Short Solo

Prime Minister Carney’s recent speech is being rightly hailed across much of the Western world as the kind of honesty required if we are to collectively confront the reality of American empire.

It lands close to a story I’ve just finished working on and will share soon.

The speech forces the truth that many Canadians have always avoided: the “sign in the window” that convinced us there was a fair, rules‑based world order never actually existed for vast numbers of people subject to the constant wars of conquest inflicted on them by American greed.

For decades, Canada has been aligned with America’s proxy wars, regime change, sanctions, and resource extraction.   

We told ourselves that the system worked because it appeared to work for us as allies of a country that is always at war – but never against us.   

We just went along and pretended that people in another nation somehow deserved the use of power against innocent civilians to control their sovereignty.  

Why is Canada noticing now?  It’s obvious, we are finally in a position that most people around the world have always been in.  We now must face the strength of a nation that wants to own the entire north – much of it in northern Canada.

It brings up Pastor Martin Niemöller’s post‑war poem, “First They Came.” Niemöller was not born as a hero. He was a German nationalist who initially supported Hitler and only recognized the danger of authoritarianism once it intruded on his own freedom—specifically when the Nazis moved to control the Protestant churches. He was arrested in 1937 for speaking out about church and state and spent years in concentration camps.

After the war, he reflected on his earlier silence with clarity:

First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

This is the reason I believe in what Martin Luther King Jr. said along those same lines in his 1963, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail:’

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The American empire has always been a problem for world peace. It’s now on our doorstep.