Sen. David Richards: Battles Are Won Before They Are Fought

Commentary

You fight the enemy where he’s not, said Sun Tzu a few millennia ago. The Chinese general and philosopher should be listened to, for this is what China is doing in their relations with United States.

Don’t worry about Canada. I don’t mean to be impolite, but it seems our government doesn’t, so why should we? Nor am I blaming this government alone. I have lived long enough to know this downward spiral into modern complacency has existed for quite a while through multiple governments, from the time of the Avro Arrow on, and is now almost a state of officious policy.

It was American pilots in F-22’s who shot that impertinent balloon and UFOs out of the sky. The signal is implicit—Canada cannot act on its own behalf—and this is no one’s fault but its own.

I sometimes think Canada is being led not by those I knew in school—who suffered and loved and studied on their own, worked peeling pulp and lent a hand to the forsaken, and with the little money they earned bought coats for their brothers rather than presents for themselves, and cared when no one else did—but by those fine fellows I remember who once joined the glee club, and ran to the principal to tattle if anything in their attire was amiss.

Who knows what leader will bring us forward, turn around like Avril Lavigne and simply tell someone to get the blank off the stage.

Chinese police stations intimidate our citizens, and we who mention this are called anti-Asian. That is not true. In fact, it is Asians we might be trying to protect.

China is mapping out the Arctic and meddling in our elections, and instead of being outraged at this, we attack ourselves in order to look fair-minded. The self-doubting family is always the one to blame themselves, or point fingers at their own, so those outside the family will approve.

Sun Tzu said that battles are often won before they are fought.

Canada is an example of a country which, if not careful, will someday defeat itself.

Does that mean I want conflict? No, I want diligence and a sense of obligation to one’s own, of standing up to outsiders and protecting those we care for.

We can’t seem to make a decision in time, or until pressed by such obligation that it becomes an embarrassment not to act. And then we act, as in the case of purchasing second-hand Australian F-18s, so late it is against simple common sense.

The F-35s will be obsolete by the time we acquire them. Our frigate program is years behind schedule. Woke notions of the world have complicated our military so much that our fighting men and women, as great as they are, have been left in an odd limbo biosphere, where recruitment has fallen below the radar and we can’t even muster a division. As good as our Rangers are, the North is almost undefended, and our seacoasts are woefully open. Our air defences must rely upon NORAD—that is we must rely upon the U.S. participation within NORAD out of Alaskan bases—and we no longer can fuel our own planes up north.

When President Zelenskyy spoke to our Parliament and asked how we would like it if our flag was taken away, he was speaking to a government that had already lowered our flag for over a year in unfelt theatrics. We were being punished by a government that continually signals virtue much more than it feels compassion.

What might this say about us?

It says this: Our country is devouring itself, slowly. Without batting an eye, and without knowing. And if you mention this, they say you do not love your country.

Many people, and many in government, who believe they are tolerant, are filled with such horrid bias toward those simple, hardworking countrymen and women they have never met. They seem to have no shame.

I want the environment to be clean as well—our lakes and rivers clear, our fish and wildlife protected, First Nations to be respected. But if we—that is all of us as a nation—do not protect ourselves, and those we love, and those we want to cherish, and the borders we claim, who will?

Do we have the will to do so? I am not sure anymore.

Though many might not know, many politicians have an affinity with Prince Harry these days. He has accused and berated, smirked and lessened and outed and blasphemed all those he ever knew and who actually cared for him, and still demands an apology, and says there can be no reconciliation without one. Yes, he is the new man in the new world. A man who no longer believes in duty or sacrifice and has traded it all in for a gloomy self-fascination that becomes ever more painful the more it is seen.

The last thing he recognizes is that anyone else—even those who cared about and loved him—might have suffered as well, might have had to fight trauma themselves, might have been lonely and forgotten, but never once thought of airing a grievance to a rapacious opera. So he demands others continually tell him he has suffered more than they.

Like self-absorbed Harry, many in Canada are better at self-pity. It is better to berate our own nation, pretending it is bravery that allows us to do so.

If the United States has a reasonable ally among the former colonies, it is not Canada.  It is Australia, and it should be. They are far less gullible about their position of moral superiority in saving the planet from carbon or exporting their brand of feminism and cutie-pie tolerance.

They don’t believe they are a post-nation nation—they think they have boundaries that are involatile, and theirs. They believe there might be something to fight for. Yes, they have as many internal problems. They have suffered from racism and stigmatization as well. They have their own horror stories, but they know that in order to solve these difficulties they must hang together and be vigilant because there is an enemy at the gates.

The United States is fighting a theory proposed by the master Sun Tzu. They are always fighting or supporting a fight on four fronts. The Chinese are content to be fighting the enemy where he is not.

The madman is loosed in Russia, the psychopath in the Hermit State. Taiwan is under sanction, and the Middle East is the Middle East.

All of this benefits the military aspirations of Xi and puts the United States in a precarious situation.

While we, in Canada, are many days like ferrets attacking each other in a hole.

We can dismiss our obligation to ourselves. We can say our American cousins are imperialists with an empire. We can sit in our dens in our suburban homes and pontificate and determine we are too moral and just to take a stand.

But if we do—if we do—there will at some point come a time where we won’t want to answer the door.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.