read their history. I found it interesting and an enormous contrast to the history of the United States. The British, because Canada was a colony until 1867 always sent the Army and surveyors in to the territories occupied by the Indians, before settlement could begin. Then they set up police forces to handle the settlers. There was no Wild West in Canada.
I post things about the Canadian military because as an American, despite working on a PhD in History, I never heard of any of the military history of Canada. I found it interesting and impressive, and have posted it just for information's sake. I am not trying to run down the US military, I'm just trying to provide additional information. Canadians are our allies in Afghanistan. They're trying to ensure a stable move towards Democracy just as the American troops there.
You are mistaken if you think I'm trying to denigrate American troops by talking about the good things other troops have done. You guys get that information every day. But you don't hear what the Canadians are doing or have done.
Somebody here posted that Canada has lived under the protection of the United States since 1776, conveniently forgetting that we the United States declared war on them in 1812, and that most of Canada's 19th century infrastructure was built as far from the border as possible because the US was perceived as Canada's only threat.
Canada has to some extent derived some protection from the United States in the Post WW2 era, but the US has also acted somewhat unfairly and improperly in my opinion in its exercise of power politics and trade with Canada.
I once accused someone here of a monocular view of the world. He didn't understand what that meant. If you're looking at the world with one eye, you see the world without depth, and only about 60% of what you would see if you use both eyes. I think most Americans look at the world through one eye, and have a diminished appreciation for things not American because of it. Now the odds are I will be accused of having a poor understanding of the world and trying to foist that on the American people in general (at least that's what happened the last time I tried to express this opinion). Having lived elsewhere, and having read opinions from elsewhere, some of them even in other languages, I find America's view of the world very limited and with little depth.
Now that's just my experience having lived in 3 countries, and trying to get an idea of how 3 different cultures view the world and issues. When you're buying something, do you buy the first thing you see, or do you do a bit of research, ask a number of people, try to get as much information and as many views as possible. That's what I'm advocating in terms of understanding other countries, formulating foreign policy, and formulating domestic policy.
I keep coming back to a sort of democracy of ideas. If a number of democratic countries have found something useful, the obvious example being state run health care, then doesn't it make sense to at least examine it? Not in the way it was "examined" under Clinton amid a barrage of misleading self-serving advertisements from Health Insurance Companies, but in a careful critical all-sides-of-the-argument way, because the United States is the only industrialized democracy without a national plan. That makes us a majority of one, but not part of the democracy of nations.
Rob
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