can tell you that the weather isn’t getting better. EF-6 tornados, Cat-6 hurricanes are now posited as potential, if not likely disasters. Sea levels are rising, droughts are drying out rivers, fires ravage the countryside and the permafrost is melting. In this context, the ability to fly over damaged or unviable infrastructure will be a boon.

The Canadian Skies

What will the Canadian airship future look like? I am a very long way from being an engineer. In fact, a look over my High School math and geometry transcript will show you that I am not the man to lead Canada into the weightless future, but I can posit some ideas.

The biggest hurdle is lifting gas. Several gasses have been tried in the past, such as coal gas,11 but the two with the most utility are hydrogen and helium. Helium is the obvious choice because it’s inert, but that belies an enormous disadvantage. Helium is an incredibly common element, but not on Earth. The best sources of helium are Saturn and Uranus. Undoubtedly Emperor Trump IV will attempt to seize these resources, but for now, they are out of reach. Besides interplanetary sources, helium is only available in a few places underground, often co-located with liquid natural gas. This is not practical. The airship’s key advantage is the removal of petroleum from air travel. Therefore, the solution is the universe’s most common element, number one on the chart. Hydrogen.

Hydrogen is the most efficient lifting gas in the known universe. Only a vacuum would be better, but that is rather tricky.12 Hydrogen is easy to acquire; my dad and I made some in the basement when I was a kid by passing an electrical current through water. Then we played a lighter under the container and watched as it ignited with a dull “woof,” of blue and yellow flame. The dangers associated with using a highly flammable gas in place of an inert one are self evident.

But how dangerous is it really? Let’s look at the Hindenburg. Much of the evidence was destroyed, but based on witnesses, experts and testimony by survivors, the theory of what happened is as follows: While conducing maneuvers at low altitude, a guy wire snapped under tension, tearing a hydrogen gas bag aft. The airship had been waiting for clear weather to land, but unknown to ground crew, another storm was in the vicinity, and the airship was electrically charged by it. They dropped the non-conductive landing ropes, but as these became wet in the light rain, they became electrically charged. All it took after that was a small spark leaping from the skin of the ship to the frame, igniting the gas that was, by then, leaking and filling the hull. Survivors near the point of ignition remember hearing a dull “woof” like someone lighting a gas stove. 30 seconds later, the ship was a blazing ruin, and 36 people were dead.

The Hindenburg therefore exploded through a confluence of events. Yes, there was no way it would have done so without being filled with hydrogen, but have things changed since then? I argue yes. The ultra thin gas bags of the Hindenburg were made from cattle intestines, a material called goldbeater’s skin. Modern materials are much stronger, and do not require the lives of thousands of cows. Nor would modern designs require the labyrinth of duralumin girders, canvas and wires that held together the airships of old.

The dangers of hydrogen need to be examined in detail in order to be addressed. Very few airships have been lost solely due to hydrogen fires, but many losses were made worse by them. R101 was a horrendous accident in which not one of the bodies was even identifiable without using personal effects and dentistry. But this fire, horrific as it was, occurred after the ship crashed into a hill. It is likely that the crash would not have been fatal without the fire, but that is the case for many aviation disasters. A post crash fire is a routine part of air accidents, not an appalling exception. The solution to the post-crash fire is not to crash.

Handling hydrogen has risks, that much is clear, but how much risk is it practically? In Canada, most households have highly explosive liquid natural gas piped directly to their water heaters and stoves. A poorly planned excavator dig, or a stove left on can cause a devastating explosion, yet this is seen as a matter of course. Similarly, when cars crash, there can be fires, horrible injuries, and death, yet every day we drive. The wing emergency exits of a passenger aircraft often travel over the main fuel tanks! Is that considered too dangerous? No.

One of the main dangers to a hydrogen airship besides crash was the venting of gas in poor weather. This is likely what caused the loss of the French military airship Dixmude, a captured German Zeppelin. We don’t know what happened to it, as it exploded, taking all hands with it, but it is suggested that the airship was struck by lightning. This was not usually a problem for airships, but if the vessel was leaking or venting gas, then it could have ignited the gas and caused the explosion. This is naturally a problem, but one solved through a combination of electrical propulsion and weather forecasting. As already noted, airships were forced to vent gas to compensate for loss of weight through fuel. This is not an issue for an airship using electrical energy.

Storms and bad weather conditions caused more accidents than hydrogen ever did, but again, these can be now mitigated. Weather forecasting was in its infancy when storms plagued airships. They are indeed vulnerable to weather, but modern computerized weather forecasting as well as modern fly-by-wire controls should render these a negligible risk.

The reality is that airship flight cannot be as convenient as modern aircraft are. They won’t be able to fly in as poor conditions, they will require more infrastructure, and they will be much slower. The compensation is comfort. Hindenburg, Graf Zeppelin (both), R101, and R100 all had very comfortable passenger accommodations. The Graf Zeppelin I was likened to a Pullman-style train cabin. R101 was luxurious enough that Lord Thompson used her while stationary to host guests for dinner service. These were large, comfortable means of travel, more akin to a flying passenger steamer than to a plane.

The difference in cost overhead for such an operation, as compared to modern aircraft, would be negligible. Airship sheds are indeed large and expensive but think about the fuel infrastructure required of any modern airport. Gas can be sourced from the air and water around us. Electrical power can be provided through green energy means as well as hydrogen fuel cells. Gone are the days when each engine would require a mechanic and an operator constantly maintaining them. The crew would use largely automated, fly-by-wire systems that would control pivotable propellers and thrusters, allowing for safe autopilot landings.

There are many projects underway in different parts of the world today to explore the possibility of the airship. We can’t say today which will succeed, which will fail, and which is a scam. Time will tell which entrepreneur will succeed.

For Canada, Umberto Nobile and his Arctic airships are the North Star. The long expanses of rough, trackless arctic could be easily traversed with safe, efficient, green airships. The days in which the Canadian Arctic is seen as a backwater, with expensive goods flown in by bush pilots could be gone, swept away by the airship. All we need do is be patient. We need embrace the fact that fossil fuel air travel is dying and needs to die. We will need to acknowledge the fact that to fly this beautiful country will take time, but we can do it in style, comfort, safety, and with the good of the planet in mind.

The future is weightless.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, the US military illegally bombed seven countries – Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Somalia, Nigeria, and Venezuela – and 33 boats in the southern Caribbean. In the first quarter of 2026 unprovoked US-Israeli attacks against Iran have broken out into a month-long war and the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with the US now mulling over plans to occupy Kharg Island. The war is ongoing and this article is being written as the situation develops.

The US sent several hundred Special Operations soldiers, 2,500 Marines, and thousands of Army paratroopers into the Middle East in the last week of March. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was clear about the US administration’s criminal and heinous intentions in Iran, when he bragged on March 2^nd that the US would not abide by “stupid rules of engagement” as they dropped “death and destruction from the skies all day long.” On April 2^nd Trump reiterated the threat, saying that US forces will bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” Trump has made statements marking Cuba as the next potential target, while the embargoed island nation of 10 million people has been struggling through a countrywide power outage since March 3^rd. Trump has also repeatedly talked about annexing Canada and turning it into the 51^st US state, and has referred to the Prime Minister as “Governor Carney.”
Furthermore, despite the brazen brutality showcased by the US and Israel in their joint attacks against Iran, by the end of March they had launched hundreds of BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) and over 1,000 AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs). These munitions, which cost $2 million USD per TLAM and $1.5 million per JASSM, can purportedly be produced at rates of about 100 per year and at most 860 per year respectively. Before the illegal war against Iran started, the US only had about 4,000 TLAMs stockpiled. Israeli stockpiles of interceptor missiles are also being steadily drained in their war against Iran and the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah. On March 26^th an assessment from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defence and security think tank, indicated that Israel’s stockpile of Arrow 3 anti-ballistic interceptor missiles could be gone within mere days.

The Pentagon has stated that the first week of the war cost $11.3 billion USD. The White House has requested $200 billion in assistance from other countries. Hegseth stated at a press conference that other countries’ armed forces, such as the UK’s “big bad Royal Navy,” should “step up” to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz after its closure by Iran. On at least a dozen occasions, Trump has signaled that the war on Iran was about to end. In fact, when talking to Axios on March 11^th, Trump said that the war would end “soon”, “any time I want it to end,” but later that same day he told a crowd “in the first hour it was over,” then added a minute later that they “don’t want to leave early.” Even more interestingly, just 15 minutes before Trump’s March 25^th post on Truth Social where he falsely claimed that the US and Iran had “very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East,” there was a surge in betting on global oil markets. At around 6:50 AM at least 6 million barrels of oil were suddenly sold, and at the same time DAX Index Futures in Germany and the Euro Stoxx 50 Index Futures also saw a notable trade increase, according to an article by The Independent on that day. This is a clear sign that insider trading is taking place.

This hodgepodge of imperial bravado and failure, cavalier spending and scrounging for scraps, all while the foundations of empires are crumbling and the rulers have been caught with their pants down, may make the behaviour of Trump, Carney, and both their administrations seem illogical and nonsensical. Trump appears to be fiddling around as his empire burns and Carney is dancing along to his tune. Although the imperialists do display some poor planning overall, their seemingly insane actions give us insight into the ideology of imperialism.

The openly barbaric rhetoric and aggression of the US and Israel, and the atrocities they continue to commit, have not phased the Canadian government. On the contrary, Carney and his Ministers have expressed varying shades of support for the attacks, and have made quite a shameful show of their greedy opportunism. Understanding the history of the Canadian state and its imperialist ambitions can help us understand the present war and international crisis.

In the case of Palestine, the Carney government continues the Canadian tradition of supporting colonial genocide against Indigenous nations in pursuit of resources and political hegemony. Just like its parent-state the United Kingdom, and its colonial cousin the United States of America, the Canadian state has always supported the Israeli Zionists’ colonization of Palestine, because the foundation of Israel is very similar to colonial atrocities against Indigenous nations on this continent, and the situation is so lucrative for Canadian imperialists.

In 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a banker-politician and leader of the British Jewish community, containing a declaration of support for a Zionist colonial project in Palestine. The previous year, British forces had pushed Ottoman forces out of the Levant region after an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire. The British deemed the Arab population unfit to govern their own territory, and these conditions led to the creation of Mandatory Palestine in 1920, which was administered by the British government. Subsequent conflict between the native Palestinians and the invading Zionist settlers broke out into an Arab revolt in 1936-39. In response the British government approved the White Paper of 1939, which was an attempt to quell the open conflict, but it neither helped the Palestinians nor appeased the Zionists.

Further conflict culminated in the Nakba (literally “Catastrophe”), a settler-colonial ethnic cleansing campaign in which Zionists killed 10,000-15,000 Palestinians, forced over 750,000 to flee their homes, and depopulated over 500 mostly-Arab villages, neighbourhoods, and towns. Between 1947-49, the state of Israel and its army the Israeli “Defensive” Forces (IDF) were created, and the Zionist state had occupied 78% of what was formerly Mandatory Palestine. The Palestinians continue to endure terror and genocide at the hands of the Zionists, who are eagerly aided and abetted to this day by the imperialists of mostly European countries and the countries they have colonized.

The Canadian bourgeoisie and their state have long maintained friendly and supportive relations with the state of Israel, which was officially recognized on May 11^th, 1949 after it became a member state of the United Nations. Canadian companies and the government have continued to cooperate with their Israeli counterparts. For example, the 2012 Canada-Israel Energy Science & Technology (CIEST) Fund saw Canada commit about $4.75 million from 2013-16, toward innovations in oil and gas technologies, such as those for extracting crude oil and bitumen from tar sands and for assessing shale deposits. The Israel Innovation Authority reportedly matched CIEST funds “on a project-by-project basis.” According to a BDScoalition.ca article from February 21^st, 2025, Canadian companies such as Fabricland, Reitmans clothing, Tepperman’s furniture and appliances, and Browns Shoes all have longstanding ties to Israel or pro-Israeli causes. The Canadian government has repeatedly stated its support for the Israeli fascist state since its inception, and advocates for Palestine have faced repression across the country, regardless of which party was in the leadership. The brutality of the Nakba did not phase the Canadian bourgeoisie 80 years ago, and we should expect the same with regard to the imperialist brutality on display around the world currently.

On January 3^rd, the US illegally attacked Venezuela, killed over 100 people, and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a bid for undemocratic regime change and control of Venezuela’s natural resources such as lithium and oil. Afterwards, Carney told a series of bold-faced lies that Canada “welcomes the opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people,”... “has long supported a peaceful, negotiated, and Venezuelan-led transition process that respects the democratic will of the Venezuelan people”,... and “calls on all parties to respect international law.” These words would be empty if not for how insulting they are in the aftermath of a violent, forceful, and US-led coup d’etat that quashed Venezuelan democracy in violation of international law.

Destabilizing states that oppose US hegemony, such as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, is also in the interests of Canadian imperialists. Toppling the governments of economically weaker states and destroying their infrastructure creates a chaotic power vacuum that can be exploited by the imperialist states’ armed forces and financial-economic influence to seize control and gain more wealth and power.

The US coup in Venezuela, and Trump’s threats against Cuba, can be understood more easily when we consider what happened in Chile in 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet and a group of reactionary military officers overthrew the nominally socialist President Salvador Allende, and installed a fascist dictatorship. This coup was supported by imperialists in the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, as well as Chilean right-wing parties such as the National Party, the Radical Democracy Party, and the Christian Democratic Party. The fascist dictatorship tossed 40,000 suspected “political enemies” into detention centres, and thousands were tortured or killed.

Just days after the coup Andrew Ross, Canadian ambassador to Chile, described these actions as the junta’s “probably thankless task of sobering Chile up” in a cable he sent to External Affairs. Ottawa sent $95 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) immediately, and on October 2^nd Export Development Canada (EDC) granted $5 million in credit to Chile’s central bank to assist with aircraft purchases. According to a Rabble article from September 11^th, 2018, within the following five years Canada would establish five EDC facilities worth $15-$30 million each, Canadian chartered banks gave 20 loans totaling over $100 million, and investments by Canadian companies amounted to almost $1 billion. This all came after Pierre Trudeau declined President Allende’s invitation to visit Chile in 1970, “for fear of alienating rightist elements in Chile and elsewhere.”

Alongside the fascist military coup and imperialist investments, there was also a group called “The Chicago Boys” – Chilean economists who studied at Chicago University under neoliberal thinkers like Milton Friedman, whose ideas had a strong influence on policy-making. This group of economists travelled from Chile to Chicago and back again, refining and spreading these concepts. Privatization, deregulation, government spending cuts, and austerity, were part of a “shock therapy” that aimed to eliminate public services and social movements, and ensure the people’s reliance on foreign private companies, to increase the profitability of imperialist exploitation of Chile’s working class and natural resources.

Neoliberal shock therapy helped the US destabilize and impose their interests on Chile, a country that had ostensibly rejected US influence when they elected a President from the Socialist Party. In the case of Canada however, the government has been applying shock therapy all on its own, and Carney is cranking up the voltage. Privatization has been steadily taking over Canadian healthcare in recent years, and as Trump continues to float the idea of annexation, the Canadian government is enacting further neoliberal austerity measures and drastically altering their spending habits.

In 2026-27 there will be cuts to over two dozen federal departments, agencies, and crown corporations, including a $2.04 billion cut (-98.9%) to Canada Post, a $1.33 billion cut (-10.9%) to the Department of Health, a $367 million cut (-19.4%) to the Public Health Agency of Canada, and a $191 million cut (-12.2%) to CBC. Just like their approach to making cuts, the Canadian government will not be spending all these “savings” in one place. Among the 20 areas receiving a spending boost in the next year are the Department of Finance (+$8.53 billion or +5.7%), Department of National Defence (+$5.259 billion or +11.6%), Communications Security Establishment (+$346.9 million or +20.9%), Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency (+$22.9 million or +20.6%), Canadian Security Intelligence Service (+$20.4 million or +2.1%), and Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP (+$11.9 million or +68.9%). On top of that, Canada recently added $9.3 billion into the DND budget in June 2025, to meet NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence.

While it may appear at first that Canada is preparing its defences in case of a US attack, the reality is that even with this increase in defence and security-related agencies, the Canadian forces are ill-equipped to withstand direct military confrontation against the US, and the people of Canada are at present less committed to engaging in an asymmetrical armed struggle against US forces than Iranians, Venezuelans, or Cubans. While such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article, we can see from the recent US-Israeli attacks against Iran that the American war machine seldom shies away from overkill and depravity. Despite this clear disparity in military might, and the looming threat of annexation, the Canadian ruling class keeps watching happily as American-made horrors unfold in Iran.

After the United States’ February 28^th double-tap strike against an elementary school in Minab killed 175 people and injured 95, mostly young girls; after another US strike mere hours later in Lamerd killed 21 people, many of them children playing at a sports hall and school, with a previously unused state-of-the-art Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) that detonates above targets and flings tungsten pellets at high velocity; as further US-Israeli strikes killed over 600 civilians and targeted 13 Red Crescent-affiliated centres, 14 medical centres, 65 schools, over 5,535 residential units, and 1,041 commercial units according to reports from the Iranian Red Crescent; as at least 120 historical sites were damaged by attacks according to Iran; after Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei and about 40 other officials were assassinated in airstrikes; as flaming crude oil flowed out of bombed facilities down the streets of Tehran and spilled into the drainage systems; and as the sky over the region turned black with toxic smoke, the Canadian government and oil industry circled the wounded Iranian oil market like profit-hungry vultures.

That same day, Carney glossed over the horrors wrought in Iran by the US and Israel, and resolved in a series of platitudes that Canada “stands with the Iranian people in their long and courageous struggle against Iran’s oppressive regime,”... “reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself and to ensure the security of its people,”... “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,”... and “urges the protection of all civilians in this conflict.” Then on March 13^th the office of Tim Hodgson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, announced that Canada will contribute 23.6 million barrels of oil to an effort by the International Energy Agency (IEA) to “stabilize the market”, and that Canadian exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) would also be expanding soon. Of course, the IEA’s list of member countries includes almost all the imperialist states except Russia, with China and India as associate countries, and Israel still undergoing the membership process. For what it’s worth, the horrors are virtually unspeakable so we can hardly expect that bankers, politicians, and other parasites would speak of them, especially not when they could instead pose as philanthropists and then rake in some dirty dollars from the bloodbath. It would not be surprising if the environmental damage caused by US-Israeli attacks against Iran gets repurposed in propaganda as a rhetorical justification for further funding increases in energy technologies and/or interventions in Iran, under the humanitarian guise of preventing climate change – after all, just like pollution, imperial shamelessness knows no bounds.

The rhetoric about the state of Israel’s right to defend itself is easily dispelled with a basic understanding of historical events. The Zionists are colonial-fascist aggressors, as explained above, so it is clear that they can never “defend” themselves; everything Zionists do is a continuation of the Nakba and part of their Greater Israel plot to conquer the region. The reality of this plot has rapidly become apparent. In violation of a ceasefire signed into effect since November 27^th, 2024, Israel has already been bombing Lebanon on an almost-daily basis since that date. About 500 people were killed in that period. Since the war against Iran started, Israeli bombing campaigns have increased, and on March 16^th Israeli forces began a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Since the recent Zionist escalation of force against Lebanon, over 1,000 people have been killed and 1 million displaced. The Dallafa and Qasmiyeh Bridges were also destroyed, severing key transit routes through the country. All of this is under the guise of fighting against Hezbollah, which has done a vastly superior job compared to the official Lebanese Army in terms of defending the Lebanese people against Zionist aggression. The people of Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and every other country threatened by Zionism, are right to resolutely defend themselves. Palestine’s ability to defend was weakened by foreign intervention, so it became occupied by Zionists; the Lebanese Army appears unable or unwilling to defend Lebanon against Israel, but Hezbollah is picking up the slack; despite its flaws as a theocracy with anti-people policies, Iran is standing up in the face of inhuman US-Israeli brutality, and their resistance deserves support.

While Trump pretends that people believe he is brokering a deal for US victory against Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and anti-imperialist resistance groups in the region such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (AKA The Houthis) in Yemen, have made sure that the US, Israel, and their allies pay dearly for their acts of aggression. On top of the massive expenditure of missiles mentioned earlier in this article, the US has also reportedly lost at least 15 soldiers, an A-10 attack aircraft, and F-15E fighter jet, to Iranian defences as well as damage to an F-35 and two HH-60W helicopters.1 On March 31^st, the IRGC issued a warning that beginning on April 1^st at 8:00 PM, they would target an American tech company in retaliation for every further assassination in Iran. The statement listed 18 companies: Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Nvidia, J.P. Morgan, Tesla, GE, Spire Solutions, G42, and Boeing. That day the IRGC also made the United Arab Emirates waste over $100 million in interceptor missiles, by launching munitions that just release flares and set off air defence systems, making an April Fool of the Zionists’ ally.

Iran is on the north coast of the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that is a strategically important chokepoint because it is the only passage from the Persian Gulf to the ocean. This gives Iran the advantage of closing the Strait, through which one fifth of the world’s LNG and one quarter of global seaborne oil trade passed during 2023-25. The closure of the Strait cuts off a critical source of petroleum products for Europe and Asia, and gives Iran a very valuable bargaining chip. Qatar Energy, Bapco Energies in Bahrain, and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation have all declared force majeure in response to the crisis – a contractual clause that cancels all obligations due to extraordinary circumstances.

Although the resulting energy crisis and rising cost of fuel is causing even greater price increases for the masses of North American, European, and Asian countries than we were already experiencing, this must be understood as the result of US-Israeli imperialist aggression, and not as some kind of cruel ploy by Iran to cause a crisis. The imperialists knew that their hubris would cause an energy crisis and rapid cost of living increases for the people, and yet no effort was made to ensure our safety and well-being. Minimum wages throughout the US and in all Canadian provinces still remain substantially lower than living wages, the Canadian government recently increased the minimum wage for their own federal employees to a pitiful $18.15 per hour which barely meets the living wage rates for the cheapest Canadian cities, and the US has even used UK military bases to strike Iran which now makes the UK complicit in the illegal war. In part, the imperialists expect that their propaganda will convince the people to blame Iran, but more and more the working class and oppressed masses are beginning to realize the truth: that all social, political, and economic problems are caused by the bourgeoisie and the states they control.

The Canadian state is a two-faced monster: an uncannily human face looks you in the eyes and tells you it is your meek old friend and steadfast caretaker, looking after you with concern and politely reminding you to be a good little citizen; the second face – a warped predatory maw – devours capital and resources, destroys innocent lives, and disfigures the environment. This is a cultural factor that makes Canadian society somewhat different from US society. Despite its “democracy-loving” stranglehold on the world economy and mainstream media, many peoples around the world know that Uncle Sam does not really believe in freedom. On the other hand, the Canadian state’s politeness propaganda has been largely successful, and in turn the people of Canada are often indoctrinated into this trap of respectability; Canada has adopted the identity of a polite problem-free paradise, so to be a good Canadian means to politely let problems slide. It is helpful to the ruling class that many people don’t speak up or rock the boat, lest people think they are rude – or worse, an American! Ironically, because the Conservative Party seems to have a monopoly on rhetoric about self-defence, many people in Canada misinterpret any talk about self-defence as being reactionary, even though the Conservatives almost exclusively uphold the right of self-defence for property owners and not for the oppressed masses. Through the foggy goggles of respectability politics every justified act of self-defence, resistance, and revolution looks the same as the violent oppression that the masses have been struggling against in the first place. This cultural tendency is politically expressed as pacifism and reformism, even among many self-styled radicals.

If we are going up against not just the Canadian bourgeoisie and its ties to global imperialism, but also US imperialists and their fascist ambitions in annexing Canada, then the class-conscious Canadian masses will need to get comfortable with asserting themselves against aggressors, manners be damned. Just as we can draw from historical examples of revolutionaries such as the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists, and resistance fighters in Vietnam, Cuba, and Palestine, we can also look to the incredible resistance of Iran, Hezbollah, and The Houthis recently. This does not mean total support for a theocratic capitalist state – just as supporting the Vietnamese or Cuban struggles against imperialism does not equate to support for revisionist interpretations of Marxism – but it is a call to examine the history, conditions, strategies, and tactics of these conflicts. If and when the time comes to respond to US aggression in Canada, the masses of Canada need to be able to act effectively to not only resist and repel the occupation, but to follow through with overthrowing the Canadian imperialist state and building socialism. Without establishing socialism as a path toward communism and the end of class society, we can never defeat colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. To establish socialism the working class and oppressed masses of Canada will first need to shake off their indoctrinated self-defeatism and apathy, become conscious of their position in settler-colonial capitalist-imperialist society, and organize for socialist revolution.

Self-defeatism and apathy have helped the Canadian ruling class as a whole to gouge public services, privatize and hike up the cost of our basic necessities, and lick Trump’s bloody little shoes in appeasement, while the workers and oppressed masses of Canada endure increasing exploitation and the peoples of the Caribbean, South America, and the Middle East face mounting imperialist violence. There is no way to peacefully advocate for liberation from imperialism. Revolution is the only solution, and the sooner the people realize this the sooner we can put an end to the imperialist nightmare. For people who are only just waking up to this harsh truth recently, there is no shame in admitting that you were lulled into complacently believing that the Canadian ruling class and their state could be on the side of the people. Those of us who already understand that imperialism cannot be fixed need to work as hard as possible to organize the masses for socialist revolution. In particular, those of us in the imperialist countries who understand this necessity to organize must do so in solidarity with targets of imperialist war and super-exploitation, such as Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba.

Karl Marx popularized a principle among Marxists in his 1975 Critique of the Gotha Programme: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Those of us living in the imperialist countries have the opportunity to take action against the imperialist war machine from within, despite the exploitation that we also face; we have the ability to show effective solidarity to those who are in need of it. And on the topic of everyone working within their abilities to show solidarity, we should consider the words of Che Guevara, in his August 1960 speech known as On Revolutionary Medicine:

“... if we use this new weapon of solidarity, if we know the goals, know the enemy, and know the direction we have to take, then all that is left for us to know is the part of the way to be covered each day. And that part no one can show us; that part is the private journey of each individual. It is what he will do every day, what he will gather from his individual experience, and what he will give of himself in the exercise of his profession, dedicated to the well-being of the people.”

Solidarity is the link between all the struggles against resource extraction, labour exploitation, bigotry, wars of conquest, and every other oppression and injustice. Solidarity is multi-purpose: it is a weapon for attacking the enemy and a tool for helping the masses. Imperialist war strengthens the bourgeoisie and deepens the masses’ suffering, and revolutionary war is the only way to liberate them from the suffering caused by class society. That is the simple truth the Canadian imperialists do not want us to understand – war is good for making revolution! Solidarity means ending the unjust imperialist war with just revolutionary war!

Talk to people in your community, your workplace, your school, and wherever else you go, about imperialism and Canada’s role in these terrible injustices.

Organize and protest against Canadian imperialism with those who see the necessity for action.

Stand with the oppressed masses of Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon, Cuba, Yemen, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, and every other country that the imperialists set their sights on!

Check it out on YouTube and Spotify

On the 17^th of February 1915, a small canvas and wood seaplane buzzed around above one of the most important pieces of naval geography in the world: the Dardanelles. This narrow strait connected the Aegean Sea the Sea of Marmara, and thence to the Bosporus Strait and beyond, the Black Sea. The little biplane was flying over the now closed route connecting the Russian Empire to its allies in Europe.

The Short 127 seaplane was a Royal Naval Air Service aircraft launched from H.M.S. Ark Royal, and it was the precursor of a formidable fleet of 18 British and French battleships. Their objective: clear the straits of the forts and artillery batteries guarding them, pick their way past the sea mines, and sail in the harbour of Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and force that country’s capitulation. How the Anglo-French fleet was to force said capitulation was not clear. They could not occupy a city of one million with a fleet and a handful of marines, nor could a fleet alone force the surrender of a city, let alone an entire nation.

As events transpired however, such concerns were immaterial. The minesweepers were unable to clear the mines under fire of the Turkish guns, and the battleships were unable to silence these. Disaster struck the Allies on March 18^th. The French battleship Bouvet was the first victim; her magazine detonated by a Turkish shell, she exploded and went down with all but 79 of her crew. Then H.M.S. Inflexible was damaged by a mine, followed in short order by H.M.S. Ocean, and H.M.S. Irresistible striking mines and sinking.

With three battleships sunk and three more badly damaged, the British Admiralty came round to the opinion that the only way to clear the straits was with troops. The first 29,000 landed on the 25^th of April and faced immediate, heavy opposition. The bloody campaign that followed, known to posterity as the Gallipoli Campaign, has become synonymous with the very worst aspects of the First World War. The Allies would suffer upwards of 300,000 casualties including more than 50,000 killed, as well as the loss of two more battleships, this time to submarine torpedoes, for a few blood-soaked miles of rocky Turkish countryside. The allies admitted defeat and were withdrawn by the 9^th of January 1916.

On March 13^th, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S.S. Tripoli, a US Marine Corps assault ship, was being sent to the Persian Gulf to assist in clearing the Strait of Hormuz. It has been suggested that POTUS Trump has dispatched these Marines, approximately 2,500 ground troops, to seize control over the vital oil shipping Kharg Island, thereby crippling the Iranian export economy, or perhaps to clear the Strait of Hormuz itself.

The parallels write themselves.

Subscribe now

The War Situation

The United States and Israel have conducted a campaign against Iran that has managed to be violent, brutal and stunningly inept. The war, started by the American/Israeli strikes of February 28^th, 2026, shows no sign of slowing since it began has indeed, showed ever sign of continuing escalation. Several Gulf States and Israel are still being hit by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and while these have slowed somewhat from day one, they continue to inflict damage across the Gulf and beyond. Exactly how much damage is being inflicted by the various combatants is not clear. Press and social media censorship, especially in Israel make accessing damage difficult, military equipment losses are not generally acknowledged, and the internet in Iran has been shut off.

As of this writing, we do know that thousands of people, mostly in Iran and Lebanon are dead, and many more are wounded. Israel, along with bombing targets across Iran, has begun another invasion of Lebanon, claiming they plan to conduct an advance as far as the Litani River and are considering the mobilization of 450,000 reservists to do so. Ansar Allah in Yemen, are still on the fence, considering joining the Iranian side.

Being astride one of the most important trade routes on the planet, the conflict has inflicted already enormous hardship on the oil markets. This has caused oil and liquid natural gas (LNG) prices to rise precipitously, enough that 32 nations have released oil from their strategic reserves to cushion the blow. So far there is oil leaving the Gulf; Iranian oil. What is clear today is that the Strait of Hormuz is not closed, but rather it is open to Iran, and those in good diplomatic standing with Iran.

Recently US strikes hit the primary Iranian oil terminal at Kharg Island, though these apparently did not hit oil infrastructure. On the 18^th of March, aircraft, reportedly Israeli, hit the Iranian South Pars LNG facility. An Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) spokesman said afterward they would respond by hitting US aligned oil facilities. Since then, oil infrastructure targets in Kuwait and Bahrain have been hit. It is reported that the Ras Laffan LNG facility in Qatar has been heavily damaged with remediation expected to take years, representing in one strike, 20% of that nation’s LNG production.

Iranian counterstrikes, mostly drones and missiles, have hit US and regional allied targets. Much smaller in terms of casualties, they have been enormously expensive. Besides economic hardship associated with the Strait closure, targets hit include airports, petrochemical tankers, radar facilities, US air defense infrastructure, US embassies, and US installations. So far acknowledged casualties for the US have been limited to seven killed by Iranian drones and six in KC-135 tanker crash.

The Iranian missile campaign, while destructive, should be seen as a military campaign with mostly political objectives. The targets seem first to be American sensors and air defenses, including a multi-billion-dollar THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) radar. The primary effect of this campaign other than damage to key targets, has been a degradation of Arab-American relations. The Gulf States are furious that the US has launched this war on the behest of the Israelis and left their allied states in the region in the lurch to take missile and drone hits, and socio-economic damage.

Mismanagement

United States military operations being a cartoonish mix of extreme violence, pathological arrogance and bumbling ineptitude is so routine that to say this particular war is being badly handled is not doing justice. There is a rot at the center of US geostrategic thinking, and it goes far deeper than Trump.

So much of military planning, training and doctrine amounts to advanced contingency planning. Known in CAF parlance as “actions on,” contingency plans are the bedrock of military planning. It is clear from the state of the Middle East that the US military establishment did none.

The US Navy has been assembling forces for weeks now in order to clear the Strait of Hormuz, and as of this writing, they are not assembled. In the lead up to the conflict, the Iranian regime was emphatic; in the event of attack, they will close the Strait. It was clear, well documented, and represents their primary strategic leverage. The US not only did not acknowledge this threat but didn’t even bother to assemble the forces necessary to counter it.

As of this writing, other than the peak missile output during the opening days of the bombardment, Iranian drone and missile activity has actually increased in the past weeks from its low on Day 8 of the conflict. This is a clear demonstration of the inability to target and destroy launchers, launch infrastructure, or targeting personnel by the US/Israeli forces. In the first week, launches dropped as strikes took out the known launchers, but now that the conflict is ongoing, it is clear that the US/Israeli forces are unable to end the threat. Ballistic missiles and suicide drones are often much less sophisticated and expensive than the interceptors designed to counter them and are easier to manufacture. Media reports concerning a shortage of interceptor missiles in Israel and the Gulf have been swirling for days now as they did during the 12 Day War last year. If the Iranians can win this battle of missile attrition, the strategic situation could get much worse and fast.

The US/Israeli forces have also repeatedly stated that they have succeeded in such tasks as destroying the Iranian Navy and have gone so far as to say they are running out of military targets. This is demonstrably false; they have been hitting civilian targets since day one, and little more than an excuse to begin targeting civil infrastructure. The Gaza-ization of Iran has begun, and while it is unlikely, bordering on impossible that such a strategy will work, that should not undersell its horror. Guernica was a signpost to the future.1

Politically, Iran is now by all accounts, stronger than it was before the war. As of the 19^th of March, Iran is considering leveraging their total control over access to charge a fee to shipping while sinking the ships of its enemies. Meanwhile the US efforts to assemble a force to clear the Strait have been joined in support by… Estonia. The other nations of Europe in particular have entirely rebuffed the US entireties to help.

Thus we have a scenario that the USA and Israel created that they can not fix. There is of course, diplomacy, but these two nations have willfully used diplomatic meetings as cover for their aggression on multiple occasions. Why would Iran talk to them without a unilateral ceasefire and compensation? Diplomatically, Iran is absolutely in the driver’s seat right now, with the ability to cripple the world economy within a matter of hours in the palm of its hands. Iranian casualties are heavy, but far from extreme. Besides, in order for negotiations to occur, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and their respective fascist regimes would have to admit defeat or at least impasse to Iran.

To Clear a Strait

“Clear the Strait of Hormuz,” is a phrase heard often in the past weeks, but what does it mean to clear a strait? What are the threats requiring clearing?

The US in particular has claimed that they have all but destroyed the threat from Iran, and some select senses, this has some merit. The Iranian Air Force is likely smashed, and if it came out would likely be torn out of the sky were it to take off, leaving that threat negligible for now. Likewise, the Iranian Navy has largely been destroyed by US/Israeli airstrikes and in one notable case: a submarine attack.

However, none of the threats to the global economy or the Gulf region are encompassed in that claim. The Persian Gulf is protected by a multi-layered Iranian defense that is likely mostly intact.

The longest range and most lethal danger is the missile threat. They come in all types, from maneuver-capable hypersonic ballistic missiles to sea skimming anti-shipping missiles. The 1982 Falklands War was formative in the defense of modern warships to these threats, and they can be mitigated to a point. The same, however cannot be said for merchant vessels. Missiles have as wide a variety of launch platforms as they have in missiles themselves. It is very likely that Iran has carefully concealed such sites in strategic positions that would be very difficult to identify and strike. Mobile platforms like truck mounted weapon systems are likewise likely.

Closer to shore, drones are an omnipresent threat. Flying drones are cheap, require very little infrastructure, are disproportionately expensive to defeat, easy to transport, and very long ranged. They are not powerful, and those drones that are powerful are easily defeated by the types of weapons seen on most warships. However, they are plentiful. One drone is probably not a threat to a US Carrier Battlegroup, but 1000 could be. Likewise, one is unlikely to cause critical damage to a warship, but one hit on an LNG tanker is a different matter.

Naval drones made their combat debut in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and while they don’t have the utility in that conflict that flying drones do, their importance cannot be overstated. These most often take the form of small, low-profile motorboats that function as a sort of above water, steerable torpedo that can be launched at extreme range. These weapons have already been credited with the destruction or damage of several tankers in the Gulf region.

In the Strait itself, sea-mines are the next hazard. These weapons, originally called torpedoes, have existed in many forms for centuries. One claimed the sister-ship of RMS Titanic, the HMHS Britannic, in 1916. The irony of the United States Navy’s famous unofficial near-motto, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” coined by Admiral Farragut in the US Civil War, appears to have reared its head.

A sea-mine, like a landmine, is effective because its cheap, easy to employ, and random. The effect of even a small explosive under a ship, using the hydrostatic pressure of the surrounding water to channel the charge into the hull, is devastating. They act as an area denial weapon, one that to make safe would require the efforts of minesweepers, something the USN just pulled out of mothball this week. Like almost all of the weapons I have mentioned, they are cheaper and easier to deploy than they are to counter.

All of these weapons have counters, those counters have counters, and so on, but that isn’t important. In order that the Strait be open, it must always be open. These weapons don’t have to work every time or even most times to be effective. Shipping and insurance companies won’t tolerate a substantial loss rate: the Strait must not only be open enough to squeeze through under the guns of the entire US Navy, but it must also be open enough for the world economy to function.

Can the United States and Israel open the Straits based on the above listed criteria? In the opinion of this author there are only two ways: ground invasion or diplomacy.

Gallipoli with drones

Thus 111 years after the Allies hit the rocky shores of Gallipoli, do we arrive at the Gallipoli scenario. The face of warfare has changed substantially in the past century, but the fundamental issues remain: the only way to clear the seaway with force is by land.

Is that possible with the forces the United States has available? Yes. Is it possible with the forces the United States has mobilized? No.

As of this writing, the United States has publicly mobilized and dispatched the U.S.S. Tripoli Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). This is a compact, capable all-arms combat force of 2,500 (approximately) Marines with significant built-in support capabilities. The US maintains several of these stationed at various points around the world, this MEU originating from their base in Japan.

One does not simply invade a country of 92,000,000 with 2,500 Marines.

A force such as this, likely led by, or at least augmented by substantial Special Operations Forces (SOF) could seize a key point in Iran, Kharg Island, an island in the Strait of Hormuz and the Isfahan nuclear facility have all been floated by the regime. However, even the most basic understanding of geography and war could tell the reader that this is not a force capable of ending the threat to the Strait of Hormuz. To be sure, raids could be conducted in which critical Iranian anti-shipping related installations are destroyed or personnel killed, but this is no more likely to be decisive as any of the measures up to now.

Furthermore, not only would such a raid or raids not secure the Straits, but they would also run a significant risk of being isolated and cutoff by the exponentially larger Iranian military. The Iranian military is one of the leading users of drones in the world and these would likely inflict significant losses in troops and equipment. While the US air power in the region is such that they could likely protect a single, small force of Marines from major Iranian counterattacks, creating a permissive environment to conduct operations is another matter.

Any deployment of larger forces than a MEU or SOF would require substantial logistical investment. Soldiers would need to be gathered, their equipment loaded, ammunition stockpiled, medical stores acquired, food stockpiled, troops and heavy equipment shipped, workup training conducted, operational briefs given, wills written, weapons zeroed, reconnaissance conducted, forward bases established, and every other piece of minutia required to move tens of thousands of soldiers to a battlefront.

The preparations would be extensive, and evident. For some reference, the buildup for the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine by Russia started in 2021 for a war with Russia’s next-door neighbour. To do so by sea, across the entire world, would be an enormous investment of time, sweat, and treasure. Nothing like this is currently underway.

The United States started this war manifestly unable to end it. There was evidently no planning for the Strait being closed, in spite of the Iranians making it clear this would occur. There was no contingency for escorting tankers by sea by the USN. There is nothing underway that would the US and Israel are capable of ending this war on their terms, and no effort is being conducted on ending the war diplomatically.

The incompetence on display is staggering.

There is no excuse for any level of American planning in this. Clearly at no point in the operational planning was how Iran would respond to being suddenly and ruthlessly attacked even considered. There clearly was an assumption of their immediate and unconditional surrender. The arrogance is breathtaking. They never once considered that Iran would fight back.

It’s all well and good to say Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were arrogant and that’s why this happened, but it fails to consider that many of these decisions are in the hands of the US Military. There are so many layers of operational command within any military command structure, yet this asinine, obviously doomed to fail, murderous act of stupidity made it all the way to action without a single part of the US regime accounting for Iranian agency.

Diplomatic Disaster

If a large-scale invasion of Iran is not to the liking of the US and Israeli regimes, then there are few other options but diplomacy. As I have already written about, the notion that Iran or any nation can be destroyed and forced to the negotiating table by air power alone is extremely unlikely and given the context of Iranian-Israel/US relations, bordering on the unthinkable. Bombing people doesn’t make them like you more.

It has proven immensely costly for the US military in spite of its low casualty figures. No less than 16 aircraft have been destroyed in the air and on the ground, many sensitive installations have been destroyed, and they haven’t even attempted to secure the Strait yet.

At this point even with good faith diplomatic efforts, it could prove incredibly difficult for anyone to stop what is now in motion. The US may well have irreparably poisoned its relations with the Gulf States. The economic damage those states have taken through the impact of weapons and trade closures will likely be felt for years to come. The comprehensive mismanagement of the war, likewise, will erode perceptions of US power everywhere. If the war ended today, it would become an object lesson in how not to conduct a war.

As of right now, it seems the only way the US is going is to keep bombing until something changes, and all the while keep upping the ante. There are many offramps to this conflict, but there is no bottom to it.

Ian, March 19, 2026

Edit: Since publishing this piece, the U.S.S. Boxer MEU was activated at San Diego and dispatched to the Indo-Pacific. This would double the amount of US Marines available, but does not significantly alter the situation described above.

It is difficult to simplify such a long period of historical development across every human civilization. However, broadly speaking, our ancestors over 2 million years ago developed a sexual division of labour – the labour a person performed was determined by their sex. As human societies developed, this gave rise to conditions in which men had access to hunting tools and were organized into special groups for hunting, while women usually looked after children and foraged for food.

Gender is conceptualized and expressed differently depending on factors like language, culture, and class. For example, in the Plains Cree language there are no gendered pronouns like he or she, and there are words such as âyahkwêw which means “a man living as a woman” or vice versa, and înahpîkasoht which can mean “a woman living as a man” or apparently “someone who fights everyone to prove they are the toughest.” In South Asian cultures there are people known as hijra, a Hindustani word roughly meaning “eunuch”. They are officially recognized as a third gender and often live in all-hijra communities. In pre-colonial Hawaii, same-sex relationships were accepted, and were termed moe aikāne. The Hawaiian word māhū refers to a third or middle gender.

After further developments that occurred throughout many societies – such as agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the settlement of populations – the existence of private property became possible. People had crops, livestock, and the places they lived in, and they began delineating and defending the land they lived on as their property. Through the emergence of private property, men with hunting tools could become armed property owners. Men eventually sought to pass their property down to male offspring. Women were treated as a means to this end and became relegated to the reproductive labour of being mothers and housekeepers.
Throughout history, women have consistently been forced into these exploitative dynamics in order to have a place to live. Patriarchy and class society likely emerged from these same historical processes. It is worth considering that the term “patriarchy” itself comes from the Greek pater + arkhein and means “father-rule”, and the word “family” comes from the Latin famulus which means “servant, slave.”

This familial patriarchal dynamic was mirrored on a larger scale in feudalism – feudal landlords owned large pieces of land where labouring classes, such as serfs or peasants, were required to work the lands they lived on. A large portion of what the labourers produced went to the landlords who did no labour. The landlords and labouring classes were in a type of patriarchal relationship, where the labouring classes must maintain the landlords’ properties and ensure that they keep producing, or they will have nowhere to live. Canadian capitalism-imperialism has developed out of European social conditions via settler-colonialism, so those patriarchal dynamics are also seen in our present society – landlords are now part of the capitalist class (AKA bourgeoisie), and the majority of the working class (AKA proletariat) are now tenants being exploited by landlords.

The aforementioned tendency toward a binary (male—female) sexual division of labour became commonplace in the most imperialistic and hegemonic states of Europe. In the process of colonialism many of these Indigenous gender-pluralistic social customs were violently and coercively replaced by a gender-binary that aligned with the colonizers’ cultural framework. Thus, the oppression faced by LGBT people is not a modern problem, and it can be traced back to the same historical developments that gave rise to patriarchy, class society, and colonialism.

Although capitalist liberal democracies may boast about the progress they have made in advancing women’s rights – the right to vote, to hold public office, to own property, and many of the other rights that the women’s liberation movement has fought for – women in such countries still experience overwhelming exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and violence. Working women in Canada still face the double exploitation of capitalism and patriarchy. We are exploited as workers and as women. Millennia-old customs have persisted, and women are often expected to do the majority of domestic labour. For the average working woman this amounts to a “second shift” with no wages.

According to a 2025 study by the Library of Parliament, “women in Canada have a lower average personal income than men ($48,400 for women versus $66,000 for men in 2022).” It indicates that Indigenous women, senior women, single mothers, and transgender people also live in poverty at a higher-than-average rate, and that even when Canadian-born women work the same occupation as Canadian-born men, the women made 9.2% less than the men. Many working women face additional forms of exploitation and oppression, because they are Indigenous, Black, immigrants, LGBT, disabled, or belong to other oppressed minorities.

Canada’s racist and misogynist culture, combined with the greed of resource extraction industries, have created conditions that are especially dangerous for Indigenous women. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls reported that from 1980 to 2012, although Indigenous women constituted only about 4% of Canada’s female population, MMIWG represented 16% of female homicides in Canada. Temporary housing facilities for oil workers and other extraction industries, also called “man camps”, are a major factor in the ongoing genocide against Indigenous nations. The culture of these camps is violent, misogynist, and bigoted, where increased income and social isolation feed into rampant drug and alcohol abuse. These conditions, when unregulated and unsupervised, produce a population of men who sexually assault and murder Indigenous women and girls. Man camps turn these men from supposed workers into settler-colonial predators. The extractive industries are Canada’s colonial frontier against Indigenous nations, facilitating encroachment into unceded Indigenous lands, and Indigenous women and girls are the main victims.

Overall, the capitalist class tends to extract more surplus-value out of the labour of women workers, and workers of other oppressed minorities, by generally making them work more intensively under cheaper conditions and paying them less wages. The existence of private property is the condition that allows the capitalist class to exploit the working class, and it also allows for the existence of patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, and every other form of oppression and bigotry. It is these very same conditions that will inevitably spark the flames of revolution among the workers and oppressed masses, as has happened so many times throughout history.

International Women’s Day is one of those rebellious sparks that has helped start the fire. Women’s Day events were not always held on March 8^th. This became the de facto date after major historical events in Petrograd, Russia, on March 8^th, 1917, in which women textile workers went on strike and demonstrated. Their demonstrations quickly gained support and pulled in more workers, until the crowds swelled in size and overtook the city with the demands of “Bread and Peace.” This slogan signified the end of food shortages and the imperialist World War, and it helped bring about the end of Tsarism. One week later, the Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne, and his autocracy was replaced by a bourgeois-democratic provisional government which granted women the right to vote. However, the provisional government headed by Kerensky was unable to resolve food shortages and was eager to stay involved in the war. Kerensky and his Russian Republic became very unpopular.

Later that year, the Bolshevik revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the provisional government and, after a period of civil war, these events led to the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR, or the Soviet Union) in 1922. These events are collectively known as the Russian Revolution. To everyone’s amazement, the demands of women workers had helped bring about the end of Tsarism and the war, and the rise of women’s rights, democracy, and socialism. This is why we observe International Women’s Day on March 8^th.

We are taught that incredible progress has been made towards women’s liberation, but when we consider the culture of present-day North America we can see that reactionary practices are unfortunately still prevalent. The Epstein Files have shown that there is a well-established human trafficking industry that deals in women and girls, catering to the depravity of the rapacious ruling class. Capitalism and imperialism are built on constant exploitation, so it should really come as no surprise that the capitalists and imperialists are predators – and yet their predatory nature is still shockingly horrific when the evidence is laid bare.

Even a cursory look through the Epstein Files produces stomach-turning results: in an April 2009 email Epstein told Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem that he “loved the torture video”; in April 2018 Canadian-American physicist Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein to vent his frustration with the Women of the World Summit, and suggested doing a “Men of the World Conference” with their fellow sex-pests Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, and Woody Allen; in December 2021 Epstein received an email from US secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick’s wife Allison saying they were “looking forward to visiting” Little Saint James Island with their friends and providing the ages and genders of the 8 children they were bringing; there are hundreds if not thousands of instances of child sexual abuse material not included in the DOJ library, instead replaced by green FBI sheets labelled “CSAM NOT SCANNED”.

Victims of Epstein have detailed being coerced into giving sexual massages for money; having their boundaries repeatedly violated; being trafficked around the world to meet wealthy men who arranged to abuse them; being treated as a “human incubator”. Girls targeted by Epstein’s network were often just 14 years old, and there is evidence of at least one as young as 9. The horrific abuses inflicted onto women and girls by parasitic filth like Epstein and his co-conspirators should disgust and enrage every decent person who learns about them.

This network of pedophiles and human traffickers has existed for decades. It is propped up by a coalition of the ruling class and the most reactionary elements of society, and that is evident when we look at the so-called “people” who were close to Epstein. He was a billionaire financier who operated a global pedophile ring, with connections to wealth and power: the investment bank Bear Stearns; the Towers Financial Corporation debt collection agency and eventual Ponzi scheme; JPMorgan Chase multinational bank; current US president Donald Trump; fascist propagandist and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon; former US president Bill Clinton; former British prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor; British-French media proprietor, politician, and Zionist intelligence agent Robert Maxwell, who was also the father of Epstein’s girlfriend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell; Saudi Arabian businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi; billionaire Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner; US lawyer and Zionist mouthpiece Alan Dershowitz; Canadian-American billionaire media-and-real estate owner-investor Mortimer Zuckerman; Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg; former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates; former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak; German/American tech-fascist venture capitalist and Palantir CEO Peter Thiel; South African apartheid emerald mine heir, tech-fascist CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, X, and xAI, and former Trump advisor Elon Musk; Japanese venture capitalist Joichi Ito; the Trilateral Commission, an NGO that connects bourgeois members from North America, Western Europe, and Pacific Asia;... ad nauseum.

The current Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney was also apparently in Epstein’s circles, as he and his wife Diana were photographed palling around with Ghislaine Maxwell at the 2013 Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire when Carney was the governor of the Bank of England. It is important to remember that Epstein was charged with soliciting an underage girl for prostitution in 2008, a despicable crime for which he was sentenced to just 18 months in prison and only served 13 months, in a private wing of the stockade for his own safety, with up to twelve hours a day spent outside of the jail on “work release” six days a week. Many articles were written on the topic. His crimes were publicly known, and extreme suspicion should be aimed at everyone who chose to associate with such a disgusting person.

Despite his wealthy status, Epstein was not above networking with lower-income scumbags such as Chris Poole (AKA moot), the founder of the imageboard site 4chan which is a cesspool for internet harassment campaigns, conspiracy theories, racist memes, and mass shootings. On top of that, Epstein kept in touch with an assortment of PR consultants, AI researchers, geneticists, and other scientists, academics, and experts, as part of his plans to control the narrative around his criminal network, sow confusion and distrust among the people, and apparently to “spread his seed” among the population. In a June 2016 email to Peter Thiel, Epstein remarked that Brexit was “just the beginning” of a “return to tribalism”. Epstein sought to divide society into smaller groups that are increasingly hostile to each other because, as he put it, “finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

Financiers and fascists may not be surprising to see in a list of Epstein’s associates. What is shocking is the amount of women who remained acquaintances with Epstein, or even remained close friends and accomplices. Ghislaine Maxwell, who groomed so many girls and took part in their sexual abuse, is the obvious frontrunner for the most disgusting woman in Epstein’s circles, but she is far from the only disgusting woman.

Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, emailed Epstein while he was still in jail for sex crimes against a minor in 2009, to ask for advice about her “Mothers Army” charity that supposedly “amplified the voices of mothers”. Ferguson met with Epstein at his New York apartment five days after he was released. Other emails involve Ferguson objectifying women for Epstein – weeks after his release she notified him about a single woman with a “great body” he should meet, and in other emails she comments on her daughter Eugenie’s sex life. Ferguson received money from Epstein on numerous occasions, and their email correspondence shows that she requested between tens and hundreds of thousands of British pounds at a time.

French banker Ariane de Rothschild, as well as her ex-husband Benjamin, and the Edmond de Rothschild Group of which she is now the CEO, were all associated with Epstein – upon introducing himself to Peter Thiel in a 2016 email he said “as you probably know I represent the Rothschilds”. In December 2015 almost $25 million was split up between two separate wires from the Rothschilds to Epstein’s Southern Trust Company.

Eva Dubin, a Swedish-born physician, former model, and founder of the Dubin Breast Center at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, was Epstein’s girlfriend in the 1980s. She later married hedge-fund manager Glenn Dubin, and the two chose Epstein as the godfather of their children. Epstein gave at least $250,000 to the Dubins’ Center, according to a review by Politico. Eva Dubin testified at Maxwell’s 2021 criminal trial, saying that she still viewed Epstein as a trusted friend and was comfortable with him around her children.

Kathy Ruemmler is an American lawyer who counselled the Obama administration and is currently general counsel at Goldman-Sachs. Epstein planned dozens of meetings with Ruemmler between 2014 and 2019, when she was a partner at Latham & Watkins. In a May 2015 email exchange, Epstein seemed to complain that his charges should have just been prostitution instead of child sex offences because the underage victim agreed to be paid for it (!) to which Ruemmler replied “I think the point is that if she was underage, she could not legally consent to engaging in prostitution.” With that statement in the record, it is clear that she was not just aware of Epstein’s crimes but that the two spoke frankly about it.

Lesley Groff was an executive assistant and office manager for Epstein, who worked with him both before and after he served time for child sex offences. It has been alleged that she helped facilitate Epstein’s abuse of girls, and there are many emails in the records in which she talks about girls and whether or not they will be able to meet with Epstein.

Peggy Siegal advised Epstein on public relations to help him manage the details of his past crimes. Ironically their correspondence is filled comments that are a PR disaster, such as her complaints that an “Asian c**t is trying to steal thousands of dollars from [her]”, about a “nasty f** who has tried to steal [her] business”, and other emails in which she complains about “nasty” things, herself and Jeffrey excluded.

Nadia Marcinkova (or Marcinko), a Slovak-born model and aviation entrepreneur, assisted Epstein, lived in his homes, and piloted his private jets. Though it is alleged that she began as one of Epstein’s victims, it seems that she eventually moved up into his inner circle as a co-conspirator.
In January 2018, a Diane Ziman also reached out to Epstein and made reference to a Women’s March to request support for her son Philip Levine’s gubernatorial campaign, to which Epstein remarked that his “colorful past” might be a burden with regard to donating.

Lana Pozhidaeva, a Russian model and current poster-girl for Fekkai hair products and L’Oreal’s SkinCeuticals brand, received funding for her female entrepreneur nonprofit WE Talks from Epstein, as revealed by her 2019 tax records. She also served as president of Education Advance, to which Epstein gave $55,000, amounting to 97% of its $56,500 total funding.

Knowing all of this, how can we believe that we have really made “progress?” It’s true that in past eras, women did not have the rights to vote or own property, and that some steps forward have been made. But we cannot pretend to have come a long way in the struggle against patriarchy, when we are in essentially the same predicament as always, and we can see that almost no one has been held responsible for these vicious crimes. Moreover, we see bourgeois women actively facilitating and benefiting from patriarchal violence.

Despite stipulations in the Epstein Files Transparency Act which state that the names of victims must be redacted and that names should not be redacted to protect people from embarrassment, the Department of Justice has been protecting the identities of wealthy co-conspirators like Wexner, has redacted previously unredacted files that implicated Trump, and has allowed the victims’ names and personal information to slip through unredacted. There are even reports of unredacted CSAM being included in the DOJ library. These are clear attempts to shield criminals and intimidate victims by the DOJ which is headed by Pam Bondi, a bourgeois fascist woman who squawks endless praises for Trump.

The upsetting truth is that more progress has been made in the sophistication of oppression than in the struggle for liberation. Communications technologies, once lauded as a means of establishing connections between people, are controlled by the ruling class who have used them to coordinate the most vile crimes and spread propaganda and confusion. Long-trusted institutions and figures have been tainted by their connection to Epstein’s network. The rise of women as political leaders, public figures, and entrepreneurs, has not resulted in patriarchy being stripped away from capitalism, but has instead resulted in bourgeois women serving patriarchal interests.

Reactionary women are not a new phenomenon; reactionary tendencies even exist in the women’s liberation movement. Despite her contributions to the women’s suffrage movement, Susan B. Anthony notably campaigned against the Fifteenth Amendment, which would enfranchise Black men, because she wanted women and Black people to simultaneously gain the right to vote. In her 1912 speech, Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle, German socialist Rosa Luxemburg stated that bourgeois women “... are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their ‘right’ to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.” Ever since transgender activism started in the mid-20th century, the feminist movement has been plagued by a subsection that attacks and excludes trans people, sacrificing them to the oppressor in the name of a false “liberation.”

Make no mistake, it is men – especially bourgeois men – who are responsible for the vast majority of crimes against women and girls. But we are making a serious error if we have a Women’s Day “for all women” including our exploiters. The bourgeoisie is innately exploitative. Their existence as a class is based on extracting more value from proletarians than they receive in wages, to accumulate as much capital as possible by whatever means is most effective. Exploitation is what determines their behaviour as a class, regardless of other factors like gender or nationality.

According to the common Turkish proverb, when a lumberjack walks into the forest with an axe, the trees would be sorely mistaken if they believed the axe was their ally just because its handle is also made of wood. Similarly, many working women have unfortunately been duped into believing that the capitalists can be our allies if they are women, or Indigenous, or Black, or LGBT, or whatever other demographic. Instead of “empowerment” we just get chopped down by oppressors that look sort of like us. This burgeoning “return to tribalism” is welcomed by those with the same interests as Epstein. Don’t trust those who are chopping down the masses, regardless of whether they’re lumber-Jacks or lumber-Janes!

As the Indian Communist revolutionary Anuradha Ghandy wrote in her 2006 book Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, efforts to seek solutions within the imperialist system “... have at best benefited a section of middle-class women but left the vast mass of oppressed and exploited women far from liberation. The struggle for women’s liberation cannot be successful in isolation from the struggle to overthrow the imperialist system itself.”

The so-called “Epstein Class” is not a separate class. It is part of the capitalist class, its upper stratum; the haute bourgeoisie; the bankers and financiers who trade not just in capital, commodities, or stocks, but in the connections, the intel, and the unfathomable quantities of debt that keep the rest of the world in their snare. When bourgeois women cooperate with any of these parasites they are taking part in a system controlled by the most predatory upper stratum. They are not just betraying women, they are showing their solidarity with the exploiters and oppressors.

Liberal bourgeois women may pretend they are empowering all women, but they are really attempting to share the power held by the mostly-male bourgeoisie in a patriarchal and imperialist class society. Patriarchy cannot simply be extracted from class society and discarded, the whole system must be smashed and replaced. To liberate women we must end patriarchy; to end patriarchy we must end class society; to end class society we need social revolution! And a social revolution can only be organized by the working class and oppressed masses!

Working women must reclaim Women’s Day from the bourgeoisie!
We must reassert its internationalist and socialist origins!
We must make it an International Working Women’s Day!
BREAD and PEACE!

__________

March 2026

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, August 3rd, 1914.

On February 28, 2026, American and Israeli forces attacked Iran, in an operation named OPERATION EPIC FURY. Internet-poisoned names notwithstanding this blatant act of aggression has ignited conflict across the Middle East.

In the leading waves of American-Israeli airstrikes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian head of state was killed, along many other regime members, military leaders, and civilians. Notable among the casualties were 180 students and faculty members at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran.

Following waves of fighters, cruise missiles and drones have hit military, infrastructure, civil, government and nuclear industrial targets across Iran. The Iranian Navy has been badly damaged. The Iranian death toll as of this writing is in excess of 500 persons but this a very fluid and number likely to massively rise.

In response, the Iranian Military has launched successive waves (13 as of this writing) of cruise missiles, long range drones and ballistic missiles at US/Israeli targets and their allies in the region. So far, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Cyprus, Jordan, and Israel have all been hit in response. At sea, several ships have been destroyed by Iranian attacks. The primary targets for the Iranian strikes appear to be airbases, airports, gulf oil infrastructure, and naval bases. Two Iranian SU-24 bombers have been claimed destroyed by Qatari air defense.

As of this writing US casualties are six dead and 18 wounded. Further, three F-15E Strike Eagles based out of Kuwait were engaged and destroyed by Kuwait air defense with all six crewmen recovered. Israel has been hit by many missiles, but with their laws concerning the publishing of strike videos, it is very hard to ascertain the degree of damage being inflicted. Given there are nevertheless many videos of Iranian missiles evading interception and hitting Israel, the damage is likely notable. So far 12 Israelis are reported dead with that number likely to increase. Seven civilians are reported dead in the Gulf States as well as two members of the Kuwait Naval Force.

In the wake of the strikes, Canadian PM Mark Carney voiced his support, saying in a prepared statement he described Iran as “the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East,” and that it “must never be allowed to obtain or develop nuclear weapons.”

On March 1, the governments of France and Germany announced their intention to join in the strikes on Iran. British PM Kier Starmer announced that the US forces could use British bases, though he stopped short of saying the RAF would join the strikes. Evacuation of British citizens from the region has begun, with some 100,000 seeking departure.

On March 2, Ukraine said it would aid in the destruction of Iranian Shaheed drones, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called upon members to support Israel’s war effort. Also on March 2, the Israelis announced their intention to start strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hezbollah announced their intention to avenge Ayatollah Khamenei. Shortly after the two forces began exchanging fire.

An Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps1 spokesman has announced that Iran is shutting the Strait of Hormuz to all oil traffic and targeting of oil pipelines will commence. The Saudi Ras Tunura oil refinery was hit on March 1 and disabled. Owned by ARAMCO, this facility is the largest in the world. Iran has not claimed to have struck the facility. On March 2, Qatar announced it would no longer export or process liquid natural gas (LNG) after strikes on gas infrastructure.

There has been rage-filled pushback against the US-Israeli war. The US Embassy in Baghdad has been surrounded by demonstrators. In Karachi, Pakistan, at least 10 people were killed by security forces when they stormed the US consulate. The USA has issued a notice informing its citizens to leave what amounts to the entire Middle East.

The US leadership appear buoyed by their successes thus far, with Trump stating that the war will last four to five weeks. They lack any coherence or objective in their planning and have already admitted having killed the opposition leaders that would otherwise have taken over the country in a Trump-ideal world. In an interview with CNN, he expressed surprise that Iran would hit targets it did on the soil of the Gulf States. Given that Iran explicitly said they would do precisely that, this is either a lie or a sign of the dysfunction at the heart of American decision making.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on March 2 stated that he believes the Iranian regime will fall after the decapitation strike and a subsequent uprising by the Iranian people. He later said the strikes were launched because Israel was going to hit Iran regardless. On the same day, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that he cannot rule out ground invasion. This is a desire echoed by the Israeli regime. In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu; “Israel has the assistance of the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military. This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.”

Imperial Incoherence: An Empire at War

Thus, on 2 March 2026, an enormous crisis unfolds in the Gulf, but it does not exist in isolation. The American Empire is fighting already in Ukraine. As Russia fights an American-backed proxy in the ravaged towns and trenches of Eastern Ukraine, the USA fights a friend of Russia in Iran, and the picture of the Empire becomes more clear.

The American Empire isn’t an Empire that identifies itself as a unitary state, but a collection of the like minded, US Dollar spending, militarily aligned nations. Less akin to the Roman Empire than to the Holy Roman Empire.2 A complex, multidimensional web of capital, alliances and interests that bind all to one another, for the service and profit of the center.

The crisis that lies at the heart of this is the attack on the oil industry. Iran has one card to play on the world stage in the face of aggression, and that is to eliminate, delay or make economically unviable, the Gulf oil industry. Iran is aided by geography: 1/5^th of the world’s petroleum-based energy comes passes through one 29 nautical mile wide strait: the Strait Hormuz.

As the forces of Ansar Allah demonstrated in the Red Sea recently, a small group of highly motivated fighters can close a very large nautical area to traffic with relative ease. No amount of striking and escorting of vessels seemed to be able to stop them, and only through diplomatic agreement, did they stop hitting Red Sea traffic. With that in mind, it is unlikely, bordering on impossible that the Empire will be able to end the threat to shipping in the Strait with anything less than an enormous force on sea, air, and yes, land.

During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Iran attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz in order to trigger a collapse of the Iraqi economy. The US commenced Operation Earnest Will (1987-88), an escort program for oil tankers that rivalled all since the convoy operations in the Second World War. Floating sea mines and missile boats vs the US Navy despite the disparity in force, tanker losses were significant, and insurance premiums skyrocketed along with oil prices.

2026 is not 1987. The Iranian military has had 39 years to prepare for this, technology has changed dramatically, as has the Iranian military itself. During the Tanker War, as it became known, Iran was in the seventh year of a brutal attrition war and under a wide-ranging arms embargo. Today, Iran is a leading developer of long-range missiles, drones, and irregular warfare. It is therefore the assessment of this writer that the USN will be unable to open the strait in a way that would be economically viable for oil producers.

As I have already written about, the notion of an American invasion of Iran is nightmarish, and victory is far from assured. Even if successful, any land campaign would be costly, slow, and lethal. In the same breath, however, success from the air is also by no means assured. They can bomb Iran, hit civilian centers, demolish the infrastructure, but that is not enough to win a war, as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and so many others aptly demonstrated.

Russia is likely to watch developments in Iran with interest. Every missile, bomb and bullet the USA and its allies must use in Iran is unavailable to be used in Ukraine. Russia is an oil and LNG producer and much of that product goes to Europe. With a significant portion of European energy sources now for all intents and purposes, blockaded, Europe will be desperate for affordable energy.

With renewable energy being not only the best for the environment, but also the cleanest, fossil fuels will decrease relatively in significance. In the Green Energy sector, China is the innovating power. Chinese green development in relation to the oil industry in particular is critical. As the oil market diminishes in relevance, so too does the American hold on oil-based power. Between its own industry and that of its oil-drilling Imperial allies, the US double-down on oil-based industries at the explicit expense of green power signals a strategic decision to maintain an oil centric economy to hold onto the leverage entailed in it. The seizure of power in Venezuela, and the threats against Canada can also be seen in this light.

The simple fact: in terms of strategic resources, the USA will not be as powerful in the future as it is right now. Now, or never.

Thus, the situation is that the Empire, for all its enormous power, is hamstrung. Green energy development isn’t close to replacing petroleum products for transportation or energy, and the Empire is thirsty. Because of what amounts to a spectacular own-goal, the aggressor nations now must now take this fight to the conclusion they seek, or make an embarrassing, hegemony-shaking concession of defeat.

The Haunting Specter of World War III

What is a world war?

There are many definitions, but it is hardly scientific. One could best describe it as a conflict in which most of the world is involved, or perhaps one that occurs in most of the world, but that isn’t very clear. One can easily define a number of colonial conflicts from the 1600s onward as a world war. A “world war” is something one attributes in hindsight, or context with the other named conflicts.

What I can say with a measure of certainty, is that what is happening right now is not a world war yet. The American Empire is indeed, fighting a war on several fronts, but the universal socio-economic mobilizations that were hallmarks of both named world wars are not yet taking place. Another large power, Russia is also fighting, but it is not directly fighting another major power. However much of a NATO proxy war the Russo-Ukrainian War may be, NATO is not yet fully in it.

Tension in the world has skyrocketed. Steadily on the rise since the 2022 Invasion Ukraine and the Oct 7, 2023, attack on Israel and subsequent Gaza Genocide, now we see one of the key actors, the United States, fighting without proxy. Tension has flared across the Muslim world in the wake of the American aggression, a situation already brought to new lows by the Gaza Genocide.

Where this crisis goes from here is impossible to say, but the level of tension in the world is unsustainable. Taken together with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War and the Genocide in Gaza, the American attack on Iran could ignite a conflagration greater than anything we saw after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

This is not a world war, but the specter haunts every move now.

On May 7, 1915, Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, peering through the periscope of submarine, the U-20, gave the order to fire. With a hiss of compressed air a single torpedo was on its way. It slammed into the large four funneled ship Schwieger was observing with a terrific fountain of water.

To many aboard RMS Lusitania, it seemed the ship was not badly damaged. Then, on the heels of the first explosion, came a second, enormous detonation.1 The Cunard liner listed to starboard, and within 18 minutes of the torpedo’s impact, she had sunk off Cork, Ireland with 1,197 of the 1,960 passengers and crew perishing. Of these, 124 were American citizens.

The sinking of the Lusitania was not the direct cause of the US entry into the First World War, but it was a key moment. After this incident, the US public was firmly against the Central Powers, and the US Government demanded that the German Navy refrain from attacks on neutral shipping.

Subscribe now

It was not to be. The Germans by 1917 were struggling to keep up with the material and manpower requirements of the war, and desperate to cut the supply line to Great Britain, declared an unrestricted submarine warfare campaign.2 On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on the Central Powers and entered the First World War. While it took a long time for the US to get into the conflict, the result was decisive. An influx of two million men and material all but doomed the Central Powers and the war was over a year and a half later.

It was in many respects, the birth of Atlanticism. The US did pull back from European affairs after 1918. Indeed, Congress even refused to ratify President Woodrow Wilson’s formation of the League of Nations, leaving the USA out of the new body. However, the links, forged in the trenches of France and reinforced by the US Dollar, would not weaken so easily.

By the time the Second World War began in Europe, the US public was isolationist and had little interest in joining another brutal war in Europe. However, policy makers were anything but neutral. The US had been supplying France and the UK with raw materials, weapons and volunteers from the outset. September 10, 1939, just days after the war broke out in Europe, leaders in the Americas, at Roosevelt’s behest, met to declare the Americas to be neutral, and closed to combatant submarines. Being as only one side had any need to have submarines in the Americas, this was the first of an escalating series of decisions that pushed the US closer and closer to war with Germany. Thus, in a very real sense, Monroe Doctrine pushed the USA towards war with Germany.

From 1941 to the US entry into the war, the US Navy fought what amounted to an undeclared war with the German Navy in the Western Atlantic. The US fired its first shots in the Second World War on April 10, 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor.

Breton Woods, the Marshall Plan and NATO

By 1944, the writing was on the wall for the Axis Powers. Italy had surrendered and been occupied by Germany, Hungary, Romania and Finland were on the ropes, and the Japanese Empire was being inexorably crushed. The end of the war was already being envisaged by the allies who sent representatives to Breton Woods New Hampshire to meet and discuss the postwar world.

It was this conference that saw the US Dollar become the international standard of currency. The participants founded the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Other monetary arrangements and agreements have largely superseded what was decided at Breton Woods, but what can be said is that they laid the groundwork for the hegemony of the United States through the power of the Dollar.

From 1948 until 1951, with the Second World War over, the US enacted what has come to be known as the Marshall Plan. Named for Secretary of State George C Marshall, the program involved nation-building on a hitherto unheard-of scale. It involved $13.3 billion USD (approximately $137b in 2024 US Dollars) of investments in the rebuilding of and supplying of Europe in addition to another $5.9 billion in a separate rebuilding program for Asia.

This program of financial restructuring and rebuilding in the fought-over parts of Western Europe and Asia placed them firmly in the hands of the US financial and political institutions. Where nations like the UK struggled to even provide employment, the USA profited by rebuilding.

The seal on the deal was the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Established in 1949, NATO united much of Western Europe and North America into a single political and military alliance. Tensions with the Soviet Union and the western capitalist nations had been a consistent feature of the political landscape since 1918, with only a brief respite during the Second World War. With the creation of NATO, these tensions coalesced into formal alliance.

Since the end of the Second World War, the notion of the USA or Europe as free agents with wholly separate agendas disappeared and Atlanticism was born. It advocates close socio-economic and military cooperation between the nations of the ‘West,’ and dealing with geopolitical issues as a bloc. This ideology is one that most of the liberal leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have adhered to. Other ideological and geopolitical positions like Capitalism and Communism have taken center stage, but Atlanticism3 has been central to the establishment of the American Empire.

The Greenland Extortion

In 2025, POTUS Donald Trump began his campaign to acquire Greenland, an autonomous protectorate of Denmark. Denmark is a NATO member, and as such, an ally of the USA. Danes fought and died in Afghanistan, a conflict triggered by the September 11^th, 2001, attack on the United States by Al Qaeda and joined by the NATO member states according to Article 54 of the NATO treaty.

Before this crisis the US has conducted all manner of aggressive wars, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Venezuela and countless others. This, however, is the first time that the USA has turned its ire toward a treaty ally.5

On January 22^nd, after a rambling speech in which he said “That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”

If that sounds incoherent, that’s only because it is. Since this speech, everyone who has a stake in the conversation has seemed to use their own pre-held beliefs as to what exactly it means.

On the same day, Trump announced an “unconsummated” deal in which Greenland would give up sites for US bases for an unlimited duration, for the use of the Golden Dome missile shield and negotiations for future mineral extraction, in return for which, he said he would halt the tariffs he had threatened to levy on the EU nations supporting Denmark. Denmark and Greenland have since disavowed his interpretation to the deal, leaving the entire situation up in the air as of this writing.

Extortion works. The reality is that this entire crisis could have been6 a type of brinkmanship to force NATO nations to increase their arctic presence. The era of Donald Trump is the era of uncertainty. We know, for instance, he is fond of madman diplomacy, in which those he seeks to impress are frightened by his irrationality and cave to his wishes. He did it with North Korea, and that could absolutely have been his intent here.

However, nobody, least of all Greenlandic people, can bet on that being the case. The Danes had already announced a buildup of troops in Greenland explicitly in response to the threats from Washington, and the French, Germans, Swedes and the Dutch also said they would chip in. It is unclear if they will be withdrawing or maintaining that presence.

What is unclear thus far, is Canada’s role in the crisis. PM Mark Carney, a man who makes fence sitting an art form, has thus far managed to infer support to Denmark, met with French President Macron, and stated publicly that the USA is Canada’s closest ally.

What we can say with certainty is that Atlanticism is dying. NATO is in tatters, and at this point barely credible as a bloc. Clearly, what was conceived was a naked land grab, and the leaders of Europe, it would appear, finally have begun to realize that the Pax Americana is gone forever.

Canada in the crosshairs

So where does Canada fall in all this? The government is also, finally, seeming to wake up to the threat that we all know is here. The Globe and Mail has reported that the CAF has begun studying insurgent tactics expressly intended to combat an American invasion. The question becomes: will we hold? Where is our red line? If Trump demands that we give him bases for free, for unlimited duration, will we cave?

PM Mark Carney made a nice speech in Davos saying “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it… But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger and more just.”

It sounds like Mark Carney, Liberal leader, campaigning for the last election, not PM Carney, the man who caves to Trump every single time they meet. I welcome PM Carney showing some backbone in a speech, but will it translate into deeds? The reality he must internalize is that the threat of annexation or attack on any North American territory by the USA is an existential threat to Canada of the highest order. American expansionism should, naturally, be opposed on all occasions, but when its our next-door neighbor, we can no longer play the long game, nor can we afford ambiguity.

Does angering the US over Greenland place the crosshairs on Canada? It has, yes. Trump has become obsessed with Canada in the wake of the Davos speech. He has called Carney “governor,” a slight he first used on Trudeau. He has claimed the deal Carney made with China means Canada will be taken over by China. The reality is, however, that the crosshairs are already firmly on us and have been for some time. In his speech at Davos, Trump explicitly threatened Carney and Canada. It’s not, however, the US relationship we need to worry about in this critical moment, but our other allies. If we desert them in this moment, we’ll deserve what the USA does to us afterwards.

What these bases mean strategically, is anyone’s guess. A wholesale US seizure of Greenland would be disastrous Canada: with Alaska in the West and American-Greenland in the East, Canada would lose any chance of retaining the North-West Passage, we would lose our allies in Europe, and we would gain nothing from the Mad King of America. The King appears to have been appeased and got his bases, but he could just as easily be lying. Regardless, the appeasement must end, and it must end now.

The death of the Atlantic Alliance

Whatever comes of this deal, I cannot understate the absolute ground shaking diplomatic changes currently underway. It can be said without exaggeration, that this is the biggest reordering in geopolitics since the fall of the Soviet Union. Trump may have got a lesser concession, but the chasm that has opened between Europe and North America won’t be forgotten.

Now, as the ICE-led ethnic cleansing operations in the USA get more and more violent, the gulf continues to widen. The repulsive violence on the streets of the USA, best exemplified by the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by Federal paramilitaries, is also widening that gulf. In Germany, there are proposals to bow out of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The French government has considered withdrawing from NATO. Danish pension fund has divested itself of US treasuries.

It could well mean the dissolution of NATO. Normally, I would not consider that to be anything but a positive, but the context is important: the dissolution because one member, the USA, became unmoored and a danger to the other members is not a cause for celebration.

The reality is that NATO without the USA is unnecessary to the European members. The European Union already has article 42.7, the mutual defense clause of the EU Treaty. Without the USA, NATO is really just Canada, the UK, Türkiye and the EU. The combined forces of the EU are more than sufficient for the defense of that continent from Russia, their only real hemispheric threat. Europe has recently shouldered more and more of the costs of the Russo-Ukrainian War, as well as providing the majority of intelligence to Ukraine.

The European allies of the USA might finally have realized that life is just easier without the USA in it. The era of Atlanticism is over.

Ian, January 26th, 2026

On the night of February 15, 1898, an enormous explosion rocked Havana harbour, Spanish Cuba. The battleship1 USS Maine, which had arrived the month prior, exploded, killing 261 Americans, and injuring most of the 94 survivors. The cause of the blast was soon pinned squarely on Spain by the American media. The Spanish, who were fighting a brutal war with Cuban rebels at the time, denied the claims but the American public was soon in a war frenzy. The likely cause of the blast was a coal bunker fire, but nevertheless, on April 21, 1898, war was declared.

The Spanish-American War lasted only until August 13 of that year, but it served as the foundation of the American Empire. The Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam were all placed to varying degrees, into the sphere of the United States.

The conflict served, until recently, as the most effective demonstration of Monroe Doctrine. Monroe is an unofficial policy that states that the European colonial powers have no jurisdiction in the Americas, and that meddling in the American sphere of influence constituted a threat to US interests and security. It was never a formal doctrine, and never recognized outside of the United States, but it has been implemented to varying degrees, by many US Presidents.

Then along came Donald Trump.

Subscribe now

On January 3, the Trump regime attacked Venezuela and kidnapped their President, Nicolas Maduro. Since then, it has threatened Cuba, Mexico, Greenland (Denmark) and Colombia, and declared a new Monroe Doctrine in the Americas. North and South America are to be sole sphere of influence United States. Greenland, says the regime, will be either purchased or seized with military force if necessary. This is the encapsulation of what Trump cringefully called “Donroe Doctrine.”2

I have noted before that Trump is generally not unique in the history of the United States. Rather, he is the dark reflection of the United States. The moral rot, the unchecked capitalism, the rampant militarism and normalized violence manifest. The fact he sees the entirety of the Americas as the fiefdom of the United States is therefore not a surprise, but natural progression based on the rhetoric emanating from the Empire.

That is what is emanating from the USA, and it is profoundly dangerous. In making this claim, Trump has for all intents and purposes, declared overlordship over the Americas. Much of it is itself, fait accompli, as much of the Americas is already a US playground. The majority of ICE concentration camp inmates are sent to places in countries like El Salvador to facilities like CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or Terrorism Confinement Center).

On January 9, Donald Trump, on an episode of Fox and Friends, stated that “we’re gonna start hitting land, with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico.” This is a clear threat to one of precisely two nations that border the United States, and he has already threatened the other with annexation.

In the face of this aggression, the western world has come together to ensure it remains unchecked. It is very likely that by seizing Greenland, the USA will destroy NATO3 itself, yet it took PM Mark Carney three attempts to come up with a public statement that didn’t overtly support the Trump regime’s diatribes. This in spite of an undisclosed number (above 100) of Canadians are in ICE custody, and without regard to the threats levelled at Canada. As to Venezuela, it is all too clear that he sees no issue in kidnapping a world leader from his home in spite of the fact that, legally speaking, seizing Maduro is no different than seizing Carney.

There are those that would argue that Carney is attempting to walk a tightrope between Trump on one side, and Canadian interests on the other. If that is the case, then he is failing in his task. With the most generosity possible; he has been meek when dealing with Trump, and the issues of Greenland and Venezuela are simply too big and too important to be meek. He is not keeping us safe by not pushing back against something that, if allowed to occur there, could be inflicted here.

And indeed, there are many avenues to act against Canada. I’ve already detailed in ‘Canadian Salami’ the most likely type of annexation, but recent developments have added complications. Greenland is a major one: with that firmly in American hands, Canada for all intents and purposes, loses the North-West Passage.4 We would likely lose NATO, the only military alliance that could possibly protect us (though they almost certainly wouldn’t), and we would be encircled. Then there is Alberta and Saskatchewan. These two provinces, according to recent polling, are showing pro-independence movement support at around 20%. This doesn’t sound like much but given we have a dangerous neighbor with designs on oil specifically and Canada generally, and 20% is plenty to create a wedge.

I’m sure it’s a difficult balancing act for PM Carney, but don’t apply to be the designated tightrope walker if you can’t walk the tightrope.

Domestically in the USA, things are even more precarious. On January 7, Renee Nicole Good, 37, of Minneapolis, Minnesota was murdered at the hands of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent Jonathan Ross during an ICE roundup operation. There is no need to post the video here and explain point by point why this was a murder. We’re past that point now, it was obvious, and I will no indulge fascist fantasies to the contrary. Two people were shot the next day in Portland, also by CBP.

As independent journalist Aaron Rupar said on Bluesky, “We evacuated our kids out of Minneapolis this weekend and my spouse reports that as she drove them out of town she saw “multiple freeway exits where people are being pulled over.” It feels like the Twin Cities is being subjugated by a hostile occupying force.”

Today (Saturday 10 Jan), as I write this, the USA is on a knife edge. Protests are gathering in many major cities, and first and foremost, Minneapolis. Many activists have stated publicly that the time for peace and order is past, and that it’s Second Amendment time. The regime, meanwhile, has already declared Renee Good a terrorist.

It is certainly possible that nothing happens, but events in the US are moving very quickly now. If the demonstrators remain peaceful and non-violent as most undoubtedly will, and police do the same (less likely), then this could blow over for now, but the anger won’t dissipate. By all but saying aloud that protest and opposition to ICE is illegal, the US government has removed the safety valve holding back the anger of the masses. It will be released, the only question is how, when, and toward whom.

The United States is a powder keg actively seeking a spark, and we are sitting right on top of it. As one unnamed American protester said:

“They fired the first shot; it’s time to end this shit by any means necessary… we’re in the dark time. There’s no waiting for the ballot box. We need to get to the bullet box.”

I recently watched the 1997 miniseries ‘The Arrow,’ a story about the design, building and the 1959 cancellation, of the Avro CF-105 Arrow interceptor. As a show, it has everything a made-for-CBC movie could have; heavy handed melodrama, anti-Americanism, anti-Conservatism, and Canada’s own Dan Ackroyd.

It’s a story of the finest piece of technology in 1959, about an exceptional Canadian company that made a miracle only to see it brought down by the Machiavellian intrigues of the Conservative Party and the United States. It is a film about Canadian Exceptionalism and the Canadian military industry.

Some of it is even true.

Unfortunately, reality is less exciting. The CF-105 was, as the Diefenbaker Government said at the time, obsolete. It was indeed, cutting edge, fast, likely would have broken speed records and been operational for decades. However, while the advent of the ballistic missile had not rendered manned fighter/interceptors obsolete, it did make the Arrow’s principal target; Soviet long-range nuclear bombers, obsolete.1

It was a threat that never existed. The hundreds or even thousands of bombers the CF-105 was designed to intercept were actually dozens. The Myasishchev M-4 (NATO codename: Bison), the aircraft that sparked the original RCAF requirement for the CF-105, was a failure and less than 150 were manufactured.

Today the Avro Arrow is almost unknown outside of Canada, but in Canada it is treated with a cultural reverence. Beyond the mystique, legends, myths and the objectively silly miniseries, the aircraft is a symbol of the Canadian Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), a vestige of the time when Canada made aircraft for war.

Birth: The World Wars

Canada has always had an arms industry, but the MIC is something beyond that. It’s fusion of military production and public policy. It’s one thing to manufacture arms, but it’s another to see your foreign and domestic policy dictated by the manufacture of those arms.

August 1901, saw the birth of the Canadian MIC. The Canadian Minister of Militia, Sir Fredrick Borden, was unhappy that Canada didn’t produce its own military rifles as the Royal Small Arms Factory that produced the Lee-Enfield service rifle was unwilling to set up license manufacturing in Canada. Canadian leaders at the time, acutely sensitive of issues surrounding Canadian identity, pushed to develop an independent, domestic and distinctly Canadian arms for the independent and distinctly Canadian military. This feeling was made more acute by the Boer War (1899-1902), during which the Canadian Army was bumped in priority for Lee-Enfield rifles by British orders.

The board that considered the merits of the two rifles was chaired by Colonel William Otter, the Canadian officer who had become famous for his role at the Battle of Cut Knife Hill.2 Competing against the Lee-Enfield rifle of British manufacture was the rifle of Sir Charles Ross that would bear his name.

In the history of the Canadian military there are few pieces of equipment that have been seen with such contempt, and fewer still that can claim to have killed so many Canadian soldiers as the Ross Rifle. The Ross was straight-pull bolt action rifle chambered in .303 British, the caliber used by the Lee-Enfield. As a target rifle it was outstanding. Indeed, after it was withdrawn from regular infantry service, Commonwealth snipers retained it for its exceptional accuracy. However, as an infantry rifle, it was a disaster.

The Ross had so little tolerance that even the slightly different brass casings of British manufactured .303 rounds as opposed to Canadian manufactured rounds was enough to jam the mechanism. The bolt thread would deform. Bayonets would fall off when firing. The rifle could be fired when put together incorrectly, causing the bolt to fly backwards and injure the user. Mud and dirt, the ever-present feature of the First World War, would jam the rifle terribly. There are accounts of entire platoons being left with half a dozen functioning rifles during the Canadian baptism of fire at the Battle of Ypres.

As Sergent Chris Scrivins of the 10^th Battalion, The Canadian Division, later said; “I laid in a shell hole with four other men for a day and a half, and out of five Ross rifles in that hole, it took four of us to keep one of them working, banging the bolts out. As soon as you fired a round you had to sit down and take the entrenching tool handle to bash the bolt out.”

These rifles, unloved by all but a few, found their way into the hands of all sorts of militaries in the inter-war period. Spanish Republicans, White armies3, the Haganah4, and the British Home Guard to name just a few.

Thus it was that the Canadian MIC was born. Like so many staples of Canadian identity, it came into its own during the First World War (1914-18). As the Canadian military expanded, so too did the weapons industry. When the War began, the Canadian military was a militia force of semi-professional soldiers, when the war ended, an entire corps of four divisions plus supporting troops, navy and air forces. They all needed equipping.

Sam Hughes, Minister of Militia, had very specific plans for the Canadian Army. He wanted the force equipped by Canada, in Canadian uniforms, using their Canadian rifles. It was the first such initiative, but it would not be the last.

It wasn’t just defective rifles. The Canadian troops were issued paper soled shoes that melted before the soldiers even saw action. Ostensively bulletproof MacAdam shield-shovels, absurd devices that the user would poke their rifle though. Designed by Sam Hughes’ secretary, Ena MacAdam, they were entirely ineffective as shields, and having a big hole in the center also rendered them ineffective as shovels. The shovels, boots, and distinctively Canadian uniforms that were difficult to replace, were all supplanted by British items.

This should not be seen as disparaging to the Canadian manufacturing effort during the Great War as a whole; Canadian industry answered the challenge of the war with expedience, in general. From the misadventures of the Ross and the MacAdam shield-shovel, came the industrial powerhouse of Second 5World War Canada.

Canadian industry demilitarized by in large in time to see the need to remilitarize in 1939. In that role, Canada became a powerhouse. Enormous shipbuilding projects, aircraft manufacture and small arms factories. Canada manufactured everything from enormous Avro Lancaster bomber aircraft, Ram Tanks, warships, and soldier’s personal equipment.

Canada even armed the Republic of China in their fight against the Japanese. “Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl,” our equivalent of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ was manufacturing machine guns destined not for the Canadian Army, but Chinese National Revolutionary Army, rechambered for Mauser ammunition.

Variances in manufacture notwithstanding, by the Second World War, Canada was manufacturing not Canadian designed equipment, but license manufactured copies of existing equipment. Thus Canadian manufacturing capacity can be seen as part of a doctrine what we today would call Coalition Warfare. Canadian industry sought independence, and indeed did gain local autonomy, but cost and allied pressure shifted production away from domestic innovation towards licensed production. The Canadian military and associated arms industry was thus designed with the understanding that the Canadians would be part of a much larger force, not as an independent entity.

Death: Cold War and the Avro Arrow

The Cold War saw Canada in one of the most powerful positions relative to our allies it has ever been in. Canada ended the Second World War with the 4^th largest navy in the world (the Japanese, German and Italian navies being somewhat worse for wear), a large and experienced air force, and a substantial army.

The 1949 formation of NATO saw the position of Canada as a coalition member-state solidified. With the member states of NATO having clearly defined roles, equipment and supply would be built around those roles. Within an alliance such as NATO, each nation has a role, and for Canada, the defense of North America became paramount. The Canadian Navy was centered on anti-submarine work, the RCAF on air defense.

Maintaining a large military and associated MIC is easy during wartime; necessity trumps most other concerns, and while the War Pigs will still rake in their enormous profits, they won’t have much of a worry convincing people it’s the right thing to do. Peacetime and Cold War on the other hand, is more difficult. A mercurial threat from “the Reds” is no “international crusade against fascism,” and defense expenditures for a war that might not happen are much more difficult to justify.

Canadair, formally Canadian Vickers Ltd, was active aircraft manufacturer during this period. For the entire Cold War prior to the purchase of the CF-118, they manufactured most of Canada’s air force aircraft on license. The Saber (F-86), the CF-104 Starfighter (F-104) and the CF-5 Freedom Fighter (F-5) were all built by Canadair, the future Bombardier.

AV-Roe (Avro) Canada, the former manufacturer of such aircraft as the Lancaster and Anson, became a military aircraft designer in its own right. In 1950, the Avro CF-100 Canuck first flew. This was a two engine, two seat interceptor designed to defend the skies of North America from the Soviet bombers that, once again, did not exist. It was a solid, if unremarkable aircraft, and to date, the only Canadian designed fighter aircraft to enter production. It had Canadian designed Avro Orenda engines, and nearly 700 were built. Most were used by the RCAF, but a substantial number were also exported to Belgium.

Then came the Avro Arrow.

The Arrow was unlike any project the Canadian arms industry had ever participated in. The project, as well as the aircraft itself, was enormous. Not only the airframe, but the Orenda Iroquois engine, and the Velvet Glove weapons system were designed in Canada for use in the Arrow. When the CF-105 project was cancelled, Avro and its subsidiaries had over 50,000 employees, making it the third-largest corporation in Canada.

There are many books, stories, and documentaries about who exactly killed the Avro Arrow project, with titles like ‘Who Killed the Avro Arrow.’ The purpose here, is not to dissect the issue, but in broad strokes, capitalism and protectionism killed the Arrow. The US and UK had their own aviation industries at the time that would have suffered if a Canadian aircraft superseded them.

In a MIC, protectionism is more important than functionality and at no time was this more the case than in 1959. Canada caved, and in 1961 purchased the CF-101 Voodoo, an aircraft rejected by the RCAF when they issued the requirement for the Avro Arrow in the first place. Unlike the Saber and Starfighter, the CF-101s were built in the United States. Canada also bought several batteries of Bomarc surface to air missiles. These weapons were not very accurate, and as such designed to use nuclear warheads that Canada declined to purchase, making them useless even at intercepting the mythical bombers that weren’t coming in the first place.

None of this is to say that the Avro Arrow cancellation killed the Canadian arms industry; Canada was and remains a significant arms manufacturer. What cancelling the Arrow did, however, was alter the basis of ownership in the Canadian defense industry. Canada today produces pieces of military equipment, but they don’t greatly influence policy on a national level.

Until now.

Rebirth: Ukraine and Carney

“This starts with rebuilding, rearming, and reinvesting in the Canadian Armed Forces. The government’s generational investments in our Canadian Armed Forces will provide our military with the necessary tools and equipment to protect our sovereignty and bolster our security. This increase in investment also creates opportunities for the Canadian defence industry. We will reform defence procurement to make it easier and faster to buy Canadian-made equipment— supporting our domestic defence industry and creating high-paying careers.”

This is one of the opening paragraphs of the 2025 Canadian Budget, Chapter 4, ‘Protecting Canada’s Sovereignty and Security.’

The 2025 budget can easily be looked to as the rebirth of Canada’s Military-Industrial Complex. As already noted, Canada has been a producer of arms for much of its history. The Danish Military is equipped with Canadian C7 rifles, the Royal Saudi Land Forces were infamously provided with over 900 Light Armoured Vehicles (LAV) 6s built by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada. The Ukrainian Military uses a dizzying array of military equipment, a great deal of which was donated by Canada.

The Carney budget, however, brings this to a new level. In it, $6.6b is to be invested in the Defense Industrial Strategy, which is explain thus: “As the Strategy is implemented, starting with initial investments announced in Budget 2025, we will develop our defence industrial base so that more of our military capabilities are procured from Canadian supply chains.”

This includes an investment loan system for military equipment producers, investments into ‘dual use technology,’6 and natural resource exploitation under the guise of ‘defense.’ There will be a Defense Investment Agency “focused on providing the women and men in uniform with the equipment they need, when they need it.”

This, therefore, isn’t a massive funding increase just in the CAF/DND, but rather a massive funding gift to the Canadian weapons industry. Military investments are planned for every province and territory. A brick-and-mortar military budget. Indeed, a Military-Industrial budget.

How much of this investment will be directed at Canadian owned companies remains to be seen, but what is immediately clear is that it is production that is wished for.

It’s not without cause. The Russo-Ukrainian War has been an eye opener for the powers-that-be in NATO. Not only has NATO war stock been badly depleted, but it became clear within a year of the commencement of hostilities that rebuilding that war stock was a near impossibility while it was being expended as it was. Production now, has finally ramped up, but it is clear by this budget and the military budgets of many other nations in the NATO alliance that this was a major shock.

The shock has also been seen on the technology front. Drones dominate the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine. Cheap, easy to use, and lethal, the drone has supplanted many of the traditional roles of artillery, air support, mortars, and even tanks. Is this a trend or an aberration? We won’t know until the next war (gulp) but given their supremacy in this war and the Israeli genocide in Gaza, it seems likely that drones will continue to dominate the battlefield.

What this new CAF will look like in five years time remains to be seen, but if this minority Liberal government falls before that time it is unlikely that the Conservatives would change much vis-a-vis the military budget. Not only do brilliant minds think alike, but the Conservatives and Liberal minds do too.

The other question is this: what will we do with our new MIC?

If I had to guess (and ‘tis but a guess), I would say Canada is outfitting itself to become a new Arsenal of Democracy.7 It would seem that this government smells a tidy profit in war and wants their share. The production of arms is clearly being centered in government policy.

There is also the matter of personnel. War, as I have noted in other stories, is a personnel hog, and conscription is very much in vogue at the moment. The Canadian Government, with that in mind, proposed and then withdrew a program to enlist 300,000 civil servants in the supplementary reserve, after giving them one week’s military training. The breathtaking stupidity of this plan aside, it is clear that massive military mobilization is on the horizon as far as this government is concerned. This budget reflects that desire, the mobilization or not of 300,000 semi-willing professional bureaucrats notwithstanding.

I will conclude with the Oxford Dictionary definition of a Military Industrial Complex, and I will let you decide what we have on our hands:

“A country’s military establishment and those industries producing arms or other military materials, regarded as a powerful vested interest.”

Postscript

There is one other message to be found in the story of the Canadian Military-Industrial Complex. After the Avro Canada plant was shuttered forever, many of the experienced personnel went elsewhere, but the factories, still fully capable of production, did not.

Avro’s assets were taken over by Hawker-Siddeley Canada, and in their new role, these facilities produced train cars. Toronto’s GO Train, and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) H-series subway cars are the surviving legacy of the Avro Arrow.

Maybe if we’re lucky, one day Carney’s weapons will become useful public transport too.

Ian, Nov 24th, 2025.

Select Sources

Dancocks, Daniel G, ‘Welcome To Flanders Fields,’ copyright 1988

Budget 2025

Winchester, Jim, ‘Modern Military Aircraft,’ copyright 2010

The Arrow (TV Mini Series 1997)

At 7:00am, on August 29th, 1949, a blinding white flash lit up the desert of Semipalatinsk, in the Kazakh SSR. It was followed by an enormous shockwave. Tanks, artillery and other pieces of military hardware were smashed. An ugly black mushroom cloud rose in front of the spectators. The observing scientists soon wired to Stalin at the Kremlin, that the test was a success. The Soviet Union had become a nuclear power, and the world would never be the same again.

The explosion of RDS-1, known also as Pyérvaya Mólniy, (First Lightning) was the culmination of seven years of work by scientists led by Igor Kurchatov, under the codename Operation Borodino.1 It came as a shock to the Americans who thought the Soviet nuclear program was far behind their own.

RDS-1 made the nuclear world multi-polar. There are other dates more significant in the history of the atomic bomb; the Trinity Test, Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the most prominent, but these events happened at the height of US power, when they were the only controllers of the most powerful weapons in human history. RDS-1 is significant for the change it represented.

This test occurred right when the second Red Scare was gathering momentum. We know the history of the Cold War, the nuclear stand off, “duck and cover,”2 and the Cuban Missile Crisis are all woven into the lore of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons permeated military doctrine. By the 1960s, NATO3 and the USSR had doctrinal use for tactical4 nuclear weapons in a wide variety of roles, from air defense, to anti-submarine work. This is on top of the strategic role they possessed from the outset.

Subscribe now

The tactical role of nuclear weapons has faded, somewhat, as high precision conventional weapons, cheaper, more efficient, and much less politically damaging, became the standard. There was, however, a time when NORAD doctrine called for the Canadian use of nuclear weapons to destroy incoming Soviet bombers over the Arctic.

However, for all the nuclear erections the generals had during the Cold War, society itself was terrified of them. Movies like ‘The Day After,’ and ‘Threads,’ showed the horrifying realities of nuclear holocaust. ‘99 Red Balloons,’ expressed in music the fear of being caught between the warring nuclear powers. Nuclear warfare was a nightmare to billions of people.

That fear made the world a safer place. The idea of fighting with nuclear arms became an unthinkable doomsday even as India, Pakistan, China, Israel, and briefly, South Africa5, developed nuclear weapons.

There was a brief scare in the 2000’s when North Korea tested their first bombs, adding that nation to the exclusive club of nuclear powers, but in general, the biggest change since the Cold War has been the diminution of the fear of nuclear weapons, not the threat of nuclear weapons themselves.

Now, in 2025, we have Donald Trump. Naturally much of the world is on edge, and this very much includes Canada. So much so many individuals (though nobody close to government) have been advocating for the acquisition of nuclear weapons ourselves, following the conclusion that Iran made and DPRK already made that nuclear weapons remain the only proven method of defense.

With Trump’s recent announcement of a resumption of nuclear testing, such calls have only grown. What, if anything, this means remains to be seen, but it does show clearly that the threat of nuclear weapons never went away.

The Efficacy of the Nuclear Deterrent

The fact nuclear weapons work is clear. If you want something here today, but erased tomorrow, nukes are the best tool for the job. The fact they work as a deterrent is also clear, though less so. Why? Because it’s very difficult to prove why something didn’t happen.

We see examples of nations that have surrendered their nuclear weapons or halted research in them, only to deeply regret this. Iraq and Libya both had weapons programs, they got rid of them at the behest of the Americans, who subsequently invaded their countries and killed their people. Ukraine inherited a large stockpile of nuclear weapons6 during the collapse of the USSR, and gave them to Russia in exchange for security guarantees that have clearly not been effective.

On the other side of the coin, since the start of North Korean nuclear tests in 2006, the USA has not seemed very interested in regime change there. Russia remains a foe of the USA that they cannot get at directly, lest they throw nuclear weapons around, and the Taiwan-China issue remains at a nuclear impasse. If you were to use these examples, then peace through nuclear arms has been achieved.

But has it?

Israel and the USA are nuclear powers. In the 2000’s alone these two countries have been at the forefront of mass murder on an enormous scale. Millions have died directly because of the USA’s actions in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria, with little end in sight. Israel is currently committing genocide, and has either attacked or violated the sovereignty of almost every nation it borders plus Yemen, Qatar, and Iran just since 2023. In fact, since Israel got nuclear weapons, they have acted with complete impunity in the Middle East.

Nobody will sacrifice their own people, society, and indeed, civilization itself, in order to fail to stop a genocide. Conscious self-immolation is not a policy made for success. The lack of international response has a lot of feckless cowardice to thank for it, but if an international coalition formed to stop Israel, what do you think would happen?

Thus we see the deterrent working for precisely the wrong reasons. Anyone staring down a rogue nuclear power must weigh the very real risk nuclear hellfire brought down on them.

Since 2022 we’ve witnessed NATO and Russia fight a vicious (partial) proxy war in Ukraine. Not only have nuclear weapons not stopped or even slowed this conflict, every day it goes on is another day we are at risk of an unforeseen escalation causing nuclear warfare. In May 2025, India and Pakistan fought a brief skirmish in the skies over Kashmir. In both these examples the nuclear weapons all the combatants possess did nothing to stop the violence.

This begs the question: is the nuclear deterrent a deterrent at all, or is it a free pass for the most odious governments in the world?

Genocidal Doctrine

Nuclear war has changed since Hiroshima. ‘Little Boy,’ the bomb used to destroy Hiroshima, was 15 kilotons (Kt).7 It killed an estimated 70,000-140,000 people and wounded or sickened at least 72,000 more. The US Navy’s current submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM), the Trident II, can carry five reentry vehicles, each containing a 475Kt warhead. Thus each warhead has 35 times the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Some warheads are larger still. The Russian R-36M2 missile can carry a 20 megaton (Mt) device. The largest bomb ever detonated was the Soviet AN602, nicknamed Kuz’kina mat (Kuzka’s mother)8, an enormous 50Mt bomb tested in 1961. The blast wave circled the Earth three times. It was designed to be 100Mt, but was scaled down for fears of excessive radioactive fallout.

When a nuclear bomb is detonated, debris is sucked into the cloud and spread on the currents of superheated air up into the atmosphere. Dust, smoke, droplets of water, and burnt organic material become a fine radioactive dust that falls back to earth as ash, or in the form of black rain. In a nuclear war, this fallout will kill more people than the bombs themselves.

The targeted nation’s agriculture would fail as produce is either destroyed in the resulting fires, too radioactive to be consumed, or withers in cold of nuclear winter. Starvation, climate collapse, and avoidable deaths by disease would outnumber the people killed by fallout. Entire parts of the world would become uninhabitable for generations. These are unavoidable byproducts of nuclear warfare.

There are even weapons, theorized and real, that do this deliberately. Russia9 is alleged to have a device called the Poseidon, a submarine drone with an enormous nuclear weapon that would create a radioactive tsunami. The USA and USSR experimented with Electromagnetic Pulse weapons that would cripple the entire power grid of whole continents if used. It is also theorized that a “salted bomb,” using Cobalt-60, could cause an even more devastating nuclear fallout.

Thus, nuclear war is at its core, genocidal and ecocidal by its very nature. In order to be willing to engage in it, one must be willing not to fight your enemy, but to destroy your enemy. To incinerate their children, irradiate their communities, destroy their hospitals, eradicate their government, and render their lands uninhabitable. The enemy is not just killed on the field of battle, but every subsequent generation of people to live on that ground are condemned. You must kill the very ground they live on, destroy the animals that live there, attack their genetic structure, and murder every chance of life.

The deterrence-genocide paradox

It is theorized that the best defense against nuclear aggression is the possession of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. It has, for precisely 80 years thus far. In the span of human history, 80 years isn’t much of a sample. But let’s assume it continues to work.

“Get them in order not to use them.” This is the commonly heard phrase by many people, left to right, that would support acquisition of nuclear weapons by Canada or another nation. The problem with this statement is that it is utterly nonsensical. The key factor in deterrence is the knowledge that if attacked, the possessor of nuclear weapons would use them.

In order, therefore, to deter, a nuclear weapon must be usable. It can’t be a sacred object one points to in order to ward off invaders. It must be deployable or it’s just a decoration. It must have a delivery system in place for its operation. It must have willing operators for that system. It must have a political control apparatus that able and willing to use it.

You can’t deter a nuclear armed nation with one nuclear weapon. Redundancy is the only thing that can protect a nation from a sneak attack. There must be many, and they must be spread out so as not to lose them all in one strike. Furthermore, there’s a risk that if one only possesses a small number of them, the enemy might just risk taking the hit. Therefore, dozens, hundreds even, are required.

Once a nation has supplied itself with a number that would guarantee the deterrence remains effective, they are inevitably in possession of enough to commit genocide by nuclear arms.

“But we decided we wouldn’t actually use them.”

Have you? If you have the weapons, delivery systems and personnel to do it, then you are at that juncture, precisely one government decision away from using them. One election away from the new Prime Minister deciding that policy is over. They wouldn’t even need to tell anyone the policy ever existed at all, let alone that it ended.

As a deterrent, if they work at all, nuclear weapons only work if you are willing to use them. And to be willing to use them is be willing to commit genocide.

Is there a cause worthy of committing genocide?

No.

Missile Shields

There have been discussions between the governments of Canada and the USA about both nations acquiring the Golden Dome missile defense system. Setting aside the obvious fact that we shouldn’t be investing in defense contracts with fascists, it’s also a bad idea on the grounds of efficacy.

The reentry vehicle used by an ICBM or SLBM is incredibly difficult to intercept, especially with the advent of hypersonic weapons. As we’ve seen in the Ansar Allah and Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Israel, even the most effective missile defense system in the world can’t catch them all. When one is firing nuclear tipped missiles, then they don’t all need to get through.

This is a cutting edge and highly secretive technology. What is true today may not be true tomorrow, but fundamentally, the ballistic missile will have an advantage over the interceptor for the foreseeable future.

Thus not only would Canada be drawing closer to the fascists, it would be doing so for a system that cannot protect us from a determined attack. In return for an ineffective defense, Canada would become a target itself.

Joining Golden Dome would make Canada less safe.

A principled choice

Thus there is no logical option for nuclear weapons and I will advocate always against their procurement. This, however, does not mean I support anti-nuclear interventions in the world. Acts of warmongering or sanctioning cannot close Pandora’s Box, least of all by those powers who opened it in the first place.

The unfortunate reality is that the choice to bring nuclear weapons into the world cannot be undone. Treaties that limit nuclear weapon acquisition are good and should be worked on, but I do not believe there will be a worldwide diplomatic agreement to end the era of nuclear weapons.

Rather, it becomes an issue of principal. We must realize that the weapons exist, that they can be used by others, but must never be considered by us. Only by understanding the realities of these weapons can we arrive at the consensus needed to reject them. It must become an acknowledged fact that to acquire them is to support genocide and ecocide. It must be an embarrassment for a nation to possess them. Disqualifying from civil society to advocate for them. A national shame expunged only by a regime that chooses to reject them.

An act of treason against the entire species, and every other species. Only by such a rejection can we be free of them.

Ian, Halloween 2025

Well it’s the Fourth of July, and Americans might as well celebrate their last Independence Day as a nominally free country. They should practice fireworks safety however; the bad times have arrived, and they’ll need their hands intact for whatever will come. After 2025, the 4th of July is going to mean something very different.

For us Canadians, we must understand in the clearest way possible that an evil wind blows from the south. This will get much worse before it gets better, and it will take a concerted, national effort, to arrest our fall down the fascist rabbit hole ourselves.

Yesterday, the US House passed the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ proving once again, that fascism can be idiotic as well as evil. In this bill, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the programs under its aegis, will receive $100 billion, with $37 billion of this direct to ICE itself. This will make ICE one of the most well funded paramilitary organizations on the planet, after the US, Chinese and Russian militaries. The United States is quite literally going to spend more on self-oppression than the Russians are invading Ukraine.

Also included in the bill, seemingly a footnote after amongst these overlapping horrors, are devastating cuts to Medicaid and other social programs. People will die because of this bill and these cuts. Thousands, probably many more. Unfortunately, social murder is just one branch of the fascism that will now come to pass.

ICE has been around since 2003 and has been steadily expanding under Republicans and Democrats alike. However, since Trump’s return to power in January 2025, their role has been broadened and become much more sinister.

ICE is the American Schutzstaffel (SS).

I’ve written before about the SS, but the important thing here to understand is that the SS is the parallel nature of the power it held. The SS was the political, police and military arm of the Nazi Party and reported directly to Adolf Hitler through its boss, Heinrich Himmler. When Hitler seized power and passed the Enabling Act into law, the SS became the most powerful institution in Nazi Germany. Not only did they run concentration camps, but also the police, for-profit businesses and factories. The latter two were largely expropriated from Jews, Czechs and Poles, and were run most often by slave labour. It had its own intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).

What we see today in ICE, is what we can see in history with the SS. ICE already is able to second police forces around the USA to act as auxiliary ICE detachments, something the cops are gleefully in support of. They have multiple concentration camps1 , intelligence gathering capabilities, and report directly to the President of the United States via the Department of Homeland Security. Kristi Noem may make an unconvincing Heinrich Himmler, yet here she stands, astride her new private army. With the budget increase previously discussed, she will become the second most powerful person in North America. The commander of an army of occupation.

The hate-filled propaganda has gathered to a frenzy. The new concentration camp built in the Florida Everglades has been called “Alligator Alcatraz.” Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer with the ear of Trump, made reference to this by saying “if we get started now, the alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”

65 million is the number of people of Hispanic descent in the United States. This cannot, and should not, be seen as anything less than a call for genocide by someone close to the President of the United States. Recall that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security already issued a Red Flag alert for genocide after Elon’s Nazi salute.

Already under discussion by the White House is the stripping of citizenship, and the denaturalization of legal immigrants when it suits the administration, as we see with the rhetoric around Democratic candidate for New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Not included in the discussions about ICE, but very relevant to them, is the ongoing oppression of LGBTQS2+ people in the USA, which again, is expanding and gaining militancy. Whatever the oppression inflicted upon Americans, will be worse for Queer Americans.

The US military deployment to protests has already been absorbed and normalized, so now it’s expanding. Yesterday it was announced that ICE requested, and will receive the support for its Florida operations from 200 US Marine Corps personnel. Marines have also already been taking part in deportation operations in California.

Already in California heartbreaking accounts of empty streets where once vendors were are common. The dragnets targeting “illegals” have gone after the unhoused who cannot prove who they are, immigrants legal or otherwise, and so many others. It’s not a matter of “it could, or might happen.”

It happened. Fascism is not only established in the United States, but is now consolidating its hold. The debate, is over. Notions of Trump being arrested, or the courts stepping in, or someone in power finding their soul, are self-deceptive fantasy. The window to end this tyranny before blood flows in the streets of the United States of America has slammed shut.

Canada needs to get serious, and that is something that traditionally, we are very bad at. Our neighbor and largest trading partner is a fascist country that is threatening our sovereignty while it ethnically cleanses its population and institutes martial law.

I’ve already discussed the stakes, and the abject failures thus far, of our government to take seriously this crisis. Its getting much worse. Our massive military spending, as I have mentioned, will not save us from the USA. Since I wrote about it last, our government has caved repeatedly to Trump, with the latest disgrace being our abandonment of the Digital Sales Tax to American pressure.

This was a move so craven that former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy asked, "when do we stop pretending it’s all part of some clever negotiating strategy that justifies bootlicking in hopes of tariff concessions?”

Canadians must understand something else: we’re not passively watching this nightmare unfold, we’re taking part. The Canadian company GardaWorld has been linked to the establishment of the Florida concentration camps. Our dear “elbows up” Prime Minister is indulging Trump and his regime at every turn. The day before Canada Day, we gave his cronies a $2 billion dollar gift. We are on the same path as the Americans even without the obvious risk that America comes to us before we find our way to them on our own.

We need to not just hope our Government is doing its best, but demand it now. Already, at least 55 Canadians are in ICE custody. One has been killed in ICE detention. We can’t wait on the crumbs Trump might see fit to let us keep. We can’t stand idly by and watch this horror unfold. Cowardice in the face of fascism encourages fascism. We’re going to need to make sacrifices. “But the economy” arguments can only go so far when our economy is invested in concentration camps that kill Canadians.

This will test our notions of solidarity. If the resistance to the regime is ruthless, will you balk? The Nazis are at the gates, we must end our squeamishness and say “I don’t wish that this need to have happened, but it did, and I support resistance.” Solidarity, not surrender.

If the United States does even a quarter of the horrors the regime is now promising it will do, the entire North American continent will never be the same again. Shockwaves will reverberate around the world and no amount of being slightly better than them will save us.

My message to Americans is simple:

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Ian, July 4th, 2025.