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True Dreams of Robben Island: Dreams, Conspiracy Theories and the Public Memory of Nelson Mandela

Truth, Reconciliation and the Creation of Saint Nelson
Following the last South African election, in which the African National Congress finally completed its multi-decade project of squandering its parliamentary majority, I have been commenting and watching the country more closely and not just because it is a more popular subject of dinner conversation in Dar Es Salaam than it likely is back in Vancouver.

Even before the election, I had been writing about the fundamental unsustainability of the deal hammered-out between the African National Congress and the South African National Party because of my views on what scholars euphemistically call “transitional justice” in Canada and my belief that our “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) was not the unalloyed good it was imagined to be. I argue, you may recall, that the reason we mistakenly view our commission as an unalloyed good is that we have the same mistaken view of the original South African TRC.

When I was a child in the early 80s, we used to go trick-or-treating on Hallowe’en carrying little boxes for UNICEF in which we collected pennies, or larger denomination coins if we found ourselves at one of those overly liberal houses that was giving out boxes of raisins instead of real candy. But as the global anti-Apartheid movement became a bigger deal in my home town, folks at my local Unitarian-Universalist Church made us little cardboard boxes, the same shape and size as the UNICEF boxes but for the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU).

Late in PW Botha’s presidency, under increasing pressure from the wave of democratization sweeping through Eastern Europe and mounting boycott and sanction campaigns, the South African regime’s stance towards the African National Congress began to soften and the international anti-Apartheid movement sought new, positive ways to highlight their support for the country’s main opposition movement. While the ANC’s offices were in Zambia and its president had been Oliver Tambo since 1967, the movement, at Tambo’s instigation developed a new international public relations strategy.

In this strategy, Tambo’s leadership was effaced in the public square and the true leader of the ANC and the global anti-Apartheid movement was presented as Nelson Mandela, the former president of the ANC who had been imprisoned and whom no one had seen in decades. And so, in July 1988, the movement staged seventieth birthday celebrations for Mandela all over the world, in community halls and stadiums and everything in between. They were a great success. Performers and activists genuflected to grainy black and white photos and footage of Mandela prior to his incarceration, the imposing, gun-toting burly communist guerilla leader and former boxer of the early 1960s.

This campaign to create a new public image for the ANC and its supporters around the world, one focused on Mandela, the elderly political prisoner, was a great success and led to Mandela making public appearances in 1989 and being released from prison the following year.

Another Important Dream
In the late 80s, my high school friends and I had a number of dreams that strongly influenced our politics, life choices and the increasingly distinctive lexicon of our small community. Oscar’s dream about the zombie invasion at Church’s Fried Chicken had been important. So was my sugar refinery zombie invasion dream. But then there were the Dreams of Steve, an extraordinary set of dreams and visions our friend kept a dream journal by his bed to record. And it is on the basis of this journal that I present: the Nelson Mandela dream.

Steve was fifteen years old and still in high school when the new, shorter, white-haired, peaceful-seeming, almost beatific Mandela began making appearances on the world stage in 1989. And in his dream, he learned that Mandela would be getting out of prison to celebrate his seventy-first birthday and that Steve had been chosen to host the affair in the small apartment in a three-storey walk-up, on Vine Street in Southwest Vancouver, that he shared with his mother.

Steve is one of the world’s great raconteurs and has a talent for offering up only the details most necessary to understand the shape of a story, like those economical paintings in which the artist renders an image using the fewest brush strokes possible. So, the narrative of the dream is awfully short:

“Once people showed up, everything was going just fine, until Nelson started doing his card tricks. And then, for an encore, he started passing little red plastic combs through his head. Then the police showed up and tear-gassed the sofa.”

But what Steve found most disconcerting in his evaluation of the dream was this: the Nelson Mandela who did the card tricks was the 1960s Mandela not the 1980s Mandela. He was a huge, broad-shouldered, tough man in a suit with a gun, the communist bomber and implacable foe of the National Party.

I have reflected on that dream many times in the decades since. Because somehow it captured something I could not fully express, until my pal David returned from his most recent trip to South Africa.

The 2024 South African Election and Its Aftermath
Earlier this year, South Africa held an election in which the ANC lost its majority, not just thanks to the corrupt and shambolic leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa but because the flaws inherent in the deal between the ANC and the National Party, between Mandela and, Botha’s successor, FW De Klerk, made South Africa’s current political crisis inevitable by kicking the resolution of major structural problems down the road rather than resolving them at the time.

Because the agreement was structured by the contemporaneous global embrace of neoliberalism that was taking place in the 1990s, not only did it immunize the vast majority of those who had terrorized, tortured and murdered black dissidents; it placed off limits any transfers of wealth or lands from the white population either to the black population or to the state. Not only did the deal radically constrain the state’s powers of expropriation and redistribution; it actually took land away from the black population. By decommissioning the Bantustans, the fake, internationally unrecognized countries like Ciskei, Transkei and Kwazulu, ruled by local strongman stooges for the South African government, there actually came to be less land in the country controlled by the black majority.

Further constrained by capital flight and emigration by high income professionals, black-ruled South Africa had limited ability to use social programs or compensated expropriation to meaningfully transfer wealth to the black majority, whose land and labour had been stolen and exploited for decades. Effectively, the most politically viable strategy for converting black political power into black economic power naturally became government corruption, favouritism and self-dealing. By leaving almost 100% of the economic power with whites and almost 100% of the political power with blacks, the “compromise” reached by Mandela and de Klerk set South Africa on an inevitable course towards corruption, and via, corruption, to the return of tribalism.

The ANC lost its majority due to two main factors: first, the resurgence of actual socialists within the ANC demanding land reform and, the ultimate exit of that faction under the leadership of Julius Malema into a party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which began winning seats in the 2014 election. Second, the tribalization of the ANC spoils system and growing intraparty conflicts between the Xhosa majority and the Zulus, ultimately leading to former president Jacob Zuma’s exit and creation of another pro-land reform spinoff party appealing also to more economically moderate Zulus who felt that the ANC had become a Xhosa party and peeled 15% of the vote off the ANC.

Without a parliamentary majority, the ANC faced an impossible choice. A partnership with Malema and/or Zuma would almost certainly have entailed Ramaphosa’s resignation and replacement with a leader more acceptable to the pro-land reform parties and, more importantly, would almost certainly cause an immediate wave of capital flight, emigration and unrest in response to land redistribution, not to mention possible punishment by the World Trade Organization, World Bank and independent bond-rating agencies.

So, the ANC went into coalition with the Democratic Alliance, the main party of the white South African minority, a party committed to neoliberal economics and opposed to land reform. Now, not only do white South Africans continue to hold disproportionate economic power, for the first time since 1999, they also hold disproportionate political power, with white South Africans opposed to redistributive policies controlling the ministries in charge of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, immigration, infrastructure, public works and environment.

While this deal may have saved the ANC in the short term, it will almost certainly lead to the continued decline of the ANC’s popularity and a growing sympathy for Malema’s explicitly racialist, black nationalist take on what ails South Africa.

The Nelson Mandela Conspiracy Theory
It is in this specific political context, of the formation of South Africa’s first black   -white coalition government in thirty years, that a new conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire, first among South Africans but now among African nationalists everywhere: the real Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s and the man who made peace with FW de Klerk was an imposter.

After his latest business trip to South Africa, my friend David reported the widespread popularity of this theory, backed by claims that the government has prohibited Mandela’s genetic information being compared against those of his descendants, that Winnie Mandela’s fall from power was due to her efforts to expose the imposter and that her atrocities were made-up, that access to Mandela by his old comrades was radically restricted during his presidency and a host of others.

Obviously, I think those claims, as literal claims, are hogwash.

But I have to say that the moment I heard the conspiracy theory, I felt like it was true on a deeper, more profound level than the literal or the historical. And I began to weep. The Marxist who believed that his people would never truly be free without redistributing the land, without nationalizing the mines, without taking control of the factories, did die in that prison.

And that, I think, is why Steve’s dream has stuck with me all these years because what made it uncanny was the irreconcilability of the two Mandelas, the way it referenced without articulating all the dreams the anti-Apartheid movement nurtured that were discarded in the peace deal with de Klerk, losses we never allowed ourselves to acknowledge and therefore were unable to grieve.

From the 1920s to the 1990s, the former German colony of Namibia had lived under South African rule, its small German colonial population placed in charge of a vast and diverse black population. In the 1980s, when Sam Nujoma, the leader of SWAPO (the Southwest African People’s Organization), Namibia’s equivalent of the ANC, was asked when his people would achieve freedom and independence from South Africa, he answered “when President Mandela gives them to us.”

Nujoma’s statement speaks to a global phenomenon of shifting our agency and aspirations from our home countries into the South African freedom struggle. As the Cold War wound down, socialists faced disappointment after disappointment, defeat after defeat, on the world stage. As our own domestic horizon of possibilities grew ever narrower and supposedly anti-capitalist regimes around the world were increasingly not just defeated but utterly discredited, we vested more and more of our hopes and more and more of our idealism in the anti-Apartheid movement, the ANC and the person of Nelson Mandela.

And so it was that his total capitulation to neoliberalism and his abandonment of the ANC’s socialist ambitions between 1990 and 1994 narrowed the horizon of possibility of socialists the world over. The total victory of Blairism within the social democratic parties of the Global North over the course of that decade would have been more of a fight had Mandela, our mythical hero, not made these capitulations acceptable through our overinvestment in the international personality cult Tambo had created.

It may not be true. But the world in which we live today, the one in which the left failed and has been replaced by a monstrosity shambling around in its flayed skin, functions as though the real Nelson Mandela died in a cell on Robben Island in 1987 and a doppleganger took his place.

Miscellaneous Articles Race | fusangite |

The Last Good Year: The Politics of Time Travel in 2024

In 1997, Canadian literary icon Pierre Berton published 1967: The Last Good Year. It was not his best work. It made him seem old, stuck in the past, yearning for a simpler time that probably never existed, seen through the rose-tinted bifocals of a once-great man of letters. The idea that one can reach back in time to find some past moment of pristine fairness or decency has been a popular one for as long as people have been conscious of social change over time.

In Classical Greece, this idea that we live in a fundamentally inferior order was already well-established and beautifully articulated in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which described a succession of ages, from Golden, to Silver, to Bronze to the Age of Heroes, ending with the Iron Age in which he lived.

This idea of somehow returning to a past age of decency has long been a staple of traditionalist and conservative politics. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump channeled that idea with their use of “Make America Great Again” as their political rallying cry. But, as I have observed before, as progressive time consciousness has continued to collapse under the weight of its contradictions and the messy complexities of actual history, this kind of discourse has ceased to be monopolized by movements calling themselves conservative or traditional.

Indigenous neo-traditionalism, the ideology within which the Canadian judiciary effectively forces indigenous people desiring land reform to operate, has received a lot of cultural patronage, despite it being a family of beliefs held by a minority of indigenous people, and concentrated among those with strong financial and political incentives to espouse it e.g. indigenous academics, state-patronized entertainers and artists, and members of pre-colonial aristocratic lineages whom the courts have declared are the sole legitimate representatives of indigenous people’s interests on off-reserve unceded territory.

Nostalgia, traditionalism, neo-traditionalism: these are forces that have been with us for some time. But I want to suggest that a new kind of traditionalist discourse of history is emerging as a global force: Pierre Berton’s idea of a “last good year.”

I was disappointed by Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson’s conversation. I am sure that if I had to sit across from Putin, who has certainly personally killed people with his hands and has ordered the deaths of thousands, I would have come off as a cowardly sycophant too. But then I have never claimed to be competent to interview a man like Putin. Putin, for his part, seemed unable to understand that he was dealing with a submissive, supportive interviewer and engaged in all sorts of antics to gratuitously dominate Carlson, to show who was boss every second of the interview, no matter how that might play to the home audience in the West.

But the interview did have a highlight or two. Putin observed that it seems as though everyone has decided on some arbitrary year in the past when the international borders were fair. He then wryly added that if we were going to play that game, he was picking 1648, the year that the Cossacks overran Ukraine, seized it from Poland and established the Hetmanate.

While Putin spoke half tongue in cheek, the reality is that a new historical consciousness is sweeping through various social movements, who take this idea of moving millions of people around and stripping them of their political rights quite seriously if it can transport it back to the Last Good Year.

1648: The Year of Orthodox Slavic Unity and Heroism
While Putin clearly believes that Russia should be a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state, he also clearly believes it should be one led by Eastern Orthodox Slavs like himself. This is not an uncommon or critical belief for a pluralistic order. All pluralism is structured by the theory of pluralism held by one of the groups in society more than another. The so-called “post-national” Canada is, after all, animated not by some kind of neutral compromise theory of social organization but by a minority who have converted to a novel American space religion during the Third Great Awakening.

For this reason, even as he sells off pieces of the Amur region to the Chinese government, he remains focused extending his territorial hegemony over Orthodox Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians. Reincorporating the Russian exclave of Transneustria in Moldova and the Donbas and Crimean regions of Ukraine have extended into multi-decade projects this year, as has his relentless domination of Belarus through his satrap Aleksandr Lukashenko.

For Putin, the foundation of Russian greatness is clearly Orthodox Slavic unity. And so, it is not so much the territory of 1648 that he seeks to recapture; Russia was smaller then, not yet an empire, still struggling to challenge Swedish hegemony in the Baltic and eliminate the Khanates of Northeast Asia. What matters to him is the triumphant march of the Cossacks into Kiev, the way the Ukrainians welcomed their liberators who established a united territory encompassing present-day Moldova and Ukraine, under Russian patronage.

1763: The Year of the Royal Proclamation
Although “land acknowledgements” have become a cultural practice that has spread as a ritual act into the United States of America, the most repeated aspects of their ritual speech is based on a legal doctrine developed and propounded by Canadian courts. The term “unceded territory,” for most of the history of these ceremonial speeches was not about all North American land but specific land that had not been ceded by treaty.

Much of the East Coast of North America had been ceded by treaty by 1763. While we might have criticisms of the treaties with the Wampanoag, Narragansett, the Powhatan Confederacy, the Mi’kmaq, the Abenaki, etc. that they were signed under duress, poorly understood, not fully honoured—the list of legitimate grievances goes on—treaties were signed and land was ceded.

But, as the demography of North America became increasingly lopsided in favour of the English settlers, and following the cession of Eastern Louisiana to the British following France and Spain losing the Seven Years War, English settlers began moving into the new territories without any effort to conclude treaties. This had already been a problem was what had actually touched off the global war in 1754 with George Washington and Iroquois ambassador Tanacharison’s fateful confrontation with the French and their indigenous allies in Ohio Country.

Between 1763 and 1775, the British Empire rolled out a series of laws designed to calm tensions in its New World colonies and also to pay down the massive war debt through new taxes and fees. While we hear a lot about the Hat Act and the Stamp Act, we hear rather less about the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the first document to put forward the legal doctrine of “unceded territory.” The Proclamation only applied to the traditional territories of indigenous peoples who had no pre-existing treaty with the British.

One of the first things the new US government did, following their successful revolution was to tear-up the Proclamation. They would pursue treaties case-by-case, when they suited the United States.

But to the #Landback movement, 1763 is the last good year, the last fair year. People descended from African, European or Asian settlers living west of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New France and the Thirteen Colonies should be stripped of their democratic and property rights and either shelter in place with the consent of the local hereditary indigenous aristocrats or be repatriated to… wherever their family was living in 1763, I suppose. Because 1763 was that brief shining moment when land was fairly governed and distributed, somehow.

To deal with the fact that much of North America, with hunter-gatherer or village-based societies, ravaged by Virgin Soil epidemics of Eurasian disease, their populations decimated did not have the state capacity in 1763 to govern their vast territories in any kind of recognizable way, I have noticed that people who believe in this particular Last Good Year theory like circulating a map of indigenous language groups via social media, typically with the comment “we never learned about these nations in school,” falsely implying that our state education system has been covering up the existence of large, organized pre-colonial polities in places like Northern Saskatchewan and the Nevada Desert.

Unlike Putin’s “last good year,” which at least is based on accurate maps and a certain level of demographic consistency, the restoration of 1763 North America is, as I said in my essay on the #Landback movement neither possible nor desirable and is actually an impossibilist obstacle to the just and urgent need to reform Canada’s land tenure system and uplift rural indigenous people from poverty.

1947: Palestine’s Last Good Year
The only map I have spent more time fruitlessly arguing about on Facebook the past year is the map of British Mandatory Palestine in 1947. #BDS with its “right of return” doctrine takes a similar position to the #Landback movement: that we just need to move everyone in Israel-Palestine to wherever their family was living in 1947 because 1947 is the last year the borders in the region were fair. We would send the Sephardim to North Africa, the Ashkenazi to Eastern Europe, the Mizrahi to Baghdad and Cairo… oh wait… that might be a problem. Some of the Mizrahi were the descendants of the Jews of Israel, Judea and the Herodian state. Where to send them?

The map is often accompanied by the claim that Palestine has always been a country and will soon be a country again. This is an absolutely bananas fantasy, easily disproven by the most cursory reading of history. British Mandatory Palestine was a colony ruled from London by Englishmen. It was founded over the vehement objections of the ancestors of the Palestinians who strongly supported the creation of a state called “Greater Syria” which would have incorporated present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Golan and the West Bank.

The decision to create Lebanon and Israel was taken not by residents of the region but by British and French negotiators at meetings held in Paris. France wished to create a country with a slim Roman Catholic majority, a group of Arabs in the Mount Lebanon region south of Beirut that the French had been patronizing since the days of Charlemagne. Although Beirut was a mostly Sunni Arab city, its annexation to the new Christian country of Lebanon was seen as necessary to make it more economically dynamic.

The British government of David Lloyd George was informed by some eccentric eschatological beliefs of held by the Prime Minister. He believed that the Zionist movement that had been buying up scrub land from the Ottoman Empire and settling European Jews in present-day Israel was a sign of the impending eschaton when the Jews would gather in the former territory of Israel and Judah and then be attacked by a neighbouring country from “the North.” (The “Tribes of the North” reading of the Book of Revelation has long informed Christian philo-Semitism and its role in the Reagan Administration was documented in Fred Knellman’s Reagan, God and the Bomb.)

But it also had practical reasons behind it. Arthur Balfour, at one time considered Lloyd George’s likely successor had promised to accelerate Ashkenazi Jewish migration and land acquisition if the Zionist movement supported the British during the Great War.

But let us be clear: neither Palestine nor Lebanon had ever been an independent state and they did not become so in 1921 when they were created by the stroke of a pen on another continent.

The ancestors of the Palestinians boycotted every election the British held in the territory, refused to co-govern a country they deemed an illegitimate fiction. And despite their differences with the Zionist newcomers to the region, both Arabs and Jews waged intermittent guerilla wars against the colonial government of Palestine from 1921 to 1948, when it was forced to withdraw thanks to their combined campaigns of bombing and terrorism.

The idea there was something fair about these borders or the government of this colonially occupied non-state seems to have welled-up out of nowhere.

634: The Last Good Year in the Levant
Sometimes if a stupid and unproductive idea becomes popular enough, people cease countering it with reasonable ideas, especially when reasonable positions have increasing political costs. The totally inappropriate application of the idea of “aboriginal” or “indigenous” to Palestinian Arabs and the conflation of North American colonialism of indigenous peoples and the social order of Israel and the territories it occupies has permitted a very stupid debate to take place.

Palestinian Arabs are not an indigenous people. Of course they mixed with local Greek, Jewish, Samaritan and other populations when they arrived in large numbers in the Levant during the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate in 634 but that doesn’t make them indigenous in the sense of being an “original” people, like, for instance, the Maori of New Zealand. Also, unlike Polynesian and Amerindian colonized populations, their societies were not decimated (literally) by the arrival of new diseases. There were no virgin soil epidemics and no catastrophic population declines.

Unlike most supporters of the idea of Zionism, as espoused by people like Theodore Hertzl and Shimon Peres, I am sympathetic to the idea that if there is any arrangement to compare Israel-Palestine to, it is late-phase South African apartheid under PW Botha. Gaza and the West Bank are not unlike the townships and Bantustans of 1980s South Africa, in that they are populated by the residents of fake countries ruled by strongman dictators and who are required to use passes to enter Israel, the real country, where many of their jobs are but where they have no citizenship rights. Certainly, there are Arab citizens of Israel who do enjoy full democratic rights but they do not comprise the majority of Arabs contained in the territory Israel occupies.

The problem is that unlike Ciskei, Transkei and Kwazulu in the 1980s, Israel’s Bantustans and townships are shrinking, because Israeli politics has become a spoils system. It has become nigh-impossible to assemble sixty-one votes in the Knesset needed to form a government, without the support of the parties of land-hungry settlers.

Between the need to justify this constant encroachment on Palestinian territory and the eviction of Palestinian Arabs from their land, and because the discourse of indigeneity has been so effectively abused by Palestine solidarity movement, we are now hearing a mirror discourse: that Jews as the true indigenous people of the region should kick out those evil settler-colonialist Arabs and end their 1390-year “occupation.”

It is not just Kahanists and supporters of the Greater Israel fantasy pushing this. Where I am seeing it is from pragmatic fans Likud’s territorial ambitions and apologists for their punitive expedition to Gaza. Why should the Gazans have rights? Have meaningful citizenship? Have land? One moment tongue in cheek, one moment deadly serious, the assertion of Jewish indigeneity has become increasingly powerful rhetorically in this intellectual and humanitarian race to the bottom.

If we can go back to 1947, why not 634? If we can go back to 1763, why not 1634? Why is one year fairer than the other? These Last Good Year arguments are a morass of historical revisionism, submerged ethnonationalism, post-political rhetoric and outright fantasy. But we can’t cherry-pick which one we dismantle. They all have to go.

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

The Ugly Symbiosis Between New Democrats and Church Burners

Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.

And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.

When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.

They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.

But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.

Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.

And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.

Why is this?

I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.

Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.

There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.

Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.

The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.

My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.

In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.

People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Segregationists Who Burn Churches Are Who They Have Always Been

Unpopular authoritarian regimes often intimidate their subjects into faking popular enthusiasm and support through extortion, coercion and intimidation. But when such regimes are weak, the best they can do is to intimidate their subjects into silence, at least. This is the reality of modern Canada, a weak government, led by weak, authoritarian men, who lack the power to terrorize the populace into a fearful ovation and must settle for browbeating the majority into silence.

I grew up in a black family in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the stories from my mother, aunts and uncles, as well as veterans of the US Civil Rights movement like folk singer Leon Bibb, friend of the great Paul Robeson, at the dining room table. One of Leon’s most evocative stories was of the first time he witnessed a lynching on a countryside drive with his father on the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s. He talked about how after witnessing the swinging corpse of a young black man, a silence descended over their car and followed him and his father into their house when they returned home.

Unable to compel ordinary, decent Canadian people into the kind of terrorized ovation a great authoritarian like Joseph Stalin might elicit in support of his government’s most depraved policies, Woke Canada must settle for the grudging silence of its non-white Christian population as its governments proceed with a set of bizarre and perverse policies opposed, by the vast majority of the Canadian public, a majority that has been cowed by relentless smears, threats and intimidation.

Yet, as the Kaufman report, just released by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, states, when anonymized by pollsters, Canadians of all races, religions and cultures share a profound skepticism of the articles of faith of Woke Canada. While I do not share the report’s analysis about structural racism (indeed, this article is premised on the opposite belief), the data about Canadian public opinion, on which it is based, is indisputable. And it is no coincidence that the strategy we see being used to shut down opposition to the establishment is based on the one Woke lie that has been successfully sold to Canadians, according to the report: that there are mass graves of hitherto-unidentified bodies of First Nations children near abandoned residential schools.

Last week, a surveillance in camera in Saskatchewan captured a striking image. A Roman Catholic Church whose congregants are primarily of African, Middle Eastern and Filipino origin, in Regina, was the site of Canada’s ninety-seventh church arson since the start of 2020. But it is not the flames emanating from the gasoline poured into the church that was most striking. The camera captured an image of a young, white man, wearing a white hood performing the arson.

Having grown up as I did, such an image is an especially chilling one for me. We descendants of slaves know of the long tradition of white men in white hoods burning the churches of racialized people.

The Klan Is Not An Organization But A Property of American History
What historians call the First Ku Klux Klan, which flourished from 1865-89, burned the churches of their former slaves throughout the South during the violent process euphemistically called “Redemption,” whereby black voters were intimidated and murdered to allow white majority governments to seize power and disenfranchise black citizens. The Klan favoured the churches because they were typically the sole or primary place black people could congregate. Lacking community infrastructure and real estate, black churches played a special role as political meeting hall, community centre and place of worship.

So the irregular Confederate militias torched these buildings and often the people inside to intimidate black people, to let them know that the simple act of assembling on their own terms would not be tolerated.

That original Klan died out after it had outlived its purpose and restored Confederate rule to the South. But following the release and smash success of America’s first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which the original KKK were portrayed as the heroes, those responsible for America’s reunification and true ethnogenesis with the inauguration of the Jim Crow system. A new Klan formed, this time with broader interests, as a mass national organization that opposed Slavic, Jewish and Catholic immigration, as well as supporting ongoing racial segregation and its expansion to the national level.

In reality, the Second Ku Klux Klan was created as an insurance and mail fraud scheme and fizzled after a series of criminal prosecutions but, in its day, it nationalized tactics previously confined to the South. Black farmers in Upstate New York were lynched and mosques, synagogues, and orthodox churches became targets of arson by young, white-hooded white men.

My mother, aunts and uncles all remember the church bombings and burnings of the Civil Rights Era, after the Klan had reassembled, this time as the paramilitary of the White Citizens’ Council movement. The Third Ku Klux Klan was not so much an independent organization but the paramilitary wing of White Citizens’ Councils, its violence functioning as a kind of initiation process to vet ambitious young white men the Councils installed in leadership positions in state-level Democratic Parties to resist the national party’s efforts to integrate the party and end segregation and disenfranchisement.

This time, the churches were targeted not just because they had remained the primary civil spaces of black people in the South but because the Civil Rights Movement had decided its public-facing leadership should be churchmen like Martin Luther King Jr. and church activists like Rosa Parks.

That Klan fizzled-out when the last miscegenation laws were repealed and avowed segregationists like George Wallace recanted their white supremacy in the early 1980s. While individuals like David Duke continued to grab the odd headline by claiming to lead an organization that barely existed, the reality is that like its two previous incarnations, the Klan fizzled-out as an organization.

The thesis of this essay is that the Klan is that it is not so much an organization as a set of reactions inherent to the Anglo American racial system. Until the premises and structures underpinning this system change in profound and fundamental, ways, we will be overshadowed by the Once and Future Klan.

Four Years of Church-Burnings in Canada
In 2020, young white people began donning white hoods and setting fire to racialized people’s churches all over Canada in response to a controversy over whether there were undiscovered mass graves of indigenous children near former residential schools. Shockingly, despite nearly one hundreds arsons having been committed since this controversy erupted, only one arsonist has been arrested or charged.

Kathleen Panek, a young white woman who wore a conventional black hood, rather than a KKK-style face-covering white hood was identified through camera footage, charged, prosecuted and convicted. While her lawyer claimed that she was under the influence of drugs and upset with her boyfriends, Panek has remained closed-lipped about her motives for destroying a Surrey church whose congregants are Egyptian immigrants. 

So the only clues we have had about the other arsonists came from their social media supporters, who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Woke. The constituency least supportive of the burnings, which originally targeted indigenous Christian churches exclusively, before branching out to include Filipino, Coptic and other non-white urban congregations, were indigenous people. All factions of indigenous civil society, from the most neo-traditional and eco-conscious to the biggest pro-business, pro-development folks roundly condemned the burnings and begged the arsonists to stop.

This has had no effect. Woke, white Canadians continue to applaud or remain silent as the most sacred buildings of constituencies with whom they purport to sympathize are destroyed. Just four days ago, a Conservative MP seeking a unanimous motion of condemnation of the church burnings was shouted down by NDP and Liberal MPs refusing to grant consent.

Churches of indigenous people, churches of immigrants, churches of racialized people—their burnings have either been celebrated or Wokes have averted their gaze. No condemnations have emanated from supposedly “anti-hate” organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. They are busy sharing lists with Antifa so that when these non-white people of faith object to government policy, they can be more efficiently doxed and threatened.

I have found it telling that Woke activists were eager to label the participants in the Freedom Convoy as Klansmen and suggest, without the slightest evidence that they are led by the KKK. That is because fundamental to Wokeness is its use of projection as a rhetorical tactic to sow confusion in its adversaries.

There is one group of white supremacist, white-hooded, church-burning segregationists in Canada and we know who they and their friends are. Only one social movement is fighting to racially segregate university campuses and classes, the Wokes. Only one social movement is asserting that whites are intellectually superior to non-whites (the euphemism they use is “logocentric”); the reason non-whites just can’t do math as well and can’t even show up on time is that whites are uniquely logocentric, according to the ideology propounded by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Only one movement in Canada is claiming that history is made exclusively by whites and that non-whites are just bystanders and victims.

As we have seen in the fiasco at Harvard, Wokes are not interested in appointing competent, intelligent minority tokens to represent them in their elite-level diversity projects. They want to see the least competent, the least qualified, the most dependent, the most precarious non-whites in token positions. Because that is all they expect of non-whites: inferiority.

Think of all of the brilliant black female academics who have out-published and out-taught Claudine Gay a hundredfold, the formidable black and Asian women of American politics who could out-organize and out-debate Kamala Harris in their sleep. That’s because, if a minority token goes off-script, their fall needs to be immediate and precipitous; so one seeks out tokens with the fewest accomplishments and the most skeletons.

Going off-script is, after all, highly consequential, when Wokes wield so much of their power through acts of extorted ventriloquism. As Cherokee author Thomas King observed, nothing upsets white liberals more than one not being “the Indian [they] had in mind.”

When Canadian Labour Congress officials assert that lesbians, women’s rights and child protection activists are white supremacists controlled by evil, shadowy American money, leavened by “Russian disinformation,” they need reality to resemble, at least superficially, their outrageous claims. And that means keeping down, keeping silent non-white Christians who are deeply concerned about the capture of our schools by genderwang and deeply racist teachings, asserting their children’s inherent racial inferiority as a host of disciplines and skills.

Indigenous Christians, immigrant Christians, non-white Christians need to be intimidated, to be kept silent, lest they contradict the white supremacist “narrative” of the Wokes, that they love all this tokenization, DEI racism and genderwang. And one of the ways you do that is a four-year campaign of burning their churches.

Does this mean someone is orchestrating the burnings? No. But I do think that we can now assume that the enthusiasm the Canadian establishment has for punishing the perpetrators is about the same as that of Dixie’s establishment during the last round, half a century ago. Those wielding the hammer, the commissar class are not trying too hard to stop this because they’re not sure that it’s wrong.

Am I asserting that there is a conspiracy here? No. Am I even asserting that Wokes are aware that they are white supremacists, that their whole tearful colonizer act is a giant racist humblebrag? No. What I am saying is that: I don’t care who the Wokes think they are; I don’t care how they self-identify, who they believe they are or what they think they’re doing any more than I care about the inner life of the supporters of the first three Klans.

What matters is this: if white people are putting on white hoods and burning the churches of non-whites who need to be kept in line to be kept out of politics and civil society, it doesn’t matter how they identify. If people fighting to segregate schools and propound doctrines of non-white inferiority, we already know who they are.

They are the Ku Klux Klan.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Jackie Robinson, Barry Goldwater and the Geomagnetic Reversal

Since the Earth first formed, its magnetic field has re-polarized several times. The North Pole has become the South Pole and vice versa. Sometimes these transitions have taken as long as ten thousand years; some have taken place in less than a hundred. All of these transitions, by the standard of geologic time, have taken place in the blink of God’s eye. Suddenly, south is north and all the molecules start realigning based on the new magnetic field structuring the matter and energy of the earth’s systems.

I want to suggest that, since the emergence of what is called the Second Party System, this is essentially how American politics functions, that it does, in human time, what the earth does in geological time: re-polarizes. US politics and its coalitions are highly dynamic, as dynamic as any in the world. But, especially since the introduction of the Primary System in the 1920s, this political dynamism has been coupled with a bipolar system. And even before the 1920s, for the previous century and a half, the emergence of a new party always led to the collapse of an old one.

This combination of a locked-in two-party dynamic with a highly dynamic politics constantly making and unmaking big, unwieldy coalitions means that, unless legally restructured from the bottom up, the United States is fated to undergo a series of magnetic reversals. And it is my view that we are at the crescendo of such a reversal today.

Furthermore, the way that news media have changed throughout the Anglosphere white settler states, the repercussions of this realignment, globally, are even greater than during the Cold War.

For those less acquainted with US history than I, let me take a moment to describe some other re-polarizations. Beginning in 1932 and culminating in 1960, the Democratic Party went from being the party of white supremacy, backed by the Solid South, running on a national platform of segregation and the maintenance of Jim Crow disenfranchisement laws to becoming the party of black America, steadily losing white majority segregationist states from 1944 until 1980 when not a single state in Dixie backed them.

Intimately related to this process, the Republican Party began actively courting southern segregationists in 1960, running against the Civil Rights Act in the 1964 election under Barry Goldwater, with the assistance of floor-crossing segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, and adopting Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, to actively solicit the votes of white supremacists.

In the 1970s, under the leadership of Gerald Ford, the Republican Party became, explicitly the party of neoliberalism, moving its progressive wing, which had long favoured greater state regulation of business, since the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, to the periphery. Free marketers eclipsed old school right-progressives and politicians changed their stripes accordingly, with long-time progressives like George H W Bush becoming evangelists of neoliberalism.

From 1932 until 1992, the Democrats had been the party of the New Deal, the Welfare State, having previously been the party of deregulation in the nineteenth century. But in 1992, they shouldered past the Republicans on their right and from 1994-2000 enacted an aggressive program of deregulation, free trade and social program cuts. Having previously been the party of Catholics, Blacks, Latinos and the white working class, the four most socially conservative groups in the country, the post-Clinton Democrats coupled their newfound love of free markets with a muscular social liberalism, focusing on aggressive secularization and hot button social issues like gay marriage.

Consequently, Republicans became aggressive in playing to Catholics and the white working class (even in the early twenty-first century, they feared actively recruiting racialized constituencies while trying to keep the last of the segregationist southerners on board.) First, they focused exclusively on social issues, abortion, gay marriage, the coerced secularization of private business, etc.

But with the ascent of Donald Trump, advised by Steve Bannon, this appeal to working class Americans of all stripes broadened. And, for the first time since the Clinton Administration ratified it, Americans were given the chance to vote against NAFTA in 2016, a hated agreement that had ravaged so many industrial towns, tearing the fabric out of communities and leaving industrial town after industrial town looking like a Bruce Springsteen song.

This brought more dividends than even imagined, for the GOP, in the form of working class voters of all racial backgrounds. Despite the largely cosmetic changes to NAFTA, working class voters continue to pour into the Republican Party.

Of course, everyone who has a progressive between 1992 and the present knows the Democrats’ counter-move: to vigorously, assiduously recruit upper-income, educated white suburbanites who have traditionally voted Republican but are disgusted not so much by the party’s policies but by its adoption of the most boorish, proletarian cultural affectations. Correcting the spelling of working class people and sneering at their belief that they could do research or form political opinions on their own became a staple of the party that had once propounded its core doctrine as the common sense and decency of the working class.

This is starting to generate its own set of problems for the GOP: in primarily white regions of the country, they are now at a disadvantage in special elections and other low-turnout contests, because the voter suppression laws could not name a colour and could only suppress people’s votes based on class. So, because Democrats are now richer and better-educated than Republicans in growing swaths of the country, the very laws Republicans enacted in the twentieth century to suppress Democratic voting is now suppressing their own vote, as they grow increasingly dependent on the white working class.

And, how long before, mere lip service to respecting working class people turns into policies that could materially benefit them at the expense of the Mitch McConnells of the world?

Curiously, possibly because of its incredibly incompetent and maladroit style from top to bottom, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign actually told us poignant and ironic story about this, a powerful piece of American history when they aggressively popularized video footage of Jackie Robinson and his cadre showing up at the 1964 Republican convention to denounce the nomination of Goldwater and the recruitment of Thurmond.

Robinson, one of the most important media surrogates for liberal, respectable black Americans, was an American icon, the much-beloved baseball player, the first black person to play on a major league team. Throughout the 1950s, he had been an active member of the GOP, “the party of Lincoln,” when American blacks were leaning Democratic but split between the main parties. He exerted an important influence on the Eisenhower regime in its reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and in the passage of the first national Civil Rights Act in 1957.

Robinson passionately expressed his absolute incredulity that the party that had freed the slaves would back an avowed segregationist for senate and an opponent of the Civil Rights Act for the presidency.

The Clinton campaign showed us this video as part of their sheepdog operation of snapping up that last handful of GOP-voting white, upper middle class, educated suburban liberals in the outskirts of Detroit, Philadelphia and Raleigh, an operation that was, even then, producing diminishing returns.

Looking back, in hindsight, as a reluctant Clinton supporter at the time, I now see how the video actually illustrates the opposite of what she hoped it would. Rather than focusing on equivalencies they wished us to draw between Goldwater and Trump, I am focusing on Robinson, a man living in the past, a man unable to accept the realignment he had been living through since 1932. To him, the Republican Party was not a dynamic, ever-changing force but something of a fixed essence that transcended the ravages of time.

The problem was not that the Republicans had changed but that Robinson had not. He was at the wrong convention. He should have been down the road at the Democratic convention, shepherding the floor vote on the Voting Rights Act and defusing the conflict between the two Mississippi convention delegations.

Unfortunately, since the Jon Stewart-ization of progressive news in the Anglosphere, this distinctively American polarity is now culturally if not politically enveloping society in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The political obsessions of Canadian progressives are those Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah tell them to have. They are worried about militarized police forces, abortion laws, gun control and host of other issues, where the US and Canada are in very different situations with respect to our problems, our laws and the possible solutions. Unconcerned about the Trudeau government’s massive expansion of guest worker programs, they whitter on about needing to support illegal immigrants to the US. Unconcerned about the fake college shakedown we are running on the children of the global middle class, indebting families for generations, they are focused on American student loan forgiveness.

For this reason, the American realignment has come to Canada, not because of structural features of Canada but because of the cultural politics of the post-political Anglosphere.

You see, Canadian progressives, you are actually Jackie Robinson, people living in a nostalgic past to justify membership in parties that have long since abandoned the working class.

Canadian Politics Race US 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 |

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 |

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

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

A Short Background on Caste for the Uninitiated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Review of My Past Arguments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Contagion

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the Party!

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 2): Rural Land Reform Lessons from Latin America

One of the most significant differences between Canada and the other countries of the Western Hemisphere has been not just what it has (or has not) done in response to the massive dispossession and oppression of Indigenous people during the European conquest but where that impetus has come from.

As I stated previously, most countries in the Americas have sought democratic political resolutions to land inequity through their legislatures. Candidates have run in elections on platforms of reconciliation, been elected and carried these programs out to varying degrees of success. The history of Canada has no such episode and recent Canadian history shows no real attempts.

In 1969, the Pierre Trudeau government put forward its white paper on Indigenous peoples, proposing termination, the legal doctrine the US had unsuccessfully applied 1894-1933 and which Mexico had tried 1857-1920 to similarly disastrous effect. Not only did First Nations leaders oppose this policy and rebuke the Trudeau government but so did many settler Canadian voters, not so much because they opposed abolishing Indigenous “status” and Reserve governments but because this radical rewriting of settler-Indigenous relations had not been placed before voters in the 1968 election.

Since Trudeau’s shelving of the doctrine of termination before the 1972 election, pretty much every significant advance in Indigenous rights in Canada has emanated not from parliament and the provincial legislatures but from the courts. As rehearsed in my essay last fall, this has produced a number of perverse and pernicious effects when it comes to resolving the land question.

With the exception of BC Premier Mike Harcourt’s proposed BC Treaty Commission, which failed to settle one single demand for land reform during its decade in operation, political leaders no longer go to the voters with plans for settling the Indigenous land question in the form of any discernible government program. Their essential message is that they will ape the language of the courts and follow the decisions of the courts because it is the judicial not the legislative branch of government that should decide the land question with respect to Indigenous peoples.

When it comes to the land crisis experienced by settlers, along with non-status, Métis and off-reserve Indigenous people, a completely different, unconnected, siloed conversation ensues. First of all, once treaties are off the table, the land question is thought to be a wholly provincial matter, or at least has functionally been so since (a) crown land south of 60 degrees was distributed to the provinces and not the federal government since the 1867, and (b) the federal government abandoned its guarantee of every Canadian enjoying a “right to shelter” when it defunded federal housing programs and enacted the Canada Health and Social Transfer legislation that untied provincial transfer payments from housing guarantees.

Shockingly, even though the vast majority of land in every province west of the Gaspé is state-owned “crown land,” governments have not come to the voters with land redistribution plans to alleviate unemployment or the housing affordability crisis. And in a divisive and perverse move, they have argued that because so much land is covered by flawed, corrupt and non-consensual “numbered treaty” system, treaties whose meanings are in dispute and often before the courts or, was simply seized by the state without a treaty, it would violate the rights of Indigenous people to redistribute land to settlers.

In reality, neither settlers nor any group of Indigenous people have meaningful, functional, stable access to the crown land near them, nor do they have any democratic control over its use, as it is typically under the direct control of forest, fossil fuel, bottled water or mining companies, or of provincial government departments responsible for selling water, minerals and timber.

The only programs remotely resembling what one might call “land reform” were some experimental pilot “community woodlot” programs in Western Canada in the 1990s, where some crown land was alienated to a local municipality or corporation with community ownership to be controlled for the limited purpose of producing wood for a local mill. Multi-use, non-extractive use, these forms of community land tenure are not even on the table, not even part of the debate.

Meanwhile in our cities and towns, the housing affordability crisis is being fobbed-off on the private sector in the same way the Indigenous land question is being fobbed-off on the judiciary. Provinces and cities rarely use their own land to solve housing problems; even when they decide to take public land and dedicate it to housing, the first step in that process is typically privatization, after which times, the failure of the land to provide what it was intended for is blamed on the free market.

This is a messed-up state of affairs but the good news is that it is uniquely Canadian. If we stopped seeing our land crisis as multiple, separate, siloed or competing land crises but as one, we could chart a different course. And if we saw our legislatures, not our courts or our markets as the place where our land problems are solved, we could chart a different course. Finally, if we looked to the rest of the continent at how to build majority coalitions for land reform, we could create the social movement needed to chart that course.

The Mexican Revolution was a complex, multi-phase, multi-faction process that effectively re-founded Mexico a century after its initial separation from the Spanish Empire in 1821. The basis of this re-founding was the restoration of something Mexicans call the ejido. Previously privatized lands that had been held by major landowners and foreign corporations were seized by the government and redistributed to rural cooperatives.

Eligibility for these lands was based on three main things: (1) the grassroots, inclusive and cooperative nature of the project, (2) the economic viability of the business it sought to create and (3) the material need for the land. In other words, the government redistributed land to the rural proletariat and peasants based on self-organization on the basis of class.

Of course, it went without saying that the primary beneficiaries of the ejido were Indigenous Mexicans because class and race function synergistically. Consequently, this policy proved very popular with Indigenous people. But it was also popular with the non-Indigenous rural poor because it did not walk back the reforms of 1857 that had abolished separatist race-based courts and race-based systems of land tenure. The fact the ejido equally available to settlers and Indigenous people located in the same geographical and class position.

The ejido proved the most popular and long-lasting of the many reforms of the Mexican Revolution but was ultimately destroyed as a condition of Mexico joining NAFTA in 1994. This attempt to re-privatize the ejido has led to an ongoing insurgency, the Zapatistas, in Southern Mexico for the past generation.

Between 1950 and 1953, Guatemala undertook a hugely popular land reform program very different from the Mexican one. There, the government expropriated private land the big fruit companies had left fallow for three or more consecutive years. This land was then parceled as family farm plots and distributed to families who had previously been sharecroppers on the fruit companies’ lands. The government assessed a market value and automatically qualified the landless family receiving the land for a mortgage with the government bank. Families began working the land and paying off their mortgages within months and Guatemala’s banana production actually rose; but much more importantly, kitchen gardens got a lot bigger and families were able to meet more of their food needs on their own land.

The program was so successful and popular with the peasants that the fruit companies convinced the Eisenhower Administration to remove the government in a coup and begin reversing the reform in 1954.

As in Mexico, the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries were Indigenous but, as in Mexico, the land reform was based on people’s class, location and financial need. And the reforms were popular because they benefited a broad class-based coalition from all three of the country’s main castes (i.e. races), indio, ladino and criollo.

Another interesting example of land reform was that of the Peruvian dictatorship installed by the Johnson Administration at the beginning of 1969. Whereas the Mexican and Guatemalan revolutionaries were anti-capitalist (despite the Guatemalan reform being a capitalist reform designed to move the country forward historically, in the style of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1980s China), the Peruvian regime was installed by the US as a bulwark against communism and an example of how even something like land reform is possible under capitalism.

Unlike the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the junta running Peru was constrained by its alliance with the US from engaging in uncompensated expropriation. But years of corruption and tax fraud allowed the government to purchase land far below market value because the owner had been paying property taxes based on land values artificially depressed by fraud and collusion between tax assessors and the landlord class.

Like Mexico’s land reform, self-organized cooperatives rather than family units were the beneficiaries of the reform and the types of cooperatives were evaluated based on similar metrics to Mexico but with greater sensitivity to the wide diversity of Peruvian ecosystems, commodities and the amount of processing required before goods were sold for further processing or sent to market. Whereas Mexico and Guatemala had already gone through a process of termination, eliminating Indigenous land tenure, Peru had not. This meant that the junta converted pre-existing Indigenous collective lands into land cooperatives, not dissimilar to the Alaskan reorganization that was taking place at the same time. In this way, land reform was the means by which Peru effected termination.

Yet, termination was embraced by most Indigenous groups because the new cooperatives were more dynamic, democratic and prosperous and meaningfully more land. Complications later arose with these Indigenous lands but the complications stemmed not from objections to the loss of traditional forms of land tenure and government but the tendency of small holders to function more as neighbourhoods of independent yeoman farms with only superficial economic cooperation.

As with the other examples, there is a common theme: reform was conducted based on class; settlers and Indigenous of that class benefited equally; the overall program primarily benefited Indigenous people.

I am not proposing to copy any of these, except with respect to one thing. Canada should embark on a project of land reform that is driven not by the courts or the private sector but by our parliament and legislatures. And that project should benefit and be supported by a broad coalition of Canadians needing land, rural and urban, settler and Indigenous. In the next piece, I will look at global examples of reforming and redistributing urban land.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Race | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 1): We Are Not As Divided As We Think

One of the reasons the establishment has been so keen to import US-style cultural politics and the moral panics they generate into Canada is that keeping Canadians divided culturally grows more important every year as our material interests and needs become increasingly aligned. The growing disagreements in Canada about gay rights, women’s rights, free speech and coercive public health measures mask a broad convergence on the material interests of Canadians.

Today, there are virtually no ordinary, decent working people in this country who are not victims of Canada’s land inequity crisis. Most land in this country is owned by the banks or by real estate and development firms. Now, it is true that much of that land is technically held in the name of one or more individual Canadian “homeowners” but most of these individuals are functionally indistinguishable from renters. They must transfer a vast amount of money to a third party to avoid the loss of their home and subsequent eviction. In some senses, the average heavily mortgaged property owner has less housing security than the average renter because more legal protections exist against eviction that repossession.

For a while, this thing urbanites call “the affordability crisis” was largely limited to cities and resort areas but in recent years, all Canadian real estate, from un-serviced lots in Central New Brunswick to bungalows in the village of Valemount (despite the closure of its only sawmill and main employer), has massively inflated in cost and can only be purchased with the “assistance” of a bank.

Since Covid’s arrival on the scene, rents in rural industrial and agricultural communities have increased faster than those in resort and urban areas, almost catching up. That means that whether renting or owning, a home is an increasingly exorbitant cost and the largest cost in almost all household budgets.

Even among people who owe little or nothing to a bank, things are scarcely better. That is because as housing and land prices rise astronomically, property tax rates do not even need to increase for annual property tax bills to double in the space of less than half a decade. This is especially impactful because those who own their homes outright or almost entirely are typically seniors or people at the very end of their working life.

And because neither private- nor public-sector pensions have kept up with inflation, RRSPs grow more unreliable as the stock market in which they play grows ever more casino-like and our governments keep stripping away legal protections for private sector and union pension funds, not only are seniors incomes both volatile and in decline, they are caught in a double bind. They need their home to continue to appreciate in value so as to deal with rising inflation rates, declining income and declining income security by selling or borrowing against their home.

Finally, there are the Canadians who live on Indian Reserves. While these people’s housing is technically “free,” chronic shortages mean that not everyone entitled to reserve housing can obtain it or are forced into incompletely constructed, incompletely renovated or dilapidated housing. Furthermore, those who are unemployed (and on-reserve unemployment rates remain more than double off-reserve unemployment rates) typically have half or more of their provincial government income assistance withheld as it is categorized as a “shelter allowance.” And as we well know, a shocking proportion of those houses are connected to inferior or non-existent utility grids, often lacking in everything from reliable electricity to potable water to internet access.

Few reserve governments have been permitted by provincial or federal governments to levy their own taxes (the Sechelt and the Nisga’a nations being notable exceptions). Consequently, with such woefully insufficient and insensitive block grant funding from the federal government, reserve governments do not have a ready mechanism to fund infrastructure improvements, housing repairs or new housing. Urban reserves have increasingly turned to using their own meagre land holdings to conduct real estate megaprojects that they hope will produce a secure revenue stream. And rural reserves have been forced to accept “benefit agreements” from forestry and mining companies in exchange for endorsing industrial activities on their traditional territories.

In other words, young or old, rural or urban, conservative or progressive, owner or renter, Canadians are suffering under and trapped in an intensifying national land crisis. And a key part of the establishment’s trick in intensifying and profiting from this crisis has been to redescribe it as a set of unconnected, separate problems or, worse yet, a set of competing priorities canceling each other out in a perverse zero-sum.

Let me just list some of the most egregious and obvious ways Canadians are being divided on the land question:

Owners versus Non-Owners

Most Canadians who “own” their home are in one of two situations: (a) the bank owns their property and they need its value to appreciate because mortgage payments are so high, there is not room in the family budget for adequate retirement savings; they rely on constant appreciation to replace lost retirement savings and declining pensions; (b) they own their property almost entirely or outright but are now living on a fixed retirement income that is steadily declining against inflation and a finite number of RRSPs they will run out of in a few years; they too rely on constant appreciation as their sole source of new equity and income.

Non-owners are generally in two groups, lifelong renters and aspiring owners. Neither group is served in any way by the continuous rapid appreciation of housing. Rising mortgage costs due to appreciation and interest rates raise rents in the basement suites and laneway homes in which an ever-increasing proportion of our renters live, also driving up prices in purpose-built rental as basement suites typically occupy the bottom of the rental market. Obviously, constantly increasing home prices pull potential homes out of the reach of first-time buyers with the consistency of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every year.

As both groups’ financial desperation intensifies, so too does their polarization. Every years one group needs prices to rise even more, just as the other needs them to stop rising.

Landlords versus Tenants

A witty publication in my home town coined the term “artisanal landlording” last year. It pointed to the fact that a shockingly large proportion of people’s rental housing needs are being met in basement suites or laneway homes by landlords who are renting-out between one and three suites in order to meet crippling monthly mortgage payments. These artisanal landlords typically have full-time jobs and often children as well. In addition to being short of time, they often lack even the most basic building maintenance and repair skills and knowledge and often also lack the liquidity to engage tradespeople in a timely manner to deal with matters as urgent as blocked plumbing or malfunctioning heating systems.

Without any real control over rising mortgage payments, these landlords often lack financial wriggle room when provincial governments cap rental increases at a level lower than their costs have increased and are often one major flood or other architectural disaster away from their whole miniature real estate empire collapsing like a house of cards. For this reason, they often have an incentive to be slow and inattentive to repairs because, in most provinces, a landlord can only make major rent increases when switching tenants.

Tenants, consequently, face not just rents increasing as fast as legally permitted. They are dealing with increasingly incompetent, underresourced, overworked and harried amateur caretakers who will try to push them out of their home if met with a big bill or mortgage payment hike. Furthermore, tenants who live at closest quarters with their landlords and being set up to have the most acrimonious relationships. Worse still, these declining standards in the promptness and quality of maintenance and repair work in these isolated new units allow purpose-built rental businesses to cut back on their repair and maintenance spending.

Indigenous People versus Settlers

In both rural and urban environments, Indigenous people are usually the most underhoused, poorly housed and insecurely housed people. And most are associated with a “traditional territory” on which they have no title, sovereignty or rights of occupation, except at a theoretical, legal, unenacted level.

As I have long suggested, the “land acknowledgement” is one of the most odious woke racist humblebrags out there. Settlers stand in front of other settlers and engage competitive acts of weepy, emotional histrionics about how guilty they feel about doing whatever they want with the land they are standing on without, themselves, consulting anyone Indigenous about what they are doing.

In rural areas, land injustice is thrown into sharper relief than it can be in any urban environment. Tiny Indian Reserves sit in the middle of huge swaths of alienated public land, realms the size of European countries that have been alienated to pipeline, mining and forest companies. This technically public or “crown” land containing trap lines, spawning streams, sacred and historic sites and other sources of long-term sustenance, both financial and physical but it is under the sole dictatorial control of a single resource-extraction company that sees no value in other things the land produces. Indeed, it is in the interest of these companies to ruin things of value to other economic sectors as quickly as possible to reduce land use conflicts over precious things: destroy the biggest trees, most beautiful vistas and the richest sources of fish and game first.

But what many in Southwestern BC miss is that the settler towns are not in any significantly different position. Like many living on Reserve, many are of mixed Indigenous descent and have a variety of legal statuses with respect to their personal Indigeneity. Like many living on Reserve, they depend both on short-term jobs from the companies liquidating the natural capital on the land around them, and on that land not being liquidated so that it can provide recreation, food and a sense of place and belonging.

If one lives in the extractive belt from Timmins to Terrace, whether one is a settler, on-Reserve Indigenous person or off-, one enjoys no democratic control over the land around one’s community. Decisions are made by corporate boards or branch offices of transnational corporations in Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto, overseen by governments comprising legislators mainly elected in suburbs and cities far, far away.

The most demoralizingly extractive jobs, which often involve the physical destruction of places and activities with which one has grown up are, outside of white collar government work, pretty much the only family-supporting jobs in much of Western Canada’s rural industrial periphery. Consumers in the city demand wood, natural gas, pulp, etc. and then blame the workers who do their bidding for the environmental destruction they, themselves, have demanded they enact. Consequently, it is crucially important to prevent any multi-racial class-based alliance among the workers of Canada’s rural industrial periphery.

Dividing rural workers on a racial basis has been the strategy of the establishment in the West since the first cannery started paying a different wages to Chinese migrants, Anglo migrants, Tlingits and Tsimshians. But our current situation is best traced back to the 1980s and 90s when the combined effects of unsustainable over-cutting and mechanization thinned the ranks of Canada’s International Woodworkers of America from 40,000 to 8,000. The 1990s mining industry capital strike in BC and Saskatchewan produced similar effects in adjacent industries.

Whereas bush work had been largely racially integrated (even if the towns in which the workers lived often fell short of that mark with de facto restaurant, laundromat and other commercial business segregation), the layoffs were not. The minority who managed to keep their logging, mill and mining jobs were whiter than those who lost them.

Reserve governments are often as or more motivated to sign benefit agreements in order to guarantee jobs for unemployed residents as they are to gain a new revenue stream. Guarantees of a portion of new pipeline, mining or logging jobs, however temporary they may be are the best shot these communities have at resolving catastrophically high on-reserve joblessness. But those agreements are made in the context of a zero sum of bush work; every job gained by someone living off-reserve is a job that doesn’t go to someone who resides in a conventional municipality or regional district.

Similarly, court-mandated and government-negotiated land claims settlements are reasonably understood by those living off-reserve as endangering one of the few sources of non-government employment in the region. In other words, both the benefit agreements won by pro-industry reserve governments and the land claims made by traditional, hereditary governments are understood as either transferring settler and non-status bush work jobs to Indigenous people or annihilating them altogether.

A Call For Unity

But what if we swept all this aside? What if instead of pitting people against each other, we recognized that the real problem is this: forest companies, mining companies and banks have seized control of our land, the land of all people living in this country. What if we took our land back, together? What if #LandBack was not code for transferring title and sovereignty from people of one race to people of another? What if it stood for ordinary, decent, working people coming together to take our land back from the super-rich and the transnational corporations they control and use to extract the value of our land, of our work?

What if we realize that we were all being manipulated to fight each other, as a distraction by the bastards who have stolen our land and reap astronomical profits from it? The next several articles in this blog will be about how we might overcome the obstacles to building a coalition of settlers and Indigenous people, on-reserve and off-reserve, urban and rural, renter and small owner to take our land back together and all gain more land, more financial security and true political independence.

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