In the most stirring performance by a Canadian since Celine Dion sang My Heart Will Go On, Mark Carney this week confirmed that the so-called “ruled-based order” is not so much dead than undead, a zombie in a suit shuffling slowly through the world and moaning “Hypocriseee …”
Speaking at Davos, the Swiss enclave where the people wrecking the world go every year to wonder why the world is being wrecked, the Canadian prime minister described the rules-based order as a “fiction” that had been “useful” but that was now crumbling.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” he said, “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.”
Of course, none of this was news to many people, especially not people who have survived the rules-based order raining down some of those rules on them, whether Iraqis invaded for rules-based oil via rules-based fabricated weapons of mass destruction, or Palestinians in Gaza slaughtered to keep rules-based Benjamin Netanyahu out of jail.
Indeed, many of these people have clearly been struck by the absurd spectacle playing out right now as Europe and the UK fret over Trump’s aggression and praise Carney for calling it out — the same Europe and UK that have done so little to curb or even condemn Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza, currently being ethnically cleansed for the ‘master plan’ land-grab unveiled by Jared Kushner at Davos on Thursday.
I must admit that I also found myself slightly bemused by Carney’s choice of metaphor as he tried to illustrate how oppressive regimes are maintained and enabled by the compliance of individuals who know that these regimes are wicked or fraudulent but comply anyway.
Right now, the gravest threats to Canada and perhaps Europe, too, are white nationalism and the winner of the still-undecided race between oligarchy and fascistic state-controlled capitalism, and there are plenty of examples Carney could have used to illustrate how those forces demand obedience and unthinking compliance, from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa.
Quoting a 1978 essay by Czech dissident Václav Havel, Carney described a shopkeeper in a communist regime placing a sign in his window every day that read “Workers of the world unite”; one of many identical signs being put up in similar windows by similar shopkeepers, none of whom believed in communism any more.
I have no doubt that that essay was an absolute banger in 1978. I also would never underplay the horrors of Stalinism or the deprivations suffered by Europeans living behind the Iron Curtain.
But, with all respect to Carney, it’s not compliance with communism that’s threatening the southern border of Canada or Greenland right now, and it’s not worker solidarity that’s likely to cause upheaval in the global economy.
Right now, the gravest threats to Canada and perhaps Europe, too, are white nationalism and the winner of the still-undecided race between oligarchy and fascistic state-controlled capitalism, and there are plenty of examples Carney could have used to illustrate how those forces demand obedience and unthinking compliance, from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa.
Still, at the very least Carney has somewhat lanced the Western liberal boil by becoming one of the first leaders of a rich and relatively powerful country to say the quiet part out loud.
Will it change anything? Probably not. But calling a thing by its name is often the first step towards understanding it, and if a single hypocrite can start to see the sand on which he has built his house, perhaps that’s not a bad thing.
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