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Comment by b3lvedere | Hacker News Reader

"Trump has pissed off one of the nicest countries on earth—our northern neighbors, who have faithfully stood by us in times of great calamity and never wronged us—so much that their leader told the world today that enough is enough and the United States and other superpowers should understand what has been done cannot be undone."

Fact is Trumps leadership keeps causing great trouble and bullshit on a global scale. At the cost of lots of lives and freedom of human beings. History is on repeat once again.

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I don’t know if history is on repeat, but it rhymes.

Trump is a traitor to the United States. Society’s biggest failure was its inability to take off the sanewashing kid gloves and put him on trial for the big boy crimes he committed before it was too late.

He was caught on recorded phone calls committing election fraud.

He was caught stealing classified documents and refusing to give them back.

He was caught planning an insurrection and a coup. Even speaking of ending free elections should be illegal and shouldn’t be considered part of 1st amendment protected speech.

Republicans in congress have the power to end this today with articles of impeachment but are accomplices in the traitorous destruction of America.

He’s even a convicted felon and still got elected.

This version of democracy where corporations optimize the system for people voting against their own interests is not working. At this point it’s not even working for the corporations, who will find it much harder to make the green line go up without the stability of the past 70 years.

The only people left making a profit will be the mafia extraction economy Trump goons if we let this continue, just like the way it works in Russia.

Putin is a traitor to Russia but there he is still, 25 years on with no end in sight. The public is too easy to manipulate.

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Every country in the planet has skeletons in their closet.

Some of them, however, acknowledge it, accept and try to do their best to overcome it. Others don't.

Some examples: most Germans know and acknowledge the atrocities of Nazism; very few Japanese know of the Nanjing massacre. And how many Dutch know about the atrocities of the East Indian Company in Indonesia? How many Belgians know about the genocide in Congo? How many Portuguese know about the tragedy of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Canadians know about the cruelty against First Nations in their history and acknowledge it, few Americans do it. In parts of Latin America (e.g. Brazil), those atrocities keep happening even today. And no, we don't "supporting everything the US have done". From Vietnam to Iraq, we have lots of disagreements with American foreign policy.

This country is shaped by the escape of the loyalists, the war of 1812 and the 49th parallel. We are not Americans.

While it's decent to acknowledge the past, it doesn't make a country nice. just as Germany has no reputation for niceness despite their self-flagellation.

Canada's world reputation comes from the progressivism in the 60's and 70s, which has largely disappeared or failed (ecological science, multiculturalism). The undercurrent of canadian politics is just as neo-liberal as the US, and we differentiate ourselves on a facade of social progressivism. Canadians confuse their dont-rock-the-boat attitude with actual solutions to social problems. meanwhile they have similar political schisms as the US, just look at the Ford politial dynasty. Canadian niceness is mostly good PR.

A clear indicator is that Canada has consistently underfunded their military as a show of deference to our powerful neighbour. This is why all the bluster of Canadian politicians "taking a stand" against the US is theatre. The truth is in the state of our military and economic allegiances, which are mainly with China and the US, nothing nice about that.

Every single group of people that has been around for long enough accumulates things that they should be ashamed of. But everything is relative, and compared to other countries, Canada and Canadians have always seemed to me to be much better than the world average.

Everywhere has its south.

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