• Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Canada’s Hundred Days. Aka the last 100 days of WW1.

    Functionally, Canada won WW1 for the allies.

    Being under 10% of the WW1 force, in that period they tackled defences everyone else thought impregnable and shattered them, like the Hindenburg Line, and in the process paved the way for the allied advance. They also took out a quarter of the German forces in that time.

    While they did arguably use proto-blitzkrieg tactics of using lots of machine guns, and then also using vehicles to move troops even quicker while using said machine guns, one of the biggest factors was a prodigious use of chemical weapons.

    To the point that in the interwar period, Canada had the largest capacity and stores of chemical weapons. During WW2, said stockpile is one of the reasons Hitler refused to use chemical weapons on the allies.

    Edit: And a lot of the rules on fair treatment of POWs and rules on capturing surrendered soldiers also stems of Canadian soldiers behaviours during WW1.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      To be fair, French Canadians were overrepresented and didn’t want to be there so they figured if they were super good at it they could go back home ASAP.

      • Narrrz@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        so the French are cowards, Canadians are teddy bears, but somehow when you combine the two they not only cancel our but hyperamplify the opposite?

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          The French will riot for weeks if you raise their retirement age. Americans will just complain online if you take away their human rights.

          The French are not the cowards.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Oxygen isn’t flammable, Oxygen is what reacts with the things that are flammable.

            • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              If I remember my chemistry right, chlorine trifluoride would like to have a chat with you. It’s such a powerful oxidizer that when burned with oxygen, the oxygen is actually the fuel rather than the oxidizer.

              But then this is the stuff that the Nazis decided was too dangerous to use as rocket propellant, then decided it was too dangerous to use as a chemical weapon.

              • merc@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                I don’t want to chat with Chlorine Trifluoride, it’s nasty.

                But yeah, there are some obscure situations where oxygen isn’t the oxidizing agent, but the name “oxidizer” gives a clue how rare that is. In most normal situations, oxygen is the oxidizer and the thing it reacts with is the fuel. Partially that’s due to Oxygen being a good electron acceptor, but mostly it’s because there’s a lot of oxygen in the planet, and anywhere you can have humans you pretty much need to have oxygen.

        • Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Fun fact, numbers to numbers for personnel, vehicles, equipment, air force and navy, France has more stuff than Britain in every category.

          I don’t know too much of how good their stuff is other than the Rafale being a fine piece of tech.

        • Ech@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Two incredibly dumb generalizations proven wrong in this very thread, but people like you are still perpetuating them.

    • Jay@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      In our defense we were jonesing for maple syrup.

      • spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        We’re a simple people, enjoying quiet lives and good standard of living. But threaten our maple syrup - even from afar - and we will give you a reason for the Geneva convention!

    • wombatula@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Also don’t forget the good old Shotgun / Trenchgun, which was seen as an unfair weapon in trench warfare as there was no answer to it in close range and tight corridors.

      Germany literally banned the use of them, Germany.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Genocide of our indigenous population mostly. The worst of it ended in 1996 when the last residential school closed. Basically, the Catholic Church under the authorization of the Canadian Federal Government in the 1800s and onwards, abducted children from indigenous communities, took them to boarding schools where they attempted to assimilate them into Eurocentric culture by punishing them for speaking their own language and practicing their own culture. Beatings, sexual abuse, and neglect were commonplace, with many children dying of illness, exposure, or violence. Many children survived the schools and are still alive today to tell us about it. There are also mass graves at several of these schools where children’s corpses were dumped and hidden from public view, until ground x-ray technology came around and we found the graves.

    Also, random weird fact: women weren’t allowed to have bank accounts in Canada until like 1964.

  • TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The Nazi’s got the term, and concept, ‘final solution’ from a Canadian:

    “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.

    “…the system was open to criticism. Insufficient care was exercised in the admission of children to the schools. The well-known predisposition of Indians to tuberculosis resulted in a very large percentage of deaths among the pupils. They were housed in buildings not carefully designed for school purposes, and these buildings became infected and dangerous to the inmates. It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein.

    (This is why there was a fair bit of anger in Canada when Civ 6 added Wilfred Laurier as Canada’s leader.

    EDIT: I transposed Laurier and MacDonald here, as someone pointed out. The above quotes are from Duncan Campbell Scott, as Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs under MacDonald. Laurier was a key architect of the Residential School system. TLDR; MacDonald started the genocide, Laurier built upon it.)

    • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This reminds me of the murals at the Pawnee city hall in parks and rec

      Side note: for this atrocity, we Canadians punished the Catholic Church by… Checks notes… Publicly funding all Catholic schools in Canada.

      • can@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        And how did we punish the RCMP? By allowing them to still exist and making the old uniforms a national icon.

        • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The RCMP are like the Texas Rangers, they have this clean cut hero PR image, when in reality they’re a bunch of thugs and corrupt narcissists.

          Even our police are fucked up and almost as bad as American cops, never forget the G20!

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        “Publicly funding all Catholic schools in Canada.”

        All the other sentences in this thread are obviously atrocious, but this one is plain old infuriating.

        I know it’s an “American” thing, but the people of a country should never be forced to pay for someone else’s religious bullshit especially when it’s indoctrinating and essentially torturing a portion of the populace.

        • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s fucked we pay for only one specific religion’s education system, especially when that religion has trillions of dollars in their coffers

  • TheMightyCanuck@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    “Good” at war : ✅️

    Human rights : ❌️

    Supporting catholic genocide : ✅️

    We have a really weird history that isn’t really something to be proud of…

    • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And There in lies what annoys me with Trudeau. He is the epitome of the morally pompous kid that shows up in the middle of the fight and decides right then who is the bully and the victim without getting the full story of how the fight started and just doesn’t care. Cringefully and willfully naive with an unhealthy side of ego. The worst kind of Canadian.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        With citizens, ignorance can be an excuse. With politicians, it’s their job to know, and if they’re on the wrong side that pretty much means they’re complicit.

        • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          With politicians in his position they should have intel. So I’m deeply disturbed if his intel on this is lacking why he’s acting this way when even the most basic news outlet is describing it pretty basic. There’s just no way citizens should be that much more educated than their prime minister. If he does have intel no one else has on the citizen level but to then go off calling them as supporting terrorist as a result is just shameful.

  • Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Never ask a woman her age

    Never ask a man his salary

    Never ask Canada what the “indigenous boarding schools” were for

    Never ask Russia, America, Hamas or Israel why they all see the Geneva Convention as a to-do list

  • lad@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    There were also jewish refugees that were not allowed into Canada. Afair, the bigger arsehole in that story was the UK, that panicked and decided that everyone who fled Germany during some 193x–194x must certainly be a german spy. They forcefully moved people to camps, and also to foreign territories, but it didn’t work terribly well with Canada, too.

    I though this to be the article I first heard this story from, but it doesn’t seem to address that. Here I found some more details, e.g. on how refugees were in prisoner of war camps along with actual nazis.

    Edit: But those are likely not related to the question of what Canada did to become example of how Geneva convention should be, so maybe an unnecessary info ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • thelazywriter@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    To add to the list: internment of Hungarian and Ukrainian Canadians in WWI in Canada (some other Eastern Europeans too); internment of Japanese Canadians in WWII in Canada.

  • wombatula@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I love how most of the comments in this thread completely ignore the context of the post, and instead are “Canada bad!” posts that seem to delight in bringing up every horrible thing the country ever did.

  • BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The mask is slipping…

    https://breachmedia.ca/leaked-report-accuses-canada-of-covering-for-mining-companies-in-war-torn-ethiopia/

    The report indicates that new investments by Canadian mining companies in Tigray have increased as the region has been plunged into a major humanitarian crisis from military attacks by the Ethiopian and Eritrean government, whom the United Nations has accused of deliberately “starving Tigrayans.”

    ​​The U.N has warned that hundreds of thousands of people in Tigray face starvation, as the Ethiopian military—backed by Eritrean troops and militia from Ethiopia’s Amhara region—have raped women and children, committed massacres, burned crops, and blocked aid to the region as they conduct a lop-sided military offensive against the Tigray People