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Sept. 11, 2001, was similarly one of those events that “crash down on our heads from a blue sky,” and 10 years later, beginning in Tunisia in January 2011, the Arab Spring took everyone equally by surprise, in the same way that the uprisings in Poland and Hungary did in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was pulled down, and the world was changed utterly. You’d probably have to reach back to the War Measures restrictions of the 1940s to find the closest comparison with the draconian measures adopted across Europe and North America to contain the rising pace and spreading scale of the COVID-19 sickness that has suddenly afflicted more than 200,000 people worldwide, killing more than 8,000.

Sept. 11, 2001, was similarly one of those events that ‘crash down on our heads from a blue sky’

Where this is all going, and what sort of world we’ll soon be living in, is still very much up to the people of the world’s liberal democracies to decide, or at least to influence. The G7 countries, Canada included, are facing the necessity of economic intervention at a scale unknown in peacetime, just to tide us all through our travails with landlords, grocery bills and the basics.

But we’re just coming off 14 years of democracy’s worldwide retreat. Part and parcel of all that is the impunity afforded Vladimir Putin’s expansionist gangster state, the NATO capitals’ unconscionable indifference to the crucifixion and dismemberment of Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, and the savage hegemony asserted by Iran’s Khomeinist regime throughout the Middle East. But most notable in the prospects for democracy’s survival is Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s determination to replace the 70-year-old liberal world order entirely with a world remade in the image and likeness of the Chinese Communist Party’s vast military-industrial surveillance state, with its sundry satrapies, its compliant client regimes, its globe-spanning subsidiaries, and its corporate compradors, embedded so noticeably in Canada.