The Antisocial Socialist

This is some bullshit.

For those outside of Toronto, Soufi's was a really awesome restaurant run by Syrian refugees and activists. It was almost a cliché Canadian success story. Also, their food was fucking great. Thanks to them, I got to try vegan knafeh for the first time. I just ate there last Saturday, in fact.

Last week, there was a demo in Hamilton against Maxime Bernier, leader of the fascist People's Party of Canada. Now, this is not a guy who should be given a platform to speak. Among the people who paid $75 to hear him rail about immigrants was an 81-year-old lady with a walker. Antifa yelled at the people going in, including this lady. She was not touched or otherwise harmed.

While it is bad strategy to yell at disabled old people, an 81-year-old woman would have grown up in the shadow of WWII, in which people who believed what Bernier believes in murdered 12 million Jews, Roma, queers, Communists, trade unionists, disabled people, and anyone they disagreed with. An 81-year-old woman lived through the Civil Rights era. Anyone who pays $75 to see a fascist speak is not some senile pensioner but someone who knows exactly what they're signing up for and has the disposable income to sign up for it. And thus deserves to get yelled at (but shouldn't because the optics are bad). By the way, we deport Nazi war criminals who are older than that, and they stand trial, and some of them use walkers.

What does this have to do with a nice Syrian restaurant? Well, the owner's son is also an activist and a person of conscience, and he happened to be at the rally and was standing next to the woman, unmasked, when people yelled at her. For this, he and his father have been doxxed, harassed, and sent death threats, even though the owner apologized for both of them. I have been in contact with the son all week and the threats are very serious and scary, from people who know where they live and who have a history of racist violence.

Today they announced that they were closing for the safety of themselves and their workers.

The media has been complicit, sensationalizing the whole incident. Now they're bemoaning the loss of a beloved restaurant as if they didn't help spread lies about the people who run it.

The racists have learned that their tactics win. While the PPC is unlikely to win a seat in the election, they and their brownshirts have been emboldened by a successful attack against hardworking, kind refugees.

Welcome to Toronto in 2019.

If you needed further proof that Tumblr is a garbage hellsite, behold the notice I just received:



GREAT JORB POLICING HATE SPEECH U GUYS

I was feeling really guilty about prancing around the world whilst my comrades back home prepared for a counter-protests against the fascist World Coalition Against Islam (WCAI) and its cronies. Fortunately, owing to infighting, the main rally was cancelled (they blamed a Bollywood festival which was supposedly happening in the square, even though no such festival was planned—though now I desperately want a Bollywood musical about punching Nazis and you know I deserve one). The exchanges online were all screenshotted for the lulz.

Our local fash are dogged, however, and a few still planned to show up, and I was worried as usual that our side wouldn't have the numbers to keep them from marching.

Fortunately, very few showed up and the ones who did were forced to hide in City Hall until the cops could get them away. But they showed up late, I guess, hence this amazing picture.



Toronto Police Services
But Freezed Peach!, 2018
Site-specific performance art

(Title courtesy of rdi. Photo courtesy of No Borders Media.)

While it's pretty funny that cops showed up to guard an empty space that fascists were supposed to be in, well. I've gotten into a lot of internet debates with people who are fully willing to cede the fight against racism and authoritarianism to the state, condemning antifa as needlessly violent, etc. And this picture is a good example of why we can't do that. Because despite the fact that there is zero threat to public safety here, the cops find the prospect of anti-fascism dangerous enough that they must assemble in large numbers to protect the idea of fascism.

That should scare the shit out of you. And piss you off if you pay taxes in Toronto.

There’s this glurgy poem about the Earth being a few feet in diameter. It’s an incredibly cheesy poem (and will you check out the cheesy website I found when I went searching for it to write this post), but I’m kind of partial to it for what it reveals about human psychology. It ends as follows:

“People would love it, and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives could be nothing without it.

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter.”

This gap, between real things and representations of things, is at the heart of something I’ve been struggling to get my head around in recent months. The passion I see for stories, be they movies, games, or—gasp—sometimes novels, is something that I share, and yet it boggles me that as much as they affect culture in a broad sense, they seem to often have little impact on the individuals most devoted to them.
( long and with pictures )

Went to a hastily organized vigil for Charlottesville. There were maybe about 50 people and almost as many TV cameras. A blessed minimum of speeches as we all knew why we were there. We sang "The Red Flag" and "Solidarity Forever" and marched with drippy candles to City Hall.

it helps, at times like these, to be with folks that get it. There's another demo tomorrow morning but I don't think I'll make it because 8 am is very early. So I'm glad this one happened.

ETA: as I type this, I'm reading of another attack, this time at a solidarity demo in Montreal. Fortunately the victim survived. We must fight these bastards; nothing less than our survival and the survival of the most vulnerable communities is at stake.

 
Apparently my little design got famous enough to be tweeted by local fascist nutjob Greg "the Goof" Renouf!

I would be flattered were it not for three critical errors in his sentence-long tweet:

1) I'm not actually an anarchist, nor am I part of any anarchist group, nor does this design have anything to do with or benefit any anarchist group. I'm not even sure which anarchist group he's talking about. I mean, I like (some) anarchists and I have broad ideological agreements and commonalities with them, but I lived in a cooperative house for too long to actually be an anarchist, as I'm quite fussy about dishes and such.

2) It says right in the product description that the graphic refers to peacefully dealing with fascism through fun sports like baseball.

3) And this is the weirdest one—I am not nor have I ever been a Christian. I mean, this commemorates a battle primarily fought by Jews, albeit with some Christian allies. But while I've been accused of belonging to all sorts of beliefs and causes that I have nothing to do with, I don't think I have ever in my life been mistaken for a Christian.

So that's neat.