Timothy Snyder: Winter sieges of North American capitals

[Nevilledog]

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Timothy Snyder
@TimothyDSnyder
"What seems to be emerging is a model for disabling the central government of major democratic countries through the actions of a small number of people."

snyder.substack.com
Winter sieges of North American capitals
The worrying new model of politics in American and Canadian insurrections
1:27 PM · Feb 12, 2022

https://snyder.substack.com/p/winter-sieges-of-north-american-capitals

It is uncanny to watch two proud North American capitals stormed by their own citizens in the space of about a year. Just last January, no government authority was able to protect the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Now, just a bit more than a year later, something very similar is unfolding in Ottawa.

On January 28th, truckers began a siege the Canadian capital. Since then, some of the echoes with January 6th 2021 have been eery, right down to the the far-right organizers and the Confederate flags. The January 6th protestors were of course trying to overturn an election. The people who planned the "Freedom Convoy" Canadian truckers proposed a "Memorandum of Understanding" demanding regime change (which has now been abandoned). On January 29th, the prime minister was led away to an undisclosed location. The sergeant at arms of the House of Commons warned Canadian parliamentarians to avoid the truckers, and to avoid being seen, lest they be followed to their houses and attacked there. Amidst the tumult, some representatives of the more right-wing of the major parties expressed their support. More echoes there. And as in Washington DC last year, the locals in Ottawa are generally aghast.

Perhaps the deepest similarity was that the cause of the protestors made no sense. The Americans who stormed the Capitol last January purported to believe that Trump had won an election that he lost. There was no evidence of this; what is more, there was no logic: if the Democrats really stole elections, surely they would have arranged comfortable majorities for themselves in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Canadian trucker protest plumbs similar depths of unreason. The ostensible pretext for the "Freedom Caravan," the use of trucks from around the country to disable Ottawa, was the need for Canadian truckers to be vaccinated before they enter the United States. But this is not something over which anyone in Ottawa actually has control.

The American federal government makes the rules for crossing the American border. Back in October, the U.S. ended a period of exception which had allowed Canadian truckers not to follow the vaccination rules that bound others. Canadian truckers were then given three additional months to get vaccinated. That grace period came to an end on January 22; and on January 23 the trucks got on their way to Ottawa. To be sure, Canada also requires vaccination to get back in to Canada; but Canadian truckers cannot do business in America without crossing the American border and complying with American rules, so this does not really matter. The protestors might then say that they are opposing vaccine mandates generally. But in Canada, these rules are set in the provinces, not in the capital. The Canadian federal government cannot change American and provincial policies. But this senselessness, it seems, is part of the point. Making demands that cannot be met makes it hard to bring the chaos to an end.

*snip*

[niyad]

1. KNR. Same crazies both places.