Singer/songwriter/guitar player/Acadian drifter/Tradical father/True North patriot/existential crisis manager/Simply Saucer commander in chief

Hamilton, Ontario Canada
Joined January 2012
Simply Saucer in Chicago is a brand new short doc film created by Chicagoan, Chris Buddy, I'm sending it your way! youtube.com/watch?v=WcNIlFKL…
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Edgar Breau retweeted
Replying to @ImJulianAssange
The Globalist Playbook: • Subordinate national sovereignty to supranational rules and institutions (ICC, WHO, climate schemes just a few examples). • Promote unrestricted movement of goods, capital, and people. • Favor technocratic expert governance over democratic accountability within nation-states. • Advance cultural or value homogenization (often framed as “universal values”) at the expense of particular national cultures and identities.
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Estimate of 6.3 billion annually for Canada's EU Associate membership. Carney and the liberals are making Canadian taxpayers EU taxpayers. Financial analysts and policy observers have modeled a potential total cost based on Norway’s framework. Norway pays roughly €869 million annually for its access to European Economic Area (EEA) cooperation and programs. Because Canada's economy is roughly 4.5 times larger than Norway's, a comparable baseline for wide-scale program integration would translate to nearly €4 billion (approx. C$6.3 billion) annually. There is no annual fee required for Canada to participate in the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA)
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Replying to @ImJulianAssange
‼️ These concerns are exactly why I started this petition. Carney never campaigned on EU membership or association. Winning an election is not permission to sign Canadians up for whatever harebrained notion pops to mind for him afterward while pretending we asked for it. Our country... our money... our say... Whatever your political stripe, we ALL live with the consequences. Agree or Disagree: At the very least, Canadians should be fully informed of the EU deal and afforded a vote on it BEFORE Carney signs Canada up to a FOREIGN PARLIAMENT. Please sign.🙏🏻 And if you already signed... THANK YOU! Please share it. Canadians deserve a vote before the ink dries. Link👇🏻 ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/P…
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Edgar Breau retweeted
Open borders + state welfare = disaster These two things cannot coexist within a society without destroying it. When millions of low-skill workers flood a labor market simultaneously, wages at the bottom compress. Supply and demand operate exactly as advertised. George Borjas ran the numbers on the 1980 Mariel boatlift: 125,000 Cubans hit Miami in under six months, and wages for native high school dropouts fell measurably. The market eventually adjusts, but "eventually" is cold comfort when your paycheck shrinks this quarter. The fiscal damage compounds separately from the wage effect. A low-income household in California consumes roughly $30,000 annually in state and federal services, schooling, healthcare, and transfer payments, while paying perhaps $4,000 in taxes. Multiply that gap across millions of arrivals and you have a structural deficit that your children inherit as debt. Welfare states and open borders cannot coexist indefinitely. The tax-funded magnet subsidizes arrival and rewards dependency. Destroy the welfare state, and mass migration becomes a straightforward story of voluntary exchange, workers seeking employers, capital seeking labor. Keep the welfare state and open the gates, and you are simply voting to transfer wealth from working taxpayers to a federal distribution apparatus. The hard question is never "should people move freely?" It is who owns the tab when they arrive.
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Edgar Breau retweeted
Rome collapsed because Romans stopped enforcing the conditions that made Roman citizenship worth anything. The same is happening to France right now. The Western Empire's third- and fourth-century emperors, desperate for tax revenue and military manpower, settled entire Gothic and Frankish tribal confederacies inside the limes without demanding assimilation, military oaths, or any meaningful integration into Roman economic life. In 382 AD, Theodosius I settled roughly 100,000 Visigoths in the Balkans under their own chieftains, exempt from Roman law. They owed Rome nothing, and they acted accordingly. By 410, Rome fell. The Austro-Hungarian Empire ran a version of the same experiment. Vienna absorbed millions of Slavic, Magyar, and Romanian subjects into a single fiscal and administrative unit without establishing coherent property rights or common rule of law across ethnicities. Capital fled the peripheral regions because contract enforcement varied by ethnicity and political connection. The empire spent itself policing internal tensions rather than producing anything. Open borders can work when you couple them with private property, enforceable contracts, and zero access to a welfare state. Every historical collapse involved governments absorbing populations onto public land, public payroll, or public grain dole. Welfare states and open borders function as a single detonator, not two separate policies.
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Edgar Breau retweeted
Replying to @DestinationTele
Remember they like burning our churches and us
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Excellent closing by @PardyBruce at the Canada Strong & Free Network debate with @jkenney.
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Chcieliście samochodu, który umie latać – a do tego jeździć do góry nogami i przyspieszać do setki w sekundę? No to macie. Elon zrobił. Ludzie mogą robić takie rzeczy – ale my nadal jesteśmy rządzeni przez te bandy kretynów i złodziei, więc my nie możemy…
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💥MAJOR BREAKING: Ottawa scrapped the only rule that required employers to hire Canadians first. Buried in paragraph two of an IRCC release, employers no longer have to advertise a job, prove no qualified Canadian applied, or pay $1,000 for an LMIA — for a high-wage job offer to count toward permanent residence. The Labour Market test is gone from the PR route, and verification moves out of ESDC, whose mandate is protecting Canadian workers, and into IRCC, whose mandate is selecting immigrants. Still think the great replacement is a conspiracy?
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One student shot two teachers with a hunting rifle. Protesters have thrown hydrochloric acid at riot police in 7 separate incidents. A high school headteacher in Marseille was doused in gasoline. CTV Toronto: Mostly peaceful student protests. 📸 Lou Benoist AGP/Getty
Replying to @NatashaMontreal
The local CTV 6 o'clock news, in Toronto, framed it as "student protests" and "mostly peaceful" 🫤
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I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road. France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything, it owns everything. Our shops belonged to the state, so they had no reason to have anything. Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street." At work, we had another one: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to say one thing in public and another at home. Today the method is softer. In Poland, your neighbor informed on you. In America, someone reports your post, and you’re cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine. And all of it was supposed to be exactly the way it is being sold to you now: fairness, protection, a state that takes care of everything. Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise. We spent forty-five years getting out. We know what it costs. Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
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Edgar Breau retweeted
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Je n'ai jamais été aussi optimiste. Pas malgré le chaos actuel, mais grâce à lui. Je vais vous expliquer pourquoi l'empire du mensonge construit par la gauche depuis cinquante ans va s'effondrer, et pourquoi ce n'est pas une opinion mais une question de physique. Tout commence avec un mouvement né sur X il y a quelques années : l'effective accelerationism, ou e/acc. Au départ, c'est une idée presque thermodynamique. L'univers a une tendance de fond : la matière s'organise pour capter et dissiper l'énergie de plus en plus efficacement. Une cellule fait ça. Une forêt fait ça. Une civilisation fait ça. Le marché, la technologie et le capital sont les formes les plus avancées de ce processus. Ce sont des machines à transformer l'énergie en intelligence, en abondance, en complexité. La thèse e/acc est simple : il ne faut pas freiner cette dynamique, il faut l'embrasser. Plus d'énergie, plus de calcul, plus d'innovation, plus de croissance. Monter sur l'échelle de Kardashev au lieu de s'excuser d'exister. En face, il y a les « décels » : ceux qui veulent ralentir, réguler, taxer, interdire, culpabiliser. Ceux qui voient le progrès comme une menace à contenir plutôt qu'une force à libérer. Mais il y a une dimension de l'accélération dont presque personne ne parle. L'accélération n'est pas seulement un moteur. C'est un filtre. Pensez à n'importe quel organisme. Un corps humain en bonne santé peut courir. Il accélère, son cœur pompe plus fort, ses muscles consomment plus d'oxygène, et tout fonctionne parce que le système est bien conçu. Maintenant, prenez un corps malade. Des artères bouchées, un cœur fragile, des organes qui ne communiquent plus entre eux. Faites-le courir. Il ne va pas plus vite vers la santé. Il va plus vite vers l'infarctus. L'accélération ne corrige pas les défauts d'un système. Elle les amplifie. Un système sain qui accélère devient plus fort. Un système dysfonctionnel qui accélère meurt plus vite. Et c'est exactement ce qui est en train d'arriver au projet que je vais appeler par son nom : le projet globalo-socialiste. Celui porté par les démocrates américains, par la technostructure de Bruxelles, par les entités supranationales qui n'ont de comptes à rendre à personne, par un réseau d'ONG financées par l'argent public pour dicter la morale aux peuples qui les financent. Regardez ce que ce projet a produit. Des États obèses qui prélèvent plus de la moitié de la richesse produite et qui délivrent des services publics de plus en plus dégradés. Des écoles qui n'apprennent plus à lire mais qui apprennent à culpabiliser. Des hôpitaux à bout de souffle malgré des budgets records. Une immigration massive sans aucune exigence d'assimilation, présentée comme une chance par ceux qui n'en subissent jamais les conséquences. Une désindustrialisation organisée au nom d'une écologie punitive qui délocalise la pollution en Chine et l'emploi avec. Des normes, des normes, et encore des normes, jusqu'à ce qu'il devienne plus simple de créer une entreprise à Austin qu'à Lyon. Une justice qui excuse le coupable et soupçonne la victime. Une censure qui avance masquée sous le nom de « lutte contre la désinformation ». Et une jeunesse à qui l'on a expliqué que son pays, son histoire et sa civilisation étaient des crimes à expier. Ce n'est pas un ensemble de bugs. C'est la conception elle-même. Maintenant, changeons d'image. Voyez ce système comme un moteur. Un bon moteur, c'est de la précision. Des pièces qui s'emboîtent, un minimum de frottements, une énergie qui se transforme en mouvement. Le marché libre, la propriété, la responsabilité individuelle, la monnaie saine : c'est ça, un moteur bien conçu. L'information circule par les prix, chaque erreur est sanctionnée, chaque bonne idée est récompensée. Le moteur socialiste, lui, est mal conçu dès le départ. Il ne tourne pas sur la création de valeur mais sur sa redistribution. Il ne récompense pas la performance, il la taxe. Il ne laisse pas les erreurs mourir, il les subventionne. Résultat : ça frotte partout. Ça chauffe. Ça grince. Chaque pièce use la pièce d'à côté. Et que font ceux qui pilotent ce moteur ? Au lieu de le reconcevoir, ils changent les pièces. En permanence. Une pièce cède, on en remet une neuve. Encore une. Encore une. Ces pièces de rechange, vous les connaissez. Elles s'appellent la dette publique et la planche à billets. La France a dépassé les 3 300 milliards d'euros de dette et n'a pas voté un budget à l'équilibre depuis le milieu des années 70. Les États-Unis ont franchi les 37 000 milliards de dollars. Les banques centrales ont maintenu des taux à zéro pendant des années, imprimé des montants que plus personne ne sait se représenter, et quand l'inflation est arrivée, elles ont fait semblant d'être surprises. Milton Friedman l'avait pourtant dit il y a cinquante ans : l'inflation est toujours et partout un phénomène monétaire. Chaque crise, on rachète du temps avec de l'argent qui n'existe pas. Chaque problème structurel, on l'arrose de liquidités pour masquer le bruit du moteur. Mais les frottements sont toujours là. Ils s'accumulent. Et la facture des pièces de rechange finit par coûter plus cher que le moteur lui-même : la charge de la dette devient l'un des premiers postes de dépense de l'État français. Pendant des décennies, ce moteur mal conçu a pu tourner à 3 000 tours par minute. Lentement. Bruyamment. Mais il tournait. Le monde allait assez doucement pour que le bricolage permanent suffise à masquer l'absurdité de la conception. Et puis l'IA est arrivée. L'intelligence artificielle, c'est l'accélération la plus brutale de l'histoire humaine. Ce qui prenait des années prend des mois. Ce qui prenait des mois prend des jours. Des entreprises de dix personnes font ce que faisaient des entreprises de mille. Le capital, les talents et les idées se déplacent à la vitesse de la lumière vers les endroits où ils sont bien traités. L'IA vient de faire passer le moteur de 3 000 à 20 000 tours par minute. Posez-vous la question qu'un ingénieur se poserait. Que se passe-t-il quand on fait monter à 20 000 tours un moteur mal conçu, rafistolé de partout, qui frotte à chaque rotation ? Il explose. Pas parce que quelqu'un l'a saboté. Parce que la physique ne négocie pas. Et c'est exactement ce que nous voyons en ce moment, sous nos yeux. L'insécurité qui gagne des villes entières qui étaient paisibles il y a vingt ans. Le conflit de Gaza importé dans nos rues et instrumentalisé par une gauche qui a troqué l'ouvrier contre le clientélisme communautaire. La misère qui revient dans un pays qui a pourtant un des taux de dépense publique les plus élevés au monde. Des classes moyennes qui travaillent et n'arrivent plus à se loger. Une France fracturée, où l'on parle désormais à voix haute de risque de guerre civile. Ce ne sont pas des accidents. Ce ne sont pas des « crises » successives sans lien entre elles. Ce sont les pièces du moteur qui commencent à voler. C'est la conséquence logique de cinquante ans de socialisme international : un système qui a détruit la responsabilité, la frontière, la monnaie, l'école et la fierté, et qui découvre qu'à haute vitesse, tout ce qui a été détruit ne peut plus être compensé par une ligne de dette supplémentaire. Et c'est là que je deviens profondément optimiste. Parce qu'une fois qu'on a compris ça, on comprend aussi que leur projet a une date de fin. Pas une date politique. Une date physique. Un système qui consomme plus qu'il ne produit, qui punit ceux qui créent et récompense ceux qui détruisent, qui finance son présent en hypothéquant l'avenir de ses enfants, ne peut pas durer indéfiniment. Il n'est pas soutenable par construction. L'IA ne fait qu'avancer l'échéance. Le mensonge a besoin de lenteur pour survivre. Il a besoin que les conséquences arrivent assez tard pour qu'on puisse accuser quelqu'un d'autre. Dans un monde à 20 000 tours, les conséquences arrivent immédiatement. Le mensonge n'a plus le temps de se cacher. Alors, que faire quand le moteur explose ? On en construit un nouveau. Et cette fois, on le conçoit correctement. Écoutez Elon Musk. Un homme qui a reconstruit l'industrie spatiale, la voiture électrique et l'infrastructure satellite en partant d'un principe simple : revenir aux premiers principes. Ne pas demander « comment on a toujours fait », mais « qu'est-ce qui est physiquement vrai ». C'est exactement ce dont nos États ont besoin : arrêter de rafistoler et repartir de la base. Écoutez Javier Milei. Un homme dont tout le monde se moquait, arrivé à la tête d'un pays ravagé par un siècle de péronisme, et qui a pris la tronçonneuse au sens propre. Ministères supprimés, dépenses coupées, inflation écrasée, excédent budgétaire retrouvé. Il a prouvé une chose que la gauche jurait impossible : on peut démonter le moteur socialiste et le peuple peut le soutenir. Écoutez Milton Friedman. Relisez-le. Tout était déjà là. La monnaie, la liberté de choisir, la responsabilité, les effets pervers de l'intervention publique. Il disait que si l'on confiait le Sahara au gouvernement fédéral, il y aurait pénurie de sable en cinq ans. On a ri. On a confié le sable. On a eu la pénurie. Revenez à une hiérarchie et au respect du beau. Une civilisation ne tient pas que sur des chiffres. Elle tient sur l'idée qu'il existe des choses supérieures à d'autres. Que l'excellence vaut mieux que la médiocrité. Que le mérite compte. Qu'une cathédrale est plus belle qu'un parking. Que transmettre est un devoir et pas une oppression. Le relativisme a été l'arme culturelle de ce projet. Le retour du beau, du vrai et de l'exigence en sera l'antidote. Et enfin, faites le Nuremberg du communisme. Le nazisme a été jugé, documenté, enseigné, et il est devenu moralement indéfendable. Le communisme, avec ses dizaines de millions de morts, ses goulags, ses famines organisées et ses peuples réduits en esclavage, n'a jamais eu ce procès. On peut encore porter un t-shirt du Che dans une université sans que personne ne cille. Tant que ce procès historique et moral n'aura pas eu lieu, l'idéologie continuera de muter et de revenir sous de nouveaux noms. Il faut nommer les crimes, les enseigner, honorer les victimes, et rendre cette idéologie aussi infréquentable que celle qu'elle prétendait combattre. Le monde qui vient sera plus rapide, plus exigeant et plus impitoyable avec les systèmes mal conçus. C'est une terrible nouvelle pour ceux qui ont vécu du mensonge. Et c'est la meilleure nouvelle de notre génération pour tous ceux qui veulent construire. Le moteur va exploser. À nous de dessiner le suivant.
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Edgar Breau retweeted
The Empire suppressed the self-immolation of widows and female infanticide in India and female genital mutilation in Africa. It moderated the disruptive impact of the inevitable arrival of Western modernity upon very unmodern societies in North America and especially Australia. It created regional peace by imposing an overarching imperial authority on multiple, warring peoples—unifying, for example, much of the Indian subcontinent. It promoted a worldwide free market, protected by the Royal Navy, that gave native producers and entrepreneurs in India and West Africa new economic opportunities. It made foreign investment attractive by reducing risk through establishing political stability and the rule of law. Consequently, Australia’s gross domestic product per capita became the highest in the world by 1890, and by 1914 India was the world’s fourth largest textile-producer. The Empire built canals in India, bringing five times as much land under irrigation as the Mughals had in the 18th century. By 1900 it had figured out how to prevent food shortage escalating into famine there and went on to fight disease in tropical Africa. It provided a civil service and judiciary that was generally and extraordinarily incorrupt. It introduced liberal ideas and liberal institutions of a free press and representative government to places that had never known them. New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant the vote to men and women on equal terms, in 1893, and by 1935 electoral democracy had been established in Indian provinces. From May 1940, when France fell, to June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, The British Empire offered Nazi Germany the only military resistance—with the sole exception of Greece. Inspired by the ideal of the Commonwealth, it helped to plan and realise the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations after 1945. And it brought up three of the most prosperous and liberal states in the world—Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and gave birth to one more, the United States. Significantly, there is evidence that all of these former members of the British Empire are among the least racist countries on earth. Read our latest here: nigelbiggar.co.uk/p/empire-a…
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In the Reference re Secession of Quebec case, the Supreme Court did not dismiss the potential separation of a province as treasonous or illegitimate. It treated it as a serious democratic and constitutional question.  The Court stated:  “A functioning democracy requires a continuous process of discussion… No one has a monopoly on truth, and our system is predicated on the faith that in the marketplace of ideas, the best solutions to public problems will rise to the top. Inevitably, there will be dissenting voices. A democratic system of government is committed to considering those dissenting voices.”  The Court explained that our democratic institutions accommodate “a continuous process of discussion and evolution,” including the right of each participant in Confederation to initiate constitutional change.  The Court also explained what would happen if the people of a province clearly expressed a desire to leave Canada stating:  “The continued existence and operation of the Canadian constitutional order could not remain indifferent to a clear expression of a clear majority of Quebecers that they no longer wish to remain in Canada.”  In other words, a referendum does not itself cause separation or change the Constitution. A clear majority voting on a clear question would instead give the democratic legitimacy for constitutional negotiations. It does not guarantee any particular outcome.  Yet many people are making things up about how this process would work. They suggest that merely discussing independence, advocating for it or even voting in a referendum would somehow automatically change Canada’s constitutional order. That is simply not true. It is fearmongering.  If Quebecers were entitled to have that discussion, Albertans are entitled to have it too. The Supreme Court even set out the process a province would have to follow, and Parliament later confirmed that process in the Clarity Act.  One may support independence, oppose it or remain undecided. But calling the discussion extremist is not an argument, calling its supporters traitors is not an answer, and shaming citizens into silence is not democracy.  If the discussion is lawful and the process is clearly set out in Canadian law, why is there so much vitriol toward the citizens who want to have it?  That question reveals what this is really about.  It is not fundamentally about right and left.   The real divide is not between neighbours who vote differently. It is between unaccountable power and a public demanding answers.
Asking a question is not treason. Silencing the debate isn’t democracy. Albertans have the right to advocate for independence. The Supreme Court already treated secession as a lawful democratic question. @echipiuk’s full speech at We Unify 2026
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Poland has a civilizational role. A civilizational role is not measured in GDP. It is measured in what you refuse. Look at the map. Poland is a plain. No Alps, no Channel, no ocean – nothing between Berlin and Moscow but fields and forests. Other nations got their borders from geography. Poland had to make its border out of people. That is why resistance here is not a policy. It is the national character. When the land cannot defend you, you become the wall. Three times, the wall held for everyone else. 1683, Vienna: the Polish king arrives with his cavalry, and Europe stays Europe. 1920, Warsaw: the Red Army is stopped at the Vistula, and communism does not reach Berlin and Paris – not then. 1980, Gdańsk: a shipyard strike becomes a nation, and the Soviet empire starts to crack from inside. Each time, the West thanked Poland briefly and forgot quickly. That is part of the pattern too. The fourth time is different. The invader does not come with tanks. It comes with forms, directives, and a vocabulary. Poland recognizes it at once – because Poland has already lived it. Zakłamanie: everyone knows the official story is false, everyone repeats it anyway. Obłuda: the institutions preach virtue and practice the opposite. The West calls this progress. Poland calls it communism – and remembers the smell. That is the mechanism. Poland had the disease and survived it. It carries the antibodies. The West never had communism at home, so it has no immunity – it cannot see the Lie when it wears a suit and speaks of values. And there is a deeper rule. Centers forget. Frontiers remember. The capital grows comfortable and produces the ideas that dissolve it; the frontier still remembers what the walls were built to protect. Rome did not fall at the edges. It fell when the center stopped believing in itself. Poland is the frontier that still believes. It still knows that some things are not up for negotiation: a family is a family, a nation is a nation, a lie is a lie. The West has put all of them on the table, one committee at a time. Poland never sat down at that table. So Poland’s role is not to catch up with the West. It is not even to join the West. It is to remind the West what the West was. And if the West refuses to remember – to carry it alone, until the West comes back for it.
🔘 What We Defend, What We Fight For – What This Is All About In Warsaw in 2017, beside the monument to the Uprising, Donald Trump said: "Our values will prevail." He listed them – faith and family, symphonies, innovation, the rule of law, free speech, the dignity of every life, liberty, sovereignty. A good list. But a list is not a framework. The Polish historian Feliks Koneczny offered one. A civilization, he said, is a method of organizing collective life – and no society can live by two incompatible methods at once. Poland, for him, was the eastern outpost of Latin civilization: Greece, Rome, and Western Christianity. That civilization was built in layers. 🔘 From the Greeks Truth, goodness, beauty. Spiritual goods above material ones – that is the Latin order of things. Science. Reason, evidence, open to criticism, open to new methods. Freedom of inquiry, limited only by the protection of human beings. Copernicus studied in Kraków. Marie Curie was born in Warsaw. 🔘 From Rome Law. Justice is giving each person their due. No retroactive laws. No one forced to incriminate himself. Poland guaranteed – long before England’s Habeas Corpus – no imprisonment without a court judgment. Two spheres. Public and private are distinct. The state is not the ruler’s property, and governing a territory does not mean owning everything in it. Law is subject to ethics – passing a statute does not make it right. Property. A basic right, protected against the state itself. Koneczny judged every civilization by three things: family, property, inheritance. In the Latin model, all three protect the person against an all-powerful state. 🔘 From Christianity The Ten Commandments. The foundation of personal and public morality. Universalism. No one is above moral judgment – not by birth, not by rank. A Polish scholar argued before a church council that pagan peoples had the right to their own states and could not be converted by the sword. The person. Each person answers for his own acts. No collective guilt, no herd. Self-reliance is a virtue. John Paul II built his philosophy on this. Dignity. Every human life has it, regardless of age, health, or ability. The family. Monogamous marriage. Parents and children above the clan. Time. Not to be wasted. A bond between generations – memory of the past, responsibility for the future. Self-government. Society organizes itself from the bottom up, and rulers and ruled answer to the same morals. "Nothing about us without us." Ten million Poles lived it in Solidarity. Defense. A duty of citizens, not a job for hired soldiers. Subsidiarity. The higher level does only what the lower ones cannot – the family first, then the town, then the region. The nation. A spiritual and cultural community held together by allegiance, not blood. "Ruthenian by origin, Polish by nation," as one Renaissance writer described himself. 🔘 The Modern Layer Liberty – yours ends where another’s rights begin. "For our freedom and yours" – a Polish motto. Free speech – full, won against censors, kept alive under Communism by émigré and underground presses. Religious toleration – the state does not impose a faith. While Europe burned heretics, Poland was a state without stakes. Its king: "I am not the king of your consciences." This fits with the Commandments: conscience binds the person; the state compels only what law may compel. Pluralism – different faiths and ways of life under one law. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews and Armenians shared the old Commonwealth. Excellence – not just living alongside each other, but learning from the best. 🔘 So Only when we know what these values are and where they come from can we argue about them seriously. Are they sound? Do they hold together, or pull apart? Are they worth defending? Trump said our values will prevail. They will – if we can still name them. A civilization that cannot say what it stands for has already started to lose it.
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I don't know why Quebec folk songs are going viral on X but they're irresistible. Vive le Québec libre !
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Edgar Breau retweeted
The Supreme Court ruled today that judges MUST "meaningfully engage" with the recommendations of a sentencing circle when sentencing indigenous offenders. The court also upheld a lighter sentence for an indigenous man who severely beat his girlfriend. scc-csc.ca/judgments-jugemen…
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Czesław Miłosz – How Brilliant People Surrender to a Lie. The most precise book ever written about how intelligent people surrender to a lie was written by a man who had served one himself – and then stopped. Czesław Miłosz. Poet. Nobel Prize, 1980. After the war he served communist Poland as a diplomat in Washington and Paris. In 1951 he defected. Two years later he published The Captive Mind. 1. His question was not why ordinary people submitted. Fear explains that. His question was why the brilliant ones did – the writers, the professors, the poets. Often before anyone forced them. Often with enthusiasm. 2. The first answer was a pill. Miłosz took the image from a Polish novel written before the war. An army from the East is about to conquer Europe, and people start taking a little pill. It makes them stop resisting. The fear goes away because the judgment goes away: they no longer see the conquerors as conquerors, and when the army arrives, they welcome it. Miłosz watched his friends take the same pill – the communist doctrine. It explained everything, so they no longer had to look. It promised that history was on its side, so surrender felt like wisdom. It filled the emptiness modern man felt when the old faith died – with a lie. That is what the pill does: it lets you live inside the lie without feeling it. 3. The second answer was the double life. Miłosz called it Ketman, after an old Persian practice: keep your true beliefs hidden, show only obedience. Outside, you say what is required. Inside, you think what you like. Done long enough, it stops feeling like lying. It becomes a way of life – even a private pride: I play their game, but I know better. The professional who serves the regime so he can keep working. The patriot who collaborates "to save what can be saved." The skeptic who believes nothing and recites everything. Everybody knew. Everybody performed. That is how a lie survives with almost no believers. 4. He drew four portraits of writer friends – the moralist, the disappointed lover, the slave of history, the troubadour – and showed each of them surrendering for a different reason. The lesson is uncomfortable: there is no single type of collaborator. The system has a door for every temperament. 5. The West didn’t want to hear it. Miłosz saw that people who had never lived through war, occupation and terror could not imagine how quickly their own convictions might collapse. In Paris, the intellectuals treated him as the problem, not the regime. Pablo Neruda attacked him as a deserter. 6. Then came 1980. The Nobel Prize. And the same year, in Gdańsk, the workers of Solidarity carved his verses into the monument to their fallen comrades. The nation he had left put his words in stone. 7. The pill is still on sale. Only now it is swallowed for status rather than out of fear – and nobody needs a secret police, at least officially. Ketman is everywhere: the employee nodding through the diversity training, the academic signing the letter he doesn’t believe, the journalist who knows and doesn’t write. Read Miłosz today and you will recognize your office. He showed that a mind is not captured by force. It is captured by fear, ambition and the hunger to belong. And it is freed the same way it was captured: one person at a time – the moment he stops pretending.
James Burnham – The Trotskyist Who Saw How It Would End. He was a Trotskyist first. In the 1930s he was one of the leading Marxist intellectuals in America – building the movement, debating Trotsky himself by letter, believing in the revolution. But he was also an American. A practical mind, trained to look at what actually happens rather than what the theory promises. So he understood what it was really about – and explained to us how it would work out. 1. In 1940 he broke with Trotsky over one question: what was the Soviet Union? Trotsky said a workers’ state, temporarily deformed. Burnham looked at it and saw something else: a new ruling class. The workers owned nothing. The capitalists were gone. Someone else was in charge – the people who ran the machine. Trotsky spent much of his last year writing against him. Burnham was right. 2. In 1941 he generalized it in The Managerial Revolution. The future would belong neither to the capitalists nor to the workers, but to the managers – the administrators, technicians and bureaucrats who control things without owning them. Capitalism would fall, he wrote – but not to the working class. To the managers. The capitalist, who risks his own fortune, would be replaced by the manager, who risks nothing, owns nothing and runs everything. That is the whole difference. The capitalist pays for his own mistakes. The manager’s mistakes are always paid by someone else – the shareholder, the taxpayer, the citizen. Burnham saw the same class rising in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and New Deal America. Different flags, the same new masters. And he said what it meant: the end of capitalism and of freedom – even if the façade stayed standing. 3. Orwell read it, argued with it – and borrowed from it. The three superstates of 1984 come from Burnham. So does its ruling class, which owns everything collectively and nothing personally. 4. In 1943 came The Machiavellians. Burnham studied the realists – Machiavelli and his modern heirs, like Pareto – and drew the lesson idealists never want to hear: every society is run by an elite. The only question is whether there is more than one. Freedom does not come from the absence of elites. It comes from their competition – rival powers that check each other, a free press, an opposition that can actually win. A single elite with no rival is tyranny, whatever it calls itself. 5. Now look at what the long march actually produced. Not the rule of the workers. The rule of the managers – the administrators of the ministries, the regulators in Brussels, the HR departments, the editorial boards. The façade of capitalism still stands – but who actually rules? Corporate boards spending other people’s money on other people’s ideologies. Officials in Brussels. Directors of foundations and NGOs. No voter elected them. The revolution succeeded. Only the managers won it. Gramsci designed the march. Burnham told us who would be waiting at the end of it. A class that owns nothing, answers to no voter, pays for none of its mistakes, and runs almost everything. 6. In 1964 he wrote Suicide of the West. Its verdict: liberalism – the modern progressive kind, not the classical one – is "the ideology of Western suicide." It lets a civilization accept its own retreat and feel good about it. Every loss becomes a sign of progress. Sixty years later, it reads like a description of Brussels. 7. The ex-Trotskyist ended up a founding editor of National Review, and in 1983 Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. From Trotsky’s comrade to Reagan’s medal. He knew the left from the inside, and he had the American instinct to ask the only question that matters: not what the theory promises, but who ends up in charge. In 1941 his answer was the managers. It still is – unless a rival elite rises. For the first time in decades, one has: builders, not administrators. Burnham would have recognized the moment. Not a revolution – a rotation.
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