History Hit Why Isn’t Canada the 51st State? Trump thinks it should be, and in this episode Dan Snow goes through the various attempts that have been made in the past to achieve this end. When the 13 colonies rebelled, they hoped that the French colonists in North America would join them and rise up against the British. But the Catholic French were not keen to align themselves with these land-hungry Puritans and so they stuck with the devil they knew. In 1775 the first US military action was an attempt to annex Canada, and in 1812 with Britain at a low ebb after the Napoleonic Wars, they tried again. The 1812 War ended with the boundaries remaining much as they were when the war started. In 1844 President Polk, the successor and protege to Trump’s hero Andrew Jackson, wanted to take all the west coast up to Alaska as part of America’s ‘manifest destiny’. During the Civil War, the British in Canada were friendly towards the Confederates and after the Civil War Charles Sumner demanded the whole of Canada in reparations payments. Instead, the US settled for 15 million pounds and an apology. In 1911 Canadians wanted lower tariffs but big business wanted Protection, and when the Conservatives won, they wanted higher tariffs against US goods. In 1948 Newfoundland had a referendum about self government or integration with Canada, but joining the USA was not one of the options. So, although Trump’s rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state is not new, he is drawing on older sentiments like small government, tariffs and manifest destiny. I hope that Canada stands strong.
The Rest Is History Episode 230 Portugal: Football, Fado and Fascism? (Part 4) By the 1820s, Portugal had lost Brazil, and although it still had a few enclaves throughout the world, it called itself a ‘pluri-continental nation’ rather than an empire. There was a sense of stagnation and nostalgia, exemplified by saudade , a sense of longing for something that will never come again, and expressed through Fado music. There was a Republic in Portugal during WWI, but it was a disaster. Portugal supported Britain and France during WWI but it was a time of tension between the Liberals and devout Catholics. It was the time of Our Lady of Fatima, who prophesied the Russian Revolution (and gave 2 other prophesies as well, which are in the keeping of the Vatican). In 1926 after years of chaos under the Republic, there was an army coup and they called on Salazar, a professor of economics to fix their problems. A deeply conservative man who disliked modernity, he only lasted 5 days, so to keep him, the army generals kept giving him more power. By 1932 he was Prime Minister, but interestingly, never President. He did sort out the economy, and was seen as an important and useful tool by the army, landowners, the church and the conservative forces in Portuguese society. Although he copied much of the iconography of Fascism, he doesn’t fit neatly into the category of Fascist. He always served at the pleasure of the President, and although he had secret police and political prisoners, only about 50-100 prisoners died as the result of torture or assassination- bad enough, but nothing compared with the other Fascist leaders of the time. He hated both Franco and the Communists, and was benign towards the Nazis and flew the flag at half-mast when Hitler died. However, Britain was more important as a long-time ally, and so Portugal remained neutral during WWII, although its diplomats did provide visas for Jews to escape Hitler. He was a founding member of NATO as part of his anti-Communist stance, and he knew the importance of popular events and so championed football (soccer) with Portugal winning several World Cups. But he was becoming increasingly politically isolated, eventually having links only with South Africa and Rhodesia at a time when no-one else was talking to them. In 1968 he suffered a stroke from which he was not expected to recover, and so the President dismissed him and appointed another academic technocrats. But no-one told Salazar, who believed that he was still Prime Minister. He is an unsettling, ambiguous figure: not a clear ‘baddie’ but backward looking and deeply conservative in a world that had changed.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 