The People’s Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.
Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you. But liberty, you see, that precious child of our liberal democracy only two hundred years old, has one notable side effect.
Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.
Power is sexy, not simply in its own right, but because it inspires self-confidence in its owner and a shiver of subservience on the part of those who approach it.
I have got up at truly deplorable hours in the morning to confront Vancouver’s Jack Webster on television because I have been told that is the place to get exposure for ideas.
There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.
If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy.
When faced with the inevitable fatigue that comes with the recycling of speeches and the recycling of thoughts in a rather small stream of vortex, I am urged to not be ashamed of recycling.
There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well – the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.
