Skip to content

Canadian Politics - 3. page

Consciousness of Decline, the Afterlife of Oswald Spengler and My Exit From Anglo America

“There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

These words by Italian novelist Italo Calvino capture one of the most important superstructural elements in geopolitics, a phenomenon whose study was pioneered by Simon Fraser University’s Paul Dutton in his study of Charlemagne’s Empire, the first Holy Roman Empire: consciousness of decline.

Like all the truly great academics with whom I have studied (a small but not insignificant subset of the great intellectuals I have known), Dutton came to a profound knowledge of the whole world by studying one thing therein comprehensively. Dutton argued that while the Carolingian Empire, which lasted for only five generations, between 768 and 889 CE, was always a dodgy prospect from an economic and logistical perspective, a key factor in its decline was essentially immaterial (my fellow Marxists would likely distinguish it as superstructural but let’s not split that hair here).

Dutton’s argument was that Carolingian courtiers and aristocrats, especially after Charlemagne’s coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE, were intellectually shaped by an emergent historiography that sought to explain the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire between 395 and 554 CE. This caused an excessive vigilance in looking for signs of an incipient decline and fall in their present. What might be viewed as a setback or interregnum within a Chinese imperial historiography, which chronicles multiple periods of fragmentation followed by consolidation, was viewed, in the Carolingian world, as a harbinger of the end.

Dutton began his career with a doctoral dissertation on the role of dreams in the Carolingian court. One such dream of ultimate decline was the subject of an early essay of mine on the nature of hope. The apocryphal dream of Charlemagne was a descriptive composition written at the end of the empire and then backdated and retrojected to the year 813. The dream lives on today in literary form, forming the basis of JRR Tolkien’s “four ages” schema which structured Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.

But this apocryphal dream was one of many dreams, both apocryphal and real, that visited Carolingian courtiers and seemed to forebode the empire’s inevitable decline and fall. The Vision of Charlemagne (the name of the document in question), narrated imperial fragmentation as unidirectional and cherry-picked political events to do so. It depicted only centrifugal forces, when the Carolingian realms were divided, never centripetal ones, when kingdoms were consolidated and division undone.

Consciousness of decline, by conditioning political decisions with a sense of hopelessness and desperation, is not merely able to accelerate and intensify a material decline; it can, in my view, by itself, cause decline in the face of mere setbacks and the anxiety those setbacks produce. And the desperation caused by consciousness of decline is as or more likely to result in a state overplaying its hand, to prevent a temporary loss as it is to produce resignation and apathy. Usually, societies experiencing consciousness of decline will alternate between the two, following acts of grandiose risk-taking with periods of apathy and despair.

One society, so gripped, was the early twentieth century German Empire, a society overlapping and aspiring to the same territorial boundaries as the Carolingian Empire a thousand years before. That society had an eloquent spokesman for this consciousness, the highly influential authoritarian vitalist intellectual, Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s argument was that the Western civilization had reached the stage that the Roman civilization had reached at the beginning of the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar that brought about the fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.

Spengler argued, in the binaristic, catastrophist thinking emblematic of consciousness of decline, that because the West was on the same trajectory of Rome and proceeding down the same path, there was only one thing that could delay or perhaps even arrest its fall: the end of democracy and the rise of a charismatic Caesar-like authoritarian militarist leader who would institute “Caesarism.” Needless to say, Spengler’s beliefs conditioned the Nazi movement, not just indirectly through Mein Kampf, which it helped to inspire; it was a popular book among the intellectuals of German authoritarianism, inside and outside the Nazi Party.

Ultimately, the pessimistic desperation we associate with consciousness of decline, we can see in German society thereafter as both the Communists and Nazis saw the libertinism of the Weimar Republic as the equivalent of the putative “decadence” of the late Roman Republic. That desperation, the need to immediately stop the decline, cauterize the supposed wound did not just affect German election outcomes and street battles; it conditioned Hitler’s military strategy, especially in the later years of the war when periods of desperate brinksmanship were followed by abject despair and resignation, culminating in the wanton destruction of infrastructure and murder of civilian populations and then, finally, the murder-suicides of the Nazi leadership.

Ultimately, two material victors of the Second World War were states that, for all their flaws, lacked this consciousness of decline in the generation following the war. The USSR and USA did not begin to experience consciousness of decline until the 1970s and, whatever its profound flaws, the Reagan presidency was successful in dispelling this consciousness at least for a while.

It was not until the American victory over their Soviet rivals that consciousness of decline began creeping into America’s imperial court on a long-term basis. At the same time as the Third Way began downwardly adjusting the material and social expectations of America’s middle and working classes, a debate erupted between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington on the pages of the prestigious American conservative imperialist journal, Foreign Policy, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following the fall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in 1991, Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that Pax Americana was now global and permanent, that free market capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy had won the day and constituted the final phase in human evolution. But just as Spengler was no doubt reacting against Georg Hegel, who had made the same argument about the German state, and on whose thinking Fukuyama had based his book, Fukuyama’s claims elicited a neo-Spenglerian response.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argued that, contrary to Fukuyama’s theory, the world was about to become more divided and enter a period of multi-polar conflict among fundamentally different and irreconcilable “civilizations” and that America had but a short period of time before it became heir to the long undoing of the enemy sovereigns who had submitted to them.

Soon, Huntington predicted, America would be beset on all sides by civilizations with fundamentally different values, that would grow stronger, demographically and economically and soon outpace America and its vassals. The Chinese, Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Japanese, Indian: these civilizations could soon become existential threats to America. To survive, Huntington argued, America would need to retrench; it would need to consolidate its military resources in its core territory and vassal states, reinvigorate American industrial and energy production, fight strategic wars at its margins to slow the loss of territory, especially its loss to Muslim civilization. It would also need to retrench socially by reducing liberal pluralism, a key source of its weakness, and rediscover its identity as a Christian civilization.

Huntington included some case studies in his work. Whatever one may think of the man’s values, the predictive power of his model is evident as the histories of Turkey and Ukraine continue to unfold as he predicted three decades ago. But it is not events in Black Sea states that ultimately made Huntington’s thinking hegemonic among American foreign policy thinkers. It was, of course, the events of September 11th, 2001.

Whether it is the Trump movement’s focus on internal reindustrialization and energy extraction or the Democratic Party’s and Bush Administration’s proxy wars and military coups in the imperial periphery, America’s elite decision-makers are all gripped with consciousness of decline, of the neo-Spenglerian vision of Samuel Huntington, alternating between episodes of brinksmanship and shows of power and wallowing in self-indulgent despair and decadence.

Consciousness of decline is something that afflicts an empire, a civilization and its imperial culture. So naturally, this consciousness does not recognize the Great Lakes or forty-ninth parallel as any kind of barrier when it comes to America’s crankiest toady, Canada. The Canada-US border has been no barrier to the spread of this consciousness of decline, but that does not mean Canadian decline consciousness lacks a specifically Canadian inflection.

The long-term alliance between elites in the Liberal Party of Canada and in the Communist Party of China, dating back to Pierre Trudeau’s pilgrimages to the tomb of Norman Bethune means that Canadian decline consciousness is as likely to show up as supplication to Chinese power as it is to bellicosity in Ukraine.

Canada’s elites vacillate between desperately toadying to the rising power of China and the declining power of the US. Our country, which has never existed as anything other than a vassal state to one empire or another, now behaves towards the world’s great powers, be they India, China or the US, like a strapster, one of those small yappy dogs that runs up to you and decides, seemingly at random, to either bite, lick or urinate on you.

Certain that they cannot actually improve the lot of Canadians and that our country is in decline, Canadian political debate has been reduced to a blame game. We are a post-political state whose leaders, rather than trying to solve problems, either insist that the problems do not exist and that the people pointing them out are ungrateful liars or explain that the problem were caused by the other team who must now be punished for screwing things up.

So, although Canada is wealthier, more powerful and has the resources to turn things around, I am exiting North American society because it has become consumed by a consciousness of decline, because societies that believe they are in decline are scary, depressing and unpredictable places to live.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

After Twenty-Five Years, Is It Time for Second Look at Harm Reduction? (Part #2)

Forgetting the Centrality of Culture in Drug Use

In 1987, the CBC classic TV series Degrassi Junior High aired an episode about the principal character, Joey convincing his younger classmates that he was a drug dealer and selling them a random collection of vitamins and pain killers under the pretense that they were psychoactive recreational drugs. Much hilarity ensued as the characters consuming the fake drugs acted out in increasingly disinhibited and bizarre ways, based solely on their expectations of how young people on drugs are expected to act that they had learned from watching TV.

The episode was a tribute to a study conducted at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose results were published in Psychology Today in 1981. The psychology department had taken control of a campus pub and lured students into an experiment conducted under false pretenses. The study was marketed to the students as a study of young adult social behaviour but, in fact, it was a study of the scale of the placebo effect with respect to intoxicants. While some students were served drinks with the normal alcoholic content, others were served drinks with no alcohol. Their behaviour was almost indistinguishable. They behaved in increasingly disinhibited and sexually aggressive ways, the more they drank irrespective of the amount of alcohol they actually consumed, but correlated strongly to the number of drinks they had downed.

Brigham Young University, which observes stricter anti-substance use rules than the Mormon Church as a whole, prohibits its students from drinking tea and coffee, as well as alcohol and has succeeded in having the possession of electric kettles prohibited in every private apartment complex that wishes to rent to its students. Nevertheless, if you visit the campus ice cream parlour late at night, on Friday or Saturday, you find young adults behaving not that differently than the kids at the University of Washington. Because Mormons know how to enjoy a sugar high like no other people.

Expectations of the effects of a substance profoundly condition how humans experience the substance and how we behave after using it, especially in social contexts. And the main thing that forms those expectations is the culture in which we are situated.

Once upon a time, the fact that culture, as much or more than chemistry conditions the behaviour of intoxicated people was common knowledge, something to be joked about in the 1980s. But with the rise of crack, an admittedly more immediately intoxicating and addictive way of using cocaine than insufflation, society went a different route.
            Differences in cocaine use, abuse and addiction patterns between people living in housing projects and people working on Wall Street were increasingly explained chemically rather than socially. Crack was slightly chemically different from regular cocaine and, all other things being equal, did produce a shorter, more intense high. But wealthy cocaine users had been “free basing” cocaine (i.e. doing crack) for years already, with largely the same social and medical experiences as those snorting it.

Much more important, though, the Reagan Administration and the first Bush presidency, had ideological reasons for suggesting that physical differences, not social differences accounted for America’s diverging cocaine cultures.

The idea that black people were physically different from white people and that this was mirrored in the (actually quite minor) chemical differences between coca-leaf derivatives, brown-coloured crack rocks, and their lighter-coloured cousin, powder cocaine became the sole explanation for the major differences between the cocaine-using community on Wall Street and the one down the road in Harlem. The neoliberal austerity programs ravaging low-income communities and their cultural impact could be factored-out if we removed culture from how we analyze substance use and abuse, as could the massive windfall profits Reagan’s deregulation of the stock market were producing on Wall Street.

We became dumber about drugs in the 1980s and lost a good deal of common knowledge about the profound impact of culture in shaping how people feel and what they will do both to obtain drugs and once they are under their influence. Ultimately, the effects of a drug on a person are a complex dance of culture, neurology and chemistry. And if we factor any of those three things out, we make bad drug policy.

Some Historical Examples

In the nineteenth century, one of the reasons residential schools seemed like such a good idea to social reformers was the rise of the “drunken Indian” trope. Social reformers saw an epidemic of alcoholism ripping through Indigenous communities, destroying their social fabric and sought to act in a variety of ways. But the story was more complex.

While it is certainly true that the virgin soil epidemics, colonization and war had traumatized many people and communities, the reality was far more complex than just addiction caused by trauma. The places where drunkenness was viewed as a dangerous epidemic sweeping Indigenous communities were all places that had no prior history of alcohol use. Epidemics of drunkenness were generally not reported by Spanish colonizers in the Mexico Valley and Yucatan Peninsula were alcohol was already a popular intoxicant.

Instead, the places where epidemics of drunkenness were reported were in North America, where the use of intoxicants was based around very different traditions. In these regions, hallucinogenic plants were the preferred intoxicants and, aside from a small number of holy men and women who used them habitually, their use was generally confined to major bacchanalian festivals that took place just a few times a year, like the Huron/Wendat “going out of your head” festival.

These long term, stable societies were based around seasonal (often centred on the spring and fall wild mushroom harvesting seasons) binge use in which people used drugs in ways Mikhail Bakhtin associated with carnival. Pre-existing North American drug culture was based around habitual use by a small subset of the elite and seasonal binge use followed by weeks or months of abstinence.

When alcohol arrived, it was initially fitted into pre-existing consumption patterns before new cultures of drinking grew up. So, when Europeans encountered Indigenous alcohol use, it was when they witnessed a village-wide or confederacy-wide episode of binge-drinking, a multi-day bender that shut down the economy and society. Rather than seeing this as episodic, they, based on their own drinking cultures, assumed they were watching a horrifying decline of whole societies into drunkenness and abjection.

If there is one particular sort of drug whose consumption we can see as culturally conditioned, it would have to be central nervous system stimulants, such as coca, caffeine and amphetamines.

When colonists arrived in Peru, coca’s primary use was as an appetite suppressant and energy booster for people engaged in seasonal manual labour building imperial infrastructure. It is not simply that Andean peasants consumed coca at a lower molarity than one finds in cocaine, it was seen, in the heartland of the Inca Empire, as work drug of the peasant class. Its recreational use was off the radar, especially for commoners because of its strong association with repetitive toil.

And when coca first came on the scene in Victorian North America, its main uses were as an anaesthetic and as a tonic for stomach ailments and energy drink for the health conscious in beverages such as Coca Cola. Cocaine’s recreational use gradually spread outward from the medical profession as new cultures of elite use slowly, haltingly came into being over decades.

As supplies of coca declined following its criminalization in the 1920s and the destruction of the Dutch cocaine plantations in Indonesia during decolonization, America cast about for new powerful work drugs designed to improve concentration and productivity and adopted the Nazis’ strategy of synthesizing methamphetamine and other forms of speed as a cocaine alternative. Shockingly large portions of the American and Japanese populations were amphetamine users during the 1950s but no recreational culture developed because the drugs were associated with work.

The rise of amphetamines as primarily recreational drugs took place in the 1990s when youth cultures reinterpreted stimulants as disinhibiting, recreational and hedonistic, instead of focusing, study-oriented and ascetic. This happened largely by coincidence as the mass diagnosis of children with ADHD, which was treated with prescription amphetamines, coincided with the popularization of MDMA as a party drug. As young people discovered that their study drugs could function as a cheap MDMA alternative, drug cultures shifted. Now, a drug that had, for decades, made people more focused, diligent and self-controlled now made them flighty and hedonistic without a single atom of the actual drugs changing.

An interesting footnote: in Thailand, local methamphetamine is often mixed with caffeine to give it an extra kick, something that seems risible to North Americans who cannot understand why one would add a work drug to a fun drug.

I would be belabouring the point unnecessarily to provide further examples but those interested might want to look at the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony and the hot chocolate pub scene in early modern Europe for other examples.

The Worship of Self-Harm and Self-Harmers

I want to suggest that if we want to see drug-fueled madness, death and misery actually decline in our society, we need to think about both the cultures of drug use within our society and the cultural views of drugs in society at large.

Our society appears to be going through a secularized version of what was called the Athlete of God phenomenon in early Christianity. Flamboyant self-harmers, whether shooting fentanyl or chopping off their genitals are, on one hand, thought of as oracles, special people with special rights who cannot be obstructed on their special path. Yet, on the other hand, are permitted to live in states of terrible ill health, material deprivation and physical and psychological misery because this is their enlightened choice, a choice so profound that no non-oracle can understand it.

In other words, we have a double consciousness about drug users: they are concurrently infallible oracles with a special path to the truth and, on the other, people whose death and misery we are bending over backwards to facilitate.

We have also effectively made drug-user a full-time job, a vocation that people can publicly proclaim and receive applause and the chorus of “You’re so brave!” that anyone engaged in flamboyant acts of self-harm receives from our mainstream media and community leaders.

I do not have the solution to this problem. The best I can do is describe the problem better. If there is one thing we are learning in the twenty-first century, it is that we need to pay more attention to the writing of Antonio Gramsci and other who remind us that the state is not very powerful by itself, relative to the institutions and culture of the society it seeks to govern. Because I do not believe that, by itself, the state can do much to arrest this tailspin. What we need is a social movement that rejects the progressive turn of worshipping self-harm and self-harmers without returning to the prohibitionist ethos whose failure produced the original harm reduction movement.

Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

After Twenty-Five Years, Is It Time for Second Look at Harm Reduction (Part #1)

If you are just here for the actual article, skip ahead of this first section and go to section two, Denormalization Revisited. If you are already familiar with my writing on denormalization and caste-making, skip ahead to the Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars.

Retention Fatigue or Why Drug Policy Now?

There is no doubt that many reading this blog have been faithful readers since before 2020, before I departed from the progressive consensus on gender identity. Since then, my reading audience has shifted and I have had to think carefully about how to manage this shift. Not only do I continue to lose readers who identify with the contemporary left, I keep gaining readers who are identified (often against their will) with the contemporary right. And there is no sign that this shift process is going to end any time soon.

Furthermore, as I continue to exit the left social scene, even as I grow more committed to some kind of Eco-Marxism as my personal politics, distance is allowing me to gain perspective on issues where I have not publicly questioned the orthodoxies of the left. When I discover another issue where I am now out of step with the left, I am faced with a practical dilemma: if I write about my thoughts, how many of my old readers will I lose? And how many new readers will I gain?

For that reason, I have been cautious about raising yet another issue on which I am out of accord with progressives, always worried that my next unorthodox opinion will be the final straw for someone and that I will lose another reader, another comrade or another friend.

But after three years of living like this, I am done. I am sick to death of walking on eggshells, wondering if my next unorthodox view will produce another cancelation campaign that gets me another blizzard of hate mail from people who were my friends until five seconds ago and gets my loyal friends harassed and threatened. I cannot handle this slow process of cancelation continuing indefinitely. For months now, I have actually been exaggerating how many conservative views and conservative associates I have just so that the people who are on the fence about canceling me will just get the fuck on with it. So now, fuck it! Drugs!

Denormalization Revisited

Two years into the Covid epidemic, I departed from the increasingly untenable progressive consensus concerning Covid vaccines, not with respect to their efficacy but rather the public policies concerning vaccination in my article, “Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority.”

In the fall of 2021, we learned that vaccine passes were not effectively limiting the spread of Omicron and later Covid variants because, while vaccination typically made Covid symptoms less severe, sometimes saving lives and preventing permanent disability, it did not have a significant impact on transmissibility. Governments’ reactions to this news were perverse, to say the least.

Rather than abandoning VaxPasses, our federal and provincial governments rolled out more restrictive policies, further abridging the assembly and mobility rights of unvaccinated or insufficiently vaccinated Canadians. When questioned about the efficacy of these policies in limiting the spread of Covid, our governments were disturbingly frank, largely admitting that these measures’ primary purpose was to stigmatize and punish those who continued to refuse the vaccines. Our leaders seemed eerily okay with just admitting the passes were a cudgel, designed to coerce recalcitrant holdouts.

Except that I refused to accept that this was even what was going on. What anyone with the most basic knowledge of the social science of public health knows is that by de-normalizing something, like smoking, for instance, you actually make that thing more popular with people who are already marginalized, who are already stigmatized and understood to be either at society’s margins or entirely outside society. And, as anyone familiar with the social determinants of health could have predicted, the Vaxpasses intensified and solidified both vaccine hesitancy and opposition to the passes themselves, ultimately culminating in the Freedom Convoy.

Had the government actually wished to promote vaccination among people of faith, manual labourers, rural Canadians and non-Indigenous racialized Canadians, it would have involved conservative faith leaders, popular rural politicians, grassroots labour leaders and small business owners in forestry, mining and oil, in making tailored appeals to vaccine hesitant populations.

But that was not, I believe, their agenda. It was instead, to create a group of pestilent “deplorables,” to engage in caste-making.

The Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars

Canadian cities and those of America’s Blue State Pacific Coast are experiencing not just increases but increasing rates of increase in drug addiction, overdose deaths, homelessness and street violence, an increasing portion of which is disorganized violence of which individuals experiencing addiction and mental health struggles are both an ever-increasing proportion of both perpetrators and victims.

It is now twenty-five years since my city, Vancouver, adopted its Four Pillars policy on drugs as part of our decision to be one of the first cities in the Western Hemisphere to embrace harm reduction as the basis of our drug policy. I was one of the thousands of Vancouverites who chalked this up as a victory. Now, we thought, things will start turning around in the Downtown Eastside. At last, homelessness, prostitution, addiction, disease and misery will stop increasing and enter a slow, steady decline as drug users come out of the shadows and have their problems dealt with in the full light of day

Although these increases have a clear statistical correlation to de jure and de facto decriminalization of both soft and hard drugs, the response of progressives has been that we are just not making drugs legal, accessible and plentiful enough. In my city, purchasing and possession is no longer illegal for any drug, nor is dealing, provided one keeps one’s personal inventory low. Opinion leaders in my community are now advocating that the government get into the business of selling cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs and, when it comes to the most addictive and toxic drugs, my government is literally giving them away.

The thinking of the people backing an amplification of our already-failed policies is based on three main fallacies: (a) that the number of drug users is essentially fixed, that public policy cannot change the number of people who want to use drugs or who do use them, (b) that simply increasing the purity, affordability and accessibility of the drug supply actually is “harm reduction,” and (c) that drug use is not strongly conditioned by material and cultural factors.

To review, the Four Pillars policy Vancouver city council adopted to great fanfare in 1998 were (1) Prevention, (2) Treatment, (3) Harm Reduction and (4) Enforcement. This tetrad of policy reforms were based on a pre-existing model which showed promising results in Australia, Switzerland and Germany in the 1990s. But did Vancouver, in fact, follow the four pillars approach?

Prevention?

Prevention, i.e. policies designed to prevent people from falling into problematic substance use, were of two main types: material and educational. Material prevention policies in the places where the Four Pillars had succeeded included the provision of housing and other basic material supports to people who might otherwise become homeless or enter into survival sex work, given that homelessness, especially street homelessness and prostitution, especially survival prostitution create powerful incentives for habitual hard drug use in order to survive in these extremely damaging and challenging circumstances.

Instead, the provincial government, which provides these services to Vancouverites undertook a series of austerity programs in 1993, 1997 and 2001 to reduce income supports for housing and food. Following a 10% cut in 1993, income assistance rates in British Columbia were capped at 1993 levels for the next twenty-four years, not even permitting increases to keep pace with inflation.

As all federal and nearly all new provincial investment in affordable housing ended in 1993 and did not resume for a decade or more, the effective supply of housing continued to contract, especially as, when provincial investment did start again in the late 00s, it was increasingly directed to what is called “supportive housing,” of which there were essentially two types: (a) housing projects composed entirely of hard drug users and (b) housing projects that summarily evicted tenants for drug use, drug possession, overnight guests, etc.

Furthermore, the “shelter allowance” for those on income assistance remained capped at $375.00 per month from 1993 to 2023. Still dire but not as dire, the minimum wage remained capped at $8.00/hour from 2001 to 2011 and did not exceed $15/hour until 2021. Given that state-subsidized housing was so scarce as to be nigh-impossible to obtain for all but those in the most extreme straits, low-income people at risk of losing their housing saw their incomes decline relative to inflation while housing costs often increased at double the overall inflation rate.

In other words, government policies with respect to poverty did not merely fail to prevent substance abuse and addiction; they actively facilitated it.

Of course, we older folks do not immediately think of poverty when we hear the word “prevention.” We remember the school assemblies, the tone-deaf public service announcements, the awkward classes with our high school guidance counselors. Prevention, for us, conjures up the “scared straight,” “just say no,” and “this is your brain on drugs” after school specials and TV ads, designed to make kids frightened to try drugs, especially the harder stuff.

These traditional campaigns are denormalization campaigns. And that means that they produce perverse effects on people who already consider themselves to be marginalized. Amy Salmon and Fred Bass, the health scientists who made the empirical case studied anti-smoking de-normalization campaigns and found that they functioned like highly effective cigarette adds for young, low-income Indigenous women and girls.

De-normalization continues to be our main form of above-ground public “prevention” campaign but these campaigns are taking place in the dual context of an increasing portion of the population being economically marginalized and an increasing portion of the population receiving strong incentives and “identifying into” identities understood to be marginal, e.g. “trans,” “queer,” etc.

And it appears that both groups, both those materially marginalized by structural factors and those adopting boutique identities they believe make them marginalized, are experiencing the perverse effects of de-normalization and becoming more attracted to street drugs of all kinds. To an ever-increasing proportion of our population, our anti-drug propaganda is experienced as ads for the very drugs that we are supposedly discouraging.

Treatment?

Supposedly, there were going to be a whole lot more in the way of treatment facilities, approaches and services by now. But, as with housing and income, the reality has been escalating austerity and chronic labour shortages, compounded, most recently, by BC’s decision to be the only province in Canada that has refused to hire back its unvaccinated health care workers and, instead, to stand by as the BC College of Nurses and other healthcare syndical regulators proceed with internal witch hunts to deprive unvaccinated members of their professional accreditation, as though losing their jobs was not enough.

When it comes to the medically adjacent caring professions, like social work, the story has been even bleaker. There were mass layoffs of social workers in 1993, 1997 and 2001. And, when it comes to psychiatrists and psychologists, there are almost none remaining in the public system. I, myself, have been trying to obtain a psychiatrist through the public system for the past thirty-six months and have yet to have my first appointment.

The waiting list for detox and drug rehabilitation beds lengthens by the month and those that are available are often situated in neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, directly adjacent to the most active drug distribution and consumption scenes in the entire country.

Today, Vancouver has an “assessment centre,” to which one must be referred by a doctor, where one signs up to apply to be allowed to see a psychiatrist. If your case is urgent, the wait to see a social worker there is still two months; if it is not urgent, it is more like four to six. If you convince the social worker you are in serious distress, you wait another month or two to be interviewed by a psychiatrist. And even if you get the go-ahead, it is no one’s job but yours to somehow find you a psychiatrist who remains in the public system who is still taking clients and, if you do find one, your job to get them a referral not just from the centre but from the physician who referred you to the centre.

In other words, treatment options have declined significantly and remain out of reach for all but the most persistent and sophisticated, whereas you’re always just a phone call or taxi ride away from a baggie of heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, lorazepam or methamphetamine any hour of the day or night.

Harm Reduction?

The term “harm reduction” refers to the reduction in harms associated with the purchase of an illegal product, such as conflict with the law, adulteration or poisoning of said product, the need to pay increased costs because criminalization has increased prices, the spread of infection through unsafe consumption practices, and the use of drugs with unsafe equipment or in unsafe settings.

In this area, we experienced early and obvious gains. Our safe injection site did reduce the transmission of AIDS and hepatitis. The addition of a supervised site from crack use also appeared to produce tangible public health dividends generally.

But we have not seen commensurable improvements in public health once the state moved from creating supervised spaces and began to enlarge its own role in drug distribution while looking the other way as non-profit organizations, left-wing political parties and for-profit dealers became more public and ambitious in handing out drugs. Instead, the deterioration of the whole scene has sped up.

To help us understand why this is the case, it may be helpful to begin with Ricky from Trailer Park Boys in the episode where he trains school children to steal barbecues as part of their “Junior Achievers” after school program for aspiring entrepreneurs, “it’s the same whether you’re breaking the law or not. Profit, capital. Supply and command.” Or let me introduce this idea another way: if Canadians are really excited about an issue, the first thing they decide is that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to it.

You will notice that people who are excited about liquefied natural gas (LNG) and believe that fracking more of it will help us save the planet make the following argument: for every joule worth of LNG we produce and export, the country to which we send it will reduce the amount of coal they burn by the same amount. They assert that the quantity of fossil fuels that are burned in the world is a fixed amount and that no matter what the price is or how large or small the supply is, the exact same amount will be burned.

But of course that is not how the market for any commodity works. If you supply the same amount of coal and simply increase the amount of LNG, prices for both commodities will fall and the total amount of fossil fuels consumed will increase. This is the first thing you learn in a first-year economic class. It is called “the Law of Supply and Demand.” If you make something cheaper, more plentiful and easier to obtain, the more of it will be consumed.

This idea that increasing the amount of legal fentanyl or cocaine on the market will lead to precisely commensurate reductions in illegal use is insane. It is stupid. It is contradicted by the evidence we receive every month as overdose deaths continue to climb and it is contradicted by everything basic economics predicts.

Drug users do not have a fixed quantity of their drug(s) of choice they need or desire in a day, after which there are satiated. The more cocaine you do, the more you want. The cheaper the price, the more you can do. The easier to access, the more you can do. The state is actually promoting the consumption of illegal fentanyl by providing free or low-cost fentanyl. Doing so depresses fentanyl prices both by flooding the market and by fixing a low cost with which for-profit dealers must compete.

Enforcement?

In the original design of the policy, new approaches to enforcement were supposed to focus policing on drug production and distribution points, to target major dealers and producers, especially of drugs that can be synthesized in urban settings. In other words, it was premised on the idea that restricted supply was a goal in the policy.

But now that we have adopted increased supply rather than restricted supply as our approach, the police are rudderless in this area, left with a legacy policy functioning in direct opposition to current approaches.

Why would anyone expect to see outcomes in Vancouver in the twenty-first century based on the Four Pillars, if only half of one pillar is even standing? We are not practicing the Four Pillars. We are not even practicing harm reduction. We are just throwing more drugs and easier, faster access to drugs into a rising tide of human misery.

Culture: the Mastodon in the Room

But missing in all of this is a much bigger factor, something that had already walled-off the Swiss, German and, more recently, Portuguese approaches to drug policy, even as we began to consider reform in the 1990s: culture. How you interact with a drug is strongly conditioned by the larger cultural context of your society and by the more local subcultural context of your drug use community.

Anglo America does not have the same culture as Portugal, Germany or Switzerland. How one engages with drugs is about something more than the material and public policy factors I laid out above. But that is for the second part of this short series, where we look at distinctive experience of substance use in a young city shaped by colonization.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

The Omnicide and the Level Boss: Thoughts On A Weekend With Deep Green Resistance

On the last weekend of August, I gathered with a group of two dozen extraordinary people. All of us are members of Deep Green Resistance. Like pretty much every group I join, I like DGR’s analysis a lot but am not sold on their eschaton, kind of like my relationship to Marxism and Christianity. I don’t think we actually have the capacity to make any plans about really big, complicated things, like, for instance the end of the world.

One of the things I like most about DGR is that Derrick Jensen is the Saint Jerome of environmental thought; they have turned a maelstrom of factional arguments and a disorganized, variegated body of writing into a coherent synthesis. Back in the 80s and 90s, during the first generation of Green politics, there were four (as opposed to zero, in the present) intellectual movements that vied to become the dominant Green philosophy: Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology and Social Ecology. Or rather, Bioregionalists were happy to work with any of the other folks and everyone else was having a fight.

Those were heady intellectual times, times that I, in my youthful exuberance, helped to shut down. Perhaps, had those philosophical debates continued into the present, there might have been some intellectual guardrails, some moral scaffolding to prevent the BC and German Green Parties from running brute squads for and handing sacks of cash to the fossil fuel industry. Oh well…

Like Saint Jerome and his associates, DGR has recognized where these philosophies actually reinforce each other and agree, where the power of their analysis has revealed some more predictive and relevant than others. And, instead of engaging in the massive cut-and-paste operation Jerome did, Jensen and his collaborators’ books synthesize these ideas into a single authorial voice as well. There is Dave Foreman’s biocentrism from Deep Ecology, the close connections between male domination of women and societies’ treatment of the land from Ecofeminism, and the belief in valley-scale society from Bioregionalism. And, fortunately, no sign of Social Ecology (our Gospel of Thomas, I guess).

DGR also has the distinction of being the first left organization to be canceled due to Genderwang, way back in 2012, and rendering their campaigns subject to sabotage by genderist-captured environmental groups, who would rather side with the corporations than tolerate non-Woke environmentalists succeeding at saving endangered ecosystems. Seeing the danger these folks pose, Jensen’s co-leader and author, Lierre Keith, spun off the Women’s Liberation Front, now at the forefront of fighting for the rights of incarcerated women.

Anyway, I encountered some amazing people doing amazing work. But, because of the authoritarian turn we are experiencing, many are secret members who, if exposed as DGR members, would lose their jobs, friends and connections to the mainstream of the movement, not because DGR advocates the total destruction of industrial civilization but because they do not believe women have penises.

Those who had come out not as members but merely as associates of members told stories of losing 60-80% of their organization’s volunteers, their funding and almost all of their mainstream media access. And that is not to mention the personal toll. Activists from around the Global North recounted the social carnage that surrounded them, most of their long-term relationships, friends, coworkers, romantic partners: gone.

It was there that I realized two very important things: (1) no one, no matter how brilliant, no matter how organized, has figured out how to either withdraw from or to confront rising authoritarianism that stops the authoritarians continuing to harass and sabotage them (after all, Keith was punched in the face on live video by ANTIFA last fall and not a single word of condemnation was uttered by anyone on the mainstream left) and (2) the first priority of any rational socialist or environmentalist should be to fight genderwang, not, because of facilitating prison rape, mass-sterilizing autistics, practicing FGM, cheering for conversion rape, beating women in the street and the host of other associated atrocities it entails, but because it is the means by which authoritarianism is being enabled. The point is that until you defeat the authoritarians, the only politics that exists is defeating the authoritarians.

Getting politics back is the prize we will win only if we defeat them.

To believe that politics can be carried out when people’s speech, association and assembly rights are being annihilated is simply naïve. Recall that in the early 1990s we were all surprised to learn what the actual political views were of people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn actually were. That is because as long as the USSR existed, as long as any authoritarian regime runs, there was only one political identity an opposition politician could have: dissident.

The authoritarians that ran the USSR and its client states conflated all opposition to party orthodoxy as capitalist stoogery, and contrary to what you hear these days, identities really are social constructions but actual social constructions, not personal fantasies, i.e. you are who society decides you are. You can’t identify out of the social construction in which you are placed.

In Wokeistans like Canada, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, it does not actually matter what you think your political identity is. Everyone at the event who was an “out” DGR member was, like me, understood by the hegemonic ideology to be a member of the “far right,” along with Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand and Noam Chomsky.

Until this state of affairs changes, our first priority must be to dismantle the power of the authoritarians who have captured our political parties, news media, law enforcement and educational institutions, so as to make politics possible again. Until that time, society will remain in a post-political state and all projects that assemble broad coalitions that challenge the establishment will be impossible to form. Our only hope of that being possible is to form a coalition whose sole basis of unity is anti-authoritarianism.

In other words, we have to punch our way out of this corner.

This bums me out, obviously because I think there are some rather urgent matters that I have to place on the back burner to deal with this atrocious state of affairs. It is not like any part of our stressed global ecosystems has the luxury of time. This is, after all, The Omnicide. And that is not to say I will not keep doing environmental activism; I just have to recognize that society has placed stringent limits on those activities that I cannot just break out of by an act of will.

I have come to think of this political moment in videogame terms: you want to get up to Level Six where you get back to battling Royal Dutch Shell and its many minions but unfortunately, this is Level Five, the Woke level, where you have to defeat the Woke level boss so you can get back to the fight you came here to have. Of course, you should pick off any oil industry enemies you can on this level but recognize that most are going to be out of range until you defeat the exploding milk demon.

Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Suicide of Richard Bilkszto and the Erasure of Harriet Tubman

In the days since the suicide of Richard Bilkszto, Canada’s public square has continued down its dark path. There have been no voices coming from the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) sector within the management consulting industry expressing condemnation, regret or even concern for the abuse and harassment that drove Bilkszto to suicide. Nor have voices from within Woke civil society or its political class shown leadership in calling for a re-evaluation of the practices that destroyed his life, the workplace harassment, the social shunning, the public smearing, what the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police, called “Zersetzung.”

Instead, our national broadcaster is running stories suggesting that the real harm is that people are questioning the DEI sector and that people having a bad opinion of this industry is a far worse harm than an individual being tormented to death over a period of years. And state-funded activist groups have adopted the talking points developed by the first Bush presidency to defend Clarence Thomas for his sexual harassment of Anita Hill calling criticisms of the DEI trainer who repeatedly berated Bilkszto with false accusations a “lynching.”

Jonathan Kay and other Canadian critics of DEI and the Wokeness it slings are doing a good job of pointing out the ghoulish nature of a media, political class and civil society that is spending its time dancing on Bilkszto’s grave rather than looking in the mirror. In fact, as podcaster Russell Barton has suggested, it seems that the goal of these Zersetzung campaigns is, in fact, the target’s suicide.

Lost in this maelstrom is the actual dispute that led to Bilkszto’s harassment and ultimate death, an increasingly contested question for Canadians: the politics of race in Canada’s past, especially the nineteenth century. The original attack on Bilkszto took place during a session in which DEI trainer Kiki Ojo Thompson made a false historical claim, that Canada’s past was more racist than that of the United States and that Canada was implicated in and actively facilitated the practice of the chattel slavery of black people in the nineteenth century.

I grew up in a black family and many of the stories around our dinner table were not just of racially-motivated discrimination and violence our ancestors experienced in the nineteenth century but of discrimination and violence people at the table had, themselves experienced in the past and present. I would never suggest that Canada was a country free of racism at any time.

But equally important in the stories that were told around our dining room table were those of the struggle to escape slavery, segregation and inequality in America by traveling north and west. My maternal grandfather had migrated first north from Boston to Halifax and then West, to Winnipeg, Prince Albert and finally, Vancouver, to start a new life in a less racist place, without laws that singled-out black people for special persecution. Our family’s participation in the Great Migration was part our larger involvement in the freedom struggle.

My great grandfather’s people were escaped slaves who escaped from the Fugitive Slave Law onto the Sioux Reservation and then migrated across the border to Canada. Our collective memory, damaged by a lack of education, financial stability and the traditions of stable family systems, all underpinned by the legacy of slavery,

That means, unfortunately, that we do not know whether John Armstrong Howard’s people were among those spirited out of the reach of the American federal government by Harriet Tubman, one of the greatest heroes Canada has ever known.

Tubman was a key leader of a system known as the Underground Railroad, a network of safehouses throughout the United States that would hide escaped slaves help bring them to Canada. Tubman risked life and limb; she risked herself being re-enslaved by making multiple trips into slaveholding America and personally leading people like my ancestors to freedom.

The Barack Obama speech that changed the course of the 2008 US Presidential election, “Yes we can,” made reference to those courageous former slaves and abolitionists as epitomizing the fight for freedom.

But in the “narrative” offered by the DEI industry, which is populated not by historians or sociologists but by management consultants, Tubman cannot exist. Or if she existed, she was patsy, a fool, a chump leading slaves not to freedom but to an even more racist hellhole than the one they escaped. Bilkszto’s sin, fundamentally, was in asking a historical question in the implied question, “how do you explain Harriet Tubman?”

What people seem to fail to understand is that, just as genderwang’s apologists are typically selected from groups most harmed by genderwang, i.e. homosexuals and young women, the selection of racialized spokespeople for DEI functions as a smokescreen for its profoundly white supremacist ideology.

DEI’s re-narration of history, in which time is divided between the present, when the first good white people ever to have existed are heroically confronting their sinful past, and that benighted past in which all white people were evil, ignorant murderous racists. Because, the core assumption of DEI is not that gays and lesbians, racialized people, women and the working class fought for and gained freedoms but rather that one day, today, white people decided to be good and gave women and minorities their rights.

At the core of Wokeness is the assumption that white people are amoral supermen and the sole authors of history. Everyone else is a bystander or a victim, a powerless patsy or an ignorant chump. There is no room for Tubman in the DEI “narrative” because she is a black woman who made history, who freed people, who led them to a better life in the past. And, for all its own racism, its own lack of respect for democracy, Victorian Canada welcomed Tubman and applauded her work.

That is why DEI consultants are all over the various Pride months, weeks and days (in BC 71 of the 365 days in our calendar are an official celebration of one minority sexual or gender identity or another) but they are curiously silent during Black History Month because, fundamentally, the belief that black people have made history contradicts the central claim on which the Wokeness on which their industry relies is premised.

The Trudeau government has plenty of heritage money to invest in commemorating the mistreatment of racial and sexual minorities in the past, the church of Tubman attended, Canada’s first black church, founded in 1814, and from which she raised funds from Canadian abolitionists to fund her expeditions, is in danger of falling into disrepair. Designated by a simple, humble plaque, repairs are left to local congregants. Our Woke federal government does not want to draw attention to moments in the past when black and white Canadians came together to fight racism and to recognize the leadership of a black woman in that fight.

Richard Bilkszto’s suicide is an atrocity, a stain on our society. But what got him singled-out for persecution should worry us very much too: the erasure of Harriet Tubman and the heroes of the Underground Railroad from our history.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

Canada Is And Must Be More Than Its Past

I am a Canadian; I have been a Christian; I am a Marxist; I have been a Green. These forms of identity have something in common: they are concurrently descriptive and aspirational. In other words, they are descriptive of communities in multiple contradictory ways.

Each of these groups refers to a community that exists in the present day that has a variegated and complex historical track record. Canadians, as a people, have done some crappy things. We disenfranchised and forcibly re-educated indigenous people. We fought against liberalism and democracy in the American Revolution and War of 1812. We interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. We hanged Louis Riel and stamped out his movement. We turned away Jewish refugees trying to escape the Third Reich.

Even if one dodges some responsibility by taking refuge in the fact that the USSR, Warsaw Pact and Communist China can be described as “state capitalist” regimes or “dictatorships of the commissar class,” the fact is that, globally, Marxists have historically cheered for authoritarian regimes and looked the other way when Mao, Stalin, Deng, etc. committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Marxism.

Christians, the oldest community I have been associated with have committed plenty of atrocities too, from the murderous ruthlessness of the Albigensian Crusade to Charlemagne’s massacres in the name of Christianizing Saxony to the conquest of the New World by the sword and the sanctification of African slavery based on the Church’s theory of “just war.” And then of course, there are the multi-generational pedophile grooming rings that have been given cover by a number of Christian denominations.

Even in their short history, the Green Party has, globally, done a number of shameful things from leading the charge to bomb Serbia with depleted uranium in the 1990s, to voting through massive fracking and fossil fuel increases during their three years in government here in BC, to the German Greens current support for the mass eviction of Bavarian villagers so that their villages can be turned into open pit coal mines right now.

But that is not the only way to define these communities.

Many people identify with these communities because they agree with the precepts laid down in their canonical texts. The New Testament, the Communist Manifesto, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Small is Beautiful: these are all great texts that describe a way of ordering society and solving moral questions that are compelling. Also, there are many great tributes to and interpretations of these texts, like the City of God and Imperialism is the Highest Stage of Capitalism, etc. Furthermore, there are great orators who have made compelling, inspiring speeches based on these communities’ principles; and then there are the communities themselves. There are lots of superb groups of people who congregate, meet and organize around these ideas even though their execution beyond the scale of a small group either never happens or goes terribly wrong.

But the most important way people identify as part of communities is based on what that community could be. “Make America great again,” the slogan of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump epitomizes that ethos, that if one identifies, aspirationally with a community, it is not merely a way of experiencing loyalty, hope and solidarity. It is also a way of criticizing the errors your community is making in the present by describing a future that does not contain them. And this kind of loyalty as criticism appeals across all sorts of communities, whether it is Roman Catholic traditionalists praying for the conversion of the pope or Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom lectureporn, “American isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore. But it could be.”

This last example, like “make American great again,” is also descriptive of another aspirational aspect of community identity, the idealization of a half-imagined past, or the presentation of a collage of past events that speak to the best angels of the community. While some of these curated pasts simply point to an ahistorical imaginary idyll, a self-congratulatory fiction under which a community chooses to bury the errors and atrocities of the past, not all such aspirational nostalgia is necessarily dishonest. Sometimes a community simply chooses to shine a spotlight on the moments in its history when it rose to the occasion over those that it failed to; as long as those moments of failure are not denied or blotted out. A community should focus on the moments when it overcame prejudice over those when it failed to; a community should focus on the moments when it made a shared sacrifice to achieve an important collective goal over the times it failed in those efforts.

A final aspect of aspirational identity that merits discussion is what I have termed “incarnational.” Based on the work of Mormon theologian and philosopher James Faucloner, I am using an idea I have previously used to argue against denunciations of “strategic voting.” It is an idea that resonates with my own experience of Pearsonian nationalism growing up as a CBC listener in the 1980s. Back then, I asserted that Canada only existed four hours a day, the four hours of every weekday you could hear Peter Gzowski hosing Morningside on CBC Radio, that Canada only seemed real, only truly existed while Gzowski was describing it; without his voice announcing it into being, it was little more than a legal fiction.

When it comes to any successful big, shared idea of community, one way of understanding being a Canadian, a Marxist, a Christian is that these communities do not exist at all points in space-time or even most; they only exist when they are being ritually celebrated, that one is only Canadian when one is singing O Canada, or celebrating Canada Day, cheering on some CFL team in the Grey Cup, that there is no global Marxist community except on May Day or at a communist meeting or on a pilgrimage to Havana, that Christ’s self-sacrifice, as Faulconer’s argument originally went, is real, not in the historical sense but instead, wherever in space-time the Eucharist is enacted.

It is my view that, of the five different ways we can be part of and assert the existence of big communities with broad membership, communities that have made and will continue to make lots of mistakes, by virtue of their breadth and complexity, the incarnational is most underrated in importance. In other words, much of the work and experience of a nationalism, a world religion a political movement of millions, are the moments of celebration and mutual recognition that occur within it. And the main way to judge whether these movements are pro-social is not to examine their grandiose plans for the future or the trail of mistakes stretching behind them into the past but instead to just how they are shaping the relationships of those participating in them in the present.

It is very clear that the nationalism of Justin Trudeau and the White Consciousness Movement, at this moment, in this country is making all of us into worse people, more isolated, more suspicious, more divided, more alienated, more disconnected, angrier and more confused. We need to fashion a way of being Canadians that functions as a countervailing force, that is collaborative, genuinely welcoming and inclusive, less hierarchical, more participatory.

I was inspired to put off my article about the Waffle movement and publish this because of an experience I had this weekend, attending the convention of the BC Conservative Party. Although I came away from the experience convinced that I am not a conservative and that, while I have many allies and friends among conservatives, they are not my tribe. Nevertheless, the weekend began with a simple yet profound experience: they began the convention not with a land acknowledgement but with the singing of O Canada.

First of all, the irony was not lost on me of a group of mostly rural Anglo Canadian social conservatives in the West belting out an anthem their movement had opposed replacing God Save the Queen, as atheistic, anti-monarchy social engineering by the liberals of the Laurentian elite half a century ago.

But more importantly, it felt so different than a land acknowledgement, which is an inherently hierarchical act of intermediation. A single individual stands at the centre of the room acting as an intermediating officiant in the relationship between an indigenous nation and a group of meeting attendees. Like a Roman Catholic priest administering the Eucharist, the land acknowledger has a hierarchical relationship to the crowd and an immaterial relationship to the nation (not just the nation in the present but concurrently through all of space-time). And its job is to emphasize the distance the acknowledger is covering and the incommensurability of the realities and communities on either side.

The Tory meeting opener, on the hand, was also easily comparable to a religious ritual, in this case more like a Quaker meeting or a small Pentecostal congregation breaking into an acapella hymn, everyone belting out the words slightly off-key from everyone else, slightly out-of-sync but all making a big, joyful noise together. That ritual was about building connection, sharing experience, dismantling hierarchy, reminding people they were starting with common ground, common knowledge.

The ephemeral effect of this was very important, as the room was full of long-simmering resentments and novel suspicions as new people came into the organization, occupying and contesting space, creating new upsets and confusion. But it really did appear that the anthem helped, as individuals being pushed out of leadership positions or forced to share them with new recruits took time present these occurrences as things they had long desired and the fulfilment of their past work and dedication.

And I cannot help but contrast this to how a meeting or a training session goes after a land acknowledgement, how co-workers behave after being forced to do a “privilege walk” to show how socially distant they supposedly are from one another.

It is my view that this imagined community we call Canada and the people with whom we share it will treat us better if we go back to celebrating it and them, if we return to symbols and celebrations that are as broadly shared and universally recognized as possible. Doing that will not change who Canadians have been; it will not make our national project seem any clearer or less absurd; it will not heal all wounds or solve all problems. But I do believe that the Canada we ritually enact, the Canada in which we live in the present and the future Canada we aspire to be will get better.

I am not simply saying that Canada is more than its past; in my view, it must be.

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

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

The Slow Decay of Pearsonian Nationalism 1993-2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Post-Harper Liberals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoser Nationalism and the Third Northwest Rebellion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Does Not Have To Be This Way

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

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

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

Big Dates in Canadian History

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Harper’s 1815 Nationalism

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

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

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

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

Pearsonian Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Curdling of Pearsonian Nationalism

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

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

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

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

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the climate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BC Politics Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Canadian Politics Has Been Reduced To an Intramural Petroleum Industry Dispute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |