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This Drag Is Not Drag and These Queens Are Not Queens

The Struggle to Publish
I have dithered about putting this post on my blog for nearly two months, hoping against hope that someone else with my knowledge would write an essay that I could just point at. I say this, first, because I try to limit my posts about current debates around gender in our society to guest writing on other forums so that my blog can focus on longer-term writing projects like epistemology, environmentalism and socialism

I say this, second, because I have to disclose some things about myself that I find embarrassing, whether I should find them to be so or not.

But I have decided to break down and make this post here because the issue it is confronting remains highly relevant and because of the way cancelation campaigns against me have escalated in bizarre and new ways, increasing my sense urgency around child safeguarding.

The Redefinition of “Drag”

When you are staring down people who have achieved the power they have by mastering the art of Newspeak, it is important to examine the ways in which they tilt the table, discursively, in any debate they have with you. Those critical of the Gender Orthodoxy and other aspects of Newspeak-leavened Wokeness are better than many at spotting the embedded intellectual bad faith; nevertheless, I think some crucial points about the Drag Queen Story Hours are being missed by my comrades.

Drag is a problematic, arguably misogynistic art form that has existed for well over a century in the Global North. It was part of a larger suite of “impersonation art” that flourished during the Cold War and late twentieth century. While its origins were different than Elvis impersonation, that was the category into which mainstream culture placed it once it began to gain legitimacy as an art form in the late 1960s. Some drag performers were full time “female impersonators,” the polite term for transsexuals during the Cold War but most were gay men who did drag on the side.

Like stand-up comedy, drag acts came up through a raunchy club scene, full of profanity, sexual references and drug and alcohol use. But it must be understood that the way the acts functioned at the clubs was by way of contrast. While most clubgoers might be gay or bisexual men dressed provocatively, or at least economically, for the drag act, the drag performer, himself, would comment on this by way of contrast.

Drag performers did not merely hide any sign of their actual primary and secondary sexual characteristics; they presented in the sharpest possible contrast to their audience. This included hyper-feminized “womanface” mannerisms and make-up, in contrast to the hyper-masculine crowd before them. It also included floor-length dresses, enormous and elaborate wigs and high heels, the sort of ensemble normally associated with respectable female entertainers who performed on the Las Vegas stage in the era of the Rat Pack.

These drag performers perfected mimicry, as distinct from mockery, of the female performers they, as attention-seeking, straight-attracted gay men, aspired to but knew they could never actually be. Precision when it came to dance moves in heels, lip syncing and costume mattered. This tradition held into the early twenty-first century because that raunchy club scene of gay bars that hosted entry-level drag shows could graduate its most proficient impersonators onto the Las Vegas stage, or at least onto the stages of Reno and Carson because of the nature of Vegas. Not just drag queens but Elvis impersonators thronged into Nevada; Rich Little and the great mimics and impressionists also congregated there, in Las Vegas, an extension of the replica city aesthetic epitomized in its great pyramid of Cheops and its own Eiffel Tower.

The audiences for drag queens in Nevada were little different than those for other sorts of impersonators. As an extension of the “stays in Vegas” ethos and replica city aesthetics of the place, straight men and women comprised the vast majority of the audience in top-flight female impersonators, who compared the dance techniques, costuming and vocal ranges of performers.

While some drag show viewers were no doubt also sex tourists to Las Vegas, they would not have understood their enjoyment of drag shows as part of their sex tourism, which was taking place down the road at brothels and strip clubs.

But as the twentieth century finished, a drag-adjacent form of entertainment was on the rise; transsexual/“shemale” strip clubs began to pop up in North America’s major cities for men who missed their stay in Thailand or Brazil and those who could not afford to go. I remember when the first ones opened in the mid-00s in Vancouver and Toronto because I, a sexually ambivalent man, was a patron of these establishments for a number of years.

These were utterly unlike either the drag shows at gay bars or the top-flight drag shows of Nevada; and they did not claim to be like them. Capitalizing on increasingly available and successful cosmetic surgical procedures, these clubs were staffed by full-time sex workers whose main clientele were men like me: straight and bisexual men who were attracted to the both highly feminine and clearly uncanny physiological characteristics of the strippers who, as in most strip bars, made their real money in the lap dance rooms. These cosmetic surgeries were expensive and much of the money made went directly into servicing medical debt. Nina Arsenault, one of the most popular performers boasted a $45,000 body.

As a consequence, instead of minimizing masculine features of their appearances, the most successful of the sex workers there concurrently amplified both their masculine and feminine primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Because, unlike female sexuality, male sexuality has plenty of time for the uncanny or, less politely put, the grotesque.

Because it was so clearly work done by surgeons and carefully burnished by its sex worker recipients that had lured us to the basement of a straight strip club in Mississauga, the “dancing” on stage did not hold most patrons’ attention and was performed in a perfunctory manner. None of the vampish showmanship of drag was in evidence. We were there for the uncanny costumes and bodies and the opportunity to unwrap them to reveal forms every bit as uncanny as those in Nero’s Domus Aurea.

After all, let us remember that Dylan Mulvaney did not rise to prominence on TikTok by making videos of himself in evening gowns singing in a falsetto but by giving tips on how to show off the contours of one’s erect penis in a leather mini-skirt.

Children and Drag

So, I want to contest the idea that the thing we are calling Drag Queen Story Hour is a drag show at all. First of all, the performers are not the straight-attracted gay men of either of those bar scenes. They are, overwhelmingly, autogynephilic men, partaking of a kind of Gold Rush hypermasculine sexuality.

But beyond that, their acts resemble, in every way, the transsexual strip clubs of the 00s, not the Vegas drag shows of the 80s. The problem with these “story hours” is that they are mainly hosted by men in grotesque, hypersexualized sex worker work attire. They are no more appropriate for kids than if a professional female stripper and prostitute came in in her work clothes and did her act for a group of children.

How would we feel if that happened, if a female stripper performed her act with children, shaking her genitals at them, exhorting them to put dollar bills in her g-string and instructing them on fellatio techniques. The woman would be jailed and the town would drive her out with pitchforks and torches, and deservedly so.

So, why, exactly, is it okay for men, who commit over 95% of all sex crimes, to engage in this behaviour with our kids?

More disturbing still, and the events that provoked me to come forward about my own sketchy past to offer some firsthand evidence others might not possess, is the idea that if children watching drag is okay, then it is okay for children to do drag. I lost four multi-decade friendships in the past month because I objected to a CBC TV documentary celebrating the “career” of a nine-year-old boy working as an exotic dancer for adults and a vendor of fetish gear to adults at a sex shop.

Leading the charge in the furious denunciations, threats and harassment not just of me but of my close friends was an individual working for Carousel Theatre, a youth theatre company in Vancouver that puts on summer day-camps with government funding to teach performing arts to kids.

I actually attended such a camp in 1981, put on by a precursor organization to Carousel, when I was nine and struggling with having been interfered-with sexually as a child. And I was naturally appalled, as an alumnus of such a camp, that Carousel was running a state-subsidized “drag camp” to teach seven to eleven-year-old boys the fine arts of sexualized cross-dressing and exotic dancing for adult men.

And if someone thinks that this is something it is appropriate for children who still believe in Santa Claus to be doing, I will say of them, what I said of the ghouls at CBC promoting that Montréal child’s sideline in sex work, and what got me into such trouble a month ago, “anyone celebrating this should be dragged through the streets of Seville in chains.”

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

The Curdling of Pearsonian Nationalism and the Rise of Canada’s White Consciousness Movement

The Slow Decay of Pearsonian Nationalism 1993-2015

I grew up as an enthusiastic participant in Pearsonian nationalism, the theory of Canadian nationalism that the governments of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau carefully designed and built between 1963 and 1982. As canvassed in my last post, this included a new flag, anthem, constitution and, more importantly, theory of what Canada was. Canada was understood to be a bilingual, multicultural welfare state structured by benign elite consensus maintained through brokerage.

This theory of Canada’s nature was embraced Conservative leaders Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, the latter of whom actually sought to amplify most features of Pearsonian nationalism, seeking higher levels of elite consensus, albeit based on a more decentralized model of the federation, with a powerful but less coercive federal government.

But, as neoliberalism increasingly came to structure the global economy, most welfare states began running large structural budget deficits. Consequently, when the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they were forced to modify Pearsonian nationalism and engaged in unilateral cuts in transfer payments to the provinces that funded most social programs.

The kind of elite consensus among the federal government and provincial premiers that had created Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Canada Assistance Plan (the system of co-funded welfare programs backed by federal legislation proclaiming Canadians’ right to food and shelter) was not sought by Jean Chretien’s government when it radically reduced transfer payments and raided the Unemployment Insurance fund.

With the exception of Paul Martin’s brief stint as Prime Minister from 2003 to 2006, no attempt has been made by any government since the defeat of Mulroney in 1993 to return to the idea that paternalistic elite brokerage and consensus should make nation-defining decisions. But neither has any successor model taken hold. There has existed no broadly shared or coherently narrated agreement about how we decide the big things about who we are as a nation.

Furthermore, one of the primary tools used to describe and instil Canadian values, the CBC has had a rough ride for most of the past thirty years, suffering under waves of austerity, during the Chretien and Harper governments, while, at the same time, being crowded out by a massive increase in Canadian cable channels in the 1990s followed by the rise of streaming TV in the 2010s.

When Canadians returned the Liberal Party to power in 2015, Pearsonian nationalism was in a state of institutional and cultural disrepair, following not just the decay I have described above but nine years of Stephen Harper’s intermittent efforts to propound the alternative 1812 nationalism I described in my previous article, during which time he did successfully rewrite the guide for new citizens and other important definitional texts.

The Post-Harper Liberals

Initially, it seemed as though, following his “Sunny Ways” election night speech in 2015, it was Justin Trudeau’s plan to reunite Canada with the Liberal past. And, although he never suggested it, we assumed that he would seek to restore the nationalism that his father had been instrumental in crafting. But instead, over the past eight years, we have seen a bizarre new kind of nationalism emerge, one propounded by a highly ideological CBC whose funding has been fully restored to function as the megaphone for Trudeau’s new theory of Canadian nationalism.

In some ways, we can see this new nationalism as an elaboration of official multiculturalism structured by a phenomenon I have been calling neo-Ottomanism in my writing over the past three years, a social order and a politics of diversity, best-exemplified in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Or, in the language of the Second British Empire, “a place for everyone and everyone in their place.”

This intensification of multicultural rhetoric and state support and endorsement of the festivals of racialized Canadians and non-Christian religious minorities not, itself a bad thing at all. I welcomed and continue to welcome enthusiastic state support and endorsement of festivals like Vaisakhi, which really brightens up my neighbourhood and is really important to our sense of community here as my Sikh neighbours welcome everyone into their traditions of generosity and celebration. I have no beef with the Trudeau government’s policies when it comes to sponsoring and promoting even nationalist patriotic festivals like Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates not a religious or cultural tradition but a decisive military victory of the Mexican state, something of which the Mexican diaspora remain justly proud. It is the larger context in which these events are now being placed that is concerning.

If one is not a member of a non-Christian religious minority or racialized group, there are two kinds of Canadian nationalism currently on offer:

The White Consciousness Movement, an Elite Nationalism of Self-Flagellation

Among elites, the commissar class and the caring professions, there is a new, muscular vibrant Canadian nationalism, a novel and bizarre way of celebrating a new kind of white racialist nationalism. This nationalism celebrates what one might call a “White Consciousness Movement.” The idea is that Canadians born since the mid-1960s are the very first good Canadians who have ever existed. Our ancestors were, all of them, genocidal, racist, misogynistic homophobes. But beginning in the late 1980s or early 90s, an increasing number of as Stephen Harper might say, “old stock Canadians,” threw off these centuries of cruelty and bigotry and became the first ever good Canadians.

My generation and the Prime Minister’s (we were born the same year), came to understand that the Canadian project and its history were something to be deeply ashamed of and sad about. And, beginning in the 1990s, we began developing new ritual acts to celebrate this nationalism.

In fact, I attended what I believe to be the first ever land acknowledgment in Sechelt in 1992. Originally, as I have explained in other articles, land acknowledgments were performed by indigenous government officials or random indigenous people one pulled off the street and handed $50 or $100. But, as the cultural practice matured into being one of the first displays of this new white consciousness nationalism, ritual acts performed by white Canadians for white Canadians, an opportunity for commissars and caring professionals to perform their white guilt and sensitivity to a receptive audience, eager to show their virtue by crying along.

The Canadian White Consciousness Movement’s nationalism primarily comprises acts of mourning and effacement of traditional symbols. The Maple Leaf flag, which once sat at the centre of the Pearsonian nationalist symbolic order, is still used in White Consciousness nationalism but as an object of shame, humiliation or mourning. It is the lowering, not the raising of the flag that Maple Leaf rituals are about. Statues are toppled by vigilantes or decommissioned by elites. Flags are removed, festivals canceled; sometimes even books are burned.

When there is a real or imagined past event about which the White Consciousness Movement wishes to stage an apology, their preferred ritual act, one of the key ritual acts is flag lowering or flag removal. The only flags it celebrates raising are the geometrically complex, post-rainbow Pharma Pride flags that adorn the windows of every business in a Canadian downtown core and fly above our legislative buildings, military installations and chartered banks.

The White Consciousness Movement believes that Canada was a mistake, which it may well have been. And they believe that it has historically been a stinking racist hellhole. Consequently, it cannot imagine that racialized Canadians would want to celebrate their nation, never mind that many immigrants deliberately chose Canada precisely because they believed it was not a stinking racist hellhole. As a result, White Consciousness nationalism does not make itself available to most racialized Canadians; and even the few who are permitted into White Consciousness nationalist ritual are not allowed to play the same ritual roles as old stock white Canadians in civic ritual. The roles reserved for non-whites are primarily the scold, one available to folks from all racial groups who can scold the White Consciousness movement’s members to help them stage acts of contrition and grief. But the contrition and grief is reserved for whites; and the noble savage, available to Indigenous Canadians who are asked to show up with blankets and drums to sanctify, as opposed to prompting, the ritual expression of white guilt. In this way, the central form of nationalist performance is walled-off from non-whites even if they are invited as participants.

Not only are racialized Canadians disqualified from full participation in this nationalism; so are those who have an aspirational or celebratory view of the country, especially folks who don’t have a lot of days off and really appreciate having a big party weekend in early July when the weather is good. White Consciousness Canadian nationalism is fundamentally an elitist movement that conceptualizes most Canadians is ineligible to participate in its public displays of grief, regret and guilt.

Hoser Nationalism and the Third Northwest Rebellion

The degree to which working class Canadians working and living in the Boreal Forest belt are viewed as outsiders by the White Consciousness Movement became very clear during the 2022 Freedom Convoy, during which the establishment press characterized their march on the capital as an invasion and them as “invaders.” How exactly can one “invade” one’s own country?

What struck me as I read more outlandish denunciations of the convoyists was that it reminded me of something from the past. It took me a few weeks to realize that these denunciations were reflective of the same ideological and class position of the establishment figures who denounced Louis Riel and his movements during Canada’s first generation.

It became clear that the White Consciousness movement believed that, while most racialized Canadians and most members of religious minorities could celebrate some kind of nationalism, as long as they did not attempt to claim full ownership of Canadian-ness and or attempt to equally participate in the White Consciousness Movement.

But for white working-class Canadians and indigenous and Métis people who are not neo-traditionalists, there is no appropriate expression of nationalism, especially if such an expression is joyful, fun or expresses appreciation for Canada in the present or optimism about our shared future, even if the present is dark. Just today, Calgary, supposedly the most conservative major city in Canada, just canceled Canada Day fireworks because watching an entertaining visual spectacle on a July 1st would be an act of anti-Indigenous racism.

Indeed, the CBC has run stories suggesting that, like the word, “freedom,” our own flag constitutes an “alt-right dog-whistle,” a symbol of racism and hate. True Canadian nationalism must be elite, somber lamenting the existence of the nation. People who want to have a party to celebrate what they enjoy about Canada now or what they hope it could one day become are not supposed to celebrate Canada Day at all because expressing joy on that holiday reveals one to be a deplorable, someone unfit to celebrate the new elite nationalism of our White Consciousness movement.

And the very symbols and traditions that underpinned Pearsonian nationalism are now understood to be symbols of genocide and racism. Indeed, the White Consciousness Movement has attempted to replace “our home and native land” in our anthem with “our home on native land,” something that may sound like an expression of sensitivity or regret but, like so much Woke discourse, is actually a spiteful racist humblebrag, telling Indigenous people not that they are part of our communities and equal citizens but victims of a crime we have successfully committed against them. Healthy sane people want to be part of inclusive communities, not exiled from the mainstream of their society and cast as perpetual victims and dupes.

And this is all part of the social partitioning of Canada, the establishment’s effort to make sure that Canadians do not encounter other sorts of Canadians, and especially not in a joyful context. To keep Canada post-political, the establishment has fashioned an anti-nationalism, one in which recent immigrants are insulted as fools for liking their life in Canada and ignoramuses for choosing to come here, one in which regular people are looked on not merely as public nuisances but as dangerous fascists for having a barbecue, getting drunk, shooting off fireworks and waving the flag of their own country on its own national holiday

It Does Not Have To Be This Way

It does not have to be this way. I am no keen to resurrect Pearsonian nationalism, nor do I think we can return to the alternative vision of John Diefenbaker. Stephen Harper’s 1812 nationalism is not my bag either. But what if we re-considered the nationalism of James Laxer and Waffle Movement that, albeit briefly, took Canadian socialists by storm in the 1970s? In my next piece, I am going to explore the Waffle as a historical phenomenon but also, the possibilities Laxer’s project presents to us today.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

Canadian Nationalism Adrift: The Failure of the 1812 Secretariat and the Breakdown of Pearsonian Nationalism

Big Dates in Canadian History

In 1497, John Cabot made landfall on Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland. In 1534, Jacques Cartier opened European-indigenous diplomatic relations by erecting a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and kidnapping some young indigenous noblemen. In 1541, he returned to the St Lawrence basin and established a four-hundred-person colony at the site of present-day Québec City but evacuated and abandoned it in 1543. In 1577, Martin Frobisher and his crew made landfall in Baffin Island where they attempted to grow peas and mine (non-existent) gold before giving up on the colony, but not before doing some kidnapping to impress the locals.

In 1604, the French established the first sustained European settlements at Port Royal, founding the colony of Acadia. In 1763, New France became part of a bilingual British North America and the vast majority of present-day Canada was recognized as a possession of the British Empire. In 1784, this territory lost its southern colonies and the United Empire Loyalists flooded into Nova Scotia, Upper Canada and Lower Canada; and British North America became roughly co-terminous with present-day Canada.

In 1815, the War of 1812 ended with the British, their English and French subjects and their indigenous allies, the Iroquois, successfully repelling and American invasion and the resettling of the Iroquois in Lower Canada. In 1837, revolutionaries in Lower and Upper Canada marched on their legislatures demanding responsible government and representative democracy, causing a major governance crisis. In response to the crisis, the British Empire merged Upper and Lower Canada into a single colony with responsible government and representative democracy in 1840, creating Canada’s first bilingual parliament, giving rise to a series of governing coalitions comprising French and English parties.

In 1867, negotiators from Nova Scotia, Canada and New Brunswick created the Canadian federation at the behest of Whitehall, which was growing increasingly fearful of another war with the US. And in 1870, fearing its annexation by the United States, Canada admitted its first additional province, Manitoba, led by the Francophone Catholic Louis Riel. The next year, it added Prince Edward Island and British Columbia, producing a bicoastal nation-state. And in 1949, it incorporated the last of the separate British North American colonies, Newfoundland.

In other words, a credible story could be told that Canada was founded in 1497, 1534, 1541, 1577, 1604, 1763, 1784, 1815, 1837, 1840, 1867, 1870, 1871 or 1949. Making this list is the work of a historian. Selecting a particular year from that list, that is a political act because the year we choose conditions the meaning of Canada, not in the past but in the present and future.

Stephen Harper’s 1815 Nationalism

That is why, when Stephen Harper finally won a parliamentary majority in 2011, he created an entity called the 1812 Secretariat, a project that fizzled due to a lack of leadership, Harper’s own neglect and the failure of key US allies of Harper to assist with the project.

As I understand the original project, the hope was that Canada would be able to celebrate its two-hundredth birthday, its bicentennial, on February 17th, 1815, the day on which the War of 1812 ended. Had he pulled it off, it would have been an incredible propaganda coup for him and his party because this relocation of the date of Canada’s founding would have helped to change the values on which Canadian nationalism was based to values reflective of his party’s.

Harper was pretty clear as to what Canadian values should be when he and his party rewrote the citizenship guide for new immigrants in 2009 and when he spoke about what he deemed Canada’s foundational values: valour in battle, loyalty to Crown and country, steadfastness in one’s alliances, pride in self-reliance. Harper’s Canada was a partnership among three founding peoples, the French, English and Indigenous who made that partnership real for the first time on the battlefield in the early nineteenth century. These three founding peoples graciously invited the world to come to their country and share in their social contract. Canadian history, according to his manual, was not always harmonious. Indigenous people and Francophones continued to struggle to assert their independence, their rights within the federation; and phenomena like separation referenda and constitutional brinksmanship, events like the Quiet Revolution and Northwest Rebellion were part of Canadian history, that conflict was as important as compromise in the growth of the nation.

Harper’s inability to delegate, the weakness of his front bench and the unwillingness of the otherwise conservative-aligned US war re-enactor community to assist his project in any way led to successive defundings and abandonment of the project by 2015.

Pearsonian Nationalism

This raises an important question: what theory of Canada was Harper seeking to replace? For lack of a better term, I will describe the competing theory of Canada that he sought to supplant as Pearsonian nationalism, a theory of Canadian nationhood that came to be propounded as the normative theory of Canada beginning with Lester Pearson’s election as Prime Minister in 1963.

The previous six years had been hard on Canada’s natural governing party. It had lost three elections to John Diefenbaker’s Tories. Prior to those losses, the Liberals had held power continuously since 1921, interrupted only by a single Tory government during the Great Depression and a brief constitutional crisis from which they had emerged victorious in 1926.

When they returned to power, the party set about restoring its status as Canada’s natural governing party by building a new, self-conscious nationalism that reflected its values.

Whereas Conservative minority governments, be they those of Harper (2006-11), Diefenbaker (1957-58, 1962-63) or Meighen (1925-26) tended to govern not through formal agreements and coalitions but rather through brinksmanship, Liberal minorities (1921-30, 2004-06, 2019-present) typically make formal, brokered agreements with other parties that are negotiated in public view. So, it was natural that a key value represented in Pearsonian nationalism was elite brokerage, compromise and coalition-building.

Whereas, the Tories had, until the leadership of Robert Stanfield, had described Canada as a hierarchical nation derivative of and loyal to the British Empire and Commonwealth, based on a “one language, one Queen” theory of the nation, the Liberals, who dominated Québec in every election but one between 1896 and 1984 and had contributed Canada’s only Québecois prime ministers prior the 1984, saw the country as a more egalitarian Anglo-French partnership. This made sense as the Liberals’ base, even outside Québec, was largely Catholic whereas the Tories relied mostly on Protestant voters. It was natural, then, for Pearsonian nationalism to be based on the idea of two founding peoples. And also, that independence from Britain would be emphasized in contradistinction to the Tory idea of loyalty to Britain.

Holding power with only a nine-month break in 1979, from 1963 to 1984, the Liberal Party formalized, elaborated and entrenched its values as the values of Canada.

In 1963, Pearson initiated Canada’s official bilingualism policy which was developed by a royal commission over the next seven years and implemented in 1970 by his successor, Pierre Trudeau, making French a national official language with equal status to English for the first time.

In 1965, the Maple Leaf was adopted as Canada’s flag, replacing the Union Jack, British North America’s official flag since 1763. The new flag depicted a red-coloured sugar maple leaf a variety of Maple that grows in Canada’s Atlantic and Central Canada but not in the West and whose leaves do indeed turn red in the autumn.

In 1967, Pearson dropped all racially based immigration restrictions and, in 1971, Trudeau followed this with the adopting of official multiculturalism. The idea was that Canada would be a colourblind secular state that nonetheless gave priority to its two founding peoples with respect to language and culture. And, in 1980, Canada retired its long-time anthem God Save the Queen and replaced it with O Canada, an unofficial patriotic song composed in 1908.

In 1982, by agreement with nine of its ten provinces, Canada officially patriated its constitution, adding a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ending oversight of Canada’s constitutional matters by the British House of Commons and House of Lords, making it fully independent within the British Commonwealth.

Finally, the country retired the centrepiece of Diefenbaker’s Tory nationalism. While it had technically been a bank holiday since 1879, Dominion Day, which celebrated the day the British parliament recognized Canada’s confederation in 1867, had not been a national festival of any kind. The federal government and its public broadcaster had played no role in promoting or participating in the festivities. Diefenbaker changed that by making the day the centrepiece of his Canadian nationalism, which had stressed Canada’s preeminent place in the British Empire and Commonwealth.

In 1982, following constitutional patriation, it was changed to Canada Day, effectively conflating the brokered negotiations among English and French elites at the 1867 conference with the creation of Canada, itself.

Because this nationalism did not merely sanctify a set of policies but the process by which policy is made, national projects produced by negotiation among the provinces and federal government have a special exalted status as part of the Canadian social contract. The Charter of Rights, Medicare and the Canada Pension Plan are baked into Pearsonian nationalism not simply by virtue of when and by whom they were enacted by the process by which they were.

The Curdling of Pearsonian Nationalism

But we all know that something has gone terribly wrong with that nationalism. Somehow the grandiose inclusive project of the Canadian multicultural mosaic, the dream of bilingualism, the universality of healthcare and retirement security, the shared flag and anthem—something has gone very wrong; these things have stopped working. While neoliberalism and its attack on the welfare state has, of course, played a part; while Stephen Harper’s incomplete efforts to redesign our nationalism has helped to weaken the Pearsonian nationalism; something darker has happened, poisoning, curdling the nationalism so lovingly crafted and carefully enacted by the Liberal Party from 1963-82.

The Liberal Party has, itself, made the undoing and replacement of this nationalism with something strange, grotesque and threatening. I will explain what that is in my next essay.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Honey Boo Boo and the Fourth Punic War: How Gender and Climate Politics Are Linked

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a deeply disturbing “reality” show took to the airwaves in 2012. It depicted the life of a child beauty queen, groomed by her mother to put on sexualized performances for audiences of grown men in her pre-pubescent body. The show’s launch was really the culmination of a set of bizarre pedophilic fads that had ripped through the heartland of American conservatism post-911. Shocking numbers of pre-pubescent girls got to experience a novel variant on Munchausen-by-proxy as abusive parents found a new way to seek attention by publicly hurting their children.

Closely coupled with this phenomenon were the father-daughter dates and dances, culminating in formal dress “prom” dates, in which men displayed their adolescent daughters as surrogate wives, again to receptive audiences that applauded these displays of Platonic incest.

But by the third season, however, ratings were falling as was the popular cultural practice the show represented. Father-daughter proms also went on the wane at around the same time.

Ironically it seemed as though, during the rise of Donald Trump, himself, an obvious abuser of his own daughter, that his base was quietly abandoning the very kind of exhibitionistic abuse in which he himself was engaging.

Today, it is the creature shambling around in the flayed skin of the Left that we most associate with pedophilic exhibitionism. We have trans child beauty queens and trans child reality shows. Dylan Mulvaney has moved on from making videos about his ability to show off his erection in a leather mini-skirt and holding summits with the leader of the free world to making videos of himself as six-year-old girl inviting you into her bed. And, of course, there is Drag Queen Story Hour, where progressive parents bring their children to watch transsexual strip club routines and slip $1 bills into the exotic dancers’ g-strings, when not being read stories from the Ally Baby series, which explains to pre-pubescent children that they can and should consent to sex acts.

I want to suggest that there is a logic to this bizarre dance with child safeguarding practices in which Anglo America has been engaged.

And, each year that goes by, less of this dereliction of child safeguarding duties is even being laundered through the discourse of the Gender Industrial Complex. School sex education curricula are teaching kids that the term “pedophile” is a stigmatizing pejorative and that the term “minor attracted person” should be used in its place. Progressive opinion leaders like University of Victoria professor Hope Cleves propound the doctrine that adults raping children is not, in fact, abuse but a mutually beneficial interaction she euphemistically calls “intergenerational sex.”

It’s the climate.

From 1996-2015, conservative Americans’ leadership acknowledged that the Greenhouse Effect was real, consequential, harmful and also not something they were going to do anything about. In other words, conservative Americans found themselves subscribing to a set of beliefs that forced them to conclude that failing to protect one’s children from a genuine threat that could ruin or impoverish their lives was okay. In fact, it was good.

“Children are resilient,” “children are hard to hurt,” “children can consent,” “children can make adult choices,” “it’s okay to hurt kids if you get something out of it materially,” “children are really just small, dimwitted adults,”—these thoughts became normalized. Publicly staging derelictions of parental duty, of the collective duty of adults to protect kids became something a huge swath of the population needed to applaud.

But by 2015, the mainstream view of the Republican Party’s leadership and of evangelical religious leaders was that the destabilization of our climate was a “Chinese hoax.” In fact, the person who most vigorously propounded the idea that there was no climate crisis was the person chosen not just as conservative America’s president but as its Caliph, a man who could also pronounce on matters of evangelical religion from his seat in the White House.

While the effects of the mainstreaming of climate denial have been devastating in many ways, they did, ironically, I believe, spare a lot of kids in places like Oklahoma from being turned into sexualized display objects by their parents.

Meanwhile, the statistics do not lie. As I explained in my previous post, governments that talk tough on climate and whose leaders march with Greta Thunberg actually build more pipelines and sink more new wells than those run by climate denialists. And, as much as progressives try to hide those ugly facts from themselves, the reality is that they cannot.

Everybody knows the German Green and Social Democratic parties are destroying people’s homes and fields, annihilating their property rights and civil liberties, assaulting and incarcerating villagers whose homes are getting in the way of the new coal mines they want to dig. They know that it was Justin Trudeau, not Stephen Harper who poured billions of dollars and hundreds of RCMP officers into forcing the Trans Mountain Pipeline through Western Canada, that oil exploration in the US is experiencing a renaissance under Joe Biden’s presidency.

In other words, progressives now hold the same position regarding climate that conservatives held 1996-2015. And so they are compelled to engage in practices of exhibitionistic, perverted child hatred to normalize their total dereliction of duty to their children, something that has only intensified since Biden returned to a level of nuclear sabre-rattling not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first term. If nuking Eastern Europe is okay; if the carbon-forced omnicide is okay; why not FGM and pedophilia?

That is why there is almost no overlap between people who believe the Greenhouse Effect is real and that it is wrong to perform hysterectomies on healthy teenage girls. Because I am such a person, engaging with this civilization is very challenging for me.

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

While I vehemently disagree with Matt Walsh on gay rights and a host of other issues, I think there is one thing he and only he is saying right now that cuts right to the heart of the matter: the current progressive child endangerment movement is at war with Western Civilization itself.

While many trace the start of Western Civilization to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the civilizational competition between Greek and Phoenician city states in the Mediterranean that began in the seventh century BC, I argue that it begins a little later.

The Greek and Phoenician colonies that dotted the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from present-day Gibraltar to Crimea were vibrant multilingual, multicultural societies that traded luxury goods and slaves. But there was a fundamental difference between the two kinds of city states. While both types of colony lived and died by the commerce that was transacted in the agora, the marketplace, the core of civic life was not there.

In Greek city states, the centre of civic life was the bouleuterion, where political decisions were made by a group of citizens through a process of deliberation and voting. While some Greek colonies has small bouleuteria that only included members of the wealthiest and most powerful families, others, like Athens, accommodated as much as 15% of their resident in enormous amphitheatre-style meeting spaces.

But in the Phoenician city states, the centre of civic life was the altar to the god Baal, where the priests sacrificed infants by heating the idol’s bronze hands so that they would literally fry the bodies of babies placed in their embrace. While the Greeks found this disgusting and condemned it, that disgust is as far as it went, and, as I have said elsewhere, it is not like the Greeks were the best advocates for child safeguarding, given their embrace of pedophilia as a natural and laudable part of their formal education systems.

It is my argument that Western Civilization truly began during the Punic Wars, between the Rome and Carthage, an empire composed of Phoenician city-states in North Africa, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. While these wars were largely motivated by the conflicting commercial interests of the two maritime powers vying for control of the Western Mediterranean, as the wars grew more costly, they also became more ideological. Increasingly compelling narratives had to be presented by Rome’s senate and consuls to mobilize the volunteer citizen-soldiers on which the Roman Republic relied to fill the ranks of its armies.

And the most successful and compelling narrative, the one that caused thousands of Roman soldiers to cross the sea and fight and die in North Africa was this: the Carthaginians are sacrificing their own children to their god, Baal and that Romans had a duty to protect the children of strangers.

Irrespective of the motive for doing so, it is this moment that I choose to see as the birth of Western Civilization, the radical act of imaginative empathy that makes you want to protect the children of monstrous people and exact revenge upon them for their crimes against humanity. No doubt this belief has led to much cultural intolerance, conversion at swordpoint and unnecessary bloodshed. But it has also produced a compassionate, empathetic universalism that we also associate with the West.

That is what is on the line as we stare down the climate crisis and the psychiatric comorbidities it is generating in the human brain. And there is only one way out of this: we have to build a movement that will actually confront the omnicide, not just one like, the world’s Green Parties that pay lip service to doing so, while flooring the gas over the cliff, or one that will not just throw cans of soup at it. That isn’t climate politics; it’s post-political climate nihilism. Because, like it or not, the battle against the Greenhouse Effect is also the Fourth Punic War.

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Canadian Politics Has Been Reduced To an Intramural Petroleum Industry Dispute

Yesterday, flanked by indigenous elders in elaborate neo-traditionalist ceremonial dress, David Eby, the BC premier recently installed by the fossil fuel industry in a bloodless coup, announced another amazing Identitarian “first,” the first indigenous-owned indigenous-led liquefied natural gas export terminal. Far be it from me to suggest that indigenous people should be held to higher standards of environmental stewardship than their settler neighbours. While I disagree with the Haisla Nation’s decision to cash in on the LNG bubble, I disagree with it no more or less than I disagree with the BC government’s decision to do the same. It is racist to expect indigenous people, who continue to disproportionately suffer from poverty, to forego economic opportunities their settler neighbours take.

That stated, I plan to oppose this second Kitimat-area terminal as vehemently as I do Royal Dutch Shell’s terminal up the road.

The reason I draw attention to “climate champion” Eby’s ceremonial announcement is in an effort to explain one of the central paradoxes of post-political Anglo America. The fact is that the more vigorously our parties campaign on the need to fight climate change, the faster emissions and extraction increase when they are in power. So-called conservative parties that campaign on denying or minimizing human agency and the role of atmospheric carbon in climate, and promise enthusiastic patronage of the oil industry consistently sink fewer new wells, finance fewer pipelines and increase emissions and extraction more slowly than their progressive counterparts.

How is an ecologically conscious voter to determine whom to support at the polls when a party’s positions and promises on fossil fuels are not merely unrelated but inversely correlated to what happens when the party governs? And how do we explain this phenomenon?

In our post-political age, explanation and blame have become confused. Blaming individual malefactors for a problem is the opposite of explaining the problem. “Bad people” is not really an explanation for anything, by itself. Sure, I may feel that NDP leader John Horgan and Green Party leader Andrew Weaver are malefactors and sell-outs for the mass of increases in fossil fuel subsidies and fracking increases over which they presided in their three years co-governing BC. But it grows clearer to me by the day that this is bigger than individuals.

While I oppose the fossil fuel industry, as a whole, as do most people who have spent as much of their lives fighting the Greenhouse Effect as I have, one of our collective failings has been in understanding how divided and non-monolithic the fossil fuel sector is and how different parts of it operate by opposing logics.

Big Oil, transnational corporations like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, especially those that are primarily based in Europe, have different interests than small and medium-sized domestic oil companies that dot the Canadian Prairies and Boreal Forest.

The genius—and I don’t use this term in a flattering way—of Rachel Notley, and the reason she may return to the Alberta premiership in 2024 is that Notley realized that conservative parties of the West were controlled by the interests of small and medium-sized oil and carry out the agenda of that constituency, even when they contradicted the interests of Big Oil. Furthermore, there were a number of ways in which the New Democrats and other progressive parties, like the Greens, were better situated to be Big Oil’s friends in government. Nationally, that insight by Gerald Butts, the man behind the rise of Justin Trudeau, fundamentally shaped the new Liberal Party of Canada that returned to office the same year Notley was elected in Alberta.

First of all, there is the matter of class adjacency. Elizabeth Cull, the Hill and Knowlton fossil fuel lobbyist who installed Eby by disqualifying his competitors from the race to succeed Horgan, is typical of the kind of people who transact the power of Big Oil: members of the professional courtier class that exists within the larger commissar class, moving between appointed government positions, elected government positions and lobbyist work with ease. Paying a monthly retainer to a company like Hill and Knowlton, which has a stable of courtiers to lobby the government, both formally and informally, is the way Big Oil prefers to get business done and changes made in this country.

Small and medium-sized oil, on the other hand, are still based around an owner class that does not tend to delegate nearly as much of its political influencer work to the courtier class but instead works to create broad social consensus in oil-dependent communities. Both formal and informal lobbying work is still done but tends to be more owner-based, more publicly visible and, when professional lobbyists are used, they tend to be social and economic outliers within the commissar class’s professional courtiers.

Small and medium-sized oil tend to be investors and owners of locally-based firms who lack the spending power to make serious capital investments or who have to take them very slowly, in contradistinction to Big Oil. Small and medium-sized oil is interested in reducing regulatory and cleanup burdens to maximize the little liquidity that it has. Reduced regulation, reduced taxation, lower royalty fees: these are the priorities.

Big Oil has very different interests and priorities. It is interested in getting state support for major capital investments through tax reductions targeted specifically at those investments and not to the sector as a whole and through direct subsidies euphemized as “partnerships.” It also favours state patronage through law enforcement and land rezoning and prioritizes things like special squads of police specifically tasked with helping to drive pipelines and other infrastructure through hostile territory.

But more important than boutique tax concessions and co-investment in pipelines, terminals and other infrastructure, more important than turning local cops into industry brute squads, the most significant need of Big Oil is to maintain the support and continued patronage of its investors. Transnational oil companies have a global investor community to which they need to deliver dividends and maintain high share prices and from whom they need to secure funds for new investments.

In order to continue to secure investor capital in the European Union and Blue State America, they need to demonstrate to their investors that they support the Paris Agreement, net-zero by 2050, diversity, equity, inclusion, “just transition” and, as referenced in my opening paragraph, the holy grail of investor relations for Canadian projects: decolonization and indigenous reconciliation.

In other words, investing in Donald Trump’s USA is more dangerous and less profitable than investing in Joe Biden’s. Justin Trudeau’s photos marching with Greta Thunberg are very important for reassuring and gaining investment from liberal-minded, social democratic-voting members of the European and Pacific Coastal commissar class and haute bourgeoisie.

New pipelines get built faster in jurisdictions that do not approve 100% pipeline projects but only 70%. New wells are sunk faster in jurisdictions that protect some portion of their land from fossil fuel development, faster still, if those jurisdictions are unveiling new parks, plastic straw bans, electric car quotas and gas stove phase-outs. All of those things are a boon to investor relations professionals, professionals who work across the hall from the lobbyists in the most common type of lobbying firm, one with three practices: investor relations, public relations and government relations.

In essence, an especially retrograde type of post-politics has seized Canada’s already anemic managed democracy. It is our progressive parties that now represent the Big Banks, Big Oil and Big Pharma. Conservatives have been left with the table leavings in the form of generic drug manufacturers, local financial institutions and medium-sized oil. Fortunately for them, those running the real estate pyramid scheme on which the country is increasingly basing its economy, still tilt to the right.

What does this mean for me and people like me, politically? It means that until we can break the stranglehold of the commissar class on our public square, our party system and Canadian society as a whole, it will be impossible to cast an effective vote on the climate question. We once again find ourselves one step further back, further removed from politics.

Like it or not, the commissar class and their Woke orthodoxies have appointed themselves the level bosses of this phase of our video game. Until we break through the de-politicization of politics, their destruction of democratic institutions and processes and their control of the public square, all other politics is cut off from us. Only by restoring democracy and the public square can we get back to directly fighting the oil industry as a whole.

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“Are you by any chance the Mentiads? Well, it’s just that you look like Mentiads to me.” Canada, the Pirate Planet and Its Burgeoning Grief Industry

In what I consider to be both the greatest Doctor Who serial ever made and the most underappreciated work of the great Douglas Adams, there is a lot for modern Canadians to relate to in The Pirate Planet (1979). The story chronicles the planet of Zanak which teleports through space, envelops other planets and extracts the minerals and energy before leaving behind a lifeless, drained husk.

Its people live under an authoritarian regime that routinely carries out extra-judicial killings of dissidents, killings that are popular with the general public and cheered-on as a sad necessity of living in a prosperous society. The inhabitants of the planet do little work and appear to have no interest in understanding the automated processes that provide them a luxurious, indolent life.

The killings, it is revealed, are not simply about preventing the rise of dissident political movements. Because of the extraordinary scale of the death from which they are benefiting, events of mass death, when trillions of lifeforms and every ecosystem on a planet are annihilated in a single day, some sort of psychic energy is released causing the more sensitive, empathetic members of the population to become “Mentiads,” a group of telepaths who can pool their energies into gestalt capable of telekinesis.

When a planet is destroyed, the new Mentiad converts begin screaming “lifeforce dying!” When the Doctor first observes this, he asks whether this happens often to the afflicted man and the man’s friend replies “only when the Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity.” Ultimately, the more planets Zanak consumes, the more of its residents experience the psychic grief caused by unwittingly presiding over so much death and the more Mentiads come into being, swelling the ranks of the resistance, who ultimately confront the despots running their planet and destroy them with psychic powers.

Douglas Adams offers us a compelling metaphor to which many young environmentalists just starting off in the world can relate; I certainly did when I first saw the show in syndication when I was thirteen. In this story, we suddenly become conscious of the scale of the omnicide; it deeply upsets us and it spurs us to action.

But Adams actually warns us of the pitfalls of this story as well. When the Doctor arrives on Zanak, he castigates them for the fact that, until his arrival, they have not taken any action. All they have been doing is living in a cave in their creepy hooded robes, avoiding the government death squads and loudly lamenting the death of each new planet Zanak consumes, focusing all their efforts on identifying community members and building their grief-based gestalt.

And this is why I believe the Pirate Planet needs to be watched today more than ever. Because more and more of the energy and money needed to address the omnicide is being redirected into something called “climate grief.”

As I have observed more than once, if there is a single fairy tale that expresses the class politics of the ruling class, it is the Princess and the Pea, the fable in which a young woman who does not know she is a princess has a single dried pea placed under her mattress. She is so sensitive that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. To try and make a bed soft enough, people keep adding more pillows and mattresses but she can always still feel the pea, even through a dozen eider down mattresses and pillows. This sensitivity reveals her to be the true princess.

Although the sensitivity politics of the original Enlightenment bourgeoisie, for and about whom the Princess and the Pea was written, were different from those of the contemporary Commissar Class, they have many points in common. It is for a future essay to describe the substantial differences between their respective politics of emotion and sensitivity.

When members of that class engage in dominance competitions in meetings or other interactions, both inside and outside the workplace, they are structured by competitive claims of special identities (white-passing Indigenous, psychologically disabled and non-binary are favourites because any assertive high-status white man can make them) and demonstrations of emotional upset, ideally tears.

There is no world leader more effective at the latter than Canada’s own Justin Trudeau who has perfected the art of using his tears as a replacement for government action or public policy. And the BC legislature, the most Woke legislature in the country passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people and all eighty-seven members of the chamber had a big long cry together. And then went back to their multipartisan campaign of sending heavily-armed security forces to incarcerate the Wet’suwet’en land defenders to smash a new gas pipeline through their territory.

It is not that people cry while they act on climate or Indigenous rights. It is that they cry instead of acting.

Our governments constantly cry about things they are still doing and apologize for wrongs committed by the dead. So, naturally, aspiring commissars desire opportunities to demonstrate their own sensitivity, shed their own tears so as to rise is status within their class. And consequently, there is money to be made. Climate grief seminars, courses and retreats are being rolled out by private institutes and public universities. Zoom calls comprising a dozen middle aged white women each with “she/her” pronouns next to their names, in case anyone was going to get confused, allow the Woke to engage in miniature practice competitions to become the Apex Victim. And they can come away from the call all feeling like they have done environmental activism that day, that they are, in some small way, the Mentiads.

The area of environmental action that has been most damaged by this turn is the forensic. Efforts we used to put into assessing responsibility for quasi-natural disasters, magnified by human negligence we now put into mourning floods and fires. What has sped this up is increasing government funding for “commemoration,” “mourning” and “grief.”

And this phenomenon is not just limited to climate or environmental issues. Grief money is spreading into more sectors as demonstrations of sensitivity replace action as a new frontier in the post-political.

In 2021, the Trudeau government unveiled tens of millions of dollars in new spending on murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. Although four government commissions in the Highway of Tears area have all had the same two core recommendations since 2000, close the camps and restore daily bus service. None of this money went into buses going anywhere, never mind a government even considering doing anything other than expanding the man camp system faster. The biggest area of funding increase and the fastest money to be released was, of course, money for commemoration, mourning and grief.

I am not one to suggest that we should not experience grief about the omnicide. I cry about it myself every couple of days and, in my social time, my friends and I talk each other through the grief over a pint or nine. But we do not mistake those times for taking action against the Greenhouse Effect. There is more work to be done than ever when it comes to taking down the fossil fuel industry. And the work continues to grow more urgent every day.

Wake up people! We’re not the Mentiads. Your tearful gestalt does nothing. Because this is reality, not science fiction.

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“Can You Secede from Reality?”: The Oil Industry’s Fake Autonomist Idyll

The 1920s were a watershed decade in so many ways. They remain, in many ways, the tragedy to the farce of the 2020s, according to Karl Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” aphorism. Among other things, it was the first decade in which we can truly say that the oil industry began functioning more as a horizontally integrated cartel, in contradistinction to its previous sixty years as part of vertically integrated industrial production systems, its interests largely subordinate the manufacturing sector it served.

It is as a horizontally integrated cartel and not as a set subordinate extractive corporations dominated by the manufacturing sector that it made its alliance with the auto industry and began its long-term project of shaping and controlling public opinion in North America. Ideas and practices that would culminate in the “car culture” of the 1950s began being shaped in the 1920s.

Given that the Greenhouse Effect been discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s and passed peer review for the first time in 1896 and Standard Oil and its Rockefeller owners were among the most hated entities of the American corporate world by the 1920s. Even a century ago, America’s oil men already felt a strong impetus to build new tools to control public opinion. And so they did.

One initiative of America’s oil men was a monthly journal, mailed free to every Evangelical, Pentecostal and non-denominational church in America, covering a wide variety of issues, designed to provide independent clergy with little education or denominational support, a Christian analysis of the issues of the day, to assist them in their preaching. The journal was called The Fundamentals and it is this journal’s impact that introduced the term “Christian fundamentalist” to our lexicon.

In 1925, against the backdrop of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Fundamentals broke with the mainstream Christian belief that read the six days of creation described in Genesis metaphorically as referring to periods of millions or billions of years of slow geological change, often inclusive of evolution, as long as evolution did not pertain to or explain human beings. Instead of backing this reading, as propounded by Scopes prosecutor, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, the editors of The Fundamentals took a more audacious position.

Back in 1844, one of the most popular religious movements in America was the Millerites. Pastor William Miller, their founder, believed he had calculated the precise date of Christ’s return. On that date in 1844, thousands of Millerites donned white robes and stood on their roofs waiting for Jesus to descend from heaven on a big disc. A day came and went and the bewildered Millerites tried to make sense of their lives. Ever since, October 22nd, 1844 has been known as “the Great Disappointment.”

As with most movements caused by social contagions that experience a concurrent crisis of popularity, visibility, humiliation and failure, most former Millerites came down off their roofs, folded up their robes and went back to their former lives and mainline churches. But a handful devolved into tiny warring factions that sought to explain the failure and come up with a new date for Christ’s return. Two survived into the twentieth century (and, for that matter, up to the present day), the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists.

Unlike the Witnesses, the Adventists have developed a whole pseudoscience to underpin their worldview including something we today call “Young Earth Creationism,” invented by George McCready-Price, an Adventist minister in rural New Brunswick. It is McReady-Price from whom we get the idea that creation was precisely one hundred forty-four hours long and that dinosaurs cohabited with humans but were not loaded aboard the Ark (no doubt due to space constraints).

From an obscure denomination numbering only a few thousand adherents, at the very margins of Christianity, the oil men cherry-picked this doctrine, which they saw as the beachhead for inculcating anti-science belief favourable to the fossil fuel industry. As Young Earth Creationists believed (and still do) that fossils can be formed in a decade or two, the geological science underpinning the creation of oil and coal could be occluded from the worldview of the devout.

Another aspect of oil industry propaganda that formed part of a larger whole was the repackaging of petroleum dependence as rugged individualism, independence and autonomy. In the 1920s, when Anglo America had a comprehensive and effective rail grid that provided frequent passenger train service both within and between communities, most of our forbears did not need automobiles to meet their transportation needs.

Furthermore, it would be another three decades before the Eisenhower Administration created the Interstate highway system, meaning that the network of properly paved and maintained roads was smaller than the area covered by the continent’s rail grid, much of which had been financed through government subsidies. The oil industry’s response to these three entwined challenges, a) a comprehensive passenger rail system, b) a road system substantially inferior to rail and c) ongoing government subsidies to repair and expand the rail grid, was ingenious.

They marketed the car as a nostalgic return to the age of the horse, the autonomy, the freedom, the ruggedness, etc. The marketing campaign that introduced sport utility vehicles at the end of the Cold War was just a pale retread of the original automobile marketing strategy. Magazine and movie palace ads in the 1920s depicted first-generation rubber-tired automobiles parked in improbable locations, overlooking stunning vistas of natural and pastoral beauty.

In other words, from the beginning, the auto industry was pivotal, instrumental and first-on-the-ground in re-narrating the era of the Anglo American frontier from being an embarrassing, poverty-stricken, hardscrabble life from which people had escaped into an imagined idyll of valour, beauty and, most importantly, independence—autonomy.

America is full of idylls, of imagined pasts, of utopias unrealized. But such utopias often wither with time. The idyll of Joe Rockefeller and the oil men who gave us fundamentalist Christianity persists, sometimes existing in our collective cultural unconscious and sometimes bursting to the surface, as it is today with Western Canada’s autonomist movement.

“Autonomism” entered the Canadian political lexicon in the early 2000s, following the defeat of Québec’s second independence referendum in 1995 and the proclamation of the Clarity Act by the Jean Chretien government in 2000. Action Démocratique du Québec, the province’s third party, staked out this position, which its successor party, Coalition Avenir Québec, inherited and rode to victory at the polls in 2018. This was hardly the first time in Québec history that a party had won an election on a platform of increasing the province’s power and independence. Indeed, this was the rule in twentieth-century Québec politics, rather than the exception, since the 1930s, from the premierships of Maurice Duplessis to Lucien Bouchard.

This desire for greater independence within the Canadian federation has not been confined to Québec. Voters in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have long mirrored the Québecois desire for greater autonomy. However, these movements have proven less politically successful for a variety of reasons, chief among them, their populist stoking of anti-Québecois bigotry to win seats in the rural West. Alliances between Western and Québec movements for greater independence have been as short-lived as they have been numerous, generally ending in betrayal, fragmentation and resentment, such as the Anglo-Québecois split in the federal Social Credit Party in 1963, to the collapse of the Gang of Eight in 1982.

Today, however, we see a different situation. Danielle Smith, the autonomist premier of Alberta and Scott Moe, the autonomist premier of Saskatchewan are conducting themselves differently than the Western decentralists of the past.

First, rather than seeking to form a common front with a large coalition of provincial and federal politicians inclusive of leaders outside the West, Moe and Smith show little interest in reaching outwards beyond their region or upwards into parliament. A key reason for such coalitions in the past has been a tendency on the part of mainstream Western decentralists to use methods recognized by the Canadian Constitution to increase their powers, i.e. a coalition of at least seven premiers to amend the Constitution or a majority of parliamentarians to cede a federal power to a province.

Second, even though the primary site of conflict with the federal government, for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Québec is energy policy and Québec’s government holds polar opposite views to those of Saskatchewan and Alberta, an apparent shared social conservatism among the three governments appears to have restrained autonomists from bashing the people and governments of other provinces.

Third, and most importantly, unlike Québec, which uses legal, constitutional tools like international law concerning partition referenda and the Notwithstanding Clause to advance separatist and autonomist agendas, Alberta and Saskatchewan have passed clearly unconstitutional laws through their legislatures that are best described as “nullifier” bills, the kind of legislation Anglo America has not seen since South Carolina’s efforts to unilaterally nullify the federal government’s jurisdiction over tariffs and trade two hundred years ago.

I believe that this fantasist nullifier approach to law-making is part of a larger epistemological problem. Although I am currently making major revisions to it, my 2011-12 writing on the epistemology of “authenticity” bears repeating here. While it is not the newest, most popular or most pernicious deviation from Enlightenment rationalism anymore, “authentic” epistemology dominates the United Conservative and Saskatchewan parties from which Smith and Moe hail.

In addition to being closely aligned, financially, with the fossil fuel sector, the prevalence of authentic epistemology means that Western autonomists tend to believe that any abstract claim made by untrustworthy people must, axiomatically, be false. If untrusted, corrupt and/or industry-captured public health officials say Covid-19 is a danger, it must, axiomatically, be relatively harmless; if these officials state that vaccines mRNA vaccines are effective in reducing mortality, they must be either useless or dangerous. Similarly, if Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg and Klaus Schwab state that anthropogenic climate change is a genuine and immediate threat to life on the planet, it must, axiomatically, be true that climate change is not happening, if it is, it must not be human caused and, if it is human caused it must be necessary and good that we change the climate’s planet as fast as we can.

It is in this environment of woolly thinking and dysfunctional epistemology that modern Western autonomism has emerged. Central to this thinking and helping to culturally and economically bind it together is its adherents’ nigh-mystical conflation of fossil fuel use with freedom and independence, in other words, autonomy not only at the level of the state but of the individual and society.

Amplifying tropes of autonomy, individualism and self-assertion that have suffused a century of oil and auto industry propaganda, the movement reasons about personal prosperity and freedom and the horizon of possibility for an autonomous Western Canada in a way more akin to sympathetic magic than any recognizable theory of causation.

The autonomous region of Alberta-Saskatchewan, whether inside or outside the Canadian federation, believes that it can make the price of oil rise by flooding the global market with more of the gnarliest, shittiest, greasiest, hardest-to-mine oil on earth, the cost of extraction often becoming prohibitive when oil prices fall, as they do when production levels go too high.

Subscribing to the broadly-shared fallacy that the laws of supply and demand apply to everything except whatever Canadians are most upset about that day, be it oil or housing, these folks seem to think that a bunch of wells that are not currently profitable at today’s oil price will somehow become so if only they increase the supply of oil, despite the fact that—as any freshman economics student will tell you—doing so has a 100% chance of doing the opposite.

Perhaps, one might think, that this oil could be made marketable and its by-products (i.e. plastics) manufactured into industrial goods with an aggressive campaign of state-financed import substitution industrialization. One would think the autonomists would be proposing government loans and grants to build oil refineries, plastics plants, etc. and begin working towards true autonomy and independence. Such a plan might even be financed some sort of tariff on industrial goods from the hated Greater Toronto Area, which seems to have been passed the baton of hate by Québec in the minds of discontented Westerners.

But no. These governments are interested in just two forms of industrial investment: carbon capture boondoggles and more oil pipelines for unrefined bitumen and fracked natural gas. In other words, the only things for which autonomists support industrial investment are things that forestall the emergence of a local industry by subsidizing the extraction of raw fossil fuels. And, to further inhibit the growth of an industrial sector, they favour lower tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In other words, the whole thrust of the industrial strategy is to make the region less economically independent, less autonomous.

Another thing high on the wish list of autonomists is paring back not just the size of the region’s protected areas but the list of prohibited activities therein. Already, UNESCO has warned Canada we are already in imminent danger of Wood Buffalo National Park losing its World Heritage Site designation due to pollution of the park from fossil fuel extraction upstream. This downstream damage is happening all over Alberta, with local oil wells and fracked gas wells befouling farms and ranches and trapping local farmers and ranchers in a vicious cycle of permitting a new wells on their land to replace the lost revenues from declining yields.

In other words, not only do autonomists favour less industrial independence; this desire to become nothing more than a single-industry state extends to all areas of economic activity. And so, autonomists plan to intensify and accelerate policies that are already hammering other industries. You see: the tourism, hunting, ranching and farming sectors are just places where people work, not places where people interact with the material manifestation of freedom itself.

And it should surprise no one that these almost petrosexual beliefs about oil are concentrated in the regions where Young Earth Creationism and other venerable pseudosciences are most popular.

In other words, total abject dependence on and control by one industry is the so-called “autonomy” Alberta and Saskatchewan want, absolute thrall to a hated and unstable industrial complex, prone to boom-bust cycles and more strongly implicated than any other sector in the extinction event we are causing. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

Or so it would seem. It turns out, from talking with many autonomists, that my representation of these ideas mistakes fanciful thinking for hypocrisy. As first observed in 2009 by a political analyst whose name escapes me, the Tea Party movement and its relatives, the Trump movement and today’s Prairie Autonomists are the first social movements since the death of Mao Zedong to believe that backyard steel mills were both desirable and possible. Several folks with whom I have spoken appear to imagine that oil wells will be like drinking water wells, effacing questions of scale or refining. They imagine, because they are imagining their aspirations for freedom, that petroleum, because it is freedom, will be abundant and available for use by regular folks.

In other words, autonomists are not really imagining a real place. Because I believe that, lurking within the movement is a deep reservoir of post-political despair. Like so many other political movements, autonomist policies are synodal, in character; they seek to describe the order of heaven, not to change the order on earth. And that is why, unlike the government of Québec, their self-emancipatory laws are not really about emancipation from Canada but from reality.

Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 3): What If Homelessness Is a Spectrum?

I have long been a critic of the unscientific and excessive use of the idea of things existing in a spectrum. The idea that neurological disability and sex exist as spectra has had serious negative social effects. People who are simply a little socially maladroit or have minor sensory deficits have used the “autism spectrum” idea to self-diagnose their way into communities of the disabled whose political and social spaces they then dominate, allowing them to redirect accommodations for people with serious, crippling disabilities towards themselves.

And those who follow my writing in Feminist Current or track my daily activities on Twitter know how I feel about the social impacts of “sex is a spectrum” on women, gays and lesbians. In addition, “sex is a spectrum” is also unscientific by conflating the biology of sexually dimorphic species with that of clownfish and slugs. The “sex spectrum” has opened the door to progressives embracing a pseudoscience defended by an orthodoxy in a similar way to the effects of climate denialism on the credulity of conservatives.

But today, I would like to dust off the idea of spectra to talk about a phenomenon that we have organized into a binary, which is, in fact, a spectrum: homelessness.

Of course, homelessness is only a spectrum if “home” has a definition appropriate to such an analysis. In fact, the idea for this piece came to me because I spent time thinking about the implications of my favourite definition of home, that of American literary giant Robert Frost, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Upon contemplating that quote, I realized that almost everyone living in a neoliberal economy today is homeless, to one degree or another. And that shocked me.

Over the past decade, I have spilled much ink on this blog discussing Enclosure, the process by which feudal title was transformed into fee simple title, permitting the mass evictions of European peasants, first in England and the Netherlands and then, century by century, extending its geographic scope.

Enclosure spelled the end of the medieval socio-economic order and began the transformation of Europe’s economies from feudal to capitalist economies by way of an intermediate system known as mercantilism.

In the feudal economic order, holders of productive agricultural land were lords of one kind or another (barons, counts, seigneurs, etc.) and their land tenure was contingent upon their protection of the peasants living on it on behalf of the crown. When feudal lands changed hands, their new lord received them packaged complete with the peasants living there. These peasants, in turn, owned their homes, their tools and enjoyed permanent tenure over the land their homes occupied. Medieval villages, furthermore, also typically had a Common, a bunch of arable land that people who lacked customary rights to feudal land could occupy and raise food upon.

Medieval Europe also had big, capacious family systems that did not just include extended family members like aunts, uncles and cousins living nearby; the term “gossip” originates from the words “God” and “sibling.” The common term for most friend relationships was not “neighbour” or “friend” but “gossip,” someone to whom one was connected through a shared godparent, usually a respectable commoner with a high-status job like miller or smith who was sought out as a god-parent by the children of parents of lower status.

Families faced considerable social pressure to house their poorer members and it was viewed as a black mark against every member’s respectability if one member of the family were sleeping rough. Particularly women bore the brunt of this social disapproval in that their duty to keep those with addictions, dementia, madness or just bad seeds housed and fed. But what this community disapproval meant was that relatives, both real and fictive (i.e. gossips and godparents), were under tremendous social pressure in their communities to house members of their extended family systems if that person could not keep themselves housed.

In addition to these structures, medieval society did also have long and short-term emergency housing. A significant portion of the places medievals called “hospitals,” were not medical treatment facilities but the equivalent of things we call transition housing, supportive housing and emergency housing today. Anyone willing to spend a certain number of hours praying for the souls of donors’ families to be released from Purgatory could become the resident of a residential hospital. In other words, prior to Enclosure, homelessness was not an experience it was easy for regular people to fall into and the danger of becoming homeless did not shape people’s consciousness.

I have written and spoken more about this elsewhere and so I will quickly summarize the transformation Enclosure wrought in people’s housing security. First, many peasants were evicted from their lands by members of the gentry whose used new forms of land title under which there were no feudal obligations to those already resident upon it. At the same time, monastic lands and village common lands were also seized by the crown and their residents, evicted. The hospitals were also shut down. New laws were then enacted criminalizing begging and sleeping rough. And penalties for robbery and trespassing were significantly increased. And homelessness was born! There were thousands upon thousands of people for whom there was no home that was obliged to take them in.

During the first phase of the Cold War, the West’s primary strategy for winning hearts and minds was matching whatever claim of equity or generosity the communist world made, but within the capitalist world, resulting in the birth of the “the welfare state.” Indeed, one of the first parts of the welfare state to be built was the bureaucracy ensuring that returning war veterans would not be sleeping rough by the thousands of World War I veterans had.

Some welfare states like Canada even wrote a “right to housing” into our laws. But whether de facto or de jure, welfare states built housing on a large scale and ensured that social assistance and minimum wage rates were sufficient for low-wage and unemployed people to obtain housing.

But, as we know, the West’s strategy changed during the second phase of the Cold War, in the first half of the 1970s.With the rise of neoliberalism, the guarantees of the welfare state began to be cut away and, for the first time since the 1930s, “the homeless” became an identifiable group. Contemporaneous with the election of Ronald Reagan and the acceleration of neoliberal reform in the Global North, the first food banks also appeared.

As former Vancouver city councilor Jean Swanson has remarked: there were still anti-poverty activists and campaigners for income equality in the 1960s and 70s. It’s just that there was no constituency of people called “the homeless” nor was their visible or widespread evidence of people sleeping rough in the city. There was still poverty just not the kind needed to recreate “the homeless.”

But what has received less attention is the way that major industrial mergers and takeovers began to place people who were housed in the homeless spectrum. The emergence of the Rust Belt in Anglo America and across Germanic Europe resulted from the violent consolidation of the auto sector and other areas of major industrial production.

Obviously, layoffs played a significant role, first as industrial producers downsized and supposedly cradle-to-grave careers suddenly stopped in mid-life. Much ink was spilled by neoliberal propagandists and media in creating sufficient consent for these changes and establishing new socio-economic norms that allowed non-industrial sectors to also engage in “downsizing,” “right-sizing” and various “efficiencies” designed to make workers more insecure, now that social expectations concerning the reliability and predictability of employment were being adjusted to the new economic order.

But what is often missed by those who recount this well-rehearsed story of the decline of the American working class is the impact of the economic restructuring on pensions. During the 1980s, the pension funds of workers became a thing it was acceptable to liquidate or sell during auto sector mergers. Even if one did stay in work until retirement age, one was no longer working at a cradle-to-grave job because the pension into which one had paid one’s whole career might be stolen by corporate raiders and looters.

At the same time, governments de-indexed or flat-out cut universal state pensions, causing them to decline against inflation while encouraging citizens to replace this rapidly declining retirement income security by investing in special state-sanctioned mutual funds designed for retirees. And I have written elsewhere about how government workers experienced comparable kinds of increased insecurity under neoliberal governments.

By the end of the 1990s, a simple stock market correction, a bad broker, a corporate merger, acquisition or raid could annihilate most of one’s retirement income. It seemed that there was only one place where one’s savings might be safe: real estate.

In most of the Global North, in spite of the causes and consequences of the 2007-08 financial crisis, real estate remains the main strategy and best bet one has for staying afloat in retirement. And because of that, people are willing to borrow larger and larger amounts of money to enter or stay in the housing market. The upshot of these changes has been that an increasing number of us now exist on a homeless spectrum.

Returning to the original Robert Frost definition, let us note that when people’s primary source of funds for surviving in retirement is one’s primary residence, retirement for an increasing number of us entails moving to a steadily smaller and/or remote dwelling, so as to access equity stored in the previous dwelling until one becomes a renter again.

Given that generational wealth transfer is increasingly necessary for younger people to obtain mortgages and purchase housing, this state of affairs prevents the downward transfer of family equity to younger family members, potentially locking them out of the housing market. And, for younger people who have experienced profound financial or medical reversals, even if they remain on good terms with older relatives, these relatives simply do not have surplus space to house them while they struggle back to their feet.

And whether young or old, let us be clear that many mortgage holders are little more secure than renters. A few missed mortgage or rent payments and it doesn’t really matter whether one is bound by a tenancy agreement or a mortgage, the effect is the same: your landlord throws you out. The only difference is that, for mortgage holders, one’s retirement savings vanish at the same moment one is evicted.

Other than those who own their homes outright or who are part of intact family systems with members who have both outright ownership and surplus space, the rest of us exist somewhere on a spectrum of homelessness: i.e. people who no one has to take in if things go wrong. No one is obliged to house victims of foreclosure or eviction.

Those furthest along the homelessness spectrum are those who are unhoused and sleeping rough but I would argue that degrees of homelessness now apply to a majority of the population. Next to those unhoused and sleeping rough are couch surfers; next to the couch surfers are those living in a vehicle they own; next to those sleeping in their cars are people in “supportive housing” (housing from which one may be evicted for such innocuous things as having guests or alcohol in one’s room); next to those are women staying with abusive men because their rent is being extracted in sexual favours; next to those are unemployed renters; next to those, unemployed mortgage-holders; and then the employed renters;  et cetera; et cetera.

We now live in a society in which most people live with the consciousness that if things go badly, no one will take them in, that nothing more than luck (be it a large amount or a small amount) stands between them and sleeping rough with no ability to meaningfully own anything more than the clothes on their back.

This naturally engenders a profound sense of insecurity in people. Human beings are meant to have homes, not merely be housed. People need somewhere they know they can always go. If they don’t have that they become, as we have seen, more squirrelly, more desperate, less empathetic. People need a material floor to support healthy emotions; having a sense of homelessness pervade one’s consciousness reminds us that we lack that floor, that at any moment, the ground could open and we could fall, right out of society.

In 1994, Canadians were well into austerity when the Chretien government repealed the 1966 Canada Assistance Plan legislation that recognized every Canadian’s “right to housing” but it is an important symbolic watershed because it was the formal denial of the basic anthropological truth that everybody needs a home.

And this knowledge must form the foundation of land reform in this country.

Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies US Politics | fusangite |

Neo-Dalits and Caste-Making in the Neoliberal Anglo America

If you already know how caste and untouchability work in India, skip ahead to the next section. The next thousand words or so are a primer necessary for those unfamiliar with Indian history to understand a disturbing phenomenon creeping up on us in Anglo America.

A Short Background on Caste for the Uninitiated

“The English did not come to India because she was poor. But because she was rich.” – Anonymous

The idea of India as the richest place on earth, not just materially but intellectually, spiritually, ecologically is an old one. This belief has been common across Eurasia and through East and North Africa for three thousand years. While India had long possessed an extraordinary geographic concentration of biological diversity and abundance, around 3000 years ago, it had acquired a new trait: a caste system.

Systems of caste or, as we prefer to say in the Global North, “race,” amplify the efficiency of economic systems to which they are attached. By that I mean that they increase economic productivity by deepening and complicating social inequality. Indian economists and social theorists have consistently observed, over the past century and a half, that capitalism extracts more labour for less cost in India because it has the most venerable, nuanced, dynamics caste system on earth.

Caste systems are effective because of their ability to reduce wages for the lowest-status, lowest wage work below what feudalism, mercantilism or capitalism could, on their own. Furthermore, they do not just lower wages for those at the bottom, they increase their precarity, not just with respect to maintaining employment but to enjoying the protection of the law, access to the legal system and the ability to form class-based alliances with those outside their caste. But the reason for India’s economic dynamism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages stemmed from its combination of two theories of caste into one i.e. it created a uniquely efficient caste system.

The original Indian caste system was imposed by the Aryan invaders from Central Asia who used chariots to conquer the already highly developed agrarian society of Dravidian India. The Aryan invaders were a minority in the vast and populous set of territories they conquered and looked significantly different than the conquered. Their skin was much much lighter and they were taller, on average, than the peasants who toiled in the fields. The process of conquering India was a multi-century affair and, in many ways, remains incomplete and ongoing, 3000 years along. This meant that a large portion of the Aryans were involved in war professionally throughout their lives. And, as conquerors of India, their main activity, outside of war, was creaming off surplus and trading said surplus within India and with peoples as far away as the Iberian Peninsula and the Yangtze River.

It was on this basis that the original Vedic ideology was generated: there were two main groups of people: the once-born and the reincarnated. The once-born could be detected by their dark skin and small builds. They, based on being souls newly graduated to human status, worked as peasants or labourers. If they worked faithfully and obediently, they might be reborn into one of the higher castes, the merchant caste, the warrior caste or the best, the top caste, the brahmin or priest caste.

One could tell the difference among the higher castes based on a combination of colour and social position/aptitude. If one were born into a rich family or family of merchants, if that person had an aptitude at making their family’s fortune grow, or their relatives did, and if their skin were light enough, evidence showed that they were a member of the vaiysha (merchant) caste. If one were born into a family of warriors, if that person succeeded in battle or commanded others who did, or if their relatives did, and if their skin were even lighter, they were revealed as a ksatriyah (warrior). And if one had the whitest skin and was part of a family system with special spiritual knowledge from the heavens and from sacred texts, one was a brahmin.

Caste was not an attribute directly assigned to an individual. Rather one’s jati possessed caste. There is no equivalent to such a thing outside Indian society, maybe an allyu in the Inca Empire. A jati is essentially a cross between a macro-lineage/small tribe and a medieval guild, a group of people who share a common ancestor and work in a particular area of the economy. In this way, the once-born jatis were large extended families/small endogamous tribes of labourers or peasants.

Caste was supposed to be immutable but, of course, mistakes were inevitably made. A key function of brahmins was to correct those mistakes. So, if a jati seized the brahmin’s village by force and held him at spear-point, he would have to concede that whatever its caste had been, it was now part of the ksatriyah caste. Similarly, if the brahmin received a giant sack a cash from a jati’s headman, it followed that previous brahmins must have been mistaken in not declaring its members to be vaiyshas. Like all successful racial systems, it was dynamic, totalizing and predictive but, ultimately, tautological.

Brahmins were naturally intelligent, generous, unconcerned with mundane and material things; ksatriyahs were naturally brave and strong; vaiyshas were naturally cunning yet generous. And the once-born, too, had their virtues. The best were industrious, humble, respectful. They might go on to be reborn into a higher caste, whereas those who were lazy, entitled, confrontational would not.

The once-born were stuck doing the work of the once-born and, because of the stigma associated with the status and inability to rise above it, India’s economy was far more effective at keeping people in low-wage, rural work and keeping rural wages from rising, a very different situation from the Mediterranean world under Roman hegemony, which suffered from chronic periodic labour shortages and uncontrolled costs in the lowest-status jobs.

But during the time of its exchange with the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean worlds, it adopted an additional elaboration of caste that originate in the West but spread all the way to Japan in just a few centuries: the idea of “unclean work.” While Mediterranean civilizations did not have caste systems (but marveled at India’s and what it made possible), they did have class (plebian, patrician, etc.) and they did have slavery but it was the idea of unclean occupations that fitted so brilliantly into the already hegemonic Indian caste system.

In Galenic medicine (medicine based the physician Galen who expressed Aristotle’s theories of matter in medical terms), humoral imbalance is the cause of most personal illness. But “miasma” is the cause of public health problems; bad smells were understood to cause mass illness. And the Galenists were not really far off; pathogens and parasites were often generated by bad-smelling things and so Galenic medicine, like caste, was backed by real world evidence.

This discovery allowed Indians to create a caste below the bottom, an inferior kind of once-born, an “untouchable” or dalit. Jatis whose members worked as pearl divers, butchers, night soil collectors, tanners, etc. formed this new caste, the lowest of the low. This meant that odiferous skilled trades could also have their wages depressed and their labour supply assured. Dalits also possessed a property the other castes lacked: contagion. If one touched a dalit, this might result in you getting physically sick or, worse yet, the touch would reveal that you, yourself were a dalit, an untouchable masquerading among the clean. Because any non-dalit would naturally be repulsed by the very idea of touching a stinking, disease-ridden untouchable.

Whereas the attributes of the original four castes were essentially a hierarchy of virtues, dalits were understood to be people of naturally low character; their smell, their distasteful work, etc. were merely the outward signs of their low character, their dishonesty, deviousness, stupidity, depravity. Not only were they legitimately paid rock-bottom wages, no matter the monetary value of their work (e.g. pearl divers); their low character meant that if they experienced physical or sexual violence, it was almost certainly deserved.

The true genius of the Indian caste system at its fullest elaboration is that it did not merely make people underpay the underclass and extract greater surplus value from their labour. They were hated for doing, literally in some cases, society’s shit work. You knew that the person collecting night soil, shucking oysters, collecting garbage was not just an inferior person, but a bad one, one who was being justly punished by the universe for the evil they committed in another life.

A Review of My Past Arguments

I am increasingly of the belief that Anglo Americans are in the process of creating a caste of unclean workers, that people who perform certain essential jobs within capitalism are increasingly viewed as ontologically distinct from other Anglo Americans, that their supposedly unclean work allows us to identify them as people of low character, who deserve only our contempt.

The occupations we have decided are unclean are, fundamentally, those that require workers to personally enact the violence of capitalism with their bodies. Rig work, bush work, mill work and law enforcement require workers to engage in acts of violence towards the planet or towards other human beings as part of the deal. Work associated with fossil fuels but not as directly violent also fits the bill, with coal mining, trucking and filling station work adjacent and also, albeit to a slightly lesser degree, also unclean.

What these jobs have in common is that, as our current economy and energy systems are structured (much to my chagrin!), these jobs are essential jobs. Our basic systems of food distribution, our state’s violence monopoly, our energy systems, etc. would collapse without these workers. Until such time as we de-carbonize our energy systems, move away from paper-intensive administrative systems, etc. these workers are among the most essential in our society. And we appear to hate them for it.

We even have a name for this incipient caste: the Deplorables.

The formation of this caste is a multivalent process with many actors. Climate denialism is more common among this class, because, unlike members of the laptop class, many members cannot distance themselves from a sense of responsibility for their participation in causing the omnicide we are facing because they are producers of fossil energy, not merely consumers or managers of its production and use. This inability to distance oneself from one’s involvement in the collapse of planetary life support systems produces this kind of false consciousness as a natural coping mechanism, something with which those more physically (though not morally or economically) distant have the luxury of not needing in order to stay in work.

But it is also common because, especially in Canada, its members are more likely to live in communities and engage in activities more extremely and adversely affected by our climate’s destabilization, producing what psychologists call “reaction formation,” especially concentrated in Canada’s Boreal Belt, the industrial resource and fossil fuel extraction periphery stretching from Timmins to Terrace.

The cultural divergence between this incipient caste and the laptop class that dominates our cities has also been intensified by state Covid policy through denormalization programs. It has long been understood, through research into anti-smoking campaigns, that if one attempts to encourage a behaviour by emphasizing its respectable and mainstream nature, most people will be influenced to adopt it. But the campaign will produce paradoxical effects in populations that believe they have already been excluded from the mainstream. This is why anti-smoking campaigns using denormalization actually function as cigarette ads for young, Indigenous women. This clearly happened with Covid vaccines but, instead of pivoting to strategies for encouraging vaccination in communities outside the mainstream, the state intensified its denormalization messaging and added increasing levels of coercion (i.e. firing from government jobs and vaccine “passes”). And by propounding the falsehood that vaccines strongly conditioned Covid transmissibility, the idea of Deplorables as both unhygienic and contagious fitted in perfectly.

Activism resisting the mass firings and pass laws, in turn engendered further demonization of this group by the laptop class and mainstream media, which reached a crescendo with the Ottawa convoy, about which I spilled considerable ink last year. The resurrection of the “white trash” racial identity in the form of Ta-Nehisi Coates and others’ writing sometimes euphemized as the “white working class” is a key part of this caste-making process. “White trash,” in the US, until the 1980s, had the same meaning as “half-breed” did in Canada; it was the pejorative for white-passing Métis people in the Mississippi Basin and Appalachia (members of the caste in this region were also called “Hillbillies”).

White-passing Indigenous and Métis people are demographically concentrated in Canada’s Boreal Belt and it is the regional culture they have built together with their settler neighbours over the past century that informs not just those in the Northwest but urban members of this caste in the making, across the country.

Along with this pre-existing culture, de-normalization, the climate crisis and urban Canadians’ and their media’s construction of certain kinds of work as unclean has accelerated and intensified this process of caste-making.

Something similar happened in the United States a century ago, following the Dawes Act of 1894, which extinguished Indigenous title and status, pushing aboriginal people off their land and into the role of co-creating something called “migrant worker culture” in the West, encompassing itinerant trade unionist radicals, Mexican migrants, newly landless Indigenous people and the increasingly precarious and indebted regional working class. This ultimately became such a successful competing culture, and such an effective conductor of Indigenous cultural practices into settler culture, and such a threat to labour discipline that it was one of the key motivators for the Roosevelt Administration’s re-creation of Indigenous status and title in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

But in Alaska, where the Act did not apply, this culture ultimately evolved into mainstream Alaskan-ness, as epitomized in Alaska separatist and non-status Eskimo, Todd Palin, ex-husband of the 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate.

The Politics of Contagion

What ultimately convinced me to write this post tying all this together is that a final element of Indian untouchability is creeping into our project of caste-making: contagion. One of the reasons that Zersetzung is so effective is that our culture is getting increasingly judgemental of one’s associations. Not only do my urban cop friends actively dissemble about their jobs when interacting with people outside their caste, their friends and associates increasingly do, fearing, quite legitimately, that simply being friends with a police officer taints a person as someone of low character, whose deplorability has been revealed by their associations.

I routinely read Twitter posts by otherwise intelligent people about how every single police officer in the world is an evil person and that anyone socializing with, working with or otherwise associating with such unclean people is, themselves, a person of low character, even as, ironically, they grow more strident in their demands that police officers do more to abridge the free speech, assembly, association and mobility rights of those outside our progressive consensus.

In other words, our hatred of the untouchables does not get in the way of demanding more work from them and, unsurprisingly, demanding reductions in their wages and longer hours of work, i.e. “Defund the police.”

Now, this is not to say that there are not real problems in the culture of Anglo America’s neo-Dalits. Police are becoming more violent, more clannish, more isolated, more like an occupying army surrounded by a local populace that hates them—because that is what they have become. Similarly, the work discipline regimes of our oil rigs and man camps, with their isolation, long shift work, tolerance for workplace stimulant abuse and proximity to economically depressed Indian reserves and reservations, mean that one can draw rape and murder maps simply by knowing fracking locations.

What is not going to solve the problem of an increasingly stigmatized and culturally distinct neo-dalit caste is demanding that its members deliver more violence on behalf of capitalism and then further stigmatizing them for delivering the violence demanded of them.

Welcome to the Party!

Despite the scorn and demands we heap upon the neo-dalits of Boreal Canada, there is much to admire about them. Unlike the Occupy camps of the 2000s and 2010s, the Ottawa Convoy and the provincial convoys of the years preceding, that were subject to media blackouts, were not somber displays of outrage, nor did they experience anything like the rates of rape, drug abuse, unhygienic conditions, theft, looting, violence and actual protester deaths we have seen from other anarchic mass mobilizations that have originated on the left of the political spectrum lately.

Lacking a strong cultural tradition, the truckers appear to have got to Ottawa and with little planned, decided to stage an event more closely resembling an NFL tailgate party than a traditional protest. The honking, the bouncy castle, the street corner bonfires, the Canadian flag-waving exhibited a joy that I never saw from the Occupy Movement, which I vigorously supported and still do.

And it is this that I think animates our hatred of this incipient caste: like their first iteration in Louis Riel’s rebellions, the Third Northwest Rebellion is offering an alternative to the neo-Vedic, passive-aggressive, tearful colonizer nationalism of Justin Trudeau and his ilk; they are offering us an inclusive, joyful nationalism, one that breaks down the rural-urban, settler-Indigenous, laptop-labourer divisions that are deepening in our society and inviting us to join their loud, indecorous, tailgate party.

As someone irrevocably tainted by occupation, association and ideology as a member of that caste, I intend to join the festivities and practice my socialism and climate activism among my people, the Deplorables.

Postscript

Today, after posting, I learned that it’s a buyers’ market for used Maple Leaf deck chairs. Why? Because the Convoyists’ association with their own country’s flag has irrevocable tainted that flag in the minds of progressives. Further evidence of the pollution politics of untouchability.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |

Zersetzung: the Word We Need to Understand Our Present in the West

East Germany Rebrands as the Freest State in the East

When Erich Honecker assumed power in East Germany in 1971, he sought to remake the image of his brutal dictatorship in the minds both of its citizens and of the West, to achieve hitherto-elusive diplomatic recognition among members of the NATO alliance and to emerge as the most successful Soviet vassal state in the Warsaw Pact.

This plan contained two central elements, both innovative within the Soviet bloc. The first was to use a highly effective strategy for economic development that had not previous been attempted in a planned economy:

  • Import substitution industrialization, an economic development model most thoroughly explained and propounded by revisionists like Andre Gunder Frank and the other “dependency theorists,” that had been most successful in Cold War Turkey and Brazil; and
  • Developing less violently coercive and more “inclusive” means of suppressing dissent and maintaining political and social control over the population so that the unanimous elections and staged applause of the regime would be seen less as a show of power and more as a show of popularity

While the latter could not have been successful in persuading the West of the regime’s exemplary character without the former also succeeding, this piece will concentrate exclusively on the second element: social control.

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, were already among the most feared of the secret police forces of the Warsaw Pact and their playbook was largely that developed by the KGB, the USSR’s secret police, during Joseph Stalin’s purges of the 1920s and 30s. Show trials were used not to convince the public of dissidents’ guilt but to demonstrate the power of the state to rig its own judicial system and turn every verdict into a foregone conclusion. Torture, similarly, was widely practiced and efforts at denying it were transparent and perfunctory because the point was to make torture a public secret, an unacknowledged fact that nevertheless shaped everyone’s expectations of what happened if they stepped out of line. Knowledge of torture was as universal as its formulaic denial. The odd street beating was thrown in as well, so that the state’s violence could erupt anywhere, any time, again conditioning everyone’s expectations.

Honecker was faced with the problem of how to reform the Stasi without damaging the hegemonic social control it exercised on behalf of the state. The innovations he made should sound eerily familiar to anyone navigating our present society’s profoundly dystopian turn.

First of all, the Stasi were successful because of the large number of volunteers for every Stasi agent in East German society, there were two civic-minded volunteers who helped the agency do its work by informing on their neighbours, friends, family members and co-workers. Taken together, including both direct employees and volunteers (these include only regular volunteers). Those who simply cooperated or fed information to the Stasi occasionally, or at their convenience, was likely about 2 million people, or 12% of the population. But those who made Stasi activities part of their day-to-day lives were closer to 250,000, around 2% of the population. These numbers peaked in the 1980s, having steadily increased through the 70s.

Stasi operatives, paid and unpaid, were disproportionately concentrated in the caring professions, such as doctors, nurses and teachers. Stasi personnel, both paid and voluntary, were also disproportionately concentrated in institutions wielding what we might call “syndical power.”

By “syndical power,” I mean institutions that exercise direct control over key aspects of society unmediated by conventional legislative bodies like parliaments, cabinets, central committees, legislatures, etc. medical associations, nurses’ colleges, societies of engineers, law societies, bar associations, self-governing professions with the power to unilaterally impose new protocols on society at large, unmediated by the state. These modern guilds are also spaces in which the commissar consciousness is at its purest, spaces in which one’s financial success is explained based on the syndical groups’ monopolization of expertise, one state power is used to defend but in which state power is not permitted to intervene.

Theorists inspired by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had long drawn attention to a specifically Marxist understanding of “hegemony,” noting that Marxists achieving state power means little in society in which capitalism continues to enjoy hegemony. Simply controlling the state means little when the major institutions of a society, its churches, its schools, its universities, its courts, its culture, etc. are firmly in the camp of the dominant ideology and where the dominant ideology conditions people’s understandings of fairness, justice, balance, reason, etc.

The control of key social institutions, especially educational and judicial institutions, confers long-term power on those who have captured these entities. And those seizing control of them through claims of meritocratic expertise and political deal-making are those most likely to have the class consciousness of commissars functioning, as they do, as senior gatekeepers and managers in society’s most venerable institutions. Furthermore, technocrats from the commissar class who gain power in the apparatus of the state find, in these institutions, natural, powerful allies with whom to engage in mutually burnishing one another’s power.

Because of their program of controlling these syndical systems, these institutional chokepoints in East German society, the Stasi had a unique and uniquely indispensable role in functioning as the connective tissue between state power and syndical power in creating and maintaining hegemony.

Already one can see how the Stasi possessed the power to make or break the careers of high-status professionals in their society without resort to the use of violence or the application of direct state power. University boards of governors, local law societies and medical associations, these institutions could make jobs vanish and professional certifications appear and disappear.

But the most powerful tool, and the most innovative of all of the weapons in the Stasi’s arsenal post-1971 was one we have forgotten to our detriment, well, mine anyway. Maybe that of a few of my friends.

Erich Honecker Discovers Cancel Culture

Zersetzung has no precise translation into English and certainly not one that encompasses all the new context and meaning that accreted to it during its eighteen years as the primary method of social control used in East Germany 1971-89. To carry out his foreign policy objectives, Honecker had to purge his state of virtually all extra-judicial state violence: no more public floggings, no more torture, no more extra-judicial killings. At the same time, kangaroo courts generating executions or, worse yet, political prisoners, to whom Amnesty International activists could write also had to be shut down. What could replace all the arbitrary violence on which the absolute power of the Socialist Unity Party had previously rested?

Zersetzung, roughly translated as “decomposition,” referred to a campaign of coordinated social, political, personal, reputational and professional harassment and humiliation against individuals organizing against or speaking out against the regime. Tactics might include such things as workplace harassment by superiors or colleagues and the generation of workplace grievances that might result in the demotion or ultimate firing of the target. But the primary immediate effect sought by the Stasi was simply distraction: the more time targets had to invest in saving their job or defending themselves against spurious and malicious complaints, the less time and emotional energy they could invest in battling the regime.

The family was a key site of action. Zersetzung sought to alienate its targets from their romantic partners, children and family systems or, at least, place these relationships in a constant state of crisis. By placing pressure on those who continued to associate with the target, they could leave them both materially and emotionally isolated and generate internal sources of pressure within family systems, whereby family members or romantic partners suffering from Zersetzung by proxy would place additional pressure on the target whose activities now presented a material risk to others. Family members and romantic partners would begin to see the target, rather than the Stasi, as the proximate reason for their persecution, for which there was a simple solution. Again, even if families and relationships did not immediately disintegrate, the Stasi could open a “home front,” in their war on the target, forcing them to reallocate time and emotional energy from fighting the regime to the conflicts that had erupted in their family system.

Friendships were not off the table, as Stasi operatives would go to work on any valued relationship the target had on which they might exert pressure. In addition, there were reputational attacks, through both rumour and through coverage in state-controlled media that sought to delegitimate the target. These attacks were given credibility as rumour or news story would typically mix damaging falsehoods about the individual with fact, often carefully woven together so that the falsehood and fact could not easily be distinguished.

The Stasi, themselves, described Zersetzung as follows:

a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige on the basis of true, verifiable and discrediting information together with untrue, credible, irrefutable, and thus also discrediting information; a systematic engineering of social and professional failures to undermine the self-confidence of individuals; … engendering of doubts regarding future prospects; engendering of mistrust and mutual suspicion within groups …; interrupting respectively impeding the mutual relations within a group in space or time …, for example by … assigning geographically distant workplaces.

The success of Zersetzung was measured simply: did the target experience a psychological crisis or series of crises? Did the person become so bereft of reputation, friends, work, etc. that they no longer had time or energy to attack the regime?

One of the things that made Zersetzung especially effective was the reaction it engendered in those close to the target. Whereas, before 1971, Stasi activities were “open secrets,” acts of terror to be formally denied but whose efficacy was based on widespread knowledge thereof, e.g. torture, Zersetzung conducted in a more secretive way so that one could plausibly deny that it was taking place if provided with the correct incentives. Given a choice between believing that their society was liberalizing and that Stasi terror was a thing of the past and believing that the Stasi had developed an even more powerful mechanism of social control, there was a clear incentive to believe the former or at least behave as though one did.

People so wish to be free that they will cling desperately to any fiction that tells them they are free. To believe otherwise was costly. The knowledge that one is not free leaves a person a set of terrible choices: (a) to do nothing and feel oneself a coward for not fighting for it, (b) to decide that freedom is not a valuable thing and one does not desire it, or (c) to object to one’s unfreedom and court the nightmare of Zersetzung oneself. One therefore has strong incentives to believe that the fault lies with the Stasi’s target, that the target has become a bad person or, more easily, that the target has gone mad. This second explanation is hardly a stretch because targets of Zersetzung often were driven mad. And a factor in this madness was often the target’s friends’, colleagues’ or families’ disbelief in their accounts of persecution.

With this strong system of incentives, Zersetzung targets gradually did lose the will and capacity to fight the regime and, because it was in the material interest of those around them to deny what was happening, they often ended up, like the dissidents of the previous generation, incarcerated, not in hospitals but in psychiatric facilities. When the power of the Stasi was finally broken and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, about half of the targets of Zersetzung were so badly damaged by their experience that they received lifelong psychiatric pensions from the Federal Republic of Germany.

Blairite Austerity Before Blairite Austerity

As discussed in the previous piece in this series, East Germany had long maintained the illusion of ideological and political pluralism by maintaining the appearance of a multi-party political system and a large and democratic trade union movement. Of course, these organizations were totally dependent on state patronage to even exist but within this state patronage system, there remained high levels of organizational and operational independence, spaces where apparatchiks could carve out their own personal fiefs with their own personal patronage networks.

The Stasi were integral to that system. Operating with high levels of independence Stasi agents, both paid and unpaid, within these organizations were tasked with locating opponents of the regime and coordinating and prosecuting their own campaigns of Zersetzung against the dissidents they identified. While this information was shared with Stasi headquarters and used to produce a national list of dissidents, it was not Stasi HQ that put people on the list nor was it Stasi HQ that carried out the campaigns of decomposition. Those campaigns were left to Stasi operatives in unions, churches and the fake political parties that formed the coalition government.

In other words, Zersetzung was carried out on a largely freelance basis. Officials within the civil society organizations of the regime hatched and carried out these campaigns simply based on incentives, the need to maintain or increase the level of state patronage one’s organization received, the desire to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the regime and, of course, the opportunity to use the might of the state to fight out interpersonal rivalries and resentments.

Rather than emptying civil society, as dictators often do, the crew running East Germany had instead chosen to capture and colonize the organizations that had once been the institutional backbone of civil society, churches, parties, professional associations and unions, something that did not begin in the West until Blairite austerity.

The Neoliberalization of Zersetzung

To anyone paying attention, the thing I have been writing about is what we euphemistically call “cancel culture.” But how can these things be the same if there is no Stasi headquarters coordinating all the freelance cancelation? This misunderstands the nature of the Stasi at their height. They didn’t need Stasi HQ because the individual operations were coordinated out of the head offices of unions, parties and civil society organizations.

This is where we can see how the logic of neoliberalism has collided with the class consciousness of the commissars. Zersetzung runs just as well in a peer-to-peer network as it does in a client-server network. I know that one of the lists on which I appear is maintained by Lisa Kreut, the Vice President of the BC Hospital Employees’ Union. But is Zersetzung going to be less effective if it takes a while for Kreut to notice I am on someone else’s list too? Is a campaign of cancelation going to be less effective if two or even three Woke Stasi are competing with each other to see who deals the next major disruption to my life?

The real genius of creating a modern Stasi to carry out a campaign of decomposition against enemies of the commissar class’s ideology i.e. Wokeness is the discovery that people are so terrified of Zersetzung that they will maintain a double consciousness, insisting that “there is no such thing as cancel culture” and “he deserved to be canceled.” That is, after all, how every social media argument goes when someone says “I have been canceled.” The first move of regime supporters is to ridicule the idea that anyone is ever canceled and then, seemingly effortlessly, once presented with more details, to insist that cancelation is reasonable, deserved and would have happened sooner were it not for the great forbearance and generosity of the Woke Stasi.

Now, some of you may be hoping that I will now offer some sort of theory of how information about Zersetzung was somehow directly diffused to the Baby Boom generation in the 1970s and 80s by the KGB. I will make no such claim. Rather, what I will say is this:

There is a reason that East Germany came up with Zersetzung when other Soviet satellites did not: it was the first element of Honecker’s program: import substitution industrialization focused on inducing and anticipating consumer demand for manufactured goods. To carry out this program, East Germany had to develop a more sophisticated practice of management and advertising. In other words, their commissar class necessarily became more self-conscious and sophisticated in its efforts to revolutionize production. This is what allowed them to imagine Zersetzung.

That is because a sophisticated, self-conscious commissar class will naturally develop such a set of tactics as they constitute the logical terminus of management theory. Because the commissar class revolutionizes production through the new sciences of large-scale psychological manipulation, advertising and management, it logically follows that this will be the means by which they would also revolutionize society itself. Whereas, in the case of East Germany, the commissar class developed this consciousness in order to defend their hegemony, the commissar class of the modern Global North has developed it in an effort to depose the owner class and become the hegemons.

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