Yadao Republic

31/08/2026

One month after President Kennedy was assassinated, Harry Truman wrote something almost nobody remembers today: an op-ed admitting his own creation had gotten away from him.

The agency was the CIA. The man Truman was really writing about was Allen Dulles.

In 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act with one narrow purpose: gather intelligence, brief the president, let elected officials decide what happens next. No secret armies, no coups, just facts delivered upward.

Dulles became director in February 1953. Iran's elected prime minister was removed by a CIA operation that August. Guatemala's president fell to another the following year. Both happened after Truman left office, under an agency he later said had drifted from what he built.

It did not stop there. In 1960, the CIA began plotting to remove Congo's prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. He was captured and executed months later. The Senate's Church Committee later found the agency had drawn up assassination plans against multiple foreign leaders, often with no presidential signature on file.

Then came Truman's op-ed, published December 22, 1963. He wrote plainly that he never intended the CIA to be injected into peace-time cloak and dagger operations, and that it had become an operational, policy-making arm of government instead of the quiet intelligence desk he signed into existence.

Dulles never accepted that framing. To him, the Cold War left no room for hesitation, and a coup that stopped one Soviet-aligned government was cheaper than a war that stopped ten.

Critics answer differently: Iran's coup helped produce the 1979 revolution, Guatemala's became decades of civil war, and Lumumba's death left Congo in chaos for a generation. None of it made anyone safer, they argue, it just moved the danger somewhere Washington could not see it coming.

Truman built an agency meant to answer to the president. He spent his final years insisting Dulles had built something else.

So which was it: was Dulles protecting a country Truman no longer fully understood, or running a foreign policy of his own that even the man who built the CIA said he never signed off on?

30/08/2026

30/08/2026

One Canadian soldier. One eye. One night. And a Dutch city of 50,000 people that has never forgotten his name.

His name was Léo Major.

He was born in 1921 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents who brought the family back to Montreal while he was still a baby. He trained as a plumber. In 1940, at nineteen, he joined the Canadian Army.

He landed in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, with Le Régiment de la Chaudière. On the first day of the invasion he helped capture a German armoured vehicle. Days later, in a clash with an enemy patrol, a phosphorus gr***de took the sight of his left eye.

His commanders told him his war was over and prepared to send him home.

He refused.

"I'm a sniper," he told them. "I only need one eye."

He stayed. He fought through the Battle of the Scheldt — the brutal Canadian campaign to open the port of Antwerp — and came back to Canadian lines one day with 93 German prisoners he had captured on his own. Not long after, the vehicle he was riding in struck a landmine and left him with a severe back injury.

They tried to send him home a second time. He refused again.

Then came Zwolle.

By April 1945 the Canadians were pushing north through the Netherlands, and the city of Zwolle stood in their path — 50,000 people, nearly five years under occupation. An attack was set for the next morning, and it would begin with artillery falling on a city still full of civilians.

On the night of 13–14 April 1945, Major and his close friend Corporal Wilfred "Welly" Arsenault volunteered to go in ahead of it. Two snipers, in the dark, with one job: find out how large the German garrison was and get word to the Dutch resistance.

Arsenault was killed by machine-gun fire on the way in.

Léo Major went into the city alone.

For hours he moved through the streets of Zwolle by himself — firing, throwing gr***des, turning up in one place and then another so the garrison would believe an entire Canadian force had arrived. He linked up with Dutch resistance fighters. He took dozens of prisoners. He set the Gestapo headquarters on fire. He convinced a German officer that the city was already surrounded and that leaving was the only option left.

By dawn, the garrison was gone.

Major walked back to Canadian lines and reported that Zwolle was free. The bombardment was called off. Not a single shell fell on the city. When the Régiment de la Chaudière marched in, the war was already over for the people of Zwolle, and the tulips were coming up along the canals.

He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, an honour ranked second only to the Victoria Cross.

Six years later he volunteered again, this time for Korea. In November 1951, serving with the Royal 22e Régiment, he led a small group of scouts to retake a key hill from a far larger force — and held it.

He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal a second time. He remains the only Canadian ever to receive that medal in two different wars.

Then he went home to Montreal, went back to work, raised four children with his wife Pauline, and said nothing at all.

His own family had no idea. It was roughly thirty years after the war, when a Dutch official turned up at their door in Montreal, that his children learned what their father had done. His son was nine years old. Major's explanation was simple: he never thought anyone would believe him.

Zwolle believed him. Zwolle remembered.

The city made him an honorary citizen in 2005. A street there carries his name, and a bronze bust of him stands in the city with a Canadian flag flying above it. His story is taught in Dutch schools. In 2020, for the 75th anniversary of the liberation, the local football club put his name on their jerseys, and fans have raised a banner in the stands calling him the sole saviour of Zwolle. Every year, the city holds a ceremony in his memory.

When Léo Major died in 2008 at the age of 87, Dutch dignitaries — including the mayor of Zwolle — crossed the Atlantic for his funeral. He is buried at the National Field of Honour in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, and a park in Quebec carries his name.

Canadians liberated much of the Netherlands in the spring of 1945, and the Dutch have never let it go. The tulips Ottawa receives every year are part of that same gratitude. Léo Major is the sharpest example of it — a Montreal plumber whose name is better known in a city he saw once, in the dark, than in the country he served.

He deserves to be known here too.

Had you ever heard of Léo Major before today? Share this so his name travels as far at home as it does in Zwolle.

Lest we forget.

30/08/2026

The lake was named 400 years ago. Not by Canada. Not by the United States.

This week, Lake Ontario became headline news on both sides of the border after Washington moved to change its name to "Lake America" in US federal records. Canada's response was not an argument. It was a history lesson.

Here is the part most people never learned in school.

THE NAME IS OLDER THAN BOTH COUNTRIES

"Ontario" is not English. It is not French. It comes from the Wendat language — an Indigenous nation whose homeland surrounded these waters long before any European ship arrived.

The word is Ontari'io. Translated, it means roughly "the lake is beautiful, the lake is big."

People stood on that shoreline, looked out at water so wide you cannot see across it, and named it exactly what they saw. No politics. No flags. Just an honest description of something enormous and lovely.

That name is more than 400 years old. It predates Canadian Confederation in 1867. It predates the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. It predates the very existence of the two countries now discussing what to call it.

EUROPE ALREADY TRIED TO RENAME IT — AND FAILED

Here is the detail that makes this week feel like history repeating.

When this region was New France, French mapmakers did try to replace the Indigenous name with their own. On period maps you will find the lake labelled Lac Saint-Louis. Later, Lac Frontenac, after Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, the Governor General of New France. A French military engineer was still writing "Lac Frontenac" on maps as late as 1712.

None of it stuck.

The Jesuit Relations of 1662–63 already carried the label "Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois." By the 1730s, Ontario had simply won. Not by decree. By use. Because that is what the people who lived there actually called it, and no map can outvote a shoreline full of people.

THE PROVINCE WAS NAMED AFTER THE LAKE

This is the fact worth remembering.

Ontario the province did not give its name to the lake. The lake gave its name to the province. The water came first — by centuries.

So when anyone frames this as trimming a Canadian label off a shared body of water, the history says otherwise. The name was never Canadian branding. It is Wendat. It is Haudenosaunee country. Canada inherited that name the same way it inherited the land it sits on: it was already there.

CANADA'S ANSWER

Prime Minister Mark Carney did not fire back with insults. He explained the etymology, noted the name is older than both nations, and finished with a line that Canadians immediately recognized as the whole argument in a sentence:

Canadians know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly put it more plainly still: we will always call it Lake Ontario. Period. We are proud of our Great Lakes.

WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGES

Practically speaking, very little. A US executive order updates US federal geographic databases. It cannot compel Canada, and Canada has said it will not follow. It carries no weight in international usage. The same thing happened with an earlier attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico — US agencies adopted the new label; the rest of the world did not.

Roughly 47% of Lake Ontario sits on the American side of the border. The other 53% is Canadian. It is the easternmost of the five Great Lakes, and it is the door the whole system uses to reach the Atlantic through the St. Lawrence.

But the deeper point has nothing to do with paperwork.

WHY THIS RESONATES

Names are memory. Ontari'io is a 400-year-old sentence about a beautiful, enormous body of water, spoken by people who were here first and who are still here. The Anishinaabe call it Niigani-gichigami. Every one of those names is a record of a relationship with the water.

Governments can update a database. They cannot reach back four centuries and unsay a word.

Lake Ontario. Then, now, and always.

Which fact surprised you most — that the French tried to rename it twice and failed, or that the province is named after the lake and not the other way around?