if that is the website a mistake the guy made was quoting things that may or may not be true he should have put up images of original documents now that would be proof. and made sure that he had the documents to prove what he was saying.

Take it from me: you do not EVER want the immensely powerful nation to your southwards to get the idea that you are just another banana republic, such as, say, Haiti. Our Army, and our Air Force, and our Navy have weapons you have not even dreamed of. That’s brutal to say, but there it is.

Some years ago, I saw a newspaper picture, of two American Marines in Haiti, one white and one black, dragging a dead Haitian through the streets of Port-au-Prince, dragging him the way hunters drag a deer. The young Marines were both wide-eyed, obviously terrified, and on the near edge of battle-madness. The Haitian was presumably some kind of Bad Guy, a Ton Ton Macoute, or whatever they are called nowadays. We don’t respect Haiti. We send in the Marines whenever it seems necessary, every ten or twenty years on the average.

We Americans tend to put Canada up on a pedestal, rather the way a man puts a girl up on a pedestal, seeing you Canadians as exemplifications of certain virtues which we ourselves don’t have the social cohesion to manage. I mean things like National Health Insurance, and the comparative nonviolence of your dealings with indigenous peoples. We are still ashamed of Wounded Knee (1890) and Sand Creek (1864). As a result, at certain points in national conflicts with Canada, over things like fishing rights, we back off, even when we think we are in the right.

I don’t know what the rights and wrongs are in the case of John Kelly and the Calgary Police, and I don’t care. The indisputable fact seems to be that he has been arrested for criticizing the Police on a website, not on the street, where it could possibly be construed as a disturbance of the public peace, but on a website. Our own informing law is the case of Times vs. Sullivan, back in 1964, and of course, the case of John Peter Zenger, back in 1735. The gist of our law is that it is practically impossible for a government official to prove the facts necessary for civil libel, and there is no such thing as criminal or seditious libel. President Obama simply has to ignore, as best he can, the irrational imputations of his supposedly having been born in Kenya. There are lots of other people willing to be President if he doesn’t want the job. Someone wielding government power is not entitled to be sensitive of insults or calumny. That’s a bedrock matter. It’s not negotiable. It destroys the whole set of assumption underlying the pedestal. A government which arrests its critics, however ridiculous they may be, is not a virtuous government, and need not be treated with respect.

With such a government, one operates in the much narrower calculus of power. It’s very difficult to do anything about China, but Haiti is so weak as to be easy to take over. Bear in mind that the United States Army’s 82nd Airborne Division could take out the Calgary Police Department in a very few minutes. During Desegregation, the 82nd Airborne was used to (non-violently) end resistance by the governments of certain Southern states. That is another way of saying that Southern sheriffs might kidnap and murder nonviolent freedom riders, but they were not foolish enough to take on the 82nd Airborne. Most of the country’s reaction to this was in effect that if the damm “Johnny Rebs” still hadn’t got the message, all these years after Shiloh, and Gettysburg, and Appomattox, they would just have to be taught the hard way. In short, the attitude was basically similar to that involved in dealing with Haiti. The long-term condition of Canada’s national independence is that its standards of civil and human rights have to be at least as high as American standards. Canada has to be worthy of being put on a pedestal.