Terence Corcoran: The blockades are a clash over socialism, not Indigenous rights and climate change
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
                                                                        THE MUMMY RETURNS
                                                                        
                                                                        
 
                                                                        Can we now please end this great Canadian delusion, entertained over  the past few weeks, that the blockades leading to Monday’s police  takedowns and Teck Resource’s oilsands decision are part of a momentous  clash over Indigenous rights and climate change? 
                                                                        
                                                                        They are not.
                                                                        
                                                                        The blockades themselves are an ideological construct designed to  help the radical left, socialists and agglomerations of anti-capitalists  to impose a new economic model on Canada — and the rest of the world.
                                                                        
                                                                        The Indigenous aspect is also manufactured, with whole communities  manipulated into fronting for the radical objectives of New Green  Dealers, whose aim is to shut down the world’s major energy system and  usher in the next paradise of equality and clean prosperity via state  takeover.
                                                                        
                                                                        As for the climate, it is merely a pretext, a marketing tool for radicals who aim to bring down capitalism.
                                                                        
                                                                        Nobody knows this better than Naomi Klein, one of the world’s prime  popularizers of the idea that the climate issue is the left’s last great  opportunity for a socialist revolution. As she once said, “The real  solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a  much more enlightened economic system — one that closes deep  inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates  plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power.”
                                                                        
                                                                        On Monday, after Teck Resources pulled the plug on its Frontier  oilsands project, Klein enthusiastically tweeted her support for  Indigenous Climate Action, an activist group that backed the blockades  that shut down much of Canada’s rail industry. 
                                                                        
                                                                        “Congratulations on this  huge win,” said Klein. “You have been tireless in making this happen and  protecting the land, water and planet as a whole. It’s wrenching  watching the Trudeau government violate Indigenous rights across the  country but this is a major victory.”
                                                                        
                                                                        Klein has a right to be satisfied. The rail blockades that have  brought Canada to its knees are modelled on ideas in Klein’s 2014 book,  “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate.” A whole chapter of  the book is titled, “Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors.”
                                                                        
                                                                        The book is a 560-page anti-Enlightenment screed that attempts to  tear down the entire canon of Western thought — from the scientific  method, to Adam Smith and Francis Bacon. To replace all that, she  argued, we need a bottom-up revolution, based on climate change and  Blockadia.
                                                                        
                                                                        Blockadia, writes Klein, is the “only remaining variable” that can be  used to bring down “the “profiteering and escalating barbarism” of the  free enterprise economy. The option is to “block the road, and  simultaneously clear some alternative pathways to destinations that are  safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.”
                                                                        
                                                                        Klein sees manifestations of this resistance in “Blockadia’s fast  multiplying local outposts, the fossil fuel divestment/reinvestment  movement, the local laws barring high-risk extraction, the bold court  challenges by Indigenous groups and others.”
                                                                        
                                                                        It is worth noting, for the benefit of all our green socially  responsible central bankers and financial institution CEOs, that Klein  the socialist revolutionary sees divestment as a kind of financial  Blockadia. “The main power of divestment is not that it financially  harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social  license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to  introduce across-the-board emission reductions,” she argues.
                                                                        
                                                                        In short: while Blockadia demonstrators and activists stand at the  railway barricades to stop the flow of goods and services, before being  hauled away by police, the world’s financial players and institutions  are at the front line of plans to stop the flow of funds to corporations  that are not living up to their environmental, social and green  responsibilities.
                                                                        
                                                                        Financial blockades, in other words, are akin to the rail blockades.  The process of taking on the extractive economy “is leading a great many  people to face up to the underlying democratic crisis.”
                                                                        
                                                                        There can be no doubt about Blockadia’s radical objectives and  Klein’s intentions. Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, are also founders  of the “Leap Manifesto,” a plan to reshape Canada into a socialist  state. The list of Leap backers is long and filled with the names of  social, environmental and community activists, along with bevies of  entertainers and some politicians. No bankers, it would appear. But who  knows?
                                                                        
                                                                        On activist websites such as the Energy Mix, the Blockadia movement  is tracked and mapped as a global phenomena. Real successes are hard to  find. Canada appears to be an exception, perhaps because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has often supported the movement’s objectives. 
                                                                        
                                                                        The current Energy Mix site has a photo of Greenpeace and anti-Teck  student activists occupying the Montreal offices of Heritage Minister  Steven Guilbeault, himself a former blockadist who once scaled Toronto’s  CN Tower as part of a climate protest. “To me, civil disobedience was  never a goal in and of itself. It was just a tool,” Guilbealt has said.
                                                                        
                                                                        Just a tool. But one that appears to be succeeding in Canada, where  climate and fractured Indigenous communities are being used to promote a  radical remake of Canadian society.
                                                                        
                                                                    
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