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American Caliphate I: Who Are the Young Turks?

American Caliphate: Who Are the Young Turks?
There are some ideas I have been developing since I began writing on US empire and imperialism here back in 2011, a whole decade ago. Because I am now teaching an online course on the subject, I thought I should write a couple of pieces tying my reasoning together and elaborating it more fully. If you want to skip ahead to the meat of this piece, just scroll down to the second section. And if you’re already conversant with my analysis of the similarities between the US and Ottoman Empires, head to section three. This article is the first of two in a short series.

1. Why Comparative Empire?
One of the most important tools we have for understanding empires and the operation of imperialism in the present is disciplined historical comparison. I say “disciplined” because one of the features of discourse in modern imperial systems is lazy and undisciplined comparison.

There is always going to be someone in any European or Euro-American empire going on about how the present is like the “last days of Rome,” which usually yields, if explored, a total absence of clarity or accuracy about how the Roman Empire came to an end, according to any historiographic tradition. We all know that usually male, conservative, ancient mariner type who grabs the wrist of a young person at a Christmas party or wedding and begins reciting the myth of the sexual permissiveness of the Late Roman Republic and how that’s all happening again thanks to gay marriage or heavy petting or whatever the moral panic of the moment is.

But the existence of this social phenomenon should not put us off comparing empires. If anything, the ubiquity of bad thinking about comparative empire is actually a good thing; at least one’s starting position is something people are thinking badly about, rather than something people are not thinking about at all.

Thanks to first Marxists, Dependency theorists, World Systems theorists and, most recently, what we might call the “energy systems theorists” to use a broad enough brush to include Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy and Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, we can usefully compare imperial structures based on a variety of metrics across time and space. That is because they have noted universal structural properties we find across empires, both self-conscious and unconscious, such as the existence of a core and a periphery, and the redirection of energy from periphery to core.

As a historian, this is my main toolbox for thinking about not just the United States but the regional empires seeking to challenge its status as the global hegemon in the late twentieth century or as the pre-eminent global power in this century. As a non-quantitative historian, I necessarily rest my analogical reasoning atop the hard inductive work of economic and environmental historians of these empires, without whom this work would not be possible.

2. How the Ottoman Caliphate Worked
In my endorsement of the Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2020 US presidential nomination, I argued that a striking feature of the imperial vision of the mainstream of the Democratic Party and that of the shrinking neoliberal faction of the Republicans, as espoused by characters like Pete Buttigieg and Lisa Murkoswski, is a theory of political representation similar to that of the Ottoman Empire and, to a lesser extent, previous Muslim empires claiming to be the Caliphate.

The status of Caliphate and the title of Caliph have been claimed by Muslim states that wished to be recognized as the pre-eminent Muslim power globally since the religion’s founding. The head of state of a Caliphate, the Caliph, had a role similar to the Byzantine and Russian emperors who took on the mantle of “vicegerent of God on earth.” The idea was that God had effectively chosen the Tsar/Caliph by placing his chosen representative in the position of leading the state that controlled the most territory, fighting men and population within a larger religious community.

In this way, although a Tsar, Emperor or Caliph might rise to his office through the ranks of the army or through inheritance, or, most commonly, a combination of the two, he became, upon his accession, the greatest churchman in the land, the successor to Muhammad the Prophet in Muslim tradition and successor to Constantine the Great, “equal to the apostles” in Orthodox Christian tradition. Caliphs and emperors were expected not just to lead the armies of Christ or Allah, as the case might be, but to intervene in settling doctrinal and liturgical disputes, policing the boundaries of orthodoxy, not just militarily but ideologically.

With less stringent controls on doctrine and sectarianism and an impressive record of conversion across vast geographic areas, the Muslim world over which a Caliph presided was far more diverse than that over which any Byzantine or Russian emperor ever did. And this remained true up until the official disbandment of the Ottoman Caliphate by the Turkish parliament in 1922.

Within the Ottoman Empire, there were al-kitab, the people of the book, Christians and Jews, whom the Quran and hadiths specifically designated as enjoying freedom of religion. But did that apply to Yazidis? Zoroastrians? Then there was the problem of Islamic sects and movements not recognized as Muslim by most Sunnis. Sure, Shi’ites were Muslims. But Druzes? Alawites? Should they be managed like the Yazidi or like the Ismailis? This was then overlaid on a complex mass of ethnicities, Albanians, Kurds, Nubians, Greeks, Serbs, Copts and Arabs. And this, in turn, was overlaid on the geography of Europe, the Near East and North Africa.

In other words, central to the job of an Ottoman Caliph was the maintenance and management of diversity. Like the other venerable empires of its age, the Russian, Mughal, Hapsburg and Holy Roman Empires, this diversity was understood to redound to the glory of the emperor, who might style himself Caliph of his whole realm but also Emperor of the Greeks, King of the Serbs, Protector of the Jews, etc. The number of kinds of person over which one’s empire ruled, the richer it was considered to be.

This diversity had to be reflected not only in titles but in the pageantry of government. A successful Caliph’s court featured viziers (ministers handling portfolios, regions or peoples) representing all the diversity of the empire: an Orthodox Greek from Palestine, an Arab Shi’ite from Basra, an Egyptian Orthodox Copt from Asyut, an Arab Alawite from Alakia. While the Caliph was always a Turk, and the empire, one that moved wealth from non-Turkish periphery to the Turkish core, the symbolism of the empire typically sought to downplay Turkish domination through the pageantry of diversity.

Of course, because the average early modern peasant was more politically sophisticated than progressive Twitter is today, the non-Turkish subjects of the empire were not fooled. They had had no part in choosing their “representative” and correctly understood that being picked by the Caliph was not a triumph of representation and that no ceilings of any sort had been broken in the process.

While some local folks close to the vizier would no doubt benefit from government jobs and the rewriting of laws in their favour, having one’s local ethno-religious community “represented” in the court of the Caliph was hardly good news for the community as a whole.

Having been selected by the Caliph and elevated from above, the interests of the vizier were clear: their ability to “represent” their community was contingent on its good behaviour and continued labour to move resources to the Turkish core of the empire. If “his” people rose up in a costly or protracted way, the vizier had failed and could not expect to keep his job. Therefore, through a combination of pageantry, patronage, surveillance and force, the vizier did all he could to keep his people in line, as loyal subjects of the Caliph.

Ottoman diversity politics proved highly effective until the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. But while an incipient Pan-Arab Nationalism and the rise of Palestine-focused Zionism raised some concern about imperial cohesion, it was the unexpected force of Turkish nationalism that brought the empire down.

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Just like the rest of Eastern Europe and the Near East, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the forces of industrialization, dispossession and urbanization create new and unprecedented emigration to the New World and unprecedented poverty, dislocation and alienation at home for the Caliphate, especially in its core territory where it was building railroads, consolidating agricultural lands and constructing factories.

By the early twentieth century, Turks could see that capitalist industrialization was ravaging the imperial core more than its periphery. And, as they began to buy into the identity political of nationalism, it seemed clear who the culprits were and what was to be done? What was the point of even having an empire if Turkish people were passed over for senior government jobs that were given to Arabs or, worse yet, to Copts, Armenians or other Christians? Why were Jews dealt-in when modern nation-states like Russia were getting rid of theirs?

And it wasn’t just the ministerial jobs. It was government patronage. An Arab vizier might work to maintain Arab trading monopolies in Damascus or Beirut. A Copt might make a sweet trade deal for Egyptian wheat and pass over Turkish-owned, Turkish-tilled wheat fields in Anatolia.

This spirit was felt most strongly in the military and led to what we knew as the “Young Turk” coup. It should be understood that this was not the only force that propelled the mini-revolution forward. Members of many ethnic and religious minorities joined the movement backing the coup saw its central demand of representative, parliamentary democracy as serving them too. At last, their representatives would be chosen by them from below and not selected by the Caliph, from above. This presumably would mean that their representatives would pursue their community’s interests. Because in any politics, representatives can only represent the interests that have conferred their power on them.

However, one can see that Turkish soldiers and working and middle class Turks were the prime motive force, militarily and economically, behind the coup, as power was increasingly consolidated in the Turkish junta that would lead the empire into the First World War.

3. The American Caliphate
The Young Turks are alive and well in America, and not on Cenk Uyghur’s show.

Substitute “Turkish” with “white,” and one can see the same central grievance reflected in the Trump movement as in the Young Turks. Working and middle class folks in a white settler empire mistakenly focusing their grievances about capitalism on the minority tokens used to control racialized populations, rather than on capitalism itself.

And, like the Young Turk movement, they are joined by members of the tokenized minority populations who do not benefit from the small amounts of patronage and largesse the modern viziers like James Clyburn dole out to their personal networks. And this choice is, to an extent, rational because it is these tokens, these modern viziers who are the most immediate and visible faces of capitalism, corruption, cronyism and empire in their communities.

In his recent book The New Authoritarians, David Renton argues that the modern left must work harder to expose the racism of movements like the Trump movement. This is completely wrongheaded. The Black, Indigenous and Latinx supporters of the movement are perfectly aware that they are working with racists—because they have correctly ascertained that they have no choice but to work with racists because the other side are also racists hellbent on maintaining and reinforcing racial hierarchies. They flocked to the Trump movement in larger numbers in the four years following his election because they saw how little it mattered whether the racists in power were overt or covert in acknowledging their own racism and that of the socioeconomic order of the American Empire. And the same is true of white working class folks.

Everybody already knows that contemporary conservative populist parties are racist. The problem is that most but not all people know that mainstream progressive parties are not merely racist; they, like conservatives, are growing more racist. They are just manifesting this increasing racial essentialism and disrespect for the agency and opinions of racialized people through the diversity politics of a Caliph rather than the populist blaming politics of Young Turks.

Misogyny, similarly, is something people are increasingly seeing as a wash. If women wish to protect their reproductive rights as their first priority, they need to vote for progressives. But the cost of doing so grows higher with every passing year as progressive parties increasingly court social movements that advocate violence against women in the name of diversity. Incarcerated women, lesbians, victims of domestic violence, racialized feminists in authoritarian patriarchal religious communities, women concerned about girls and women’s sport, women concerned about girls’ body images, are increasingly deciding that the conservative misogynists are a safer bet on their specific issue than the progressive misogynists.

The same is true on the environmental front. The choice is between a lying family annihilator patriarch like John Horgan or Justin Trudeau versus an honest one like Donald Trump, who made it his goal to achieve the hothouse climate scenario. Both kinds can be relied on to increase fossil fuel subsidies, fracking, logging, coal mining and every other omnicidal activity on the table, to floor the gas over the cliff.

As often happens in an empire in decline, consciousness of that decline enables a growing portion of the population to see the insincerity, emptiness and simple failure of the empire’s messages about itself. “A place for everyone and every in their place,” might have been coined with respect to the British Empire but it is true of all empires large enough to encompass a significant portion of the world. And when these empires begin to contract and there are fewer places, not more, for its diverse population, one sees the rise of Young Turks.

We have to do better than that. We simply must. These Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Labour, Leave/Remain, Liberal/NDP, UCP/NDP binaries must be broken. And this is especially challenging because, just as they share commitments to increased carbon emissions, a widening wage gap and a white supremacist order, they also share a commitment to reducing regular folks’ access to the political system. Again, the differences are mostly superficial. While today’s Young Turks focus their efforts on monetizing politics and reducing voters’ access to the polls, the Caliph’s men focus on locking down candidate selection processes through vetting committees and rigged primaries.

And that means challenging myths. Just as Donald Trump appealed to a golden age that never existed through his recycling of Ronald Reagan’s slogan, “Make America great again!” America’s Democrats also pine for some lost golden age when their empire exercised power multilaterally, didn’t keep immigrant toddlers in cages and didn’t illegally detain and torture thousands of people for thinking the wrong thoughts. There is no idyllic past for the empire and the vassal states tied to it, like Canada, to return to. There is no pristine moment, for instance, in my province when the Okanagan fruit harvest was made without busing in racialized, pauperized labour force denied the full protection of the law.

After years of reluctantly backing progressives against conservatives and urging others to stay in that coalition, I have to acknowledge that they have worn me down. I no longer have a dog in that fight. Being involved in the factional politics of a necrotic imperial order makes me and anyone else in it not just a worse person but a more confused one. Before I assess what an alternative, socialist, feminist, eco-centric course might be, I still need time to shake off the confusion.

This article will be used in a number of Los Altos Institute programs this year, including our Authoritarianism reading group and our up coming online course, The Holy American Empire.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

The Tory Party’s Climate Change Vote Is Scarier and Means More Than You Think

There is so much to unpack from this weekend’s Conservative Party convention vote on climate change that one struggles to know where to begin. So, first, what happened: the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole, and his surrogates, placed a resolution before the national convention of his party to affirm the scientific truth that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an apparent effort to be cast by the media as a moderate and modernizer within the party, he used his platform as leader, not just in the convention hall, but in the media in the days leading up to the vote, to strongly promote a “yes” vote in support of the resolution. The resolution was defeated.

This is fascinating, first of all, for anyone studying the changes in epistemology wrought by the twenty-first century. If there is one thing to characterize the Trump era it is the collapse of the separate categories of “knowledge” and “power” into a single category. To quote OCAD professor Eileen Wennekers, “Covfefe points us to the master discourse of the Trump Administration. What it means is that when Donald Trump says something, it becomes a word.”

To be clear, the party that received the largest share of the popular vote in the last election (from just over one in three Canadians) just held a vote on whether a piece of science is true. This is of a piece with a larger trend across the political spectrum of completely conflating knowledge and power. Of course, a political party has the power to determine which physical laws are true. For decades now, the US Republican Party has believed that how zygotes, embryos and foetuses work is something to be determined by democratic voting rather than scientific investigation.

But this has spread to include a whole galaxy of physical laws now determined by democratic votes—the Anglo American conservative universe is full of science created by voting. Energy from solar power is impossible to store and cannot be generated on cloudy days. The Australian mega-fires were a combination of targeted arsons committed by climate change activists and false-flag operations that used special effects to simulate fires. And windmill cancer continues to kill Europeans by the thousand every year.

Progressives have taken a different direction. Science is now made by government-appointed experts. Prominent progressive activists and journalists now propound the theory that the political jurisdiction in which one lives determines how Covid-19 transmission works. If one prefers the views of better-published, more qualified scientists over those of BC’s chief medical health officer concerning the utility or masking or the susceptibility of children and adolescents to Covid variants, one is “against science.” Even when the only public figure in North America who concurs with her views on these subjects is Donald Trump.

What makes Bonnie Henry infallible is the fact that she is the most senior public health government official in her jurisdiction and has been given a title and powers reflecting this. If the medical chief of the province’s oldest hospital disagrees with her, this does not mean that there is a debate over medical science. It means that Royal Columbian Hospital’s chief doctor has turned against science itself.

In other words, while progressives prefer autocratic, state-based authority to determine scientific truth and conservatives prefer democratic, party-based authority to determine scientific truth, both of Anglo America’s main political groupings concur that power can be converted directly into knowledge.

And that is just the first remarkable thing about this vote.

Until this weekend, whenever a fellow activist talked to me about how their party convention was going to vote on an important environmental or social issue, my response would always be the same, “Look at all the provincial and national party conventions in English Canada since 1993. Tell me of one vote on a policy resolution that has materially affected a party’s platform or policies it has enacted in government.”

That’s because, until this weekend, there was none. The only convention votes that have mattered since 1993 have been the selection and deselection of party leaders. Period.

As I have written extensively elsewhere, through a combination of changes in federal and provincial law and changes in political parties’ organizational structures over the past generation, Canadian politics has diverged from other democracies in systematically draining the power out of parliamentarians and party members and concentrating it in the office of each party’s registered leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, resolutions by party members could force changes in platform and government policy, these are routinely ignored. Whereas, in the twentieth century, party members or legislative caucuses needed to approve party platforms, this is now done by head office staff and the office of the leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, candidates were chosen by the mutual agreement of local members and the party leader, local agreement is now an optional formality.

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Given this situation, one must ask two questions: (1) Why did Erin O’Toole place a resolution before his party’s membership and campaign for it to be passed, when he could just as easily have kept climate change off the convention floor and then written his desired policy into the party platform unilaterally, (2) What are the implications of this concession of power to party members?

First, let us be clear: nothing has changed legally. O’Toole still has the power to write the defeated resolution into his party’s platform. The only reason the convention vote has power over him is that he sought and campaigned for the approval of the members. It is his choice, not some institutional or legal change that has given meetings of his party’s membership this power over him. But this is now a real power. By arguing that he required this vote in order to campaign effectively in the next election, O’Toole has turned the democratic vote of his members into something necessary and real.

So why did he?

Likely, O’Toole has been observing how the “rally around the flag” effect under Covid has made our leaders even more infallible than they were previously. Party activists, at least in parties like the BC NDP and BC Liberals, understand themselves, when they attend a convention, less as decision-makers and more as members of a lavish theatrical production. A party activist’s job at a convention is to bust out of their role as an extra and get a brief speaking part at the microphone, praising their leader and his wise policies, irrespective of their private thoughts on the matter.

O’Toole must have expected that Tory convention delegates would behave like members of other parties and work from the script he had handed them. But they didn’t. Instead, we witnessed the building of an impressive coalition against the resolution led not by oil industry shills but by Campaign Life Coalition, the largest anti-abortion organization in Canada.

The Religious Right has long chafed under the authoritarian leadership of the new Conservative Party that they worked so hard to create in 2003, a leadership that has shown a surprising loyalty to Canada’s cross-partisan consensus to keep women’s reproductive rights out of parliament. Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole have all been effective at isolating, marginalizing and cutting off support from the anti-abortion movement when it came to voting on their key issue.

But what this establishment did not see coming was the emergence of a larger Trumpian coalition of forced birth advocates, climate change deniers and other stigmatized groups fronted by an issue other than abortion. In this way, the Tory establishment has found itself stuck in the 1990s, when these groups were separate and smaller, as compared to the present-day reality where, for many, climate change denial, assault weapon legalization and putting women with insufficiently documented miscarriages on death row are politically inextricable from one another.

This moment in Canadian politics should worry both left-wing and mainstream Canadians. A populist revolt against the autocracy of Canada’s political structures is happening. Rank-and-file party members are standing up to their leaders and building alliances to challenge the power of our country’s political class and the consensus they embody.

The problem is that this revolt is taking place on the political right; there is no sign of it on the left. The sense that people can organize together and, through democratic voting, challenge elites and their agenda is coming back to life in Canada but inside the our party of the right.

While this, combined with an imminent election defeat, likely marks the death of O’Toole’s political career, it marks the very opposite of death when it comes to the Tory party. As we have seen again and again, movements that mobilize and engage regular folks with the idea that they can confront power and make change ultimately triumph over movements that do not, whether or not they immediately seize state power.

This weekend is a sad and troubling moment when it comes to the climate crisis, to women’s reproductive rights and to the pursuit of economic equality. But it could be a good day for democracy in Canada, if rank-and-file New Democrats, Greens and Liberals tear a page from the new book Tory members are reading.

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

C-6 Neither Helps Nor Harms Human Rights Because It’s Not a Real Law

In 1993, Brian Mulroney and his Tories bottomed-out at 14% in the polls. After nine years in power, the party had exhausted the patience of Canadians, not so much with its policy direction, which was largely continued by subsequent governments but because Mulroney’s kind of charisma had turned on him. His unctuous charm had gone from asset to liability, as had his loyalty to his team in the face of scandal and minor corruption. But he believed he had an ace up his sleeve.

As the guy who had declined to place a new abortion law before parliament despite the invitation of the Supreme Court, and as the guy who had received much but given little to the social conservatives who had stood behind his party for decades, the last thing anyone would expect would be for him to attempt to fight an election on a social issue. But, brilliant strategist that he was, Mulroney hit upon a motherhood social issue that would reunite his coalition and stop the insurgent socially conservative Reform Party: child pornography.

The Internet, that series of tubes nobody understood, had emerged as a new social force in Canada in the late 1980s and helped to reactivate society’s fears of anonymous predators luring impressionable youths. The tricky thing was getting the opposition parties to oppose the bill. But Mulroney, a successful lawyer in Québec before his ascent to the PMO, had a damned clever plan.

What if parliament were presented a child pornography law that was so egregious, so invasive, so overreaching, so incompetently written that decent, responsible folks could not possibly support it? Mulroney sought to craft a child porn law that was so bad that opposition members felt ethically obliged to oppose it.

The draft legislation proceeded to criminalize students who were romantically involved passing notes in class and any play, film or book in which persons under the age of majority expressed a desire to sleep together. It didn’t just make it a criminal act to write or see a John Hughes movie; it would be an offense to possess a copy of Romeo and Juliet.

But the Liberals and NDP were wise to Mulroney’s ploy. Svend Robinson, the NDP justice critic, was dispatched on an extended trip to Europe, lest his penchant for honesty get in the way of the party’s plan to roll over and vote for whatever garbage legislation was placed before the House. Seeing this, the Tories began adding more sloppy, offensive and absurd provisions to the law as it wended its way through parliament. But the opposition wouldn’t bite.

Why?

Opposition parties’ desire for power was their obvious motive for waving this egregious piece of legislation through. But how did more responsible members justify this? Beginning in 1977, even before the patriation of the 1982 Constitution and adoption of the Charter, Canadian courts had become increasingly confident in striking down bad public policy and, to an extent, writing replacement law themselves. Liberals, Bloquistes and New Democrats were confident that the courts were an effective enough guardrail for Canadian democracy that they could sit back and wait for the courts to fix the law.

And that is what has happened. The law, as it currently exists, as informed by case law and modified by a succession of court judgements, is a perfectly good law.

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This might help to explain Bill C-6, the anti-conversion therapy bill before parliament, the bill that the Trudeau government is desperately trying to convince the Conservative Party to oppose. The bill appears to make it illegal for any counselor to question or treat child and adolescent gender dysphoria using anything other that cosmetic surgery, puberty blockers and hormones. Talk therapy, which has assisted young people in feeling comfortable and at peace in their bodies in the past now carries the penalty of custodial jail time. The idea that it is normal for adolescents to feel uncomfortable or alien in their changing bodies has been effectively criminalized. Adolescence is now a disease to be treated with surgery, sterilization and a lifelong hormone regime. Witnesses who have found these treatments ineffective and have “de-transitioned” with the assistance of talk therapy were barred from testifying before the parliamentary committee on C-6 on the grounds that de-transitioners are an anti-trans “hate group.” NDP MP Randall Garrison distinguished himself in the committee by first voting to bar de-transitioner testimony and then arguing that de-transitioners did not exist, that no person has ever repented of a gender transition and that to suggest such individuals do exist is “a myth” propounded by “hate groups.”

But the legislation does not merely categorize talk therapy for gender dysphoria as a criminal offense. It conflates Christian anti-gay conversion therapy with talk therapy for gender dysphoria. The clinically illegitimate and ineffective “pray away the gay” programs also now carry with them the same prison sentences as treating gender dysphoria with talk therapy. It is an offense, now, to attempt to suggest to a young person that they might be attracted to members of the opposite sex and question their same-sex attraction.

Let’s think that through for a moment… Doesn’t this mean that telling a same-sex attracted young person that they might be trans gets you sent to prison for anti-gay conversion therapy? Doesn’t this mean telling a trans kid they might actually be gay gets you sent to prison for anti-trans conversion therapy? That would be my take. In other words, it’s illegal to counsel kids who are confused about their sexual and gender identities. Period. The law puts anyone who counsels children on notice that they have until the bill achieves Royal Assent to get out of their current line of work.

Not only does this law endanger mental health providers. It endangers gender-non-comforming kids by cutting them off from the attention and support they need. And it is not merely engaged in hornswoggling the religious conservatives and gender critical feminists it provokes; it also exploits the emotional and physical labour of trans and gay rights activists by deceiving them into thinking it protects gay and trans youth.

And it’s like it’s 1993 all over again because no opposition party is rising to the Liberals’ bait. The Liberals still need a wedge issue that will stampede progressive voters into their tent, and one that must be attached to a piece of legislation so egregious, so overreaching, so self-contradictory, so incompetent that either Jagmeet Singh or, preferably, Erin O’Toole feels duty-bound to oppose it.

It is in this light that we should anticipate the anti-hate online hate-speech legislation that the government is currently crafting. We should expect to see a law attaching jail time to any criticism of Israeli domestic policy, misgendering an individual in private conversation and a host of other provisions designed to specifically target constituencies who will lobby their MPs to oppose the law.

While little of this debate will be covered in mainstream national media, which will emphasize the nigh-unanimous support for these laws, Canadian civil society will become a hive of activity as organizations mobilize, dodge or split as the election drumbeat grows stronger. In a low-turnout election, the role of mobilized civil society organizations will be crucial in driving turnout. Churches, trade unions, public education organizations, women’s centres will communicate with their members about these laws and divisive internal battles will ensue.

I know many folks on all sides are itching to get into the ring and mobilize around these two pieces of legislation; but this is a mistake. Not only will it further divide our organizations and even our families, it is ultimately serving a government re-election strategy. These laws have not been proposed in good faith. The government has no actual intention of seeing their provisions go into effect. These documents are propaganda not law; that is the only function they will ever serve.

Instead, we need to begin joining together to call out this bad faith legislating. Evangelical Christians and trans rights activists might not have much in common when it comes to their perspectives on the two bills. But both groups should experience a shared outrage at being manipulated to serve the political ends of a corrupt regime by forcing divisive and costly conflicts upon them.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The New Censorship and Its Limits

Anyone with an anti-American or vaguely left-wing worldview has probably begun noticing that the content warnings, automated suspensions, topic bans and other online speech suppression publicly justified by the need to censure Donald Trump and limit the spread of hoax Covid cures are now being broadly directed against expressions of socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist positions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other platforms.

While continuing to curate a subreddit focused on the anal rape of women, Reddit has told gender critical feminists that their discussions are no longer welcome. Articles based on reputable, credible climate science are now tagged with the same “potential hoax” flags used for the bleach cures for autism and Covid. Even good natured joke posts like “fuck America” or “Americans deserve what’s coming to them” have resulted in Facebook bans for up to forty-eight hours. Pages like The Left Chapter, Michael Laxer’s hub of socialist organizing in Canada, have been removed from their members’ Facebook feeds by a supposedly automated decision for which there are no stated reasons and no right to appeal.

Criticisms of China’s WeChat platform grow increasingly hollow as we see our speech not merely shaped by algorithms but corralled into discourses acceptable to social media firms’ owners.

How did it come to this?

First and foremost, the self-identified left has internalized and more completely believes in what, until recently, were understood to be conservative values in the 1980s. As Brexit exposed, the free trade, investor rights and dependence on rightless foreign labour are now understood to be progressive values. Nasty conservatives want to re-erect barriers to neoliberal globalization because they are cruel and racist. Therefore, we must support the very treaties that helped to create neoliberal austerity in the first place, the logic seems to go.

Because of this, progressives understand late stage monopoly capitalism the same way the original progressives, Teddy Roosevelt’s crew, understood it in their day: universal public services should not be provided by the state but by regulated monopolies and oligopolies with state-appointed oversight boards and commissions. These boards and commissions’ job would be to guarantee minimum service standards to customers and minimum profits to investors.

The return to this system through the sale of highways, power utilities, auto insurance companies, communications utilities, etc., often by progressive governments, has caused many progressive folks to see nothing as intrinsically unjust about the social media monopolies sitting in private hands. In fact, given how unjustly they have been treated by regulated monopolies, like their local phone, electrical or cable company, many see the absolute autocratic dictatorship of a charismatic individual as preferable to the faceless, bureaucratic regulatory bodies that have failed to bridle the greed of regulated firms in any meaningful way.

Second, this internalization of essentially capitalist theories of justice as, in some way, socialism-adjacent has also been paralleled by a decline in the critical vocabulary of the putative left. In this case, the ability to identify a commons must precede any efforts to socialize one. Yet, when many progressives defended Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump, they often argued that the authority of Twitter to remove Trump’s account was absolute because the online space the platform had created was its own private property and not a common carrier, i.e. a part of the communications commons required to carry everyone’s messages without discrimination.

The fact that the organizing energy of folks opposed to the private, commercialized, conservative, manipulative and censored character large social media platforms have taken on has been almost entirely directed into creating alternative, cooperative digital commons is, on the one hand, heartening. Clearly, there is some residual of Antonio Gramsci in the effort to build socialist institutions outside the state. But the flip side of this, soberingly, is that negligible organizing energy has gone into amending the telecommunications legislation in countries around the world to make these commons at least more subject to public regulation and, ideally, expropriation and socialization. Instead, progressives have, again, naturalized a profoundly conservative and undemocratic state of affairs.

Third, and most importantly, there is an epistemological split in our society. Free traders and protectionists exist in parties across the political spectrum now. Advocates for big government and limited government, same deal. Increasing rates of permanent and temporary human migration, again, no longer divisive. Nor is public borrowing. What increasingly animates what Sam Kriss terms the “reverse identity parade” that electoral politics has increasingly become is how one makes knowledge.

Progressives make knowledge using scientific expertise. What I mean by that is that progressives make knowledge by assessing who the highest-ranked or most authoritative expert is according to their criteria and then unquestioningly believe what that person says, until such time as someone demonstrates themselves to be more authoritative. The personality cult around BC’s Chief Medical Health officer Bonnie Henry is a great example. Many physicians and epidemiologists have criticized Henry’s mask skepticism and claims about the safety of schools for exposure and transmission. Henry’s followers tend to defend her on the basis of her rank. Dissidents are wrong because they are lower than Henry with respect to political and titular rank. If one prefers the opinions of the Chief of Medicine at Royal Columbian Hospital to those of Henry, one is quickly branded as being “against science.” Because science has become synonymous with expertise: i.e. the credentials and state power one possesses on the basis of one’s putative knowledge.

Conservatives, on the other hand, make knowledge in an increasingly participatory way. “Do your research!” is a slogan now associated with the false belief that vaccines cause autism in children. Pioneered by Glenn Beck, conservative talkshows function as how-to demonstrations for organizing variegated data to produce a foregone conclusion. Because the right’s enemies are amoral supermen, number in the millions and effortlessly translate their intentions into real world events, an answer like “George Soros” or “Black Lives Matter” or “Antifa” can function to explain any event. In this way, modern remedial conspiracy theory is less “pin the tail on the donkey” and more the Aristocrats. The entire joke is filler and the punchline is both foreknown and unrelated.

Because of the horrifying amount of not merely false but seemingly deranged belief out there in the form of QAnon, Covfefe, anti-vaxx, bleach therapy, climate denial and young earth creationism. And because these beliefs are clearly winning the epistemological battle, new and more drastic measures must be taken to suppress them, the thinking goes. Because FoxNews is permitted to broadcast outrageous, lethal, society-crippling lies, with Newsmax and other crazier broadcasters nipping at their heels, progressives think that we must impose new and more stringent rules to ensure the veracity of what appears in TV and on social media.

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And because efforts to bridle the power to lie of Fox and others have consistently failed in the Senate and Federal Communications Commission, centrists and progressives have become the chief apologists for the direct censorship powers wielded by Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. The problem, in progressive minds, is that these CEOs have been too timid in their efforts to control the claims and ideology permitted on their media. The idea seems to be that in the absence of the state, the billionaires must step in.

This is a grave error.

Last year, I wrote an essay about the 1980s Doctor Who story Castrovalva. In the show, the villain, the Master, creates a pocket dimension and populates it with simulacra, giving the environment and the characters detailed invented personal histories. The hero of the story is the librarian Shardovan. Although he is one of the simulacra and the books are all forged by the same hand, he becomes a skeptic simply because he detects the logical inconsistencies within the official histories, first material inconsistences, then logical consistencies. The climax of the episode occurs when he confronts his creator and accuses him of not being who he claims to be.

A number of people have so focused on how this essay fits into the theory of identity I was developing at the time that this intervention was primarily an epistemological one.

Both good stories and accurate social science derive their quality from their ability to describe how human beings think, feel and react to one another. The author of the false history of Castrovalva would have faced a choice: either write stories that are self-consistent, in which events hit together and makes sense on their face or write stories that are consistent with observed human nature. One cannot do both without capturing the desire of the human soul to be free. No matter which way the stories were written, they would have struck a false note to any person endowed with basic empathy and critical thinking capacity.

It is my argument that FoxNews, Newsmax, Breitbart, Rebel Media and their ilk should elicit the same reaction from folks with remotely functioning critical thinking skills and basic empathy. If a person with a healthy sense of empathy and basic critical thinking capacity watches FoxNews for a week, they will know that the station is telling lies, even if they have access to no other news source. In fact, a person with these two basic things should, over time, be able to figure out what is actually happening by only watching Rupert Murdoch’s equivalent to the Jonestown loudspeaker.

That is because FoxNews and its allies are horribly inconsistent. Donald Trump both organized and did not organize the riot at the capital. The riot at the capital was both patriotic and unpatriotic. No officers were killed there. The officers who were killed were no big deal. No officer death is ever acceptable. Barack Obama is a communist. And an atheist. And a Muslim. Anthropogenic climate change is good. Anthropogenic climate change is not happening. The seas are not rising. The seas are rising because we threw too many rocks in the ocean. Robert Mueller is a traitor. Robert Mueller is Donald Trump’s best friend.

No person with functioning empathy and critical thinking skills is going to be susceptible to the kind of disinformation centrists and progressives think the new censorship will protect people from. And the reason this fear seems all the more real because critical thinking skills are on the decline everywhere. The progressive embrace of expertise is a mirror image of the right’s embrace of QAnon. And they share a cause: the kind of self, the kind of soul human beings were called-upon to construct during the Enlightenment is under attack. It is being remade.

Whether moving in progressive or conservative circles, not only do we see a decline in the practice of reasoning aloud in conversation. We see the normalization of the emotional reactions of people suffering clinical narcissism. It is expected that people learning that another person has special talents or knowledge they do not will be experienced as an attack. It is expected that not being seen as one ideally imagines oneself is an injury, an attack. We determine what viewpoint is correct by assessing who has the greatest emotional stake in being right and the status needed to force that recognition. We imagine the words said about us must be the same as the words said to us. As I wrote nine years ago in Age of Authenticity, these post-Enlightenment selves are larger, more porous and overlap others. For these selves, truth is located at the centre of the self, the place most walled-off from material reality. One’s epistemological foundations are to be found on an inward journey, not an outward one.

Combined with the reduction in teaching and the lack of cultural confidence in basic critical thinking and reasoning skills, a growing portion of our population will espouse belief in incoherent nonsense. Changing or reducing the supply of pre-fabricated nonsense will make little to no difference. That is because modern conservatism has an intellectual do-it-yourself-ism that easily enables folks to substitute their own homemade batshit crazy ideas, with the same base ingredients of racial animus and confusion.

That social trend can only be arrested by dealing with the problem of the consumer, not at the level of the producer.

If Breitbart or FoxNews had existed in the 1960s, most people who believe them today would not only have disbelieved them. They would have found them laughable, funny, absurd. Even the John Birch Society and Lyndon Larouche activists would have found their explanations unusable because of the conspiracy theories would not be self-consistent with their last retelling. Too many details would be missed or wrong. And Alex Jones and his crew, the belief that every piece of errant data is a false flag or a “crisis actor,” would likely be institutionalized under the more muscular mental hygiene statutes of the time.

A population this addle-minded cannot be protected from thinking crazy things by censorship. It can only be protected by rebuilding not just our capacities for empathy and logic but for the cultural institutions that have nurtured and reinforced these things. We must re-democratize civil society institutions. We must increase the amount of zero-barrier free education available to regular folks. We must renew our democratic institutions like the FCC and CRTC to convert social media into socialized common carriers. We need to reform our education systems to prioritize critical thinking and logic and understand the inculcation empathy part of that project, not oppositional to it. We must throw off orthodoxies, new and old, that seek to shut down our capacity to think aloud together.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

New Authoritarians #2: Internment, Amnesia, the Maximato and Hindutva

This article is the second in a new series on authoritarianism, an online companion to Los Altos Institute’s reading groups on the new authoritarianism and on global diaspora and migration. Starting February 2021. It is part of my efforts to open up a larger field for both comparative and connective analysis of authoritarian movements past and present and in the Global North versus Global South. If you would like to support more scholarship like this, please consider responding to our Institute’s annual financial plea.

Last week, I wrote about the dangers of historical blindness when it comes to the catastrophic legacy of Canada’s residential school system. Unfortunately, Canada’s white settlers need to stage a performance of tearful ancestor-blaming in order to continue those very ancestors’ despicable policies.

Today, I want to write about another of our forebears’ sins and how our narration of it is blinding us to rapid and dangerous changes in geopolitics that are fueling the rise of the “new authoritarians,” like Recep Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Narendra Modi, the elected leaders of some of the largest, most diverse states on earth.

Specifically, I am writing to explain why it is that remedying this historical blindness helps us to understand that, next to the Stars and Stripes and the Confederate Flag, the next most prevalent flags at the Trump movement’s storming of Washington were the flags of the Republic of India and of its ruling party, BJP.

The Problems of Canadian Nationalism

Canadian civic nationalism is truly progressive in that it buys into what historians call “the progress myth,” an idea that the things that liberal folks like about their societies, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, free markets, open borders, tolerance, universal education, ecological sustainability, technological innovation etc. are baked into history itself; that human beings are merely agents of an invisible force called “progress” that will inevitably triumph in shaping our societies into societies that progressives (i.e. most Canadians) like.

Part of the evidence for progress is the idea that the generations that are currently alive are the best people there have ever been. By best, we mean most thoroughly embody such progressive policies as pluralism. Those of us who are at the peak of our social influence, in early middle age, believe ourselves to epitomize those values better than any previous generation of human beings in the place where we live.

To progressives, Donald Trump and his cohort of authoritarians are a glitch, a blip, an aberration. Perfunctory, symbolic efforts are invested in getting rid of those folks because history will do that. The real work of being a progressive  if how they use their time is anything to go by) when it comes to the civic nationalism of a place like Canada, is to prove oneself more progressive than other putative progressives. One could do this by calling them out for their insufficiently full-throated praise of a progressive value or cause or, maybe, less adversarially, making sure that the cans in the recycling blue box on one’s front porch shine brighter than those in one’s neighbour’s.

But the most important thing in Canada’s progressive civic nationalism, more than virtue-signaling or chastising one’s neighbours, is ancestor-blaming. There is only one area of ancestor-blaming that can compete with our crocodile tears for the Indigenous people whose land we continue to confiscate and poison, whom we continue to abduct and incarcerate from cradle to grave: Japanese Internment.

The Japanese Diaspora in the Pacific

Following the Japanese Empire’s bombing of the military base the United States was using to colonially occupy the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Canadian and US governments began stripping citizens and residents of Japanese extraction of their homes, their businesses and their civil rights, breaking up communities and relocating them to BC’s interior and the Prairies.

This process was not merely one of the most flagrant abrogations of human rights in Canadian history and, on top of that, nakedly racist (no such measures were taken towards Germans, Italians or Finns); it was clearly also commercially motivated. The strongest voices supporting internment were canneries and fishermen, and it was the white-owned parts of the fishing industry who benefited most from the resale of Japanese land, boats and canning infrastructure. Powerful Japanese businesspeople were suddenly penniless; powerful fishing and canning cartels were smashed.

There is no question that, as with the residential schools, our ancestors were on the wrong side of history. But, as with the residential school debate, flattening our forebears into no more than moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash facsimiles harms our ability to make sense of and ethically respond to the present.

In Canada and to a much greater extent, the US, Japanese immigrants were initially understood to be a kind of white or honourary white immigrant when they began arriving on the Pacific Coast and Hawaii in the nineteenth century. Newspapers, encyclopedias, school textbooks all sought to draw sharp distinctions between Chinese and Japanese people based on the geopolitics and racist pseudoscience of the day. The Japanese played baseball and wore top hats; their country was a formal ally of the British and French Empires; they had beaten a great power (Russia) in a head-to-head war in the twentieth century.

While Japanese settlers on the Pacific Slope faced a great deal of racism (and nowhere more so than British Columbia), their typical defense was their sharp racial difference from the Chinese, an indebted failing state that was exporting indentured servants to balance its books.

Like Jews, Turks, and Arab Christians, the Japanese existed at the margins of whiteness initially, with national laws typically recognizing them as white and local opinion typically not, in the early years of the twentieth century.

Ironically, it was following the war in which Japan was an effective ally of Canada and the US that the Japanese hold on whiteness grew more tenuous by the year. The failure of governments to demobilize First World War veterans, resulting in inflation, homelessness and major social upheaval (of which the Winnipeg General Strike was but one instance) was a global phenomenon. Eager to diffuse the emerging socialist consciousness that had toppled the Russian Empire, major corporations and media throughout the capitalist world began offering an alternative to socialism to cure the ills of demobilization and the early 1920s: racism and nationalism.

Always a strategy since the nineteenth century, major media and corporations began describing the workplace as a site of racial and national competition. Major manufacturers funded patriotic associations and conservative newspapers written in immigrants’ first languages and encouraged residential segregation of different ethnicities. In this environment, anti-Japanese sentiment hardened, especially because Japanese lineages were competing so effectively against Europeans. The more Japanese folks were pushed out of white society, the more they subscribed to cartels and buyers’ clubs, a local, practical economic nationalism.

But Internment was not simply produced by a rising tide of racism, segregation and economic antagonism. Something else had to happen to lead to this event:

The Maximato.

The Mexican Diaspora and Its Interwar Weaponization

Few people outside of the historical profession have heard of the Maximato and fewer still appreciate its global impact. In 1924, just as fascism was emerging as a distinct political force, two years after Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power and one after the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany, an admirer of Mussolini’s became president of Mexico.

In Mussolini’s first half-decade in power, prior to his 1928 reversal and creation of Vatican City, the centre of Il Duce’s agenda was anti-clericalism. Mussolini and Turkey’s Kemal Attaturk led political movements in societies that had traditionally been dominated by a single religion. Beginning in 1922, both governments began the violent repression of conservative religious leaders and enacted legislation like veiling bans to break the power of clerics over their followers. But the most ambitious of the 1920s authoritarian anti-clerics was Calles. Priests and bishops were prohibited from public assembly or wearing religious dress and the Callistas smashed the old church-led education system, just like Attaturk’s movement in Turkey. This ultimately led to the Cristero War in Mexico which spilled over the border in to the United States when US Catholic clergy and the Knights of Columbus began running illegal guns to the rebels.

Understanding that their longstanding control of education was the church’s greatest power, Calles and his fellow Mexican revolutionaries moved quickly to build a state-funded, secular, universal education system under the direction of the federal government and expelled or drove out thousands of clergy.

For Calles, the Cristero War was just one limitation of his power. Another was the Mexican constitution, which prohibited the re-election of a president who had served his full term. Recognizing the magnitude of his project of remaking Mexican society into a secular, authoritarian, one-party state (like what Attaturk would achieve in Turkey or Nasser in Egypt), Calles worked, from the beginning, on means to rule Mexicans via proxies. The term Maximato refers to this because, in this Save time and money by ordering from our convenient, discreet and in-expensive Indian online pharmacy.Our online medication store sells only brand-name prescription drugs, at the lowest prices let these sufferers to avail the viagra cialis on line treatment. It’s the devotedness and hard work done by Late best price on viagra Hakim Hashmi who dreamt of serving people by utilizing the healing power of mother nature. This novelty should uphold the following two rules (3 cialis online australia and 4). 3. In contrast, subliminal message experiments’ subjects display no effects whatsoever after the end levitra australia online http://foea.org/6-revision-v1/ of the experiments. system, like an early Roman Emperor, Calles’ true power came from his informal rather than formal position. Under his successors, Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio and Abelardo Rodriguez, he was still recognized, acknowledged and deferred-to as the Maximo Jefe.

While many appreciate the personal and temporal magnitude of the Maximato, our historical amnesia prevents us from fully seeing its spatial and popular elements. As much as the Maximato, as a project, was about governing beyond Calles’ 1928 term limit, it was also, especially in the context of the ongoing Cristero War, about governing beyond the US-Mexico border.

So, in the 1920s, Calles began the most ambitious campaign of politicizing a diasporic community the world had ever seen. Organizers for Calles’ party went beyond creating local associations across the border to vote in Mexican elections; these associations also participated in American elections, embedding themselves in the Democratic Party machine in Denver, Reno, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. Consulates multiplied and grew; soon consulates were partnering to create Spanish-language day and night schools. Organizing rallies, unionization drives and political education became part of the duties of a consul in the Mexican diplomatic corps.

This was a major innovation.

Because immigrants from a state were typically the most hostile to the rulers of their homeland, especially Sikhs and Irish Catholics who understood their homeland to be under a hostile occupation, Calles built on the fact that most Mexican emigrants had backed the revolution of which he had been a leader. But with a twist: the revolution was continuous, and taking place under his direction. Now emigrants could be equal parts in the building of a patriotic, secular, revolutionary state with not just members but with political aspirations outside Mexico’s borders.

This organizing played an important part in the rising tide of anti-Mexican racism in the US. But it also inspired other authoritarians to reimagine their movement as a global one, in which their diaspora played a central role.

The Failure of the Axis Powers at Diasporic Weaponization

For Adolf Hitler, this proved mostly a headache; diasporic Germans were cautious about proclaiming their sympathy for a hostile foreign power after the First World War and so most pro-Nazi parties outside Germany were those of non-Germans who had narrated their nationality into the Nazi myth of the “Aryan race.” Consequently, Hindu fundamentalist and high caste Hindus formed the majority of Nazi-tribute parties in the various electorates and principalities of British India. And many of these groups and individuals went on to form the Hindutva parties out of which the modern BJP was formed.

Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Ministers, looked to the example of the Maximato in their imagination of the role their diaspora might play in the coming global conflict but there is no evidence that the Japanese government put even a fraction of the thought and investment into creating something similar with their large diasporic populations in the US, Canada and Brazil.

Although they liked the idea that the Issei and Nisei might make a crucial difference in the coming war the British Empire and possibly the USA, aside from the odd proclamation, Hirohito and his prime ministers offered negligible material organization or inducement. But, beginning in California and traveling up the coast to Canada, many Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians reacted to increasingly restrictive laws and growing anti-Asian sentiment by publicly identifying with Japan and its imperial project.

And it is no coincidence that despite British Columbia being far more strident and extreme in our anti-Asian sentiment, the idea for Internment came from the South, from the US.

The thing is: there really were pro-Empire, pro-Hirohito activists and organizations within in the Japanese community on North America’s Pacific Slope, despite the negligible and ineffectual help from Japan.

Our forebears were not reacting to nothing, not acting merely out of a deep-seated racism, nor merely out their covetousness of their Japanese neighbours’ land and fishing fleet. Those things were no doubt preponderant factors in this crime without which it would not otherwise have taken place.

It is that our ancestors needed an alibi for that crime and that alibi was the false and exaggerated belief that the Empire of Japan had weaponized its diaspora as a political and paramilitary force.

So, how does the present change if we suddenly remember our excuse, our alibi and its origins in a real phenomenon that altered the politics of the American Southwest?

The Hindutva Movement in the Present

Maybe we would notice, then, the ways in which Narendra Modi is building his own modern Maximato, one that extends beyond the boundaries of India to encompass a larger Hindutva nationalist community and political project. One of the most striking moments of the 2016 Trump campaign was its celebration of Hindu nationalism in a nationally-televised event, presenting Trump and his movement as the Hindutva choice for America, something reenacted and reciprocated a hundredfold on his tour of India.

While including high-caste and Hindu fundamentalist Indians in mobilizing a transnational diaspora based on a shared Aryan mythic heritage disgusted Hitler, the Modi movement’s version of the project is not squeamish in this way. And we are beginning to see the kind of infrastructure the Maximato built appearing in societies around the world, an activist diplomatic staff of highly politicized consuls, working to build and strengthen Hindutva patriotic associations in our communities.

And we are not just seeing this phenomenon in far right parties. Like the Callistas, the Modi-ites are working in many scenes. Progressive and left parties with a predominantly white membership are especially susceptible, quickly placing Modi-ite entryists in key spokesperson and decision-making positions. Our hunger to tokenize brown bodies to demonstrate our legitimacy to other white Hindutva candidates for our supposedly socialist municipal party, Proudly Surrey. The BC Green Party, similarly, has nominated individuals aligned with far-right forces in India in the 2017 and 2020 elections. In the US, those trying to outflank Bernie Sanders on the Identitarian left welcomed the Modi movement into the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign.

Because today’s authoritarians have a different approach to diversity and cosmopolitanism, one that seeks to organize different peoples into a hierarchy rather than seeking to eliminate difference, Modi-ites often adopt discourses that superficially invoke unity and allyship among the autocthonous Indian religions Hindutva permits. This enables them to insinuate themselves into broadly liberal or progressive organizations, even as their primary agenda is to build a global authoritarian religious fundamentalist movement. That is because progressives, increasingly, see nothing but colour and reduce a person’s politics to what they perceive to be the interests of that person’s race, gender or sexuality.

The Modi movement and the Trump movement are increasingly organized and connected global movements that are self-conscious in their understanding that they are part of a worldwide struggle between a new and vibrant populist authoritarianism and a shopworn, exhausted and confused set of movements defending democracy. And so, MAGA hats appear at Hindutva rallies and Aryan supremacist flags fly comfortably next to those of the Confederacy.

And we are turning a blind eye, partly because our innate racism combined with progressive smugness makes us refuse to see differences of opinion among folks we do not consider white. Consequently, when activists like Surrey’s Gurpreet Singh, publisher of Radical Desi, or organizations like Indians Abroad for a Pluralist India, ask for our solidarity in standing against this Modi-backed program of institutional capture in the Indian diaspora, we fail them when we don’t show up; and, in turn, fail the global movement against the new authoritarianism.

But I also have to wonder if some of our unwillingness to make common cause with those calling this out goes back to the cartoonish image of Canadian ancestral villainy on which our civic nationalism is based. Our ancestors were wrong and evil to make so much of a handful of pro-Hirohito rallies and speeches, wrong to see these things being precisely organized and commanded by a force already present. Our ancestors were motivated by greed and racism to see an organized movement where there was none, and they then massively overreacted to this illusion. Therefore, we reason, any talk today of weaponized diasporas and global alliances among authoritarians must be both wrong and racist.

I would suggest that taking this position is grossly irresponsible. We need to stand in solidarity with our fellow citizens of all extractions against globalizing authoritarian movements. Canadians have been right to stage anti-Trump marches and protests over the past four years, against Trump’s foreign policy, against his domestic policy and against the actions of his supporters in Canada. I think our non-white fellow citizens deserve the same kind of solidarity when staring down a far more organized movement that makes no distinction in its murderous intent towards Indian Muslims, irrespective of the country whose citizenship they hold.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Historical Blindness and the Intellectual Legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools

On December 15th, Erin O’Toole, the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa very cannily remarked on a Zoom call, a call he could be confident would be leaked to the media, that the Indian Residential School system was established by decent folks for the altruistic purpose of educating Indigenous people. The uproar was as predictable as the canned and obviously pre-written apology delivered at the beginning of the next news cycle.

Jagmeet Singh, Charlie Angus and a host of other progressive politicians and opinion leaders in the NDP, Greens and Liberals were unanimous: the people who created the residential school system were all—to a man—evil people with black hearts and bad intent who wanted nothing more than to exterminate every single indigenous person in Canada. How dare Mr. O’Toole suggest that anyone with good intentions could have been involved in the project, never mind fashioning it?

This reaction is of a piece with a larger dumbing-down of the Anglo left of which I have spilled copious ink elsewhere, a dangerous slide into stupidity that makes us disoriented, flat-footed and prone to unintended acts of destruction in the present.

Canada’s Indian Residential School system did not have a single underlying motive. That is because it arose from a broad national consensus including all major political tendencies in the country. People and organizations normally at loggerheads could, at least, all agree on this. It did not just arise from an elite consensus but an elite meta-consensus, a consensus among all the major elites in mid-nineteenth-century Canadian society.

One of the biggest problems with our current historical narration is that it pays attention to one group within that consensus: members of the Conservative Party bloc within John A MacDonald’s governments. It is easy to find quotations by MacDonald and his cabinet ministers describing the schools as the means by which “termination” would be most effectively achieved. Termination was a policy doctrine developed in the United States by members of the Republican Party that wanted to see an end to politically, linguistically and culturally distinct indigenous peoples. While some people in the future might include indigenous people in their ancestry, they would think of themselves in the same way as creole (American-born European) lineages thought of themselves, as good, upstanding white Americans or Canadians (many eugenicists believed that Indigenous people’s skin would lighten even without intermarriage simply by adopting European diet, dress and lifestyle). The point was the total termination, eradication of all indigenous separateness and distinctiveness.

While those people were important in creating the residential schools, the schools would not have survived for more than a century under the administration of a succession of Conservative, Liberal, Liberal-Progressive, Progressive Conservative, Conservative-Social Credit and Liberal-NDP governments without being backed by far more organizations and ideologies. Nor would every major mainline religious denomination, United, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic not just have supported the schools but run and staffed the schools themselves.

These churches did not just have conservative members; they produced the leaders of Canada’s socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, too. JS Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas came out of the same leadership class that designed and staffed the residential school system.

Canada’s protestant churchmen were over-represented among a larger group we call “reformers,” middle-class professionals who had adopted the new ideology of “progressivism,” and had become activists, campaigners for social improvements. Many reformers believed that, with the destruction of traditional indigenous lands, food sources and economies, assimilation was the only means by which to “save” indigenous people not just from starvation and extinction but from the total loss of their culture and identity.

At the zenith of Charles Dickens’ popularity, the largest group of reformers agitating for residential schools for both settler and Indigenous children were anti-child labour reformers. Just as violence was not part of a typical Indigenous child’s upbringing, farming, hunting and artisanal work were. These reformers saw little daylight between the racialized children of sharecroppers helping to bring in the cotton harvest in Georgia and those bringing in a maize harvest or drying the catch from a salmon run in the Canadian West.

Furthermore, education reformers noted that not only were Indian Reserves unable to find qualified, permanent teachers for on-reserve day schools, this was a larger problem. Rural schoolhouses, even in settler communities with road and rail access, were having trouble finding any staff, never mind qualified staff with experience or Normal School training. Some looked to the southwestern US where residential schools had been established to address the failure of the region’s settler and indigenous day schools. That is among the reasons many in the senior leadership of Indigenous communities, not just elected band council chiefs but traditional leaders initially supported the residential schools.

There was another, powerful reason many Indigenous leaders supported the creation of the system, even though they would later come to repent it: in 1858, Benito Juárez became the first person of fully Indigenous ancestry to become the leader of a post-independence state in the Western Hemisphere. A Zapotec Indian, he had not only been democratically elected to lead Mexico by a primarily white and mestizo voting population; he had served as chief justice of the Supreme Court, on his way up, and then, following his election, successfully repelled the Franco-Egyptian invasion of Mexico in 1861-67.

Juárez was a committed liberal and believed that the strongest forces holding back Indigenous people like himself: (a) Remember, these factors are necessary but may not be buy viagra sufficient to achieve the breakthrough. But the patent protection is now open for all and not taking the medication viagra cialis achat click this pharmacy shop as indicated by the security safeguards can have antagonistic impact on the individual’s wellbeing as opposed to inhaling a few large meals Consume food high in dietary fiber, which improves the health and function of your digestive system. 22. That’s because identifying and correcting https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2019/general-assembly/Friends%20of%20UNICA%20report.pdf commander viagra the underlying cause can help restore erectile function in many men. When and how does the role of sexologist come into play? A happy conjugal life viagra without prescription usa is required to stay hale and hearty for a long time. residential segregation on reserves and (b) missionaries translating scripture and catechism into Indigenous languages so as to teach literacy to Indigenous people in their native language, rather than the language of the colonizer. Juárez pointed out that literacy in a language different than that in which laws were written, judicial proceedings held and elections conducted, was a literacy that ghettoized his people. He therefore favoured the privatization and auctioning-off of reserve lands to and a new kind of education that provided linguistic immersion in the language of the colonizers.

Juárez, a figure of pride and hope to Indigenous people all over the Western hemisphere, suggested that reserved-based life and Indigenous languages were shackles holding Indigenous people back from the kind of successful life he had led, by running away from his village and teaching himself first Spanish, then law.

While it would later turn out that privatization of collective Indigenous reserve lands in the US and Mexico would only deepen Indigenous poverty and marginalization, this was not something initially known, in these early days of liberalism. The same was, of course, true of residential linguistic immersion programs like the Canadian Residential school system.

The system did indeed result in a veritable holocaust for Canadian Indigenous peoples—it produced madness, trauma, death, injury, permanent disability and scars that will remain for generations to come. It also produced catastrophic losses in language, culture, custom and family systems. These catastrophes, this holocaust continue to the present day.

One of the reasons this slow motion genocide, this holocaust continues is because of the defects in how we remember the residential schools.

By forgetting all the well-intentioned folks who designed, built and ran the residential schools and deciding that our ancestors were, all of them, black-hatted villains hell-bent on perpetrating a gratuitously cruel genocide, we exculpate ourselves and our actions in the present.

White guilt and colonizer tears are, today, the oil that keeps the wheels of our continued colonial project greased. An endless stream of false apologies and ancestor-blaming permit us to do the unthinkable: abduct more Indigenous children from their parents each year than we did at the height of the residential school system.

Not only do we abduct more Indigenous kids than ever; we incarcerate more Indigenous adults than ever; our non-officer army ranks contain more Indigenous people than ever; and the RCMP is able to continue its uninterrupted legacy of brazenly executing a certain number of Indigenous people year-in, year-out.

What is our excuse? We tell ourselves that, unlike our ancestors, we have good intentions; whereas they had evil intentions. And we con ourselves into believing that is a remotely legitimate way to think by forgetting our forbears’ aphorisms like “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” No. We are good. Our ancestors were bad. No more questions need to be asked. We can just continue besieging Indigenous land with riot police, shooting Indigenous people in our driveways, tearing Indigenous babies from the arms of their parents.

Worse yet, we have actually incorporated the residential schools into the myths that justify continued colonialism. We tell ourselves, “Indigenous people are so damaged, so traumatized by the legacy of the Residential Schools and colonial violence, they cannot look after their kids, so we must abduct them; they cannot look after themselves, so we must incarcerate them.”

“Of course, they won’t be further traumatized, physically, psychologically and culturally because our good intentions will magically translate into good outcomes, just like our forbears’ bad intentions automatically translated into bad outcomes,” we half-convince ourselves.

By drawing an arbitrary bright line between our ancestors and ourselves, by labeling them bad people and ourselves, good people, we authorize ourselves to continue, uninterrupted, the holocaust, the genocide they began.

In this way, all of Canada’s leaders, Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau are actually in accord about continuing, in broad strokes, the policies of John A MacDonald’s governments when it comes to First Nations. The only difference is the historical myth they use to justify it, O’Toole’s myth of the white-hatted colonizer with only good intentions or Singh’s and Trudeau’s myth of the black-hatted colonizer with only bad intentions.

To quote Albert Einstein, “things should be made as simple as possible. And no simpler.”

Until we abandon convenient exculpatory myths and embrace the complexity of the motives of our ancestors, we will continue needlessly killing, jailing and traumatizing Indigenous people without accountability.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

New Authoritarians #1: Cosmopolitan Societies, Populism and the Present Moment: What’s New About the New Authoritarians?

In the 1920s and 30s, we saw so many of the things we see today: financialization and deindustrialization in core economies, a fragile world peace fraying among rival empires, massive wealth disparity and concentration, economic growth sustained by rising consumer debt and increasingly irresponsible stock market speculation, people problematizing their gender and getting tattoos and the rise of populist authoritarians.

When very similar political, material and economic conditions obtained, we saw the same kinds of political and social phenomena that we do today. Populist authoritarians, anti-democratic strongmen nevertheless returned to office through elections were one of the key phenomena associated with that period. Ioannis Metaxas, António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Plutarco Calles were not unlike Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte in their time. And much has been written about the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the 1920s and 30s and how we might apply them to fighting populist authoritarianism in the present.

But we must also ask what makes today’s authoritarians new, and examine how they are different from their forbears a century ago. I want to suggest that one of the most notable differences has to do with questions of diversity and cosmopolitanism.

1920s Europe was a continent of new countries and old countries with new borders, following the treaties ending the First World War and the ethno-national partition processes established in their wake. The border of Italy had gelled just two years before Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, following an eighty-year process of partition, expulsion and amalgamation that pulled Italian-speakers into the boot-shaped polygon etched on the map and pushed Slovenes, Croats, Germans and others out. This Italy possessed an ethnolinguistic homogeneity all previous incarnations had lacked.

The Greece in which Ioannis Metaxas took power was just twelve years old, following a century-long process of partition and expulsion, with Greeks pouring in from Asia minor and Turks, Slavs and Albanians being pushed out east and north. The Weimar Republic that Hitler overthrew was similarly only fourteen years in age, with thousands upon thousands of Czechs, Poles, Germans and others being forced to relocate in a byzantine partition process that lasted years.

For fascists, the ethno-linguistic purity of their nations was insufficient. Roma, Jews, Catalans, Basques and others were early and easy targets for political movements whose paranoid style required the existence of internal enemies. And the fact that these groups were so thoroughly assimilated only helped to feed narratives of internal subversion and conspiracy.

For all the superficial similarity of their rhetoric, with the exception of Hungary’s Victor Orban, today’s authoritarian success stories are coming from states that are best-known not for ethnolinguistic homogeneity but diversity and cosmopolitanism. Not only are Brazil, the Philippines and the United States some of the most diverse countries in the world, they are only growing more so with time. The US is increasingly a bilingual country; Filipino Muslims and Fukien Chinese are more geographically distributed than every before; even as Brazil continues to boast German, Japanese and other non-Portuguese news media from settlers a century ago, English- and Spanish-speakers constitute larger chunks of the population.

Donald Trump did not just continue but amplified his rhetoric when it came to praising white supremacists, denigrating Muslims and abusing Latinx peoples. Narendra Modi’s rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity has, similarly, not been tempered by high office. And Jair Bolsonaro’s race-baiting of Afro-Brazilians combined with continued calls for Indigenous genocide have similarly continued or been amplified in office.

Yet, when it came time to examine who the five million new Trump voters were this November, it turned out that this group of voters were disproportionately non-white, with Asian Americans and Latinx voters becoming more likely to positively reappraise Trump than white voters. Similarly, Modi’s successes at home in bringing Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs into his coalition, to make the BJP a more religiously diverse party are even being experienced in the Indian diaspora. Even former Khalistan activists and their children, who fled India in fear of their lives, with the dream of a Sikh homeland in Punjab are increasingly joining pro-Modi diasporic coalitions with Hindus.

When one delivers this news to Woke folk/progressives, there is the usual response: this should not be what is happening; the people who are doing it are stupid and because it is dumb and should not be happening, we should behave as though it is not.

But what if this behaviour is rational and based on people’s lived experiences? How can we explain what is taking place? Because if we cannot explain what is happening or why it is, we have no hope of stemming the tide.

First, we must ask this: what is supporting a new authoritarian movement an alternative to? For racialized people, ethnic and religious minorities, it is, among other things, an alternative to the way liberal societies and neoliberal economies manage questions of diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.

Most visibly, our societies manage this through tokenism, a kind of neo-Ottoman social organization where people with minority identities are prominently featured in high-level government and corporate positions. Like a Greek Orthodox vizier in the Ottoman court or an Armenian Christian vizier serving an Abasside Caliph, the material interests of the vizier are a continuation of the dominant order. When medieval fellahin in the Nile Delta saw a Copt as the Caliph’s first minister, there was no celebration of impending Christian-Muslim equality, no talk of breaking glass ceilings. They understood clearly that, to keep his job, the vizier would work tirelessly for the supremacy of the Muslim Caliph who appointed him. Sadly, contemporary progressives lack the political sophistication of the average medieval peasant and are still wowed by the pageantry of false equality.

When Mexicans or Arabs move their support to Donald Trump, they are looking past the symbolism of exhibiting children in cages and American bombs landing on Yemeni cities and recognizing that the Trump regime is only a little more racist and Islamophobic in its policies than the Obama regime that preceded it. That, when one strips away the theatre of cruelty, the same Christian and white supremacist structures are continuous, maintained by Republicans and Democrats alike.

This might explain why the Trump regime might be seen as no worse, but why might it be seen as better? First of all, transparency and honesty; while Trump is honest and unapologetic about the way that the hierarchy of American cosmopolitanism is ordered, liberals and progressives constantly lie about an imagined equality, an imagined amity. Trumpism, on the other hand, recalls the rough and tumble pluralism of the First Gilded Age, of the Roman Republic, where competition among ethnicities was acknowledged, where neighbours traded racist jokes across back fences and rioted against one another.

Of course, some especially foolish folk might say that our goal is for a pluralism that is non-hierarchical, that is culturally neutral. Even leaving aside Karl Popper’s arguments about how pluralism must be governed by a value system that values and supports pluralism, it is also obvious that different dominant cultures organize pluralism different ways.

“Personality of law,” for instance, is a historically common pluralism that has been rejected by modern liberal Christian “secular” societies. In this model of pluralism, every person has the right to be governed based on the laws and traditions of their religion or ethnicity. Sharia law applies to Muslim citizens and canon law to Christian citizens. Only in the EU is personality of law incorporated into the Christian pluralist order—and it only applies to wage legislation i.e. most workers carry their country’s minimum wage with them. In modern Ethiopia, as in the United States before the 1860s, freedom of religion is exercised by towns, not individuals.

Modern liberal pluralism is not the only, or even most logical theory for organizing a religiously and ethnically diverse cosmopolitan society. And, I would argue that one of the most powerful forces animating modern populist authoritarian movements is not a desire to eliminate pluralism but to offer new models of pluralism that are more satisfying for their followers.

The Trump movement, like its Democratic Party opponents, recognizes the United States as a complex hierarchy of races and religions that enjoy varying degrees of wealth, safety and opportunity; these are not just groups of individuals but a complex system of institutions, secular and religious, that deserve varying degrees of state patronage and recognition, depending on the race and religion in question.

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But whereas the traditional party system cloaks this in a discourse of secularism and cultural relativism, the Trump movement is transparent in how it hierarchizes these groups and the institutions that purport to represent them. This transparency has proved attractive to white Christians, who receive the most state recognition and patronage but has proven increasingly popular with groups that are below the top of the hierarchy but still seek and obtain recognition and patronage.

For instance, it has not just been Christian charter schools that have benefited from the policies of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos. Madrassahs have benefited too, albeit to a lesser extent, as have Jewish and Hindu religious schools. And the movement’s popularity has grown in these communities as their leaders have come to hear Trump’s anti-Semitic and Islamophobic proclamations as indicative not of a Nazi-style genocidal policy but rather the rhetoric one associates with the rough and tumble hierarchical pluralism of pre-WWII America, the Ottoman and Roman Empires.

In India, we see a similar set of developments. Whereas Muslims are subject to increasing brutal violence and genocidal actions by Narendra Modi’s BJP and affiliated militias, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have enjoyed increasing state protection and patronage. For the Modi movement, there exists a binary: non-indigenous religions i.e. evangelical Christianity and Islam are facing increasing persecution and attempts at eradication. But those religions considered to be part of a larger Hindu-based family of religions descended from the one true faith are now inside the Hindu tent and organized into a hierarchy. In this way, there are substantial material and political payoffs that autocthnonous enjoy when their members join Modi’s coalition in greater numbers.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to lower caste Indians. While most Dalits (ie. Untouchables) and “backward” castes have faced increasing violence from the Hindu fundamentalism being hawked by the Modiites, there is a paradox. Modi himself brags of being of “the most backward caste” and proudly shows the evidence of this coursing through his blood and written upon his skin. His personal rhetoric is not merely exemplary; it is instructive: by adopting the dress, politics and affiliations of his movement, other darker, lower caste Indians can whiten themselves.

Prior to Modi, there were processes of passing and whitening known as “Sanskritizing” that the old secular Congress Party worked actively against. Their goal was to the eradication of caste, not unlike the dreams of Latin and Anglo American liberals at the foundation of their countries. Individuals and jatis (large lineage groups) have always had a way of moving up the caste hierarchy. Under Hindu, Mughal and British rule, this process was negotiated by the brahmins, the priest class, permitting mobility for individuals and groups at the cost of reinforcing the overall caste structure. (Similar to the limpieza de sangre system I explain here.)

Under the rule of the Congress Party, following independence, Sanskritizing i.e. leaving one’s village, moving to a large city and falsifying one’s genealogy was the preferred process, not unlike “passing” in the United States during the same period.

But the Modi movement offers an alternative preferable to more and more low-caste individuals: joining the movement and using a rank in the party or one of its militias as a whitening influence on one’s lived caste position. Just as Rudyard Kipling’s fictive British Raj promoted private Gunga Din to the rank of corporal posthumously, despite him coming from a low caste ineligible for officer ranks in the army (unlike the martial lineages like Sikhs), because he better embodied the traits desired in a British officer than a man of the correct race and lineage, BJP and its militias are mass producing Gunga Dins.

In America, the Trump movement offers two models of personal whitening, both arguably imported from the more venerable and better theorized and strategized Modi movement.

If there was one event more uncanny in the 2016 US election than any other, it was the Donald Trump campaign’s Hindu diaspora campaign event. Building on the ways in which the colour line in the core of Dixie had already come to work, the campaign was explicit in its invitation to high-caste Hindus who, like Nikki Haley, are already situated above the black-white colour line in states like Louisiana and South Carolina. High caste i.e. white Hindus were explicitly recognized as part of a global Aryan nationalist white supremacist project in ways that had not been since the 1930s. While Trump, himself, was personally clueless, helpfully stating “I support Hindu,” during the bewildering event in which he was festooned in gold and received endorsements from temple priests, his advisors were clear-eyed.

And high-caste Hindus were just one part of a larger project. Many Latin American states have a long white supremacist history but none more than the two great “white settler states” of the Southern Cone, Brazil and Argentina. White Brazilians and Argentines from metropolises like Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo come from a civic discourse that is more explicitly white supremacist than that of Anglo America. And many have suffered indignity and confusion coming to Canada and the US, having led lives of benefiting from and praising white supremacy, only to find themselves situated below the colour line. These groups the Trump campaign targeted successfully.

And this is a paradoxical feature one finds particularly in the Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump movements: if one is located within the movement, the colour line becomes more flexible and moves lower to accommodate more folks.

In this way, the Trump movement’s use of regalia is especially powerful. Donning a red MAGA hat makes any person wearing it if not white than significantly whiter in the eyes of other MAGA hat-wearers. And this is not a wholly new phenomenon, especially in the US. Poles, Czechs, Irish, Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc. all became whiter by joining not the anti-racist Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln but the white supremacist Democrats of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the newly white and the nearly white joining a populist racist movement might make the country as a whole more racist, the lived experience of individuals is the opposite. A MAGA hat is more powerful than Kevlar when it comes to stopping police bullets.

What begins to come into focus with these comparisons is that unlike the fascists of the 1920s and 30s, or retro fascists like Victor Orban and the fourth and fifth parties of Western Europe’s parliaments and legislatures, the new authoritarians are not simple opponents of cosmopolitanism. Rather, they seek to refashion their countries’ pluralisms into systems that are more visible, more hierarchical, more dynamic and at peace with many long-term civic inequalities.

We see this too in Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman term. Erdogan’s movement is pronouncing on a century of secular liberalism at gunpoint in Turkey and offering, in its place, a return to a pluralistic, theocratic, ordered hierarchical Ottoman past, offering permanent inferiority to religious and ethnic minorities as an alternative to assimilation at gunpoint that the Kemalist state offered in the twentieth century.

But most importantly, for traditionalists within any culture, there is a universal appeal in the figure of the authoritarian patriarch.

Bill Maher pointed out in 2012 that, as people grow increasingly cynical about the ability of their votes to arrest or even mitigate the destruction of neoliberalism, they begin thinking about political campaigns like a wealth seminar: Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are not going to govern to benefit individuals of their class. Rather, by joining their movement and following their advice, you might become like them—they will tell you “the secret” to becoming rich, powerful patriarchs like themselves.

In this way, there is an implicit, unstated promise, especially from a man dominating a large, attractive and accomplished family like the Trumps. Every conservative patriarch sees the election of a man like Trump as authorization to intensify his domination of his women, his children. Men that head families staging gender reveal parties, sending their kids to religious schools, engaging in surgery tourism to perform gendercide or FGM see a natural ally, even if he might say a few mean things about their church, their temple, their language.

As John Sayles wrote in the film Lone Star, “it’s comforting when you see one prejudice triumphing over another deep prejudice.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

Cancelation, Neo-McCarthyism and the Civicminded Volunteer

Following my resignation from the BC Ecosocialist Party’s leadership, a few kind folks with podcasts reached out to interview me in greater depth about the larger context of what some are calling my “cancelation” from BC politics. I suggested that this plague of de-platforming and hounding people out of work for straying from left-Identitarian orthodoxy was possible because of a loss of cultural memory of the Cold War and, in particular, McCarthyism and the other Red Scares.

Current practices of policing the discourse by Woke folk are, whatever their ideological and cosmetic differences, in essence, McCarthyism. As in the Red Scare of the 1950s, the idea is that, embedded in organizations throughout society, there are evil people who believe in destroying everything good in society. But these folks are secretive; they conceal these views behind complicated academic language, or by only expressing them in private, or by encoding them in works of art. These people might be anyone: your teacher, your relative, your childhood friend, your co-worker, even your political comrade who appears to be on the same side as you. That is why it is important to be vigilant because members of the International Communist Conspiracy might be anyone anywhere.

While we often think of McCarthyism as a state-driven enterprise, with Senator McCarthy or J Edgar Hoover orchestrating the firings of thousands of Americans exposed as communists, the fact is that the vast majority of people who lost their job, their reputation, their marriage, their children, their political office through McCarthyism were people the US government was not even aware of.

That is because McCarthyism functioned like a contagious disease. Because if someone in one’s circle were exposed as a communist, a person might be asked about their friend, relative or co-worker. There was only one correct response: to condemn the person in question, ostracize them and take umbrage at being fooled by that wily communist. If one responded, “but what’s wrong with being a communist?” this would expose one as a fellow communist sympathizer. But responding, “I’m sure he’s not a communist; he seems a good guy” would have the same effect but worse: one was now aiding and abetting the conspiracy through lies. Most dangerous was saying “this person is a good and trustworthy person; I vouch for his patriotism”—everyone knew what that meant: “I too am a member of the International Communist Conspiracy hell-bent on the destruction of civilization.”

Today, we have a much wider variety of names to call folks on the left: one can be exposed as a “SWERF”, a “TERF,” a “Karen” (note that these epithets tend overwhelmingly to be misogynistic ones) but the epithets all mean the same thing: a malefactor walking secretly among us, colluding with other malefactors and seeking to lead good folk astray.

While I have experienced minor, minor consequences compared to most folks Woke activists have decided to try and cancel, I want to note that my controversial writing about identity-formation in late capitalism was not the text used to falsely indict me as a transphobe. The smoking gun was my declaration that Vancouver housing activist Judy Graves was not a transphobe. Friends of mine are now understood to be transphobes because they have said that I am not a transphobe. Declaring that a known TERF is not a TERF is the clearest evidence that someone is a TERF. And so it spreads, like a disease.

In this way, what some call “cancel culture” is simply neo-McCarthyism. We would realize there was nothing new or special about it if we were not so historically unmoored, if we remembered that rather than leading, Joe McCarthy and the US federal government lagged behind neighbourhood scolds, personnel managers, church deacons and ambitious union vice-presidents in identifying and rooting out the putative communist threats. While senator McCarthy’s inflammatory statements about communist infiltration fueled the 1950s Red Scare, they first produced a volunteer-led, grassroots McCarthyism from below. As in the present day, lawmakers sought to enact their own persecution campaign not as a project of their own making but as a means of placating or jockeying for the support of the grassroots activists who prosecuted most of McCarthyism.

And that is what so many people miss about Cold War authoritarian movements and governments: their popularity, their grassroots support, their ethic of volunteerism.

Of course, McCarthyism was hardly the greatest scourge on human liberty of the Cold War; it killed very few people and existed for a fairly short period of time in a single country. Far more significant were the “bureaucratic authoritarian” regimes that flourished in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The USSR, its European client states and America’s Western Hemisphere vassals lived far longer under far more brutal oppression.

While some were led by charismatic strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, most were led by uncharismatic bureaucrats; there were lots of examples of rotating leadership, collective leadership and leadership from behind the throne. Consequently, allegiance to these states tended to be a defensive, fear-based allegiance. The official rhetoric was that one’s country was an embattled bastion of something precious that must be defended at all costs. In Chile, that thing was the free market; in Argentina, it was Roman Catholicism; in Czechoslovakia it was socialism; in Yugoslavia, it was pluralism.

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While most bureaucratic authoritarian regimes were installed from above, often at gunpoint, almost all nevertheless began with real popular support. And it would be a mistake to assume that this support declined. Like Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, elections were not rigged or canceled because the government feared losing or had to abide by the results but because the rulers were ideologically opposed to democratic elections.  It is a mistake to assume that canceling or rigging an election is an indication of a lack of power or popularity; just as often it functions to demonstrate those things.

Yet despite the apparently sweeping and total power of these regimes over every aspect of their citizens’ lives, they, like McCarthyism, relied on the mobilization and support of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.

Even today, with cameras and satellites everywhere, with facial and voice recognition software, with increasingly invasive surveillance legislation, the state lacks the labour to utilize a hundredth of the information gathered by its own agencies, never mind its private sector partners.

What made it possible for the Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean regimes to “disappear” tens of thousands of their citizens was the work of volunteers. In these states, the role of the neighbourhood scold was elevated, empowered and trusted by the state to feed it the information it needed to know which tapped phone to listen to, what time of day to search a home, whose workplace supervisor to call.

Ultimately, these dictatorships became unstable or failed when they lost too many volunteers, when too many people stopped reporting on their neighbours, coworkers, friends and relatives. Because no authoritarian succeeds without mobilizing a sense of volunteerism and civicmindedness in its citizens. That is why internal propaganda is important; it is ineffective at changing the views of dissidents; its purpose is to mobilize and inspire the government’s essential volunteer labour force.

Today, many decent folks, myself included, admire and lionize Jane Jacobs’ idea of “eyes on the street” as the most effective public safety and crime prevention measure, a benign vision of elders on stoops shouting at young ruffians and making sure someone is watching when young women walk home at night. That vision is not a false one and I am not renouncing my support for the “eyes” principle of public safety any time soon.

But we must remember that there is a dark side, a Janus face of the eyes on the street in Jacobs’ Greenwich Village in 1965; it is the eyes on the street in Rio de Janeiro that same year, eyes watching for socialists, atheists and anarchists for the Brazilian junta.

Just as our cultural amnesia prevents us from remembering that residential schools were created by do-gooders and social reformers, who believed they were improving the lives of Indigenous people, our historical amnesia also immunizes us from seeing how little daylight there is between the impulses and practices behind Cold War social control and the forces that enforce the orthodoxies of the moment, be they the orthodoxies of the Fox News and the Trump movement or those of the Woke.

No campaign of repression from above succeeds without mass support from below, not just in the form acquiescence but in the form of labour, through surveillance and denunciations of the putative enemies of the people.

While much of this is powered by fear, fear that the volunteer army will turn on oneself, one cannot discount just how many people in 1955 looked at a long-time comrade, friend, colleague or relative and said to themselves “Wow! He’s a member of the International Communist Conspiracy too!? Who knew? I would never have guessed how many of my associates have actually been working to destroy everything I hold dear, all along! This betrayal cannot stand! How can I help getting his kids apprehended by the state?”

I am 100% certain that the primary architect of my attempted cancelation thought something very like that about me, that somehow I had been turned, changed by the forces of evil and now had to be torn out, root and branch, from the political left in British Columbia for fear that the contagion might spread, ensuring, of course, that it does.

Unlike Jordan Peterson and the other sad sack idiots who rail against the alleged totalitarianism of the present day, I do not believe that we have lost our freedom of speech or that there is some kind of authoritarian control of the discourse. Noam Chomsky’s consent factory is bigger and more powerful than ever, aided by Silicon Valley, the billionaire class, and their control of social media, their ability to shape the language and thought of both their allies and adversaries.

But I am suggesting that, as we guard against the authoritarianism coming our way, we refocus our optic, that we focus not on the small amount of monetized and automated labour needed to create a surveillance society and instead cast our eyes horizontally, that we pay attention to the lion’s share of the labour needed for such a society, the sincere, altruistic work of volunteers.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

It turns out the resignation letter is my literary subgenre

Comrades,

            I see that BC’s two counterfeit left parties have chosen their strategy for derailing our campaign. A slew of false allegations of transphobia are being circulated against me and being used to tarnish the party and derail the important work of the coming campaign.

            We cannot afford to have that happen. The primary voting issue in this election must remain climate justice. Nothing can distract us from what is truly at stake: the very survival of our species. Every day we spend discussing whether it was wrong for me to defend a local Vancouver activist from a campaign to blacklist her from employment is a day we do not spend discussing John Horgan using the RCMP as Royal Dutch Shell’s brute squad to drive a fracked gas pipeline through the territory of People suffering from sickle cell anaemia, get viagra overnight leukaemia and multiple myeloma. That’s to say, more and more people would like to face erectile dysfunction by buy generic cialis great pharmacy store picking up a conversation at work or health club, with friends, or they may even opt to speak to strangers on the Internet. In such cases, it is advisable to use twice a day for six to ninth super cheap viagra months. If you browse their website you will viagra online canadian see that they have very few differences. the Wet’suwet’en people. And we cannot afford that distraction.

            So, it is with regret and reluctance that I am tendering my resignation as director, leader and candidate effective midnight tonight. I know, from the sterling group of young people who have joined our slate and our board over the past eleven months that I am leaving this party is excellent hands. You folks will do a great job and I will be proud to cast a vote for whomever the party selects in Prince George-Valemount.

            Solidarity and courage,

            Stuart Parker

BC Politics | fusangite |

Sonia Furstenau’s Plan for the Green Party is Non-existent But Michael M’Gonigle’s is Something Worse

On August 31st, 2020, The Tyee published an article by Michael M’Gonigle entitled “It’s Time for Greens to Reinvent Themselves.” Originally submitted to the Tyee for publication, I am now printing my rebuttal here because the impending election will likely finish knocking this off the editor’s desk.

Beginning in 2014, when it entered the legislature, the BC Green Party began voting for government plans to increase fossil fuel extraction and emissions, first with Christy Clark’s “LNG budget,” and later for the Horgan government’s budgets, energy plans and throne speeches. Most recently, the party praised the current government budget as “systemic solutions for systemic problems.” This, despite it including a 26% increase in fracking, continued subsidies for Royal Dutch Shell and its LNG plant partners and the biggest-ever planned widening of the Trans Canada Highway for single-occupancy vehicles. Today, the party touts the “Clean BC” plan as its signature contribution, despite that plan including an increase in coal exports and doubling the rate of logging and mining in the province.

The justification the Greens offer is that if they brought the government down, they might lose their seats in the BC legislature. In an exercise in the most empty, tautological understanding of politics, the goal of having Greens holding elected office is an end in itself, the purpose of the party.

The party’s embrace of the crassest and most empty electoralism has had me working through a profound sense of personal guilt. You see, the Green Party used to be a party that understood its goals not in terms of electoral success, but of social change. I was one of the leaders of a generational shift in Anglo American Green politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the party into a primarily electoral vehicle, focused on acting through elections to achieve change.

We didn’t mean to initiate a process that would empty the party of principle and meaning. But maybe the choices my comrades and I made in seizing control of the party and refocusing it on contesting elections had led, inevitably, to this counterfeit, this ugly parody of Green politics we see enacted not just in BC, but on the floor of the legislature in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. If only we had listened to the party elders of the 1980s, this descent could have been avoided and Green parties in North America would be a force for good today.

Maybe we should not have made enemies of the 1970s counterculture survivors and back-to-the-landers from whom we seized control of the BC Greens through a painful and embarrassing series of confrontations between 1988 and 1994.

Then I read Michael M’Gonigle’s opinion piece this week.

And it all came flooding back: why we did what we did and why the solutions offered by the party’s boomer leadership in its founding decade (1980-89) make even less sense today.

M’Gonigle, a great environmentalist, writer and scholar, was one of the founding members of Greenpeace International and claims to have been a co-founder of the BC Greens. As the guy who actually typed-in the names and addresses from the party’s rolodex of 1983 members and the faded dot matrix print-outs of the 1984 and ’85 members to the party’s new database software in 1989, I have some doubts about that second claim. Other Greenpeace founders were on that list, though: Paul Watson, Rod Marining and Jim Bohlen.

And although they loathed each other from Greenpeace days, both Bohlen and Watson were part of the fractious alliance I put together to oppose, if not M’Gonigle, then the many active party members who shared his thinking. From 1988, when it began losing control of the party to 1993, when it disbanded, this group called itself the Ecofeminist Caucus and it embraced not just Ecofeminism but many of the nascent ideologies popular among Anglo American Greens, especially Bioregionalism, the ideology that most strongly informs M’Gonigle’s piece, as well as Murray Bookchin’s two intellectual interventions, Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism.

When efforts to form a Canadian Green Party began with the candidacies of Elizabeth May, Anne Trudell and others in the 1980 election as the Small Party, its backbone was, as M’Gonigle nostalgically acknowledges, back-to-the-landers and residents of urban communes. This was an era of high unemployment and economic recession but also wof generous welfare state income support programs, student grants and easy-to-obtain white collar employment for those with advanced degrees. Unemployment was being driven, at this point, primarily by deindustrialization and the so-called “energy crisis” in which high oil and coal prices were combining with the early stages of neoliberalism to produce major layoffs in the manufacturing sector. This led to double-digit interest rates on mortgages and bank foreclosures that produced a major crash in real estate prices in the early 80s.

Whether still living in the original 1970s-style rural and urban communes or in more loosely-organized “intentional communities,” of discrete, proximate dwellings sharing resources, that were taking advantage of cheap rents and foreclosures in the deindustrializing rural periphery, this movement shared a general vision.

My intellectual mentor, David Lewis, the climate change activist, giant, firewood collector and founder of the FOOLs (Friends of the Ozone Layer) who lived in the midst of this scene in the Slocan Valley, was able to cut through the many differences in the founding party base to explain their essential basis of unity: the embryo theory.

Whether one were a Bioregionalist doing permacultural subsistence farming in the Shuswap or a Marilyn French-inspired Ecofeminist co-op house in Kitsilano, the idea was that one’s domestic space was the foundation of one’s politics, not merely to the extent that “the personal is the political,” but that our primary job was to create an embryo of the society one wished to create. Bioregionalists focused on living on the land in the way they believed our descendants would need to. Ecofeminists focused on living the non-hierarchical gender relations our descendants would need to. The idea was that if we created the future society “in embryo,” the embryo would grow to the point where these alternative living arrangements would come to encompass all of society, giving birth to a new order.

It followed, then, that the Green Party was to be the most ambitious embryonic project because it was not so much an entity advocating the creation of a new society but the embryo of its future government. The crew that Lewis disparaged as “embrymorons” held that the job of the party was to create a miniature model of the governance of the future feminist confederation of bioregions. Its work was, therefore, to be the new politics. The new politics had already arrived; it just needed to be refined through experimentation.

  • Electoral politics was to be replaced by participatory democracy, so the party would not elect a leader.
  • Voting was to be replaced by consensus, so the party held marathon meetings to achieve unanimity.
  • Countries and provinces were to be replaced by bioregions, so the party chose not to have a central mailing address or office in Ontario or BC.
  • Bioregionalism also meant that, because provincial ridings were not based on valley bottom-based eco-regions, the party would have no riding associations and hold no nomination meetings.
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This worked for a while because the social movements from which the party drew support were communes and intentional community networks. They had built useful, functional institutions like regional barter banks, locally. They came together regionally at gatherings like the Stein Festival and Hat Creek Gathering and, North America-wide there was even the North American Bioregional Congress (NABC), attended by thousands at its zenith.

But we know what happened as economic conditions changed. Land prices began rising again. Neoliberalism began stripping away income support programs like welfare and unemployment insurance. Professionalized music festivals replaced the summer calendar of participatory countercultural gatherings. Even for those with advanced degrees, jobs became scarcer, more insecure and more demanding of adherence to cultural mores and norms. Second wave feminism was fatally weakened by the “porn split” within and “the backlash” without. And the baby boomers got older, more jaded, more tired, more conservative.

Before the Ecofeminist Caucus and their counterparts outside BC lost control of the Green parties of Anglo America, the institutions from which they drew strength withered first. NABC died. Communes and intentional communities flew apart. The rural counterculturalists who remained had to make new accommodations and alliances in collapsing rural communities as mills closed. Former dissidents became the pillars of communities, chairing library boards, running local museums and accepting seats on the Chamber of Commerce and Cattlemen’s Association.

And there was a new wave of Greens, younger people like me, whose politics was motivated by a profound sense of science-based urgency. The Antarctic Ozone Hole opened, then the Arctic Ozone Hole. As the G7 smashed the power of OPEC, the “energy crisis” was replaced by rapidly rising carbon emissions from the coal and oil sectors. A mainstream politics of energy conservation and transition to renewables vanished with the Carter presidency. Not only was there a neoliberal consensus across the spectrum in favour of austerity; the NDP of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt were at the forefront of North America’s first fracked gas boom.

For us, it was not enough to work for long-term change. Human civilization was a car flooring the gas off a cliff and someone had to apply the brake. Immediately. And one of the few points where one could exercise immediate pressure was electoral politics. It seemed to us a gross act of negligence for those not interested in doing electoral politics to control a mechanism legally constituted for the purpose of running candidates in elections. Our response to the Greens who identified with M’Gonigle was “do your embryo politics in movement groups; just let us run candidates and try to move the mainstream political discourse, maybe even elect a few people.”

The counter-argument we faced was that somehow the Green Party running candidates was inhibiting others in the movement from practicing the politics of the embryo. But nobody has ever been able to explain how having a Green Party genuinely fight an election without tying both of its hands behind its back inhibits the kind of organizing M’Gonigle and company favour. But we didn’t so much win the argument for an electorally-focused Green Party; the embryo-ists were already collapsing, as a set of linked social movements, due to changing material conditions in North American society.

Today’s Green Party is worse than useless. But trying to construct a time machine to 1980 is not going to help. The reason the Greens are such a problematic force has to do with their decision to align with the emerging professional class produced by the Third Way austerity programs of the 1990s and 00s. Today, the Greens are a party of managers and aspiring managers of the QuaNGO (quasi-non-governmental organization) sector, organizations like BC Spaces for Nature, that blossomed under politicians like Mike Harcourt, under the patronage of family trusts like the Tides and Maytree Foundations or even the sponsorship of Big Oil, like the Pew Charitable Trust, which emerged as a major funder of BC’s environmental movement in the mid-90s.

Yet, despite the sorry state of green electoral politics in this country, we see the rise of a vibrant new, holistic green politics. Thousands of young people have been in the streets this past year, staging climate strikes, demanding a Green New Deal, shutting down ports to stop pipelines, making common cause with indigenous communities to protect their land and stop the genocide they face from a militarized RCMP. They have shouldered past the NGO executive directors, the Green MLAs and city councilors, past those who claimed to be leading them to forge a new politics that responds to the social and economic conditions of the present, and to the escalating extinctions, wildfires, droughts and storms that the climate crisis is producing.

That’s why, last year, four veterans of the struggles of the 1980s that M’Gonigle is seeking to re-litigate founded the BC Ecosocialist Party, not to be led by us, but as a tool, a weapon, that these young people can wield. Because, like the North American Bioregional Congress of the 1980s, the Green Party is a dead organization walking, a historical irrelevancy requiring not reform but a dignified burial.

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