I’m pretty sure that if he publicly says he’s going to disobey orders, that’s grounds for removal, even under a sane president. (Although a sane president might not choose to remove him)
This is almost certainly why he won’t answer the question either way. If he says that he wouldn’t, Trump would just fire him and replace him with someone that says they would privately, away from any public scrutiny at all.
It would be a net negative for everyone other than fascists.
It’s a pointless question. If he answers no truthfully he gets fired. If he lies and says ‘yes’ to keep his job we get undue anxiety when there already enough of that going around from memes and trade wars.
As a Canadian I wish they would all get fired. Fuck em. Worthless disrespectful people. Never met a US soldier worthy of the air they breathe. Inbred illiterstes the lot of them. Suckers and losers.
Especially if they’re lawful orders, like this.
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Have they said no to any of the USA’s other illegal invasions? Don’t count on the bravery of Americans who tell you they would resist. Count on drones.
The military doesn’t promote officers for refusing orders.
If the USA invades, the white house gets burned down again and Trump gets ICC arrested.
Jokes aside its quite possible. Ukrainian partnerships with canada on domestic drone production, the US would burn perpetually if they dared. They are projecting a weak canada to save face, but they dare not mistaken canadian politeness for weakness. There is a reason Trump says we are the hardest do deal with of any country. Because we are done putting up with their shit. To be Canadian means to not be Amerikkkan.
The US is the only country to have used nukes in war
Remember the wildfires earlier this year? The US would irradiate themselves if they nuked Canada. Sure, Trump might try to piss into the wind, but the rest are way too selfish to let him.
Depends how they use the nuke. Airbursts are pretty clean
Vapourising/torching cities would be an unlawful order, though. And still far fetched; they want to own us, not kill us all.
Not really. People love in Hiroshima today. I visited the dome where the nuke landed.
They could drop several without any real issues, and they’ve already planned for that.
The Canadian military relies heavily on the US partnership, not to mention the average urban Canadian has never seen, held or heard a firearm, as much as liked to say that we have a chance it’s certainly would be a slim one.
The fuck kind of argument is that? How hard could it be to learn to use a gun? Students in the USA use it all the time.
Guns are stupidly easy to use. They do need training to use WELL but the most it would take is a few weeks for basic firefight skills. Most of it is knowing how to move from cover to cover and not exposing yourself.
During the first flair up of annexation threats the Canadian Forces revealed they were preparing for a possible conflict that would require them to learn from their loss to the Taliban. There is no true dependency on the US if push comes to shove.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/canadian-military-insurgent-techniques
Edit: also, the US is actively losing to Iran, dont count Canada out so quickly.
Shutting down the St. Lawrence seaway would probably not be difficult for a determined insurgency.
The strait of Hormuz might be pennies compared to that.
Forget the Canadian military, if the US couldn’t defeat the Taliban with NATO help, what hope do they have against Canadians without it?
Canadians aren’t even a different skin color - what is the US going to do, stop and question every white person with a gun? Every white person traveling long distances in a car?
Oh hey look now the Rocky Mountains are impassable by land because there are Canadian resistance hidden in caves all the way down to Mexico. But surely the western seaboard and its population will be loyal to Trump, right?
And so it goes. An invasion of Canada would dissolve the USA in a few years.
One major difference. Canada has had more Intel and data integration with the US for much much longer than Iraq or Afghanistan. This means palantir and other Intel gathering companies have far, far more shit on Canadians that might have an inkling of resistance against the US, and do not think they will spare or be nicer to Canadians. They will absolutely round up everyone they can or their families. It will actually be harder for Canadians to fight back than the others.
Sure, lots of people will get rounded up, but how many will slip the net? How many hundreds of thousands of partisans are spread over tens of millions of square kilometers of rural Canada? How thin can US patrols and round-up efforts spread themselves before they become convenient sources of weapons and ammunition as they are set upon by IEDs and household drones with weapons taped to them? What does it help the US if they know the porn preferences of the guy living in the woods sniping US servicemen?
And then there’s the American partisans who understand this is the best time to rebel they are ever going to get. With so many loyalists deployed to Canada, are there still enough to respond to riots, sieges of police buildings, prison breaks, acts of sabotage, etc. in the US? Maybe they can be tracked (or maybe the cameras will be destroyed en masse), but are there enough boots on the ground to stop them?
But the opposite is also true, and it’s much easier for Canadians to counter attack on US soil than for anyone else.
Why don’t you google per capita firearm ownership, lol.
2.4 million folks who have their PAL in this country with a population of 40.5 million people, that’s 6.17% of the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_and_Acquisition_Licence
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/canada-population/
It’s important to note while people may have their PAL, they don’t necessarily own firearms.
Canada is 7th in the world in terms of firearms per capita. I’m sure we’d be okay.
We’d run out of ammunition first
Sharp sticks with shit on them will do, as we’ve seen from history.
Also important to note most who do have a PAL and who do have firearms, usually have more than one.
The military isn’t my concern. I’m interested how many of us would form gangs jumping the vast undefended border to cosplay as MAGA while attacking infrastructure and lighting forests on fire for years and years. Hopefully I never find out.
I’ll bring the marshmallows
What a stupid ragebait headline. Of course a geneneral is not going to even suggest they would disobey a hypothetical lawful order. Why would someone end their career for some journalists gocha question?
Says nothing about his private thoughts or what he would actually do. Zero information value.
How is that a lawful order??
How is bombing a wedding a lawful order?
The military is trained to be mindless sychophants.
It’s technically not illegal to invade another country unprovoked. It’s illegal to do war crimes though. You can invade a country and annex it without committing warcrimes.
I guess if your shit hole country doesn’t adhere to international law.
No it is literally illegal to invade another country unprovoked, the crime is called “war of aggression”. It is one of the foundational pillars of international law. The Nuremberg judgement called aggressive war the “supreme international crime”. This is the reason US shuns and delegitimizes the ICC and the ICJ, the two bodies supposedly enforcing international law.
It is also separately illegal to annex another country even by mere threat of force, even if no actual force was used.
War isn’t actually illegal. I know it feels like it should be, but it really isn’t. People say a war is “illegal” because I suppose they feel like it carries more weight than to just say it’s “immoral”. I guess it’s somehow comforting to people to think that somehow some lawyers could prevent countries from going to war somehow.
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It isn’t, but Congress is pretending it is which is the same thing.
Lawful /= you agree with it, basically.
To see why this is definitely within the powers the president has, swap “Canada” for “Vietnam”, “Iraq” or “Iran”. For more detail, you’d have to refer to the actual laws of war the US government recognises.
Sounds like it’s high time America was dissolved and balkanized, then.
There isn’t any nation where the military can just disagree. Even under a military junta, it’s only the junta itself that gets a say; everyone lower down must follow orders (even the ones involving atrocities, in that case. The West is weird for exempting something).
That said, yeah, America isn’t looking so good these days.
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It never did. It was founded on genocide and slavery.
Yes, .ml person. I’m sure you believe that. And also that North Korea is better, somehow. 'Nuff said.
Edit: Clearly, the username is ironic, with this much effort to get into a fight.
I believe in history, lol? Why are you bringing up North Korea?
Is your brain okay?
Edit: clearly this person wasn’t interested in a conversation at all, based on my instance, lol?
If you don’t believe that both the US and Canada were founded on unspeakable genocide (which inspired the holocaust BTW) and slavery you are delusional. North Korea (for all its faults) was founded by those who resisted and fought the genocidal oppressors. Read a damn book.
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Because its a hypothetical where the journalist didnt specify “unlawful order”. Its a bs gocha question. There are hypothetical situations where it would be lawful, regardless of how likely.
If anything, I’d give him credit for not saying yes. Hell in the current climate that might get you removed.
If the US tried it Canada would make Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc look like a casual sunday stroll in the park. If the US couldn’t handle Guerrilla warfare against people who DON’T look like them, imagine how well they’ll do against people that do. And the further north they got the more fucked they’d be. Ever been in a fight with a pissed off Indigenous individual? try it, see how far you get. Not only that you got all the dudes living in the bush with rifles and god knows what else.
People who look like them, sound like them and know all the same pop culture, including supposedly local stuff like news anchors.
There’s not many shibboleths they could use, and usually they pick a really obvious one. I pledge…
And the further north they got the more fucked they’d be
Doesn’t like 90% of Canada’s population live within 100 km of the border? Not much reason to even go that far north unfortunately
No need to take the minerals, oil and water that are abundant in those northern places?
Ehhh. Most of the extraction happens in the south too, because you need workers (edit: and reasonably low shipping costs). Like, Fort Mac is a little further north, but it’s still below 60N, in Alberta.
Mining and O&G put together are like 5% of Canada’s GDP. All the valuable real estate and I suspect much of the industries other than mining and logging are concentrated in the major cities. You’d get like 90% of the benefits from controlling 10% of the country. Not that I’d expect Trump to realize this. Luckily he seems to be as dumb as he is evil.
But it’s a good portion of our exports. Hairdressers aren’t super relevant for an occupying force.
Although, resource extraction wouldn’t be the point of this war. There’s lots of much softer, easier to propagandise about targets out there, if they just wanted an encore of colonialism.
Hairdressers aren’t super relevant for an occupying force.
That’s fair. But I’m pretty sure most of the manufacturing is still near where the population is since workers are needed. And if they decide to go full settler mode, all the urban areas will be free to occupy if Canadians are out in the forests defending the homeland.
But tbf, it is Trump we’re talking about. He would probably want the oil more than anything, even if there’s so much else that would be much easier to take.
The plan is to follow the Taliban’s example, it sounds like, so there’d be both rural and urban activity reinforcing each other, and the point would be to make properly occupying all cities at once fairly impossible.
Trump’s main motive seems to improvement of the US’s size and border shape on a map. Probably, Like in Afghanistan, resources are besides the point. Although he’s not going to say no if he can manage it.
Regardless that at least 70% of Americans would join the Canadians
Or at least passively support us, which works.
I imagine people would start moving away from the border if an actual fighting war broke out
Quebec’s revenge would land on Trump
This might be the most delusional thing I’ve ever seen commented on Lemmy.
Why?
Like, it’s a little imaginative in parts. But Canada is bigger than Afghanistan in every way, and not weak in any of the same ways.
Because it is delusional. Afghanistan is a world away, has strong cultural influence for that kind of combat, and isn’t filled with people who came to the country with the intention of going to the USA.
When surveyed about 49% of Canadians say they wouldn’t fight for their country. 10% would welcome being annexed by the USA- after all, many people only come to Canada because they couldn’t get into the usa. We don’t have anything close to the resolve afgans have, and we don’t have the stomach for war. Sure, we have some elite snipers, but snipers an army do not make.
There’s no point in this conversation though, because anybody who thinks Canada stands a snowballs chance in hell against the USA is a full scale invasion isn’t going to respond to reason.
and isn’t filled with people who came to the country with the intention of going to the USA.
Not really a common thing, as someone who lives here. Do you live here? You have a .ca user, but that’s a really weird take.
There’s no point in this conversation though, because anybody who thinks Canada stands a snowballs chance in hell against the USA is a full scale invasion isn’t going to respond to reason.
Oh, we’d lose. For a bit. So did the Taliban.
If you want to stop there, so be it. There is more to say, though.
I don’t know what the definition of common is, but it’s about 10% of people in Canada when polled would welcome becoming US citizens. It was Angus Reid which is known to be heavily botted, so ymmv
And the American count for becoming a Canadian citizen might be 30%, and that 10% is going to be mostly Canadian born. Hell, aside from the tax requirements, I’d take a green card. It wouldn’t hurt! I still wouldn’t move there.
In any war, most people don’t fight. The Taliban was never anywhere close to most Afghans. Afghans are more used to war and harsh conditions, but again, there’s massive advantages we have they didn’t, as well.
Alright, I accept you think Canada can beat the USA in a full scale war.
I don’t believe it, and your comment didn’t convince me otherwise. On the contrary, it reinforced my existing beliefs.
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The reporter pointed out that Paparo did not answer the question. The U.S. admiral said he was dismissing the issue, adding: “Would you ask me please also what my attack plans are for the Martians?”
The reporter replied: “You belittle it and I don’t think that’s the right approach at all. This is a serious question about a serious issue.”
A Nanos poll taken in February found that three in five Canadians are concerned about the U.S. being a potential threat to Canadian sovereignty. A majority also support making it illegal for Canadians to serve in the U.S. military, according to a poll commissioned by The Maple in April.
Despite Trump’s threats, however, Canadian government ministers have continued to stress Canada’s continued cooperation with the Americans on military affairs.
I’ve got some family in the military, and they’ve served in Europe both before and after Trump. They said there hasn’t been any actual decrease in cooperation while overseas between the US and us, and everyone they talk to makes it clear how ridiculously an order would be taken to invade.
That being said, their last deployment was July last year, so things may have changed. Also he did note that none said they’d reject the order - just how ridiculous the whole situation was. Hoping we never have to find out.
Said it before and will say it again. This is why I feel running to another country you have to think about. We have this insanely large military and a lot of damage can be done with it. We need to protest and refuse to work and whatever else we can do.
Invade with what?
Didn’t they waste all their armament on Iran? And I doubt U.S. soldiers would actually follow that kind of order without any objection. They’re stupid, but not that stupid.
However. Maybe it’s time I apply for that gun license…
Now that they charge themselves 100% tariff on drones …
Jokes aside, I say we should get ready. Everybody can gain or polish some relevant skills that come in handy if it comes to it.
Best case you have a new hobby, worst case we make their life miserable if they decide to try and attack us.
Well, I suppose it’s better than an enthusiastic “Yes!”
At least they still have the decency to be embarrassed about it.
At least they still have the decency to be embarrassed about it.
Hoser Pete Hoekstra enters the room.
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‘preposterous’. meaning ‘not legal’
I don’t think this is necessarily the case. And certainly not a sure thing when reading it into someone else’s words.
(And even if it does mean ‘not a legal order’ … does that mean he’ll actually refuse the order?)
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You really shouldn’t trust the legal interpretations of an LLM. They’re frequently wrong, and, even more dangerously, they’re very, very good at making a wrong answer look right.
In this case, it does seem to be correct, though. The treaty clause has nuances in the way it’s interpreted, but according to the article they’re considered roughly equivalent to federal law. (Sorry for overlooking that and answering wrong elsewhere)
There’s still catches. Prosecution for following unlawful orders is light, and often rests on charging a perpetrator as if they were a private citizen. Violating an international treaty regarding diplomacy doesn’t really have much in the way of criminal penalties, and, even if they did, the NATO treaty doesn’t seem to have a “don’t attack other members” article. Like, it should, but it also doesn’t have a “remove members that attacked other members” clause, because that basically just wasn’t relevant when it was created. (BTW, looking over it, the US is already openly violating article 1 and part of 2)
But sure, if this guy refused to invade Canada, and was court martialled for it, it seems like he’d have a defence.
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There has to be a strong precedent that’s a lawful order.
If invading a country that it seems like you can’t justifiably invade counted, several recent American wars would be remembered quite differently.
AN order like “start bombing schools in Canada” would be a different matter. (Inb4 someone links a time they bombed a school, 'cause West bad)
“Links a time”?
Like at the beginning of the last illegal fucking war they started 6 months ago?
There you go!
It would have been embarrassing if nobody did it after/because I pointed it out.
Did you see a link?
No, because it was recent enough you know exactly what I was talking about.
Funny enough, I’m actually not sure.
Do you still want to give a link?
That’d be playing right into your hands.
Nice try.
Was it, or was it an obvious softball question you were supposed to get?
For anyone reading, the point is actually to not talk to these people, since I don’t like having the same argument over and over again, and it’s messed up they care so much about “winning” in the first place.
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Eh… I think you should maybe still be embarrassed.
Lol no.
That was actually a funny moment. It was supposed to be a 1/3 chance of no response or 2/3 of a different anti-Western canard. Instead, the internet decided to be extra dumb and walk into an obvious blunder.
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Hmm. That’s never come up before, but it sounds plausible. Is there a specific bill that says this?
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I get everyone is making jokes here, but that is serious. Even if many of you genuinely believe Canada could contend with something like a US invasion, I don’t think most of us could bear the cost of even a short conflict. How many of you are already having a hard time affording to live here or have dependents?
Americans need pads to play football, should tell you everything you need to know how they feel about violence…
This comment makes no sense. And, especially with the recognition over the last 10 years that football players experience super high rates of brain trauma/damage, this comment seems… hmmm… <fill in your own adjective>.
it made no sense… to you.
I’m just going to say you may say this, however there’s been many comments about rugby players talking about how the speed and the level of impact is much higher with American football because of the fact that they are wearing pads and it becomes a much more violent hard-hitting overall. Even though rugby is much more fast-paced and typically those players may have a lot more stamina there’s never been much comment about the lack of violence in American sports. So while your comment on the surface seems haha. If you actually know anything about both sports it really doesn’t work.
ok, sure. Americans also sit in trailers with xbox controllers launching hellfire missiles at strangers around the other side of the planet and go home calling themselves ‘veterans.’
