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These are Stuart’s articles on politics at the provincial level in British Columbia.

Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority

It is coming up on two years since Covid arrived in Canada on a large scale. And with the exception of the Atlantic provinces, we quickly adopted what has become the approach to Covid in most of the Global North: lots of hygiene theatre governed by the imperatives of neoliberalism.

In a way, Canada west of the Gaspé has been a leader in developing not just the policy but the discourse around Covid that has spread through the G7 nations and around Oceania and the European Union. The basic policy is this: if an activity accelerates the spread of Covid but its participants are making money for someone richer than themselves by participating, it should proceed. Only if hospitals and other crucially necessary systems are overwhelmed because of these activities shall they be temporarily halted or scaled-back. But if an activity does not make money for someone richer than the participants, it should probably be stopped or radically circumscribed.

These policies leave people feeling angry and emotionally wrung-out. They are supposed to work harder and work longer hours to compensate for all the lost labour and efficiency due to Covid. But they can’t see very many of their friends or relatives for support and community, unless they do so somewhere other people can make money. I have lost track of the number of times my provincial health officer has declared, without any evidentiary basis, that a gathering that would be unsafe around a kitchen or dining room table will be safe at a local restaurant or bar. Similarly, children, Bonnie Henry has repeatedly claimed, can only give each other Covid in each other’s homes; it cannot transmit in schools. Henry, there, is a bit of an outlier; only Donald Trump held out longer in making baseless unscientific claims of childhood immunity.

Of increasing importance in our governments’ performances of theatrical, half-assed vigilance has been the introduction of vaccine passports. The premise on which the passports were introduced seemed a reasonable one: vaccines would prevent or radically reduce Covid transmission, thereby making gatherings of pass holders. While the passports made the civil libertarian in me pretty squeamish, I decided that this temporary abridgement of human liberty might be a necessary price to pay for a Covid-free nation.

But, as we all know, this initial premise for the passports was false. The common variants of Covid in this country are variants whose mortality and morbidity are significantly reduced by the vaccines but on whose transmission rates vaccination has had a much smaller than anticipated effect and one that has continued to decline over time as the variant mix has changed. For a while, public health officials and government leaders tried to maintain their defense of the passports as a measure to halt or radically slow transmission but they have slowly given up selling us that substantial exaggeration and have changed their message.

The new idea is that the purpose of vaccine passports is that they are a means by which we can force unvaccinated people to get their shots. The idea, our governments and respected opinion leaders are now explaining, is that these passports can be used to compel people to be vaccinated against their will by threatening their access to their friends, their relatives, meeting spaces in their communities and, most importantly, by threatening their ability to be employed.

Before continuing, let me make clear that I think everyone without a medical condition making it ill-advised or potentially lethal, should choose to receive as many shots as they can sign up for. I just got my third on Monday and I don’t expect it will be my last one. I want this to happen because I don’t want to see my neighbours dead, hospitalized or suffering lifelong “long Covid” symptoms. All of those things are not just bad outcomes for unvaccinated individual but for society as a whole.

But I disagree with the government’s increasingly coercive vaccine mandates for two reasons:

First, I wish we lived in a society like Eisenhower’s America, in which all sectors of society trusted the government and the vaccine they got the pharmaceutical industry to produce. But we do not. Significant groups of people in our society have so little trust in their governments that they balk in terror at accepting any new state invasion of their personal space of decision-making. Rather than engaging in the process of re-earning that trust, government spokespeople are, instead, belittling, demonizing and marginalizing anyone who says they do not trust the state with their health. Those who oppose the passports and even those who simply question them are automatically tarred as “white nationalists,” Klansmen, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers. They are increasingly depicted by progressive politicians like Justin Trudeau as enemies of the people, people “who hold unacceptable views.”

This kind of language, in turn, helps to whip up hysteria against vaccine opponents. Thanks to the Identitarian orthodoxy and the neo-McCarthyism (sometimes called ‘cancel culture’) that is used to enforce it, progressives are already not just permissive of but enthusiastic about using summary firing and professional blacklisting as ways of dealing with the enemies of the people. A long-time comrade of mine, who is immune-suppressed due to having leukemia and requiring regular chemotherapy and other body-punishing treatments, was advised by her doctor not to be vaccinated and possesses an exemption. Nevertheless, efforts were made to see her writing contracts were not renewed and she braved daily threats against her life on social media, some by former comrades and friends.

Second, and relatedly, I do not believe that the establishment wants the people it has now branded as the enemies of the people to become vaccinated. While it is clear that the introduction of the vaccine passports caused a lot of people to become vaccinated, it is my belief that the passports are now producing the opposite effect, and public health officials know that.

I say this because any reputable public health professional today knows about what is called “denormalization theory.” Smoking and other kinds of addiction have been extensively studied in BC because we, as legendary addictions theorist Bruce Alexander puts it, we have a “uniquely addictogenic culture.” A little over a decade ago, former COPE city councilor Fred Bass and polymath health scientist Amy Salmon made a significant contribution to the study of denormalization and the perverse effects it can produce.

Most anti-vice public awareness campaigns, such as those against tobacco smoking and drinking during pregnancy, are attempts to “denormalize” vice activities in the public’s mind. The message of the campaigns is that successful, normal, contributing members of society do not engage in these disreputable activities. Such activities are not respectable and engaging in them marks oneself as someone not deserving of respect. When examining the whole population, evidence shows these campaigns to be successful; smoking rates fall, drinking during pregnancy declines.

What Salmon and Bass discovered, however, is that one’s reaction to denormalization is directly contingent on the social position in which an individual is located and what their expectations are regarding their future social position. Social stigma only works as a threat, it turns out, if you are not already awash in stigma anyway. Consequently, they found that the smoking denormalization campaigns they studied functioned like cigarette ads for working class Indigenous adolescent girls and other groups that are not only marginalized but nurture little hope of changing their social position over time. When bombarded with an anti-smoking denormalization campaign based on the norms of English Canada, more poor Indigenous girls buy more cigarettes younger.

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Fortunately, Indigenous Canadians, especially those living on-reserve, entered the Covid era with a strong cultural memory and proud, pre-colonial traditions of quarantining and other public health measures that allowed them to survive the deluge of European disease that reshaped the demography of a continent. Indeed, BC’s government has put more energy into undermining on-reserve public health measures than into supporting them (the BC government has smashed Tsimshian, Haida and Heltsiuk quarantines by cabinet order).

Consequently, the most vaccine-hesitant have tended to be members of the working class and underclass with cultural memories destined to cast a pharmaceutical industry-government alliance in a less flattering light, like the ongoing opioid epidemic. These vaccine-hesitant folks, are often the lowest-wage workers, the most likely to practice an organized religion, those most likely to work with their hands and/or industrial tools owned by their employer or through a loan with a local bank.

You can already picture the vaccine-hesitant person in your mind’s eye. He’s rural; he drives a pickup truck; he voted Tory or People’s Party in the 2021 election; he lives in a manufactured home; he goes to church or at least his romantic partner does; he is white or Métis; he probably even smokes. That is the effect of a denormalization campaign interacting our pre-existing sectional and class resentments.

A sane public health policy would, once having achieved near complete vaccination of respectable folks, change its messaging and begin targeting groups that have become more vaccine-hesitant because of the denormalization campaign. They would work with evangelical and Catholic clergy and opinion leaders to promote vaccination; they would work with oil industry officials who are trusted by rig workers; they would try to persuade holdouts to get vaccinated by changing their message and approach.

Instead, the very opposite is happening. Rather than ending denormalization, they are heaping stigma upon stigma, smear upon smear. First, government spokespeople disingenuously conflate opposition to passports with vaccine non-compliance, erasing the thousands of Canadians like me who are triple-vaccinated but still oppose mandates. Once redescribing us as an unvaccinated drain on the public health system, they then reason that because white nationalists are also overrepresented in the manufactured homes and work camps of Northern Canada, it must then follow that opposing vaccine passports and white nationalism are two tenets of a single political community. In this gross and inappropriate abuse of the intellectual concept of the political dog whistle, it is argued that opposing vaccine passports is both a declaration that one is unvaccinated and a statement of support for the creation of a white nationalist Petro state in Western Canada.

A handful of people argue that this is simply the next logical step in a strategy to force full compliance. If people do not just lose their jobs and larger careers but are tarred in the public square as racists, Klansmen, neo-Confederates, even Nazis, surely more will capitulate and knuckle-under, and beg for that jab in the arm, begging for mercy from the stern consequences of the technocratic state. The thing is: the kind of people who respond to escalating intimidation and threats are the kind of people who are already vaccinated.

So I do not think that is the purpose of this in the minds of our nation’s establishment. They are, I believe, playing with a kind of purity politics that would make Narendra Modi blush. The idea is to declare a growing portion of people to be outside society, itself, like the Dalits of Indian history, the ultimate scapegoats whose very touch renders whatever it contacts impure, beyond the bounds of society itself.

The idea is to create a class of permanent exiles, like the Roma of Europe, people we can push out of our workplaces, our restaurants, our pubs, even our family gatherings, a living example of the fate of those who step outside the bounds set for our ever-narrowing discourse. Already we are blaming them for individual and public health outcomes they could not possibly have changed by being vaccinated. No doubt, with the over-representation of coal-rollers and rig workers among them, we will increasingly look to blame them and not companies like Royal Dutch Shell or agencies like our armed forces for climate change.

Our government’s vaccination policies and their responses to anti-passport protesters are clearly not designed to make holdouts less vaccine hesitant. It is almost as though they have been designed to provoke key elements of the working class into becoming more entrenched in their vaccine refusal, making them increasingly financially and socially precarious, more desperate and more willing to consider extreme political positions and movements.

And it is this that will win Justin Trudeau his sought-after second majority.

Now that the Canadian establishment, progressives and centrists are increasingly comfortable in conflating opposition to vaccine passports, vaccine non-compliance and white nationalism into single phenomenon, the Trudeau government can make the argument that our society is actually full of Nazis, that not just the People’s Party but the Conservatives are rife with them. And that these vaccine non-compliant folks are responsible for the Covid epidemic not being over.

This will not just lure the Conservative Party into wave after wave of purges of candidates and members as it continues its desperate quest to recapture the mainstream; it will stampede NDP and Green voters into casting Liberal votes to protect Canada from this massive outbreak of pestilent white nationalists.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We need governments that put down the hammer and stop the smears, governments that care more about getting their political opponents’ health protected than manipulating them into a dangerous and unnecessary political confrontation.

Because the end-game is clear: the denormalization of political dissent.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Truth and Reconciliation – Part III: Canada’s Parochial Play of Indigeneity

So, if “truth and reconciliation” is not the way forward when it comes to the land question, what is? And how do we engage in a productive discussion among Indigenous people and settlers about what it might be? Unfortunately, before we can begin to join the rich, vibrant global discussion around land justice for Indigenous people and examine policies that have produced actual redistribution of wealth and power, we need to recognize the forces that have walled Canada off from the rich global conversation that regimes like Bolivia’s are part of.

While there are many definitions of “Indigenous,” it is generally recognized that Indigenous people exist in many parts of the world, the Sami of northern Scandinavia, the San of Central Botswana, the Araucanians of Chile, the Yakuts of Siberia, the Moskitos of Nicaragua, for instance. This group has been called, collectively, “the Fourth World,” a term originating in Canada from a correspondence between the Tanzanian ambassador and George Manuel, head of what would soon become the Assembly of First Nations, back in the early 1970s.

One of the things I find most perplexing about Canadians of all backgrounds who are interested in justice for Indigenous peoples is their disinterest in how this debate is conducted in the rest of the world, how the land question works, how constitutional and legal rights work, how indigenous cultures interact with national cultures, etc. There is such a deep parochialism, a deep provincialism to Canadian discourse about Indigenous politics and the land question.

And as with other highly provincial discourse, lack of knowledge forecloses any possibility for comparison, the primary handle we have on evaluating anything. If Canadians cannot compare Indigenous experiences and policies across geography, our only option for comparison is time; all we can do is compare what we are doing now with our past—a convenient turn of events given our post-1982 folk belief that our ancestors were all black-hatted genocidal malefactors, to a man, whereas we are the first generation of good people ever to exist.

The Indigenous communities on top of which Canada is being built have long sought to chart their own political course and achieve degrees of independence, self-reliance and autonomy within the chaos of the Canadian project.

One of the first strategies was to create a pan-Indigenous identity that sought to create new areas of cultural, political and linguistic common ground among Indigenous people, often with new religious movements paired with military confederations. This began in the 1780s with the prophet Neolin and Pontiac, the general and continued with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh during the War of 1812 and then Wovoka and those who followed the Ghost Dance. While impressive, these movements were crushed, one after another, the strategy delegitimated in the present day.

Since Confederation, many Indigenous people have attempted to make use of the elected leadership structures of the Indian Act. Both radicals and moderates have sought office as chiefs and band councillors in an effort to use their elected office and limited spending power to exert greater control.

Of course, these governments are set up to fail. They have no taxation power and are funded using a block grant system over which they exert no political control. The only way to find money for new activities to cut the funding of something else. Consequently, most who seek to effect change through official reserve governments become the public face of the chronic underfunding and mismanagement of reserves and are pushed into alliances and financial dealings that only further deligitimate them as corrupt.

Attempts to use the colonial electoral system have been similarly disappointing. Canada did not choose either to create reserved Indigenous parliamentary seats the way New Zealand did in the nineteenth century; nor has it enacted proportional representation, like New Zealand, so as to permit Indigenous people to concentrate their votes behind their own political party, as the Maori Party does. The only route open to Indigenous people through colonial electoral politics is entryism into major political parties. But despite extraordinary leaders like Jody Wilson Raybould, Elijah Harper and Romeo Saganash sitting on the front benches of major parties in Canada’s parliament, they have little to show, materially, for their work.

Civil disobedience, similarly, has a checkered record. While civil disobedience campaigns have delivered some results for Indigenous people with the creation of the park-reserve designation (a land use category Canada imported from Botswana that recognizes Indigenous people as a kind of self-governing wildlife, co-running the park they inhabit with the feds), the most important results they have produced have been because they coincided with a larger legal strategy to assert Indigenous rights and self-determination.

We have to recognize that Canada’s settler society is one of the more unresponsive in the world. The Sami might be far more hated according to polls of Norwegians and Swedes but they have considerably greater self-government and territorial rights. The Maori might suffer from widespread alcoholism and elevated suicide rates too but there is a Maori party in parliament that sometimes holds the balance of power. Consequently, the land and language rights of the Maori are ahead of those enjoyed by Indigenous Canadians.

The only exception to this failure of responsiveness on the part of Canadian settler institutions has been the courts. Since the landmark Gosnell case in 1972, Indigenous people have mainly lost but sometimes won major cases before the courts and regained some portion of the self-determination and land they possessed prior to colonization. Some of these cases have begun in civil disobedience actions like blocking logging roads or exercising traditional fishing or trapping rights and it has been the courts’ judgements about the protesters’ actions and not those physical actions themselves that have produced every significant political gain for Indigenous people since I was born.

The past half-century of occasional victories and some genuine gains (compared to the centuries preceding) has been pretty much exclusively because of an increasingly friendly court system. But unlike the major gains for the rights of women and racial minorities, these are not the result of more favourable interpretations of a large number of laws; instead, these Indigenous victories rest upon a single legal theory:

Canada’s (i.e. British North America’s) founding (and foundational) piece of constitutional law is the Royal Proclamation of 1763, one of the “intolerable acts” that gave rise to the American Revolution. The Proclamation stipulates that all Indigenous lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains that had not already been conquered by the British could only be ceded by a mutually-agreed treaty between Indigenous governments and official representatives of the British Crown delegated the power to conclude treaties.

The effort to secure the continued alliance with Iroquois, Mi’kmaq and other British allies by protecting them from illegal colonization by land-hungry settlers was an important foreign policy by the British Empire that was generally supported by wealthier, landed, conservative settlers and opposed by poorer, landless settlers more interested in the new liberal ideas that were washing across the Atlantic.

And following the American Revolution and the mass migration of conservatives from all over Anglo America to Upper Canada and the Maritimes, the Proclamation became the primary legal and political distinction between the loyalist colonies, which would coalesce into Canada, and the revolutionary colonies that had become the United States. Because it lays the foundation of settler self-government within British North America and creates the original legal and political distinctions between Canada and the US, the Proclamation retains a significance and legal force commensurate with supreme (i.e. constitutional) law and a status comparable to the British North America Act (1867), Statute of Westminster (1931) and Constitution Act (1982).

When Indigenous people began to chalk up significant court victories in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Royal Proclamation, and the recognition of the pre-existing Indigenous rights it recognized in the Constitution Act, were front and centre in landmark judgements. And there were a number of surprising turns accompanying this:

  • Previously, BC Indigenous people had been the worst off when it came to asserting their rights because so few were able to secure any treaties at all when their land was seized; now, the absence of a treaty was more advantageous than a treaty with which Canada was partly but not fully compliant
  • Previously, the primary representatives of most Indigenous nations were elected band councils created by the Indian Act to represent Indigenous peoples; now, the remnant and reconstituted hereditary governments were recognized as the outward-facing representatives of Indigenous polities
  • Previously, the main place where the rights of Indigenous peoples were debated and decided was the House of Commons; now, it was the higher provincial courts and the Canadian Supreme Court
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And even when it looked like that might change during Brian Mulroney’s period of constitutional brinksmanship and the crescendo of twentieth-century Indigenous resistance through civil disobedience and armed struggle, all that came to naught. The Oka Crisis, the Meech Lake Accord, the Charlottetown Accord, despite massive mobilization, failed to move the big debates and big decisions either to the streets or first ministers’ conferences. When the dust settled, the courts remained the only game in town that wasn’t completely rigged.

Before these developments, the political strategy of Canada’s Indigenous leadership involved building major federations like the Assembly of First Nations, building international links with potential allies internationally, from Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania to PW Botha’s South Africa and in making policies that were mutually beneficial to settlers and Indigenous people more popular and electorally successful with Canadian voters.

But while success in the courts meant real gains in land and power and the ability to compel elected governments to make beneficial deals, it has exacted a huge cost, one of which we are generally unaware because that is part of the cost.

As any scholar of rhetoric and communication will tell you, before you design a communication, you must answer these questions: (1) Who is the intended audience? (2) Who is the public author/speaker? (3) What does the author need to convince the audience of?

In our present environment, and for rational reasons, when Indigenous people and their allies communicate about the land question the primary audience is not the general public; it is not the voting population; it is not parliamentarians. It is the upper levels of the judiciary because the beliefs of the upper judiciary are pretty much the only settler beliefs that exert a positive effect in resolving the land question favourably for Indigenous people?

Once this is established, we then can examine the already-stated beliefs of the courts to determine who the ideal speaker (not the author) should be and the courts have made this clear: those who are authorized representatives of pre-colonial hereditary governments, in other words, individuals who most resemble pre-modern feudal lords and ladies in the minds of the courts.

How does one demonstrate this entitlement? Traditional costumes are helpful as is speech in traditional languages or, at least, English speech inflected with an accent implying fluency in an Indigenous language. Practice of a pre-colonial religion is also helpful and, if not a pre-colonial religion then, at least a neo-traditional revitalization religion like the Handsome Lake Church or Sundance Movement. Possession of an inherited, Indigenous surname is ideal but more important is the surname’s association with a lineage tied to a special responsibility to control or steward a delimited piece of territory. Finally, continued residence in or near the delimited territory is key in legitimating the speaker.

            This places a heavy burden on a particular minority constituency within Indigenous communities, given that Indigenous people are the second-most Christian, churchgoing racialized group in Canada and a majority live in cities and even those who do not often residing in rural locales far from their traditional territory. Also, as it true of all peoples, most Indigenous people are not descended from pre-modern aristocrats. While clan membership systems can sometimes mitigate this last factor, they place their own limitations and requirements for membership.

            This means that there are strong incentives to project a particular face to the world, to amplify unrepresentative voices in Indigenous communities for the communities’ collective good.

            The question then becomes what these voices should say: generally, the job of these voices is to reinforce the legal bases in which courts grant Indigenous people greater control of the lands in their traditional territory:

  1. The unbroken nature and heritability of land title: The courts are not interested in granting land to people because they need it. Their job is to return land stolen from its prior owners. That means that not only must Indigenous people show that their aristocrats and members of their clans once controlled that land but that they would still control it in the present, barring an intervening exogenous act (i.e. colonization). That means showing that Indigenous cultures are even more conservative in preserving the heritability of aristocratic privilege, that there is less churn in land ownership than in the lands and titles of European nobles.
  2. The immutability of oral tradition: One of the most important developments in the landmark Delgamuukw case was the recognition that Gitksan oral tradition had correctly dated the region’s last major earthquake right down to the year. And in the intervening generation, there have been other breathtaking instances. But, as a member of a lineage of former slaves, I know, as does anyone who has participated in a strongly orally inflected culture that this is only half the story of the power of oral tradition. The other half of its power is the very opposite; while it is capable of great accuracy and fidelity over centuries, it is also more capable of re-narrating the past and changing its details to meet the needs of the present than any written culture can. But it is necessary not only to de-emphasize but to deny this feature in order to project an image the courts need to see.
  3. The continuity of pre-colonial economic interests and activities: When it came to treaty-governed, rather than unceded territory, it was the Donald Marshall case that offered the greatest hope for Indigenous people gaining justice through the courts. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq fisherman who argued that the Nova Scotia and Canadian governments were violating the treaty between the Micmac and British by limiting his fishing rights. The greater the extent that Indigenous people can make an economic claim based on a “traditional” activity, the greater the likelihood that the courts will side with them. It is for this reason that the Wet’suwet’en have focused their public discourse concerning the pipeline the Horgan government is ramming through their territory for Royal Dutch Shell on the damage it is doing to their trap lines. Its disruption to their university-affiliated healing centre and the education and psychological treatment they are conducting there is far greater but having a psychology PhD assisting Indigenous youth with trauma and educating Masters students is not a “traditional activity.”
  4. The idealization of the pre-colonial past: In tort law, what is important to the court is the demonstration of loss. Therefore the better the pre-colonial past was, the greater the compensation for its loss. Furthermore, because it is also necessary to emphasize the continuity of aristocratic authority and heritability, it becomes necessary to show past Indigenous societies to be benevolent, paternalistic organizations with history’s kindest lords presiding over the history’s most compliant subjects. The verticality of pre-colonial Northwest Coast societies and their practice of slavery must be programmatically effaced.

Taken together, the rhetorical strategy most effective for seeking justice for Indigenous people is to present themselves as a kind of museum exhibit, as the most hidebound conservatives on earth, people with a special, nigh-magical ability to be untouched by the passage of time. In this way, Indigenous people are conscripted by financial exigency to fill that role in the consciousness of the West that Herodotus described 2500 years ago as “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods.”

With the current structure of our discourse laid-out, I will move on in the next post to talk about how and why the conversation is different everywhere else and better in most of those places.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

Fighting Back

In recent weeks, I have faced a great deal of adversity. My relationship of nearly four years with my partner ended. The separation that followed did not just entail the loss of my beloved from my daily life but of my home and all of the members of the household that she and I built during our time together. Our shared life was undermined by many things, many my fault. But not all. There is no doubt that our current political climate made a significant contribution.

This was followed by the destruction of my campaign for a seat on the Prince George School Board. My campaign launch was attended and endorsed by my comrade Chris Elston, a courageous man who has made it his mission to challenge the rise of Identitarianism in our schools and, in particular, the provincial education policy known as SOGI. SOGI, among its many flaws, requires that teachers in our school system actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity and has, in the past, resulted in the use of experimental “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones on students without their parents’ knowledge or consent. These “blockers” have never been tested on children for the purpose for which they are prescribed and, when combined with hormones and “gender-affirming” surgery frequently result in permanent and irreversible sterility and the loss of sexual function.

SOGI’s confidentiality provisions and full-throated endorsement of novel and disturbing aspects of Identitarianism deserve full public debate. Unfortunately, that is not possible in our current political environment. Indeed, questioning any aspect of the Identitarian orthodoxy has been re-described in our laws and our major institutions as “hate speech” that will allegedly result in the murder and/or suicide of significant numbers of transgender people if anyone hears these questions or entertains doubts about the policy. As a result, saying to a trans-identified person “nobody is born in the wrong body. Your body is beautiful just the way it is,” can now result in a prison sentence for the person saying those words.

It was, therefore, no surprise that my opponent staged a loud protest of my campaign launch because I had invited Chris to speak about the issue. When Chris tried to converse with protesters, they, typical of Identitarians, shouted him down. For some, this decision was a mere political convenience. But, true believers, I am sure, honestly believed that if people could hear Chris’s words, trans-identified children would die in unknown numbers.

But what followed was wholly unexpected.

Some readers of this blog know that I have run afoul of Prince George Citizen editor Neil Godbout on two occasions. The first time was when he endorsed an extralegal pogrom of homeless people in Prince George and joined a small group of conservative business owners in endorsing their mass expulsion from the city. In language heavily inflected with anti-Indigenous racism, Godbout and his friends suggested that “human rights have gone too far” and proposed the indefinite illegal detention of homeless people at some location outside the city. I am proud to have mobilized opposition to this absurd and repugnant plan.

I next ran afoul of Neil when I criticized his decision to run and prominently feature a letter to the editor of the Citizen entitled “I am a racist,’ in which a local reader explained that he was tired of the lack of resolution of settler-indigenous conflict and was now proud to call himself an anti-Indigenous racist. I criticized Neil for platforming these views and, as a result, he used his influence to cancel my radio show on CFIS, the community station of which the Citizen is an advertiser and sponsor.

Following the campaign launch, Neil was approached by the politically active husband of a former student of mine from UNBC who presented him with heavily, choppily and obviously agenda-driven edited footage of a class I had taught while suffering a personal crisis and psychological breakdown fourteen months ago.

You can hear my statement contextualizing the footage here. In the footage in question, I spent time inveighing against the prevalence of the sexual molestation of children and our society’s failure to protect them. As I was in no fit state to teach at the time, the footage contained considerable profanity, which I regret. But what was truly shocking was that, whoever the editor was, a tiny excerpt was taken to attempt to remove my statements of vehement opposition to child molestation and simply include my statements that our society rarely treats the abuse of children as a crime, unless the abuser is a stranger. Neil then chose to affix a grossly misleading title to the article and grossly misleading text claiming that I was confessing to being a serial child molester and exhorting others to molest children.

As a person who suffered from sexual abuse as a child and a person who has spoken out against sexual violence against women and children on this blog for the past seven years, I was absolutely gobsmacked by this development.

Since that time, I have received more than a dozen threats of murder and assault from Prince George residents.

While still reeling from this disgusting turn of events which I can only interpret as revenge, Jennifer Whiteside, the Minister of Education entered the fray. As the person in government responsible for the school board byelection in which I was running, she chose to demand that I leave the race on the grounds that I constitute a danger to the safety of every child in the district.

I have retained legal counsel and am suing the Prince George Citizen and the Minister of Education. And I have fled Prince George, given the continuing efforts of the BC government, the Prince George Citizen and a Twitter mob of Identitarians, including individuals well-placed in BC’s major political parties, the government and organized labour to convince Prince George residents that I am a dangerous, serial sex offender against children and incite violence against me.

In essence, I am the subject of what, in the Muslim world, is known as a fatwa.

With the exception of a few feminist activists and my father and stepmother, no one is offering any public defense of me of which I am aware. That is not because I lack for sympathizers. It is because people are terrified.

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Chris Elston is routinely assaulted by Identitarian thugs in his travels around the country. Police, even when present, do not intervene and are content to watch thugs beat him in the street. His family has been harrassed. And this is not atypical. Those who question this bizarre orthodoxy are routinely assaulted with impunity. People watch as those who stand up lose jobs, homes, relationships, church memberships and volunteer positions. Careers are destroyed as Identitarian thugs go after people at their workplace. Homes are destroyed as they go after people’s children and spouses. People are terrorized by doxxing on Twitter, with which the platform seems fine with. Even celebrities like Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling are doxxed with impunity, in addition to the hundreds of public rape and murder threats they have received.

And we must situate these developments in a larger Canadian context. With the rise of candidate vetting processes, members of political parties are only permitted to seek public office if they pass muster with secret committees of party staffers whose names are not published and which never have to explain why candidates are disqualified. A few dozen people in this country control who is permitted to seek the nomination to run for a political party and are subject to no oversight or regulation whatsoever.

Under the guise of Covid prevention the vaccination pass system has been introduced. Even though vaccines exert no significant effect on the transmission of the Covid strains and variants that constitute the vast majority of cases (they do significantly affect things like symptoms and mortality, hence me being double-vaxxed myself and seeking a booster as soon as it is available), a measure has been enacted to exert unprecedented control and surveillance over the movements of citizens despite lacking any public health justification. And there are mass firings of the unvaccinated in the public and private sectors.

At the same time, our government is proceeding, under the guise of stamping out inaccurate Covid information, with a massive increase in the regulatory scope of the state to control what people are allowed to say on social media.

And this is matched by the neo-McCarthyism of Identitarians or, as some call them, “the Woke.” All that is required to direct the attention of the mob to someone’s spouse, children, employer, landlord, church or non-profit is an individual’s refusal to denounce someone the mob has already destroyed. That is how I got into this fix sixteen months ago: I said that feminist elders Judy Graves and her associates were not guilty of the hate speech of which they had been falsely accused.

All this takes place in the context of the militarization of the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en people and an occupying force using escalating violence and intimidation against peaceful protesters to force through a pipeline to carry fracked gas for Royal Dutch Shell, the folks who mobilized even more deadly force against the Ogoni people in Nigeria and, of course, the African majority in Apartheid-era South Africa. This also has taken place at the behest of the BC government, which has not only jailed Indigenous and settler land defenders in unprecedented numbers but has also jailed journalists attempting to cover this obscene overreach.

In recent weeks, associates of mine have been threatened with a range of consequences from losing their rights and membership within their political party to losing their jobs, careers, livelihoods if they do not either denounce me or end their association with me. And Identitarian activists show up on my Facebook page to place “laugh” emojis next the to news of the next setback I have faced. They want me to know that they delight in my suffering and in the threats of assault and murder that appear on my public page every few hours.

Oddly, some people seem to think that the systematic destruction and confiscation of nearly everything of worth in my life over the past eighteen months and the fatwa that now has me in hiding should teach me a lesson, that it is time to stop speaking out.

If anything, I am convinced of the opposite. The question of what people will do in an authoritarian society is no longer hypothetical. The authoritarians have arrived; they have captured our major institutions, including our political parties. Free speech and political choice are being dismantled before our eyes.

The main lesson I have taken from the Christian Bible is that if you live a morally upright and altruistic life as a public figure, it should take the government about three years to hunt you down and kill you. I have been on the loose criticizing our social and economic order for thirty-four. A pretty good run, really.

Closer to the present, my grandfather Harry Jerome Sr. was fired by the railway companies and forced to relocate multiple times for his multi-decade fight for equal rights for black rail workers. My late friend and twentieth century folks music legend Leon Bibb spent many hours with me explaining to me what he called “the assassination of Paul Robeson,” the campaign during the last episode of McCarthyism which cut Robeson, the godfather of Leon’s children, off from work, from travel and from any venue where he might spread his message by speech or song.

Someone has to stand up. And, at this point it costs me less than it would most people because so many things that I treasure have already been taken, right down to my good name and physical safety. More importantly, I see so many people like Chris and my friends at Rape Relief Women’s Shelter who sacrifice more, are in more danger and have more to lose.

But I think I will leave off with the well-rehearsed Martin Niemoller quotation about a place and time not that different from our own:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Speak while you can, folks. The consequences for not speaking will only increase. This suppression of free speech and democratic rights will not end with Indigenous people, land defenders or feminists and others who question the Identitarian orthodoxy. It is coming for your community; it is coming for you. Fight back.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Truth and Reconciliation – Part II: The Truth About Canada’s TRC

If the South African Truth and Reconciliation process was a consequence of a particular kind of transfer of power in the context of a particular political era (i.e. a transition to black majority rule during the brief Pax Americana period and rise of neoliberalism), what was the context that produced Canada’s TRC?

First of all, let us be clear on what it was not:

  • It was not part of a transfer of power or regime change. Even in Indigenous-majority areas, no changes to the political system took place preceding or as part of the TRC.
  • It was not created as a process for all Indigenous victims of settler colonialism to air their grievances and seek redress. It was created to address one harmful aspect of the colonization of Indigenous people, and others only insofar as they pertained to this one aspect i.e. the Indigenous residential school system.
  • It was not initiated by the government, nor was it a process that was negotiated bilaterally between Indigenous people and the state. Its primary impetus came from two important sets of actors who had played a major role in shaping the TRC and its parameters, i.e. Canada’s mainline churches (Anglican, United, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) who had run the system on behalf of the state and the churches’ insurance companies.
  • The government was not under any substantial legal or financial pressure from external or internal forces to conclude an agreement that was not advantageous to it.
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While this made it considerably different from the South African TRC, it shared some important features with South Africa’s TRC:

  • Corporate malefactors were immunized from prosecution based on TRC findings because the agreement that created the TRC was an agreement between the churches, the state, their insurance companies and representatives of Indigenous people to admit limited liability and pay predetermined compensation to surviving victims.
  • There was an implied immunization of individual malefactors in the agreement determining the damages and setting up the TRC using some of these funds.

It is important, when thinking of the Canadian TRC, to understand that it came into being not to solve a problem of political legitimacy, like South Africa’s, but instead to solve a financial problem. Canada’s four mainline churches and its federal government were being sued by approximately half of the residential school survivors for pain and suffering and other forms of civil court damages for the abuse and neglect they experienced in residential schools. The insurance companies representing the churches and the state had a strong financial interest in reducing the size of their payouts in compensation and in preventing the courts from imposing a settlement that might be more costly than the one they could negotiate.

Under the neoliberal administrations of Prime Ministers Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, Canada’s government had thoroughly internalized the key principle of post-1860 capitalism: use the power of the state to reduce private sector costs. Because the TRC was understood to be part of the compensation to victims, costs the government took on in staging the commission could then be used to defray the cost of state, church and, most importantly, insurance industry liability.

The settlement mandating compensation of survivors (wrongful death compensation for families had been negotiated-away in 1998) included the creation of the TRC and was signed by Martin’s government in 2005 but implementation was left to the Harper government when it took power in 2006.

So, let us be crystal clear: Canada’s TRC was part of a larger strategy for limiting the direct costs of insurance industry and church liability for crimes committed by joint employees of the government and the country’s four mainline churches. It would not have been created had the government not been a party to a protracted negotiation among survivors, churches and major insurance companies. Canada did not wake up and politically decide it needed a TRC to address its past; the TRC was part of a massive court settlement designed to limit financial exposure for state, church and the insurance industry.

Obviously, First Nations leadership also agreed to this and, within that group, there were those who had long been calling for a TRC, based on the romanticization of South Africa’s decolonization and switch to democratic majority rule. But it must be understood that this was not the state capitulating to political demands for political reasons. The state staged the process in exchange for reductions in its liability and that of its partners.

It should therefore surprise no one that almost no recommendations by the TRC have become law or regulations. Following the recommendations of the commission was never part of the agreement, merely its staging.

Of course, most non-Indigenous Canadians have not noticed this unfortunate aspect of the TRC. We tend to see it as a net positive, a favour we did Indigenous people that serves as a foundation for some nebulous nonsense we call “reconciliation.”

But, in reality, we are the primary beneficiaries of that favour because of the distinctive character of Anglo Canadian affect i.e. emotion politics.

Because of the nature of the protracted process from 1965-82, when we re-founded Canada as an inherently progressive, liberal state, Anglo Canadian settler nationalism has a unique politics of emotion, distinct from the nationalism of other white settler states like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

As I have said in numerous other blog posts, white Anglo Canadians tend to bifurcate our history into two parts: (a) our past as a violent, racist white settler state run by evil, stupid racists and (b) the present and very recent past, which is completely disjunctive with the rest of the past. In this formulation, all good things come from us and all bad things come from our ancestors, who are wholly culpable for genocide, racism and a host of other crimes.

In this narration of our history, our ancestors did evil things because they had evil intentions. And we have borrowed Christian fundamentalist proof-texting practices to reinforce this belief. We take a handful of statements, often out of context, made by Victorian-era politicians and use them to somehow “prove” the non-existence of all the do-gooders who ran the system thinking they were acting to “save” Indigenous people from extinction, or to end child labour, or to make literacy universal, or to improve public health. Because John A MacDonald and members of his cabinet were clearly motivated by racial animus and did not care if Indigenous people died, every single one of our ancestors therefore also held the identical views and every single residential school employee was an evil, murderous racist who hated every one of their charges.

Because we are members of the first-ever generation of Canadians who have good intentions, it follows, the TRC and things like it exemplify this new Canada, run by the first empathetic, sensitive generation of white people in the history of the human race. That is why we don’t need to check on whether we have fixed the water systems on reserves or implemented the TRC recommendations. We know we have because good people do good things and bad people do bad things.

But what is our evidence that we are good, besides the new flag (1965), official adoption of multiculturalism (1971), new national anthem (1980), new Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and, to cap it all, the TRC (2015)? The answer: our tears.

While the TRC provided no tangible benefit to survivors of the residential school system, and, in fact, drained money out of compensation settlements, it provided a key intangible benefit for Anglo white settlers: catharsis. By crying with those brutalized by our system, we engaged in yet another episode of tearful ancestor-blaming. Crying with, as evinced in the BC legislature’s adoption of UNDRIP, has been a key strategy whereby settlers appropriate the grief of survivors at our systems of abuse and violence, as something we co-own. Rhetorically, instead of taking ownership of our ancestors’ mistakes, arising from both good and bad intentions, we appropriate the role of victim, making ourselves the secondary victims of our ancestors’ actions and institutions, rather than heirs to their vast windfall of stolen land.

These days, Canada’s ongoing colonialism is powered, first and foremost, by settler tears. That is why we have chosen an actor with a villainous ancestor to be our Prime Minister. He cries for us. And his tears wash the blood off our hands.

Settlers love the TRC because, in our minds, reconciliation has begun because we and our victims have all had a good cry together, just the way a family does when the wife and kids return from the battered women’s shelter to hear the abusive husband’s empty promises and professions of love for the umpteenth time.

In the land of lame holidays, in which our Thanksgiving was proclaimed as a national holiday in 1879 to celebrate the future Edward VII’s recovery from a childhood illness, while his mother was Queen of England and Empress of India, I guess Truth and Reconciliation Day shouldn’t surprise me.

But it does.

We have proclaimed a national holiday to celebrate being pressured by the insurance industry to stage a national catharsis and then ignore all recommendations arising from said catharsis. We are celebrating a tort limitation strategy used to defray the costs of settling a lawsuit by people we raped, assaulted and tortured (but not murdered—we excluded wrongful death awards), whose substantive calls for reform and justice we choose to ignore every time we convene the House of Commons.

Of course, we should celebrate. We got ourselves out of a financial jam and had a big cathartic cry. So why not dedicate a whole new holiday to our own crocodile tears and to the ingenuity of Canada’s insurance industry?

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Truth and Reconciliation – Part I: The Origins of Truth and Reconciliation Discourse

A couple of years ago, I wrote some essays about the transformation of the land acknowledgement from a ritual act that engaged in small-scale compensation of victims of colonialism into Canada’s answer to American Thanksgiving, a process by which settlers welcome themselves to the land they are stealing and then thank their victim for allowing their land to be stolen, like it was their idea.

Silly me. Land acknowledgements were merely the incubator of a new horror dreamed up by the brain trust of smug, woke colonialism, Truth and Reconciliation Day. The new kind of colonial rhetoric the managerial class has been practicing at corporate retreats, faculty meetings and gatherings of labour aristocrats and non-profit executive directors is now being taken nation-wide as an annual festival of white guilt and narcissistic mock self-flagellation.

To understand why this is happening, why the face of colonialism is now always crying, we need to trace the idea of “truth and reconciliation” as a political project from its inception, to understand what it was and what it now is.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it became clear that the Soviet imperial project had entered its terminal phase. The Soviet economy was being hammered not just by pent-up dissent from within and the rapid loss of its vassal states but by shifting global commodity prices that hammered its balance sheet and economy that, in turn, devalued and destabilized the ruble. The state increasingly lost the capacity to deliver the things its populace wanted and this, in turn, increased emigration and political dissent.

Ironically, a similar thing that had happened to the USSR was happening to the Republic of South Africa, the terrifying, retrograde white supremacist regional power of sub-Saharan Africa. Like the USSR under Mikhael Gorbachev, South Africa, under PW Botha, had attempted to engage in incremental liberalization by expanding opportunities for democratic participation. Botha had partially enfranchised previously disenfranchised South Asians and “coloureds” of mixed race; he had also rapidly expanded the “Bantustan” system, ceding large but economically unproductive swaths of South Africa to black-led governments.

As in Eastern Europe, these concessions had the effect of altering the horizon of expectation of South Africans in exactly the wrong way. Now that the government was beginning to yield and its multi-state solution was failing, the way forward was clear: a one-state solution of all South Africans, irrespective of race. Following a massive increase in resistance, which was met with escalating state violence and torture, Botha was forced to step down and his successor, FW de Klerk was given a clear mandate by the party: fix this.

As in the USSR, increasing international sanctions, increasing isolation, declining commodity prices had produced a crisis of confidence in the middle class who began both emigrating and dissenting at rapidly increasing rates. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the legendary cold warriors and the biggest boosters of South Africa were gone and their successors saw no need to prop up an embarrassing and corrupt regime now that the Cold War had been won.

De Klerk’s job was clear: stabilize the rand; increase its purchasing power; fill the stores with imported goods again. In other words, maintain the wealth of the propertied class and the economic privileges and heritage of white caste by any means necessary.

This meant striking an agreement with the African National Congress. The ANC had a number of leaders, a ceremonial imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela, an international celebrity whose personality cult had been carefully constructed by Oliver Tambo, the acting president, who ran the organization from Zambia, the nearest state to South Africa that would dare to host its government-in-exile. Its most senior and powerful leader inside the country was Joe Slovo, the head of the South African Communist Party.

Tambo and Mandela were, like Slovo, Soviet-aligned communists. That meant that at the very moment they should have had the strongest hand in the negotiations De Klerk commenced, the reality was that their primary patron had just disintegrated into a post-Soviety free-for-all of plunder, corruption and political incoherence.

We must then understand that the negotiations over the peaceful transfer of power in South Africa were skewed first, in the sense that one side held all state power and the other held none, second, in the sense that one side’s international allies had just won the Cold War and the other’s had vanished and, third, in the sense that the context of the negotiation was a hegemonic global neoliberal consensus to which all major parties in all major states were abjectly capitulating.

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Consequently, what the ANC got, in its negotiations, was actually not much. There would be no land reform, no asset seizures, no nationalizations. In addition, there was the problem of the judiciary. The judiciary was corrupt and had been appointed by a white supremacist regime for a century. Even if the apartheid government could have somehow been made to agree that its officials could be brought to justice for all their murder and torture, how could one address the crimes that were committed by a regime that also did everything in its power to prevent black people becoming lawyers, never mind judges?

With little hand to play, the ANC negotiators got the best they could: new courts with limited subpoena powers and no ability to attach jeopardy to the hearings they conducted. They could make the war criminals testify but only without jeopardy attached. Almost the entire white population was blanket-immunized against prosecution for the atrocities they had committed.

The practical purpose of these courts was twofold: rapid on-the-job education of newly-minted black lawyers in courtroom procedure and an opportunity for the victims of the regime to experience some limited sense of “closure” by hearing their tormentors at least confess to their despicable acts.

The political purpose of the court was vast: to create a mandate for the new South African state to use its police forces and judiciary to protect white South Africans’ ill-gotten gains, their wealth, their consumer spending power, their ability to continue employing black servants in their homes and black miners in their gold and diamond mines. And so it needed a really catchy name. They called it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Nearly thirty years since the transfer of power, history’s verdict is mixed. An evil that the TRC had been created to prevent did not happen; South Africa never descended into civil war. But the massive asymmetry between the voting power of black South Africans and that of whites versus the countervailing imbalance of economic power, and a state hamstrung by neoliberal property rights protections, has produced a violent, unequal society rife with corruption, which has become the only way Africans have been able to convert their political power into economic power.

In some regions of the country, especially the Southwest, Truth and Reconciliation seems to have been a step in the direction of a more equal, more inclusive, more integrated society. But as one travels northeast, closer to the gold and diamond mines, the core of the state’s economic power, the country seems as divided, as segregated as ever but with an array of private security forces and an incompetent and corrupt national constabulary replacing the old Ministry of Law and Order uber-cops.

Furthermore, as the national government devolves into a spoils system, pre-existing national divisions are increasing among black South Africans. Xhosa-Zulu relations are on the decline, to the point where the ancient corrupt vendu Bantustan leader of Kwazulu, Mangosutu Buthelezi is again a national political force. And all signs point to a continuing decline towards Kenya-style politics of great nations trapped in an endless petty fistfight over the table-leavings of neo-colonialism.

South Africa’s TRC was both a high price to pay to gain majority rule and, concurrently, a tiny amount of settler accountability bought at an astronomical price.

So why would Canada want to copy this?

It didn’t we just stole the name and put it on something emptier and worse.

More about that next.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

The Modern Donatist Crisis: What the Fourth Century Roman Empire Can Tell Us About Today’s Left

A lot of what I write on this blog these days falls into the “comparative empire” school of writing. I make extended arguments by comparing some aspect of one or more pre-modern empires to a modern empire. I am going to do the same here but my argument is going to be less state-centred; the Roman state following the Crisis of the Third Century certainly comes into the story but it does not sit at the centre. Instead, a movement or set thereof within the empire is the centre of the comparison; and that movement is Christianity.

The Christianity that existed by the end of Constantine the Great’s imperial reign in 337 was radically different than the Christianity that existed a generation previously when Diocletian’s Great Persecution began in 302. The massive changes that produced the martial, state-sponsored heresy-policing Orthodox Catholic Church that Christianity had become by 337 were not just accepted. They were contested and vigorously resisted.

This resistance came to be known as the Donatist Controversy. And I want to argue that the heterogeneous set of social movements and ideologies known as “the Left” is very much like the similarly heterogeneous, diverse Christian movement of the late third century. And that we have been plunged, since the 1990s, into our own Donatist Controversy.

The Diversity of Christianity in the Roman World

Christianity, from its inception, was riven with factionalism, as confirmed by the earliest scriptures in the New Testament. The Pauline epistles, dated to about 51 CE, are a record of disputes within the intentional communities founded by Paul as well as a larger dispute between Paul and Peter over questions of jurisdiction, revenue and compliance with Levitical ordinances. While we can see that, by the last decades of the first century, a proto-Catholic movement seeking to unify the factions had already appeared and attempted to smooth-over differences with its publication of Luke-Acts, the movement’s existence already attested to the belief on the part of many Christians that their movement was too factionalized and divided.

While it is difficult to assess the relative sizes of the different movements within Christianity, we can see that by the third century, early church historians like Irenaeus were already making long lists of all the different sects and factions that claimed the mantle of Christianity.

At the same time, members of these disparate factions had a lot in common and necessarily cooperated to advance or defend their shared interests.

Some, more moderate Christians, were little different than other residents of the Roman Empire. They served in the military; they owned slaves; they believed in Greek theories of physics; they paid taxes; they didn’t stand out at the baths because they were uncircumcised; they awaited resurrection at some distant future date when Jesus would return and take them up into the heavens.

Other Christians avoided all military service and other government jobs; they didn’t use slave labour; they adopted obscure Judean and Samaritan theories of physics; they dodged taxes; they avoided public baths or were received with scorn there because they were circumcised; they lived in hope that, any day now, Jesus would return and upend the socioeconomic order and declare the permanent Jubilee.

And there existed a wide range of Christian movements and sects between these two poles.

For more mainstream Christians, Christianity was about staying aloof from the ritual and political life of the empire so as to better sock money away for things like their kids’ education or invest in Christian burial societies that were much like modern life insurance companies, designed to take care of funerary and burial arrangements. There was a weekly Lord’s supper and they kept a low profile around the festivities for other gods because theirs was a jealous one.

And the Roman state wasn’t so concerned about them anyway. Since the reign of Trajan, the Empire had conducted few persecutions and generally adhered to a kind of “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy that Pliny the Younger, as a regional governor, had hammered-out in his correspondence with Trajan early in the second century.

For less mainstream Christians, life was that of a drop-out, living in an intentional community composed of other radical Christians, at the margins of legality, outside of the social mainstream. Christianity was the centre of life, political, social, intellectual, etc. And the Empire was not irrelevant because it was tainted with devotion to pagan gods; it was a force for evil that Jesus would smash upon his return in glory.

When Diocletian’s great persecution began, regional governors and junior emperors were told that all Christians, even the most moderate, would be subject to state oversight and punishment. Suspected Christians were rounded-up and ordered, at sword point, to make sacrifices to Roman gods like Saturn and Jupiter.

And many, many did.

Those who did not were sometimes imprisoned, sometimes tortured and occasionally executed. The thinking is that out of approximately four million Christians, comprising 10% of the Roman population, only 0.1% were actually killed in the persecutions. But the number of Christians the persecutions touched was enormous.

Obviously, these persecutions helped to rally moderate Christians, especially those in the regular army, and Germanic barbarian Christians who populated the irregular units of foederati,  on which the Empire had come to depend, to back the heterodox Constantine, who came from a Christian family, in his bid to succeed Diocletian.

But nearly a decade elapsed between the start of the persecution and the legalization of Christianity following Constantine’s seizure of power. And during that decade not only did many ordinary Christians recant their religion and sacrifice to pagan gods, so did many of the highest-ranking ecclesiastical officials, all the way up to bishops.

The Council of Nicea, Worst Corporate Retreat Ever

Following the persecution, two closely linked processes began to unfold that would result in the radical remaking of the Christian oecumene within the Roman Empire.

First, there was the state-led process initiated by Constantine, that sought to establish a doctrinal consensus and create a single normative, universal Christianity throughout the empire. As the process dragged on, the state became increasingly involved and increasingly coercive in its efforts to create a uniform, universal Christianity that would put the disputes that divided Christians behind them.

This process ultimately culminated in the Council of Nicea in 325, arguably the worst corporate retreat of all time, in which approximately three hundred bishops met for six straight months to hammer-out a single statement that was supposed to settle the major disputes in something akin to a modern “vision statement.” The meeting was so terrible that Saint Nicholas enters the historical record here as the guy who punched Arius, the Cyrenian presbyter and leader of the Arian movement, in the face.

Constantine chaired the meeting and would vacillate among different bishops’ positions, at one point requiring bishop Athanasius to flee into hiding in the Egyptian desert to avoid an imperial order to arrest him for heresy. In this way, participants in the council were acutely aware of the violent, coercive force of the state as a factor in their decision making.

In the narrative of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, the meeting was about resolving a dispute between the soon-to-be Orthodox faction, led by Athanasius of Alexandria and the Arian faction led by Arius of Cyrene. And the story mainstream Christians tell themselves is that it was a dispute about the relationship among, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Was there a moment that God existed and Jesus did not? Was Jesus God or God’s son? These sorts of questions.

The Donatist Crisis

In what is often considered a parallel process rather than a closely linked one, a conflict began within Christianity that, like the debate between Athanasius and Arius, was centred on North Africa. In this case, it was between those who had held firm during the persecution and those who recanted. Were those who recanted able to administer the eucharist still? Perform baptisms? What about those who had been baptized by those who later recanted? Would those baptisms still count?

Donatus, the bishop leading those who did not break under threats or torture, argued that those who had not kept faith were not and may never have been true priests able to administer the sacraments.

We typically date the Donatist Controversy to 312-21 and Nicea to 325 but, if we stop looking at these as doctrinal disputes and see them as disputes about political power, their linkages become obvious and inextricable.

From the beginning, those who had submitted to the power of the Roman state saw the legalization and imperial patronage of Christianity as an opportunity to fuse with the state and come to co-own the very system Christianity originally opposed. But not only were they opportunistic, they resented those who had held firm to their convictions and paid a material price for doing so. While they were enthusiastic about dead martyrs and organized festivals to commemorate their sacrifice, it was easy to side with the dead because the dead cannot speak for themselves. They cannot contest the power or narrative of those commemorating them.

The living martyrs were the problem. Even those who were not Donatists were, nevertheless, an implied criticism. Their very existence, especially those bearing the marks of torture, offered a criticism of those who had apostasized, just by being alive and walking around.

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For this reason, it became increasingly important that the collaborators with aspirations to state power have their own alternative set of criteria for true faith, true Christianity. The theory they settled upon was that the power of salvation and efficacy of religious rituals did not inhere in the personal holiness of the person administering them. Rather, it inhered in the specific word sequences and formulas used in religious rituals.

The idea was that the power lived in specific sequences of words canonized as orthodox. There was already the Lord’s Prayer. But the problem was that the Lord’s Prayer made sense. It could be mistaken for non-ritual communication, as a plea for physical sustenance and forgiveness from a benevolent god.

A set of words, if it means something clear and everyone in the community generally agrees with the meaning, is a pretty lousy boundary maintenance tool or internal loyalty test. If you want to push people out who are so committed to forthrightness, directness, truth-telling that they get themselves arrested, incarcerated and tortured, because they refuse to say something false or disloyal, then you need to craft language intrinsically offensive to that sort of person.

Of course, language was not the first place the emerging alliance between the state and Christian “moderates” went. First, there was material patronage. The churches of the soon-to-be Orthodox were repaired with government money; jobs, monopolies, contracts became plentiful for these more flexible Christians. Meanwhile the Donatists continued to meet in damaged and ruined churches and struggle financially as pagans and moderate Christians formed a united from in denying Donatists financial opportunities and privileges.

But language was ultimately where it went. While the intent of past actors is never available to us and we can only guess at how much the results of the Council of Nicea were a genuine effort to build consensus with a formerly fractious social movement, only those steeped in Christian ritual and doctrine can see the Nicene Creed as anything other that word salad. By “word salad,” I mean a set of words that, on a superficial first glance, appear to mean something specific and precise but are actually nonsensical and corrosive of any adjacent meaning:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.

“Father” and “begotten” in close proximity seem like they are part of some sort of idea about the relationship between a father and his offspring. But what happens to the meaning of “begotten” if “eternally” modifies it? There is “one god,” the father and “one lord,” Jesus Christ. But he is also “God from true God.” So, are there two gods or one? Of course, there are no real answers to these questions because, for word salad to be successful word salad, it must sound like it means something but contain not just an absence of meaning but a negative meaning, a force of intellectual disruption that beats meaning out of adjacent words.

The Nicene Creed was just the highest-profile piece of word salad that the Church, in collaboration with the state, introduced in the fourth century because these formulas were more effective, I would argue, than patronage, threats or force. After all, the Donatists had already survived those things.

Word salad, on the other hand, is a well-known tactic in domestic abuse because, unlike any other class of language, agreement with it is necessarily coerced. Because word salad does not and cannot mean anything, no person will express agreement with it of their own volition; some form of external fear, pressure or threat is what compels verbal accord with and repetition of word salad. Therefore, the repetition of, or expression of agreement with, the nonsense cannot be anything but an expression of submission. One cannot voluntarily agree with it because there is nothing to agree with.

And so, the Nicene Creed became one of a set of tools of the newly fused Orthodox Christian Church and Roman state. These tools did not just help to push Donatists but the kind of person who would become a Donatist, a person resistant to authority, a person who so abhorred dishonesty that they would pay a price to tell the truth as they saw it. Furthermore, by making the saving power of the Church inherent in nonsensical sequences of words, one could effectively select a future leadership class by drawing from those who, as abused, abuser or both, were already familiar with these thought-terminating discourses of veiled intimidation.

The Third Way as Diocletian’s Persecution

I want to suggest that, while no means identical, there are many important parallels between this period in Roman history from 302-337 and our present moment.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, every left, socialist and social democratic party enacted policies of austerity, privatization, investor rights, trade liberalization, labour mobility, etc. Having spoken to some folks who were part of these governments, there is no doubt that they truly believed that there was no alternative. And Standard and Poors and the other bond-rating agencies of the world teamed-up with the World Bank and its International Monetary Fund to punish any government that did not comply with punitive credit downgrades and coercive “structural adjustment” programs.

But there were those who could not abide these things and burned their party cards, resigned their party memberships or parliamentary seats, took to the streets with the anti-globalization movement or even took up arms against neoliberalism like the Zapatistas.

For a while it seemed that socialist, social democratic and other left parties of the world were heading for extinction. But then something strange happened. As I have written elsewhere, the Third Way movement of liberal, socialist and social democratic that incorporated free trade, contracting out, austerity, privatization, investor rights and seamless labour mobility did not die out.

The first reason for their survival was that there were some greasy, shitty jobs that parties of the right struggled to get done when opposed by mobilized citizens. Strikes, rallies, blockades and other forms of direct action could slow or demoralize a conservative government. Furthermore, elections make governments fearful of angering a majority of the population. Capital soon found that Third Way governments could grease the wheels for radical reforms governments run by their friends could not.

This was, of course, epitomized in the coalition between the NDP-Green government of John Horgan and Andrew Weaver, which was able to triple fossil fuel subsidies in just three years, something the previous right-wing governments had been unable to do in sixteen consecutive years in office. That’s because Third Way governments can demobilize lefties and environmentalists by claiming to be their comrades and buying off those needing to be bought off.

The second reason, more important in this comparison, is the way Third Way contracting-out practices function. Contracting-out is a practice whereby a government reduces the costs of providing a service by laying off the government employees who are providing it and hiring a private company to do the job instead. The private company is able to do this and make a profit by reducing wages for the work, which is easy, as the workers providing it are no longer direct employees of the government.

Third Way governments are more creative and cost-effective in much of their contracting-out because they contract charities and other non-profits to take on government work. Frontline workers in the non-profit and charitable sectors are especially reluctant to seek higher wages because they are often altruistically motivated to do the work they do and because they can see that money spent on their wages is being taken from some other area of charitable endeavour. Guilt is a powerful force in keeping wages down in the charitable sector. Furthermore, many non-profit workers labour shoulder-to-shoulder with volunteers who are being paid nothing for doing the same or similar work.

While wages are driven down in such arrangements, they tend to rise dramatically for those in charitable and non-profit management. Their organizations grow; their budgets grow; and so do their salaries and status. Over the past generation, the high-level manager class has expanded to include thousands of non-profit executive directors and management consultants and become seamless with senior civil servants, MBAs in the corporate sector, lobbyists and, as Lenin termed them, “the labour aristocracy.”

We often use the term “Astroturf” to talk about non-profit organizations that appear to be grassroots but have actually been created by a wealthy individual or consortium thereof. But I want to suggest that there is a kind of Astroturfing of pre-existing organizations that the arrival of more government money caused. The leadership of non-profit organizations came to be increasingly selected from above, based on who can redirect state patronage towards the groups rather than democratically from below.

The putative leaders of our social movements are increasingly those either patronized by the state or by wealthy individuals. And they are filling our organizations with people who resemble themselves, ambitious ladder-climbers eager to burnish their resumes with time in the non-profit sector, mainstream people who see social movement groups the way their grandparents would have seen fraternal organizations like the Rotarians or mainline churches like the Presbyterians.

We Are the Donatists

The problem is us. We stupidly think that local environmental, feminist, anti-poverty, anti-racism, etc. groups are our groups. We think that those of us who lost jobs, influence, power during 1990s austerity but held firm to our principles are the true foundation, the backbone of social movements and left-wing political parties. We stupidly think that the kids joining the local environmental group are there to get a criminal record for being arrested on a logging road when, in fact, they are there in the expectation that they will do some community service in exchange for a flattering line on their CV.

We are the Donatists, my friends. Our standing has declined as governments have lavished patronage on our rivals in civil society; theirs has risen.

We are today’s Donatists because those who vote austerity and climate arson through our legislatures, and those who campaign for them, are not satisfied with the wealth and prestige their capitulation has brought them. They are today’s version of Constantine’s moderate bishops. And they hate us. Because, like the Donatists, we are an implied criticism of them just by getting out of bed in the morning.

We are today’s Donatists because dead martyrs like Ginger Goodwin are memorialized, and praised to the skies, while surviving martyrs like Svend Robinson are being airbrushed out of our past, targets of a concerted campaign of at best, Forgetting and, at worst, Damnatio Memoriae.

Like Christianity 1800 years ago, “the Left,” has become, in a little more than a generation, a captured political formation hellbent on weeding out the vibrant discourse, diversity of opinion and strength of character on which it once relied to survive. It has turned against these virtues and is now, consequently, the enemy.

And so, it should not surprise us that we are being tested, with increasing frequency, by word salad being placed before us as one loyalty oath after another. “Sex work is work,” is just one of the thought-terminating clichés vying for the status of becoming our modern Nicene Creed.

Painful as it must have been for true Christians in the fourth century, we have to acknowledge that the institutions in which we grew up fighting for peace, socialism, feminism and planetary survival have, seemingly overnight, been captured by the very forces we oppose and are now being turned on us.

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“You’ll know when it comes up. You won’t have to ask.” – The Institutional Foundations of the Horgan-Weaver Sellout

By 1995, the Harcourt government’s Commission on Resources and Environment had played out. The multi-year public process that began in early 1992 had created “stakeholder” “tables” of government-selected “representatives” of environmental, industrial and recreational interest groups to create regional land use plans in the Kootenays, Eastern Vancouver Island and the Cariboo-Chilcotin. This process was supposed to end BC’s “War in the Woods,” and had enjoyed substantial buy-in from the various groups represented at the tables. CORE had created new protected areas and, to placate industry, had also created unprecedented new “dedicated use” areas of public land for specific industries, most notably the Elk Valley coal mining sector.

The origins of CORE went back to a press conference Harcourt had held in 1990, announcing an end to the “War in the Woods,” the media’s name for the many land use conflicts around the province that escalated to the point of large-scale civil disobedience and, in especially contested valleys like the Stein (Stagyn), tree-spiking and more radical forms of direct action. At the press conference, while Harcourt was still leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, internationally renowned environmentalist Colleen McCrory, president of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, the woman who had named BC “Brazil of the North,” joined hands with Jack Munro, the socially conservative, environmentalist-hating president of the BC’s branch of the International Woodworkers of America, who had sabotaged BC’s 1982 general strike, to announce that BC’s woods would soon achieve peace in our time.

Few environmentalists had publicly dissented. Paul George and Adriane Carr, founders of Western Canada Wilderness Committee, were among the very few prominent and well-funded environmental leaders not to join the consensus around Harcourt’s plan. But Carr and George were atypical opponents. George, who ran for the Greens in 1991 against the sitting premier Rita Johnston, had publicly stated that trying to address climate change was as futile as trying to stop a volcano and that one had to focus on the basics of putting fences around new groups of trees.

Opponents of CORE like me and my mentor, David Lewis, opposed CORE not just because it was only permitted to protect a maximum of 12% of the province’s land base from logging, but because it and its most prominent supporters were opposed to making climate change part of the conversation.

McCrory and her allies like Ric Careless of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worried that their park creation agenda would be hurt if people like Lewis shaped the discourse. Beginning in 1989, Lewis had been showcasing mathematical models of atmospheric change showing that a rapidly changing climate would destroy BC’s old growth trees “whether they are cut down or not.” In the mathematical models he had crafted with respected climate scientists, forests would have to move towards the poles at somewhere between three and eight times the maximum rate ecosystems in the fossil record had moved during prior episodes of rapid warming.

There were reasons major international environmental groups tended to be part of that consensus. Groups like WWF and Greenpeace had branch offices or affiliates in BC that received money from around the world because these organizations temperate rainforest “campaigns” were headquartered out of their Vancouver offices. Funding for these offices and access to international funds and profile were contingent on old growth forest preservation continuing to shape BC’s environmental discourse. Also, many organizations raised much of their money through door-to-door canvassing and direct mail fundraising at the time and there is no question that, especially in outdoorsy neighbourhoods like Kitsilano and Fernwood, people were much more willing to open the cheque book to support a new park than a climate action campaign that might tax or ban the SUV they planned to drive to it.

While most of BC’s environmental activists threw themselves into CORE, a minority of us demanded that science not brokerage govern land use planning and that climate needed to be placed at the centre of the conversation.

In 1991, McCrory and Lewis, who lived not far apart in the rural Slocan Valley, came into public conflict as McCrory had attempted to push the local Green Party candidate out of the impending election, arguing that if the NDP did not win the riding of Nelson-Creston, it would “ruin everything I have ever worked for in my entire life.”

To her credit, unlike most of BC’s environmental elite, McCrory turned on the government at the end of CORE and denounced its protected area plans as woefully insufficient. McCrory, unlike the rest of BC’s environmental elite, joined Carr and George in supporting the Green Party in the next election. But the rift remained. At a hastily-organized press conference, McCrory endorsed the party but still refused to speak to me, look directly at me or say my name, even though I, as party leader, had rushed to Nelson from hundreds of kilometres away to accept her support. A Jean Chretien-Paul Martin press conference writ small.

Following the 1996 election, the NDP’s next premier, Glen Clark, focused on a number of industrial development plans designed to reinvigorate the party’s waning support from blue collar workers. The most-remembered was his attempt to kickstart an aluminum-hulled shipbuilding industry in BC by instructing the crown’s BC Ferry Corporation to build and purchase the first of these ships. BC’s rentier elite saw their power threatened by Clark’s import substitution industrialization plans and orchestrated a major capital strike.

But lost in that story is the most substantive and long-lasting part of Clark’s industrial strategy: a massive expansion of petroleum, especially fracked natural gas, in the province’s northeast. The government presided over an increased subsidy regime and a massive increase in BC’s participation in the petro sector. This even culminated in BC and Saskatchewan’s NDP governments going to the Supreme Court to demand that Canada’s adoption of the Kyoto Treaty on climate change be struck down.

During the Glen Clark years and the premiership of Dan Miller, his immediate successor, BC’s environmental movement overwhelmingly focused on attempting to create new parks in regions where there had been no CORE process, most importantly, the Central Coast and Inside Passage archipelagos between Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii.

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While organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club were more engaged on climate change at the international level, this was not reflected in their BC activities. And, most dramatically, WWF disaffiliated its BC chapter after Careless was found to have suppressed the work of the organization’s own scientists in order to shore-up the government’s environmental credentials.

This was not wholly surprising in that every major BC environmental group except Wilderness Committee had been part of British Columbians for a Better Environment, a strategic voting advocacy group in the 1996 election that sought to suppress the Green Party vote with the slogan “Don’t Make Your Vote a Toxic Political Waste.” As exposed in an investigation by the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith, most of the money BCBE spent advertising in support of a strategic NDP vote was actually public money the groups had received in government grants immediately prior to the election.

I had been warned in advance about BCBE by George and Carr because it was an outgrowth of a project in which Wilderness Committee was working with the other blue chip environmental organizations, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, WWF, Valhalla, Sierra Legal Defense, etc. And so it was in March of 1996 that I learned a piece of information whose significance and meaning I failed to fully put together for decades.

All of the major blue chip environmental organizations in BC had been approached in 1995 by an entity called the Pew Charitable Trust. It appeared, at the time, that the War in the Woods was winding down and that BC’s environmental leaders might pivot to another policy issue. But Pew showed up with a promise of $1 million per year, to be shared among the groups, to support a continuation and renewal of their forestry campaigns. The groups that signed on created a new, jointly administered, corporate entity called BC Wild. The agreement to create BC Wild was straightforward: BC Wild was an organization whose purpose was to focus on forestry issues; it had no other mandate and the agreement promised nothing else. Its one curious requirement was that all the groups had to be in; there had to be a consensus among the main environmental groups who shaped BC’s public discourse on the environment.

Two decades later, I was watching the brilliant Kelsey Grammer show Boss, depicting the seedy underbelly of Chicago politics. In the first episode, Grammer’s character, Chicago Mayor Tom Kaine, approaches a young upstart politician and asks him to run for governor of Illinois. He explains that he will be putting the full weight of his party machine behind the young man. “What do you want from me?” the candidate asks. “You’ll know when it comes up,” Kaine replies, “you won’t have to ask.”

It was at that moment that I suddenly rethought the BC Wild agreement and the need for it to represent a broad consensus. At the time, I had thought that the Pew Charitable Trust, in its hamfisted way, was trying to address BC’s environmental movements predilection for institutional instability and factionalism. But, in fact, it was really an agreement like the one I had just witnessed on TV.

That is because the Pew Charitable Trust is the charity branch of Suncor.

By the end of the 1990s, the fever had broken. New environmental groups were in town. And other blue chip charities not tied to Big Oil had shown up. The consensus not to address climate change had evaporated by 1999, and so had the BC Wild money.

But the resentments remained.

Valhalla, Wilderness Committee and Sierra Legal effectively declared war on the BC Green Party, demanding that it be offered up to their leaders, now that they had embraced the gospel of climate justice. That story is unpleasant to tell and was decidedly more unpleasant to live through. But by the end of 2000, the BC Greens were a new party, its former leader no longer a member and none of its elected municipal representatives still sitting as Greens.

I want to suggest that it was during these crucial formative years that the foundations of the first Horgan government were laid. BC’s New Democrats and Greens tripled fossil fuel subsidies in a series of budget votes and increased fracking every year; they increased oil industry subsidies by more in three years than the pro-oil BC Liberals had in the previous sixteen. The “Clean BC” climate plan touted by both parties includes increases in fracking and petroleum and coal exports and promises to double the number of logging and mining vehicles on the road by 2050.

And that is because the winners in shaping the environmental policies of both parties descend from an institutional, personal and intellectual lineage that traces back to BC Wild, that, in fact, those who rose to positions of power and influence in the movement in the 90s, while so many community organizations withered, were propelled to the top by oil money. And it is their legacy we see in the anti-climate cross-partisan consensus that has governed BC ever since.

BC Politics | fusangite |

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 |

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.

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