The Antisocial Socialist

This post has to do with Israel and Palestine and questions of Jewish identity, which is to say, it is a thermonuclear drama bomb. If you are avoiding this kind of discourse, I'm putting it under a cut so you can do so more easily. I realize that this is emotional for many of us, including me, so I ask that if you disagree that you keep your disagreements as respectful as possible.

( navel-gazing lies beneath )

World War I killed 20 million people.

The Great Influenza epidemic killed between 17 million and 100 million during and immediately after.

The odds of a soldier dying in WWII were 1 in 26.

The odds of a kidnapped Indigenous child dying in a residential school at the same time was 1 in 25.

As a culture, the choices we make around whose deaths are mourned and whose are forgotten are significant. 

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

TW: Anti-Black racism, police brutality, violence

I just came off watching most of the 3-4-hour verdict in the Theriault trial, popularly known in the press as the Dafonte Miller trial despite Dafonte being the victim in the case. Dafonte was the teenager blinded in one eye by a vicious assault by Michael Theriault and his brother, Christian Theriault. Like the Forcillo trial, where a white cop was convicted of attempted murder for shooting a young man who died as a result of being hit by a hail of bullets, this was a bizarre exercise in legal weaselry, wherein despite overwhelming amounts of evidence, Christian was acquitted completely while Michael was convicted only of the lesser offence of assault.

The whole way through, the judge kept talking about how yes, they probably had no intention of arresting him, their aim was probably vigilante justice, they probably had no cause to fear for their lives, or to beat him as badly as they did. They probably lied to investigators after the fact and this was probably deliberate. And so forth. But those probablies don't add up to a pattern of oh, definitely, so only the most blatantly obvious charge could stand.

I'm not a legal expert. I have seen trials before, and I can't imagine that that all those convoluted maybes would be bestowed upon a defendant who wasn't a cop or wasn't white. Essentially the judge gave free rein to cops to act as vigilantes and above the law, even while admitting that this is what they did. That was not a benefit of the doubt extended to the victim in this case.

Dafonte isn't a perfect victim or witness, but it doesn't matter. In this country we don't typically accept the punishment of blinding for the act of petty thievery (a handful of pocket change and some sunglasses left in an unlocked car—and who leaves their car unlocked at 2 am???). There are clear rules of arrest and the judge admitted that they were violated, again concluding that it was not Michael Theriault's intention to arrest him for a crime that is incredibly minor. This was a teenaged kid who did a dumb, irresponsible thing that a lot of kids do, and for this was brutally assaulted by two adult men, at least one of whom was drunk, with a weapon, and at least one of whom was trained, in theory, to follow certain procedures, which he did not follow.

I didn't expect justice. This is a white court, enforcing laws and norms created by rich white people for the benefit of other rich white people, and Dafonte is a young black man. I actually didn't expect any conviction by about halfway through and you could tell on the barbarians' faces that they weren't expecting it either. Were it not for the dogged determination of Desmond Cole and other activists, they'd have handily gotten away with everything. But this is not enough. The system itself is guilty.

I see that kid and I think about my students. Most of us are irresponsible at 19. But some of us are afforded the opportunity to make mistakes and eventually grow out of them, and others prevented from even freely navigating the world even if they do nothing wrong at all. 

I don't want to go into a whole grief-rage thing, because whatever I'm feeling now is nothing compared to the constant terror and anger and sadness that BIPOC experience. I can't even begin to imagine. My love and solidarity to them, and to this poor kid who has to live with the physical and psychological trauma of white supremacy for the rest of his life.

But as a Toronto taxpayer who has been funding Michael Theriault's three-year paid vacation—fucking enough. Defund the police. Disarm and disband the police. And then take a good hard look at the legal system that excuses and bolsters their excesses.

If you want to help out Dafonte with his ongoing medical costs not covered by OHIP, here's the official fundraiser.

 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.

It's important to remember that when Indigenous activists (or my F6 ass doing my best to amplify their voices) say that things are bad, they're really bad, they've always been bad, no, worse than that—they are not exaggerating.

Case in point: The RCMP—yes, those quaint friendly Mounties that the Americans find adorable for whatever reason—just said the quiet part out loud. The Guardian broke the story and now it's spreading.

From the article:

Notes from a strategy session for a militarized raid on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation show that commanders of Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), argued that “lethal overwatch is req’d” – a term for deploying snipers.

The RCMP commanders also instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” ahead of the operation to remove a roadblock which had been erected by Wet’suwet’en people to control access to their territories and stop construction of the proposed 670km (416-mile) Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL).

In a separate document, an RCMP officer states that arrests would be necessary for “sterilizing the site”.

 

Another important thing to remember is that most of what Canada calls British Columbia is unceded territory, meaning the Indigenous people there never gave up possession of the land to European settlers. The government decided to build a pipeline through their land anyway. The land defenders were not using violence but even if they were, it would have been completely morally justifiable in the same way that if someone tries to break into your house in the middle of the night, you basically have the right to defend yourself and your property. Except in this case they're not just defending their community but the entire world, where we descendants of European settlers also—surprise!—have to live. But the RCMP acknowledged that while they did have firearms for hunting, there was zero indication that they intended to use them against the people violently invading their territory in violation of UN conventions.

And the RCMP planned to shoot them anyway. Including Elders and kids. Or at least shoot the adults and kidnap the kids.

This is under the shiny Liberal government of Prince Justin of the Nice Hair, by the way, who promised a nation-to-nation relationship (unless he really wanted to build a pipeline, like, really badly).

The fact that I'm not in any way surprised about this in no way lessens my utter disgust and contempt for the rotting and fetid colonialist project called Canada.

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.

There was a mass shooting at 10 pm basically outside my old house and in walking distance from my current neighbourhood. Early reports say nine injured, including a child, and the gunman is dead. Early reports, as we all know, aren't the most trustworthy things.

I wasn't anywhere near there tonight but I'm a bit more rattled by this one than I usually am.

I don't really have anything insightful to say. I don't know if there is anything all that insightful for anyone to say—if someone thinks they're engaging in clever commentary about a massacre of protestors, they're probably wrong. You see a list of names like this, which includes 14-year-old children—shit, the picture of that little kid in his tux—and there's no real political analysis to be made beyond, "Fuck this." So I'm adding my voice to the collective global "fuck this," for what it's worth.

What do you even do from over here? Like a petition is going to change things when the Israeli government, led by an actual psychopath, has been given a carte blanche to fire into crowds of protestors by the country with the most nukes? It just feels like screaming into the void.

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.