The Antisocial Socialist

It was recently Remembrance Day here in so-called Canada, and schools across the country must grapple with some inherent contradictions. Remembrance Day may have started as a whole anti-war, never again sort of vibe commemoration but as the bloody fist emerged from the velvet glove, it became a celebration of war and militarism. Canadian values, as seen in the foolhardy invasion of Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with *checks notes* the Taliban, or the brutal torture and murder of a Somali teenager, the continuous violence enacted on Indigenous peoples, or the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Haiti, are reframed as a valiant, noble fight for peace, freedom, and security. Generations of schoolchildren must memorize and monotonously recite "In Flanders Fields." Military recruiters are frequently brought in to sell war as an exciting adventure for broke students searching for a way to pay for tuition.

At the same time, schools must grapple with a mandate to be as inclusive and inoffensive as possible, celebrating diversity and multiculturalism and definitely not causing any "harm." As many students in any given school are likely to have experienced the trauma of war firsthand, the beleaguered teachers and students forced to organize the Dreaded Remembrance Day Assembly must at least nominally talk about peace. It is especially awkward this year, as our government and corporations continue to arm a rogue state that is committing a genocide that gets livestreamed to the kids on their phones.

This leads to some weird aesthetic decisions. My favourite was when a gung-ho recruiter straight out of a 60s-era Vietnam movie talked about the noble and thrilling mission in Afghanistan (to an audience that included Afghan refugees–that was before we barred them from coming in the country), and encouraged the kids to sign up to get blown up by an IED. This speech was followed by an absolutely brutal rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine." With lyrics. You know, the lyrics that are essentially "No Gods, No Masters," but somehow less cool? That one.

This year, one Ottawa school tried its best. Sir Robert Borden High School, located in an area with a large Arab population, played "Haza Salam." You can read the English translation in that video—it's pretty general and inoffensive. And prettier, musically, than "Imagine." I bet you can guess what happened next!

That's right! Triggered by having to hear Arabic, because the entire language is antisemitic now, some of the worst people—the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, the soon-to-be last democratically elected Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Poilievre. and Lisa MacLeod, an MPP who cut funding to autistic children in a decision so unpopular that she had to immediately be shuffled off elsewhere—started shrieking their lungs out. Naturally, the principal of the school, who presumably doesn't want to organize the Remembrance Day assembly by himself next year, stood behind the hardworking students and educational professi—ahahaha just kidding he totally threw them under the bus and apologized to these braying fascists. I'm fairly certain this is in violation of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board's own human rights policy, but we all know this doesn't apply to Muslims or Arabs (and especially not to Palestinians). 

This kind of thing is increasingly common in schools, which have always been bastions of white supremacy but have been given tacit permission through the re-election of the Orange Man and the media coronation of our own Trumplet, Poliievre, who gets to be appointed Prime Minister without us even needing to have an election about it. The lip service to diversity and inclusion and belonging lasts only so long as it can be done away with, revealing the rot beneath. Get ready for a firehose of stories like this, as the authoritarian personalities who worm their way to the top are at last allowed to stop pretending that they think all children are equally human.

Justice will never be done in this case, and four walls are three too many for this scumbag, but I am feeling deeply relieved hearing Chauvin found guilty on all charges.

THANK FUCK

 Pull up, kids, for another one of Aunt Sabotabby's predictions.

The good news is that the overt state repression of this round of demonstrations is almost over. The bad news is, hoo-boy. We're in for an interesting ride.

Here's what went on in Toronto last weekend: Black Lives Matter TO organized a march. Everyone knows who they are and who their main organizers are. They've been around for a long time. They have ties to various Black communities and can be trusted; if they put something out, we all know it's legit. The march was peaceful and orderly.

Here's what's happening in Toronto this weekend: Someone organized two marches. Who? We don't really know. It wasn't Black Lives Matter TO, because we all know who they are and they put out a statement saying it wasn't them. It wasn't any of the other established Black-led community or activist groups in the city. The name of yesterday's, March for Change, sounded a hell of a lot to me like that Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial. Meanwhile, the medias, state-corporate and corporate-social, went ballistic. Shops boarded up their windows and doors in fear of Black Bloc protesters. BlogTO published a very funny "who are the Black Bloc?" article that I won't link to here because BlogTO sucks and I don't want to give them the hits, but basically it was like listening to your dad explain TikTok. Meanwhile, BLMTO and other trusted organizations suggested that activists, and in particular BIPOC activists, should probably not go wandering into this particular honeytrap.

So then what happened yesterday? There was some kind of a protest, I guess? Lots of people showed up thanks to the involvement of some Instagram kids I've never hear of because I'm old. One of my young comrades suggested that for all the confusion, the cops had organized themselves a pretty good protest! I don't know what's going to happen today but I'd be gobsmacked if there was any actual violence unless the cops decided to instigate it. And they have one glaringly good reason not to.

See, the other thing that happened yesterday is that at various demos, both Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders and PM Prince Justin took a knee. This made for a great photo op. See! Our neoliberal politicians are on our side against this dastardly Trump! You're seeing it all over the US too, and the NFL apologized for being a shit to poor Colin Kaepernick and isn't it cool how we're somehow all on the same side now?

The coercion phase of the repression is over. It is failing and will continue to fail, because people are rightly pissed, even liberals, even some hard right types like Pat Robertson, who I didn't even know was still alive. As bad as things have gotten, you probably still can't convince large numbers of soldiers to shoot their own people in what are, if not their own neighbourhoods, then neighbourhoods that look like theirs. It's one thing to let suburban cops loose on urban communities, but the US has a poverty draft and there are a lot of reasons for joining the army that are not actually "being a complete dick." And the upper levels of the military probably look at Iraq and go, "nope, maybe we don't want something like that here."

Welcome to the co-optation phase.

There are two ways for an authoritarian government to retain power: Coercion and consent. Guess which one always, always works better? Look at surveillance—when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, we had to read 1984 as a cautionary tale so that we didn't become Communists or whatever.* A modern adolescent, I can tell you, does not understand 1984. It literally makes no sense to them, because they've been under a far greater degree of surveillance their entire lives and they enthusiastically participate in it; in fact, they compete to be the best at it. The GDR would have spontaneous orgasms at the ease of finding out every detail of everyone's lives. It's just one of many ways that the Soviet Bloc won the Cold War.**

Coercion works to a point and then people get tired of it and hang their leaders from lampposts and such. Consent works much better. Co-optation is key to consent.

I've seen this happen throughout my lifetime. Nike sweatshops are bad! Young people do not want shoes made with child labour. So, protests! Boycotts! Oh no! This is threatening Nike's bottom line. Time for some intervention—say, the Kielburgers, bright-faced young white kids who collected the anti-sweatshop movement and turned it into the franchises Free the Children and Me to We, and set up a branch in every school. Now kids could earn volunteer hours and scholarships for holding bake sales against sweatshops. Everyone was Making Change and Being the Change, even our corporate partners. Then Nike puts Colin Kaepernick on its ads and suddenly it's a progressive thing to buy their shoes.†

True story: I went to the first BLMTO rally in Toronto. The main chant, I shit you not, was "Black lives matter! All lives matter!" A few days later "All lives matter" was a racist meme, as it still is. Co-option can happen very, very quickly.

The significance of Saunders and Trudeau taking a knee is now all of Kaepernick's trials and tribulations are robbed of their potency. If you have the guy in charge of racially profiling young Black men and the guy who sends the RCMP in with automatic weapons to shoot Indigenous land defenders standing in the way of his pipelines mimicking an anti-racist gesture, that gesture is no longer anti-racist. The far right has honed this strategy to perfection, having ruined, among others, Pepe the Frog, the OK symbol, milk, and now Hawaiian shirts. Now the message is confused, watered-down, and muddled to incoherency.

Co-optation is much, much harder to fight than coercion. You need to be skilled in media criticism, diversity of tactics, and organizing. It's a much less violent game long-term, but it's a thornier knot to untangle. And the everyday, systemic patterns don't change, obviously, so it's not not violent, but that violence becomes more distributed, less visible. Like it always is, but this time the people committing the violence are listening to you, and on your side.

Watch for it. 

* Hahaha no one ever learns about Orwell's actual politics.
** See also: Putin's control over the US and other countries' political systems, the validation of a command economy.
† No fault of Kaepernick, by the way. He needs to earn a living and get his message out any way possible. Co-optation is much more complicated than coercion.

For those of us who can't join in on protests because of the pandemic, here are some helpful links:

Bail funds for various US cities

Minnesota Freedom Fund

GoFundMe for the family of Regis Korchinski Paquet

If you are able to go, remember:

• Mask the fuck up.
• Do your best to maintain physical distancing. Remember, the virus does not care whether you are protesting for a good reason or a bad one.
• Don't post pictures of unmasked or otherwise identifiable people; this can be used to doxx activists.
• Please be safe. <3

Sorry to go on about the Don Cherry thing when there are other, more important things to talk about, but this is a fascinating example of the way the media enables and promotes white supremacist ideology.

See, there was a protest against Cherry being fired. Two guys showed up. LOOOOOOL.


But.

If you watch the video itself, it's fascinating. It's seven and a half minutes long. There's a media scrum. For two guys standing in front of CBC! There are more people milling around than protesting.

Here is what happens in the video:

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.

Quebec gonna Quebec, and the new CAQ government is wasting no time in reminding me of why my family got the fuck out of there. They passed two new bills, Bill 9 and Bill 21, both of which could just be called "Fuck the Muslims" because that's the intent. Bill 21 bans religious symbols (but we're really talking about hijabs, and turbans because Sikhs are always swept up in Islamophobic nets) for public service workers and officials. That's teachers, cops, lawyers, judges, you name it. Anyone in the public sector can't wear a religious symbol. Unless it's a cross. Because as much as CAQ keeps making noise about removing the giant-ass crucifix hanging in the National Assembly, we know that Quebec "secularists" are really just Christians who want to sleep in on Sundays. Of course it's already being challenged because it's blatantly unconstitutional, but we're all just tossing around the Notwithstanding Clause like it's nothing these days.

Bill 9 tosses out 16,000 skilled immigrant applications and lays the groundwork for a "values test" to become a permanent resident. Which amounts to a Muslim ban, of course. That, they need federal permission to do, which isn't likely to happen even once the fascists take power in the fall. But they can still be dicks about the rest.

Not all Quebecois, of course. There's pretty strong opposition in Montreal. But this is some fashy-fash bullshit that they're getting away with for reasons.

Lest you think anything's better on the federal level, the Liberals proclaimed a climate emergency. Which, obviously, it is, so of course today they rammed through the Trans Mountain Pipeline, over the objection of Indigenous communities that are in the path of the inevitable oil spills. (Note: They could reroute it but nope. Right through Indigenous land and water supplies is always the bestest place to build a pipeline according to government engineers.) Did they do meaningful consultations? Nope, they'll do that later, you know, like after the thing is built. 

If you're wondering how they can get away with that after weeping so many tears about the injustices done to Indigenous peoples over the course of Canada's bloody history—not to mention the fact that carbon emissions are turning our entire planet into a smoking hellscape, and Canada is really central to that destruction—just check out this lovely poll which suggests that Canadians are worried about the fact that we only have a few years to fix this fuckery, but not so worried that they're willing to pay a bit more in tax or make lifestyle changes or anything like that.

It's very hard to maintain a positive attitude, y'know?

The 11 Jewish people murdered today by a white supremacist while in a synagogue—only a few days after two black people were murdered by a different white supremacist— were targeted at least in part because they were helping refugees.

If you grow up Jewish, you grow up knowing that something like this will happen. You learn your history. You do one of two things: You turn inward, closed off to the rest of the world, protective and fearful. Or you recognize the solidarity between all people. You understand that if they come for the Muslims, for the Latin American migrants, for the Black and Indigenous and trans people and disabled people, you understand that eventually they will come for you, too. The victims of today's horror took the latter approach, as I have tried to do all my life, and this makes the heinousness of the murderer's act hit that much harder.

The point is to have us cowing in terror, but but despite being rather profoundly secular and not relating to broad swathes of the mainstream Jewish community for various reasons, I'm kinda wanting to go to synagogue more, not less.

Fuck every fascist and fuck everyone who fertilizes the soil in which fascism has grown. There are people in the world like these Mexicans who are helping the migrants from the south on their long, painful journey to safety, there are people like HIAS, there are people who will take a stand and fight.  In the end, we'll still be here when fascism and white supremacy have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

 Just spitballing here because I'm only on my second mug of coffee for the morning, but how about raising the social cost of being an ICE agent. Sure, you won't go to jail, you won't be charged with human rights violations, nothing the UN is able to do is going to stick to the US, BUT the concerted efforts of a group of organized citizens can make someone's life unliveable. I'm talking about doxxing, public shaming en masse, finding out where they live. Going door-to-door to their neighbours with flyers, well sourced and with photos, explaining that the person who lives in the house down the street participates in an organized gang that kidnaps, murders, and sexually assaults children, separates them from their families, and incarcerates them. Find their social media accounts and mob them. Inflict, on a community level, the sense of shame that they do not apparently possess.

Fascism is allowed to take root when the social cost to being a fascist is low, and large groups of people are dehumanized. Fascists don't necessarily change their belief system when you make it embarrassing to be a fascist, but they are less able to organize, let alone get paid by the State for jackbooted thuggery.

Today, I was telling my class about a horrific miscarriage of justice, a murder where, despite overwhelming evidence and a ridiculous defence, the killer was not only acquitted (by an all-white jury, no less) but is also inexplicably allowed to profit from his crime through GoFundMe. A cruel case based in racism and bigotry, where a white farmer shot a young indigenous man in the back of his head, left his body outside, and had coffee with his family while waiting for the RCMP to arrive—the same RCMP who then bungled the evidence and harassed the victim's family.

It was at the end of a long day and for the life of me, I could only remember the name of the victim, Colten Boushie, and not his murderer, Gerald Stanley. Because during the whole case, they've been referring to it as the "Colten Boushie" trial, as if it's the murder victim who stands accused and not his killer.

This country. It's a hell of a thing to have to explain to kids. I've lived here all my life and yet the reminder that we differ from the American Deep South in the 1950s merely by degree, not kind, is nevertheless continuously shocking.

If you want to help out Colten's family, you can donate here.