A Very Canadian Coup

The Mounties are ready for everything, except for disoriented Polish passengers:

Charged with protecting Canadians, the ever-vigilant Royal Canadian Mounted Police have identified a new threat to national security: a coup d’etat.

The reference to a violent overthrow of the federal government is contained in the RCMP’s plans and priorities report to government for 2010-11. It lists national security as one of five operational priorities for the year.

The document then cites four specific security concerns:

• Espionage and sabotage.

• Foreign-influenced criminal activities detrimental to the interests of Canada.

• Terrorism.

• And ...“activities aimed at overthrowing, by violence, the Government of Canada.”

Oh, sometimes these posts just write themselves. Stephen Harper riding a tank up Parliament Hill? Stockwell Day in jackboots? I suspect some on the loony Left do think that the Harper Conservatives would, given the opportunity, launch a military coup. I think very little of Harper & Co, but putsch artists they are not. Nor would the Canadian military ever countenance such behaviour. 

The difference between Canada, and the average Third World hell hole, isn't so much that the Canadian people wouldn't tolerate a coup - their inertness and deference to authority knows few bounds these days - but that our soldiers have too much integrity. They think too much of our country and its institutions to destroy them. 

I doubt the Mounties are much concerned with an actual military coup. Instead the focus is probably on Islamists with delusions of overthrowing the government, or the odd Quebecois nationalist crack-pot dreaming of reviving the FLQ. Far fetched stuff, but part of maintaining internal security is making contingency plans. Being large bureaucracies, however, we may have more to fear from them than the crackpots. The dangers are real, and the responses aren't always. Case in point:

Canadian author Ian Adams claimed that after the 1963 assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy, CIA counter-intelligence branch head James Jesus Angleton became convinced Pearson was an agent for Russian intelligence and supposedly had information from a Soviet defector backing him up.

Half a century later and the CIA is still incompetent. These are just allegations, but for those familiar with the CIA's modus it sounds plausible. In the fetid imaginations of the American Left, and anarchist Right, the CIA is a sort of super agency of the government, the fulcrum of countless conspiracies. In practice it is a highly bureaucratic organization which, with the exception of a few successful coups in the 1950s, couldn't overthrow a bucket of water. 

Imagining that Lester "Bow Tie" Pearson was a Russian agent is just laugh out funny. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if CIA brass actually believed it, confusing a mild manner progressive statist like Pearson with being an outright communist. We all act accordingly to our nature, including bureaucracies. The nature of the bureaucrat is to elevate form over reality. Whether in believing that Saddam had WMDs, or that Mike Pearson was working for Moscow.

Comments

[crjc]

IIRC Pearson was a Soviet agent, a fact confirmed in the late 90s by declassified Soviet documents. This was during the war, not when he was PM. Wouldn't surprise me if he was on the KGB payroll as PM.

[Publius]

I would be interested to see what evidence you have of that.

[Binks, WebElf]

Hey Publius:

http://sleepyoldbear.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/did-saddam-lie/
http://sleepyoldbear.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/did-saddam-lie/

Saddam was told by his nuke scientists that things were going well. Then Saddam faked out the world by saying he was making such stuff, even when he found out his scientists were lying.

Meanwhile, he really was still hoping to make lotsa WMDs. What little he did have was shipped off to Syria & Jordan post-haste before the Americans invaded.

http://www.google.ca/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=jordan+explosion+saddam+wmds&meta=&btnG=Google+Search

Meanwhile, Syria was actually working on nukes, and nobody knew (except the Israelis, and Syria's allies).

The traditional Dubya-bashing meme of "What WMDs?" is so hollow, discredited and partisan that it doesn't bear dignifying on your otherwise thought-provoking blog.

Yours,

Binks