Oriental despotism

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.[1]

 - Alphonse Karr (Les Guêpes, January 1849).

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[1] Usually translated as “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  These words appeared following the Revolutions of 1848 and one month after Louis Napoleon (returned from exile in England) was elected by a landslide vote as president of the Second Republic of France on December 10, 1848.  Three years later (on December 2, the anniversary of his more famous uncle’s coup in 1804) he staged his own coup and revised the 1848 constitution.  Exactly a year later (also the anniversary of the first Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz), he started calling himself Napoleon III, Emperor of France.

Some advice for Frank Stronach

As auto-parts magnate Frank Stronach sues his daughter Belinda Stronach for $520 million CDN to regain control of the family-operated Magna International Inc.[1], an idea comes to mind that the 86-year-old might better spend his time reading Shakespeare’s King Lear.  As the Fool puts it to the King of his conflict with his daughters:

For you know, nuncle,
The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it’s had it head bit off by it young.
So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.[2]

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[1] “Stronach sues daughter for control of family firm,” The Globe and Mail (Thursday Oct. 11, 2018), Front Page.

[2] William Shakespeare, King Lear. A Conflated Text. ed., Stephen Orgel (New York, NY: Penguin, 1999), p. 30.

“The Revolt of the Elites” in British Columbia

The fact that another School District 43 trip to China is planned for 2019 can be explained by Christopher Lash’s best-selling book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, a work which anticipated the rise of populism in America over 20 years ago.[1]  The “elites” in the Tri-Cities[2] are the professional managers at SD43 whose loyalties are international rather than local, and where the language of money speaks more loudly than our democracy, to whom our school trustees are beholden.

So trips to China “strengthen the district’s international education program”[3] and allegedly create “world citizens” – but of whom – our Chinese guests who pay fees of $15,000 per year, or the Canadian students who learn that money talks in our public school system?

And the more SD43 deepens its ties with China the more it compromises Canadian multiculturalism: just look to the network of forced indoctrination behind razor wire of Uyghurs and other Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region.[4]  Estimates are that about one million Uyghurs are being re-purposed as model Communist citizens, which some call cultural genocide, and that’s about the Muslim population in Canada.

So if SD43 again goes free to China, what does that say to our Tri-City’s Muslim population?

The elites at SD43 can offer all the buzzwords it wants to explain why $62,725 for a 6-trustee trip to China was reimbursed by Hanban, the cultural arm of the Chinese government, but clearly it has abandoned (as Lash would put it) the ‘obligations of citizenship’, both local and Canadian.

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[1] See especially Ch. 2 “The Revolt of the Elites” in Christopher Lash, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), pp. 25-49.

[2] The Tri-Cities are Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada.

[3] See “More Cash for SD43 trustees” Tri-City News (Friday, Nov. 23, 2018), p. A3.

[4] See “Inside China’s campaign against the Urghurs,” The Globe and Mail (Monday Nov. 5 2018), Front Page.