Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Radio War Nerd EP #513 — The Great White Oaf, feat. Dan Boeckner (Patreon)

Published:
2025-04-05 00:01:38
Edited:
2025-04-10 14:24:51
Imported:
2025-04
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Guest: Dan Boeckner, Wolf ParadeRecorded: April 3, 2025

We talk to Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner about Trump's looming war on Canada, collaborators, oafs and oaf-overseers...

Buy Dan's music - Wolf Parade and Boeckner Follow Dan on Twitter.

  

Total time: 1:38:34Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

Jimothy Realname

it takes a damn carney to run this circus 🤣🤣🤣🤣

NYCM&AHole

Also high level finance people are pretty stupid.

Jeremy

The oaf breakdown makes me proud to be Canadian

William

Oafs having a renaissance rn love that for them

William

John *thinks about traveling* The universe, “okay break this guy’s leg again”

Andrey Malikov

Thank you guys for having Dan Boeckner on, a person that strangely doesnt include himself in the quisling category... Also Russel Williams was the CFB of Trenton Air Force base. Canadas LARGEST air force base and the was the lifeline for all of Canadas troops and equipment transported for the GWOT. Extremely important position that seems to be given to people like Russel Williams. His successor Leif Dahl was recently arrested for trying to hunt ducks in this depressing concrete canal (think LA river) in the middle of a town next to the air force base with rifles from the base. Literally firing wildly at these poor ducks in a tiny aluminum boat in the middle of town.

Cory

Release the bottlemen archives!!! There are so many episodes I want to re-listen to!! Thanks for your understanding.

Cory

I'm still apparently a supporter on patreon lol

Kamran Husain

As a current ivy leagues some of the teachers are insanely stupid

Cory

I realize this sounds lame but it actually points to your podcasts being timeless and relevant today. Specifically I only have victims of victims of communism episode 2 out of 3. Please help.

architect

Quite astonishing that we had a discussion about a US invasion of Canada, and Quebecois resistance, without a nod to the wheelchair assassins of Infinite Jest!

Elsie Hupp

You keep mispronouncing “OTAN” in this episode… ​ ​ ​ ​ (This is a joke about Gaullism.)

Elsie Hupp

If Russia really cared about Ukrainian Nazis they should have instead invaded Canada haha

a clash of purple

I think the real reason Jason Stanley fled America is because he looks like a douchebag...

Sam Zeng

Oafs are in control trust the plan.

a clash of purple

Speaking of nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers, there's actually a quite good horror video game called Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (made in 2008 by Ukrainian developers) about a doomed Arktika-class icebreaker. The ship collides with an iceberg and damage to its reactor causes a fracture in time and mutates the crew into weird monsters. So in another timeline, who knows what happened to the alternate Mark Ames aboard that ship he toured... Apparently the plot of Cryostasis references a Gorky short story called the Flaming Heart of Danko, but I'm not familiar with it.

Maggie+Al

fucking hell you guys mentioned Surrey and I just got pulled back twenty years into a room playing halo 2 with a bloke from Vancouver as he tried to explain Surrey to his Aussie mates.

Mitch H.

How many times do we have to teach you a lesson old man?

Jeremy

I’ve also never heard mark laugh so hard when Dan told the Serbian story

William

Idk what you’re talking about, I took plenty of notes. Gotta study for the final

Christopher Small

When you guys talked about “militarized icebreakers,” I just imagined them getting turned into lead boxes that they’d use to ram into aircraft carriers. Like 2500 years of innovations in naval warfare just brings us back to Salamis Also, I went to Peking University (go Peking ducks!) If Jason Stanley wants some references I could probably hook him up

IRIDYSCENZIA

Keep going, you’re doing great! 🌟

Dill Gherkin

About an hour into the episode and this is such a boring dud. The entire framing around collaboration and resistance is so unserious and stupid. So if the Quebecois are the main force of resistance it would stand to reason that Manitoba would also be a vector of resistance because of the Francophone population here. So I guess Saint Boniface would be turned into the Warsaw ghetto in this scenario? The fuck are we even talking about here. Also the whole oaf thesis is at best half baked and explains exactly zero about Canadian domestic politics. For instance Ford is referencing as a leading “oaf” yet the Ontario conservatives have a long standing agreement with the Federal liberals not to attack each other. This is mainly because of the massive EV subsidies the Federal government is pumping into Ontario. In the last several federal elections Ford gave zero help to the Federal conservatives because of this. Boeckner seems like a good guy but come on you can do better than this.

Everett

I think a lot of the really rabid anti-China attitudes started popping up around the Huawei conflict and the arrest of the two Michaels (who turned out to be CSIS agents smuggling amphetamines.) At least thats when my mom decided she would boycott Chinese products. Of course it was always simmering under the surface before that though.

Sam Zeng

We used to joke about it in the CAF and all of us agreed that a US invasion of Canada would last about 2-3 weeks.

Jack Ross

Gotta watch Canadian bacon with John candy

Jimothy Realname

I have noticed a turn. A lot of people who were (less rabidly) anti-China are now rabidly anti-American and China-neutral. They still don't see the PRC as "good" - I'm working on that - but they think they're much better than America. This is an improvement.

Standing the Gaff

I totally agree. It was below the surface and went into hyperdrive with Wanzhou arrest, which was a disaster for Canadian foreign policy. I did not know one of the Michaels was smuggling amphetamines. My understanding is one of them was indeed a spy and the other was netted because of the spy. After everyone was released and returned, a federal government intelligence oversight report written during the scandal was discreetly released to the public. I think only the Globe reported it. It stated Global Affairs Canada's new reporting directives, in service of the Five Eyes, had put all Canadian diplomats abroad at risk of being arrested for espionage because GAC was violating the Vienna Treaty on diplomatic protocols. GAC was under Freeland's cabinet portfolio.

Nate Wood

in canada is vimy treated like gallipoli is in australia? like with phony reverence/bitterness?

Griffon Simms

He was a professor at Uvic? Im so bummed out I missed him. I'm studying there now

Standing the Gaff

Dan's a nice guy but doesn't have the chops to address what's going on in Canada either today or historically. Yves Engler could talk Canadian foreign policy in great detail and historically, too. David Pugiliese is Canada's premiere defence reporter at the Ottawa Citizen who has been targeted for exposing the Ukrainian-Canadian Nazis as well as corruption, contracting and deployments of Canadian military. Gabriel Haythornthwaite could address Canadian domestic politics - his May 2022 assessment of the so-called Freedom convoy in Ottawa was deeply prescient about the annexation threat and has a stellar analysis of the domestic Canadian forces behind it (search his name on youtube for one of his recorded talks on this). Jeremy Appel has great insights into Alberta's political establishment. Andrew Stevens and Emily Eaton are Saksatchewan-based experts on the western canadian petro-state and co-edited a book published last year called Unjust Transition. Sam Gindin could talk at length on Canadian political economy, and how Canadian elites and turned to continentalism and the American Empire with "free trade" in the 80s. A decade ago he wrote a major book on American imperialism with the late pre-eminent Canadian Marxist scholar Leo Panitch. This episode was unfortuantely far below the calibre of RWN interviews on the politics of other countries.

Dill Gherkin

No. WW1 is framed by many as when Canada broke off its colony status and became a country. There is lots of propaganda around this. It is essentially a death cult because what it was nothing but organized mass murder. However when you look at Canada just after WW1 it pushed many of the divisions in Canadian society to a breaking point . There were large scale general strikes across the country in the wake of the war. Most notably in Winnipeg in 1919. But that aspect conveniently never gets mentioned by the war mongers.

Tim Quirk

Agreed. Dan is a good guest on cultural issues but the current political situation a bit more complex.

Jacob

The thing with the f-35 is that Canada needs a new jet now. We’be been using ancient fighters since the 80s, and we’ve been kicking the “new jet” can down the road for years now. The f-35 is the only jet that fits the bill.

.

Check out his eps with trueanon. He has the chops. Dan was asked very specific things by RWN and I really appreciated this episode. But Dan is a great source with a wealth of knowledge. I think those people you mentioned would be great too for RWN.

Gretchen Cleaners

Canadian here - a correction needs to be made about Dan's comments on the Boer War. While English Canada supported the Boer War (broadly) it fiercely divided French Canada and was an extremely divisive issue at the time. Look up Henri Bourassa for information.

Sean Enright

So much of this conversation had me thinking about Infinite Jest. The names for the northern territories (Canada) - the Quebecois deliberate amputee separatists.

Pete

In Australia gallipoli is treated as the birth of the nation too. Very different to how it was seen at the time.

Lord-Admiral of the Pyrenees

I think Boeckner is totally wrong about which “oaf overseers” would support a US take over. A guy like Andrew Coyne- who IS an idiot and Canada is in such a bad position because it’s spent several decades listening too much to guys like him — is from this old Anglo-Tory anti-American tradition. He would not happily give up a privileged position in Canada to be a servant in the US. Collaborators would be the people he mentioned originally: upwardly mobile oafs, exactly the core Trump supporting group in the Us

Lord-Admiral of the Pyrenees

The fact the he thinks Andrew Coyne, who I don’t like, would support a US invasion tells me Dan’s a little off the ball. Coyne definitely has right wing economic sympathies but he’s also a classic Canadian Tory type who is pretty disdainful of the US

Rod Miller

Quebeckers were always (largely) opposed to the very wars for British Empire that Anglos were big into. My Great Uncle Billy went to the Boer War & later WWI. He just couldn't get enough, I guess.

Rod Miller

As a lapsed Canadian (& a leftist one) I'm delighted to hear this conversation; insightful & hilarious. When I last lived there in the 70s, elections were enlivened by the Rhinoceros Party: a group of people who ran spoof candidates to send up the whole thing. Their defence budget was $25, for a phone number in Ottawa with a recorded message: "We surrender."

Rod Miller

Do you think the Winnipeg strike was a Direct result of WWII? I once worked with a guy who'd taken part in the 1946 steelworkers strike in Hamilton. He said "When we came back from the war, we were just in no mood to take shit any more." He wasn't really opposed to the war; just that it had changed his whole perspective on life. (also, he'd grown up in the Depression)

Rod Miller

Vimy is viewed that way in Canada. It was only with WWI that Canada began to become truly independent of Britain.

Dill Gherkin

In terms of Canadian nationalism a major part of that was public health care. While it’s in shambles now it was always brought up as a key example of how Canada is different than the states. In the early 2000s there was a national campaign to vote for the “greatest Canadian” and Tommy Douglas won. Weird that Dan doesn’t even mention this.

Dill Gherkin

Bring back the Rhinoceros party

Dill Gherkin

It was one of many factors but yes. Returning vets were promised jobs and few were available when they returned.

Standing the Gaff

I had the same thought for the same reason. There's a deep seated opposition to the United States among substantial and powerful sections of Canadian elites. They know annexation means the powers they currently wield through the Canadian state and instutions would no longer be secure. Coyne and likeminded nationalist elites are not the crypto-fascist Conservative-affiliated elements and Western annexationists, many of whom are tied into oil and potash exports south, want an American jackboot to smash Canadian "socialism": public healthcare, public sector unions, public education, etc. The US is their capitalist utopia, and they've been railing against "communist" Liberals since the 1970s when Trudeau the Elder first created PetroCanada after the 73 oil shock to secure energy supplies and was an affront to the multinational oil corporations that dominated extraction and refining and were committed to export, not self-sufficiency. This is not Coyne's ruling class strategy.

Philip Girvan

I was surprised hearing Coyne’s name. Agree w you. He is a poor example of this type.

Philip Girvan

Fun episode: I agree with some of the criticism. The significant point is that annexation happened sometime ago, and the anti-American type of CDN nationalism Dan refers to is the Great White North Lost Cause.

Philip Girvan

Also, an RWN discussion of Infinite Jest just ain’t gonna happen folks.

etienne

the canadian contigent of people who are okay with joining the US, in my experience that goes pretty far back, I think it's bascially 80% economic, like, our gas is more expensive because of taxes, so is our consumer goods for a myriad of reasons, the jobs pay better, the businesses are stronger, the big engineering, tech, corpo entertainment jobs just do better down there. In that sense it would just save a lot of those guys a lot of hassle to have to formally migrate. The same type of people who would take any occasion to go do shopping down in Burlington or Seattle or Buffalo

etienne

I basically re-read IJ after the election. Weird TV entertainment guy with germophobia who runs on a radical campaign of cleanliness?

Nico

I like Dan so I enjoyed the banter and cultural commentary in this episode, but David Pugliese would be a terrific guest on Canada-related defence issues.

CR

Reverse engineering the last surviving Arrow would literally be better than Lockheed slop.

CR

Looking at the tariffs' effects, the U.S. just nuked Germany and South Korea from orbit. I can't say I'm saddened. The best time to enact the Morgenthau Plan was 1945. The second-best time is to keep up the job Biden began in 2022.

Jacob

It wouldn’t, worse radar, worse ecm, no stealth, no modern communications or datalink, no compatibility with modern weapons, etc.

Lord-Admiral of the Pyrenees

He’s totally right about the Canadian military being a turn coat though. Whole military establishment is trained to be nothing more than a US adjunct

Sean Enright

Maybe it’s a good time to finally finish it haha.

Jeff Normal

Spending money on advanced weapons from the USA is folly, they are the biggest threat that Canada faces at this point. After what happened to the pagers in Lebanon, I don’t know why US arms exports haven’t dropped to zero. We are in a whole new age of sabotage with untrustworthy states. The USA is very much an untrustworthy state. Old aircraft or 4th gen aircraft are better than aircraft highly susceptible to sabotage. Canada may be stuck with the initial order at this point, (I’m not sure) but anything further is crazy

Jeff Normal

In reference to how the First World War is remembered in Canada, it depends on what generation you were born I think. When we still had veterans from that conflict walking around, it was understood that it was all a great waste of lives, because a bunch of cousins couldn’t get along. As an school student, I was taught it CAUSED the Second World War, and now that that’s all settled, we can focus on the the United Nations and creating peace. Canadian civilians were very proud of the blue Helmets (although it hasn’t really recovered after the Somalia affair). First World War veterans would talk to us at school and they would NEVER talk about bullshit like freedom or the flag….just about how awful it was. Then they all died, and September 11th happened….the war in Iraq…the Canadian Conservative movement did whatever it could to promote war. The Canadian Legion became some kind of pro-war, support the troops, bulwark of patriotic talking points. They succeeded in a lawsuit against peace activists who were making white poppies in remembrance of civilians killed during war to be worn beside the red ones (these white poppies were around almost as long as the red ones) So ya, I feel it’s changed a lot at least where I grew up (east coast). Now that the veterans are gone, we can forget the “never again” stuff and focus on what really matters….for Flag and Country! Especially when Harper was PM

xxx

This was a bit inside baseball for me. Working class Canadians are "oafs"? Or did I miss something

Nico

They're still around!

Nico

I'd like to know more about this, but it fits with my perception that other NATO militaries would be unable/unwilling to fight the US, should it ever come to that. I bring this up because a lot of Canadians seem to think that membership in NATO would protect us in case of a US invasion and I don't believe it would.

Laura Bouchard

Love Dan, but he did not pay attention in high school history class

Dale Sedgwick

I know this was something of a joke episode for you guys and Dan is a funny guy, but this was essentially just a man who doesn't live in Canada, who only lived in BC & Montreal, who admitted he barely follows Canadian politics, talking out of his ass for an hour forty. I doubt this man ever spent more than a gig's measure in any rural community; probably doesn't speak French, know any indigenous people, or know any immigrants. In fact he probably hasn't had a real conversation with a fellow Canadian who wasn't his close friend or family in years. Not everything he said was off-base: Canadian sovereignty was destroyed long ago by politicians, but that's not some incredible insight, and his understanding of history is deeply in question. It seemed like the American hosts knew more about Canadian history than this burn out

Dill Gherkin

You are absolutely right. I grew up in the 90s on the prairies and at that time WW1 was not celebrated as a nation building event. It wasn’t an anti-war sentiment but more solemn. The turn was definitely in the early 2000s.

Rod Miller

Are they running candidates in the present election?

Rod Miller

There's a point beyond which "following Canadian politics" gets mind-numbingly repetitive. I doubt Boeckner would challenge any of your criticisms, though he'd probably point out that until recently he spent decades living in Canada, went through the school system, whatever. How many Canadians "know" any indigenous people? How many non-Quebeckers speak French? Does remembering who Russell Williams is really constitute knowledge of Canadian history? You seem to be setting the bar pretty high here. Canada has had precious little sovereignty in the past 80 years. Embracing globalism (a joint Tory-Liberal project) jettisoned the last remains.

Rod Miller

Right, it was solemn when I was a kid in the 60s. And yes, the New Militarism seems to have come in with the Afghan thing, the dead from which were transported down the "Highway of Heroes" (gag!). And just ask someone with a "Support the troops" bumper-sticker what, specifically, that exhortation actually means, then watch them stammer.

Standing the Gaff

Can confirm very similar educstion in 1980s and 1990s southern Ontario (not Toronto!). Vimy was heroic victory but war was a nightmare that set up second. But the 1990s history wars set stage for post-9/11 militarism. Bomber command veterans whining about incredible CBC/NFB series, the Valour and the Horror, set stage for witchunt against "revisionism" and Jack Granatstein's late 90s book "Who Killed Canadian History?", a hugely popular nationalist polemic. I remember seeing him speak at London's old library downtown while Canada was bombing Serbia (which the NDP initially supported until the inevitable civilian casualties). The Blue Helmet "Pearsonian Peacekeeping" tradition also died in Somalia and Rwanda. Figures like General Lewis Mackenzie teamed up with Granatstein and CBC's iconic news anchor Peter Mansbridge throughout the decade for D-Day and then VE Day 50th anniversary extravanganzas. After 9/11 the propaganda shifted into Hockey Night in Canada with Don Cherry. By 2004, Jack Layton, the new leader of the NDP, unilaterally dropped the party's 35-year-old NATO withdrawl policy, confirming an all-party pro-NATO consensus and burying the last mass political party asserting a meaningful policy of Canadian sovereignty...and it has been militaristic horseshit ever since. Even Layton's meek opposition to Canada's combat operations in Kandahar got him slandered as Taliban Jack...

etienne

it's more or less a riff made by the guest and yeah that's where he's getting at

Boobs123

It's a more politic way of saying "white trash".

Lord-Admiral of the Pyrenees

I don’t really think Carney is at fault for the housing bubble. It’s really just due to Canada not having a real economy for 20+ years and the money is going to go somewhere (and Canada’s private business sector is a joke)

Peter Z

Trump just wants the oil (sands). He'll push for some deal. Meanwhile, in terms of inflating asset bubbles, the business lobbies in western countries have been hard for mass immigration post COVID, raising housing demand. This has caused far right groups to gain strength and allow conservatives to look good when they dogwhistle reductions.

Doug Cartel

Canadian psyops over here like "there's so many wolves roaming around, you might call it a wolf parade"

Jeemar

not that the US is in the business of making rational decisions around the borders of it's empire recently, but even if there was an invasion of Canada it seems pretty straightforward to me that direct control of the northern reaches would only hurt the US economically. If Canada is annexed you lose a guaranteed 25-35% currency margin, an already extant free trade agreement (which is not the case in Canada currently - no free trade agreement between provinces and territories but every province and territory has a free trade agreement with the US!). So much of Canadian equity is already held by US interests, and the entire domestic economy is more or less designed around shipping raw material to the US... annexation would be like a stock split at a multinational where the existing holders of Canadian equity end up with a devalued holding and then the (now violently disenfranchised?) Canadian equity holders get transferred ownership to a now intra-US business board that has to jointly pay for a mass administrative update? Canada basically belongs to the US already, why spend the time and effort for a logo change

Jason Thompson

Maybe it’s not war enough and I should check a different podcast but I would like to know more about this Nayib Bukele bastard whose dad converted to Islam but is so right wing he’s making Guantanamo 2 for Trump right now

Jonathan Penn

With all due respect to the Yale professors who are fighting fascism by fleeing to Canada, I offer this song from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":Brave Sir Robin ran away. Bravely ran away, away! When danger reared its ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled. Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about And gallantly he chickened out. Bravely taking to his feet He beat a very brave retreat, Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!

Dan

There was significant opposition in Quebec, and even from elected Quebec Liberal MP's, to Canadian participation in the Boer war; perhaps some of the French language press reflected this.