This is the first of three posts that will bring together the two prior series and culminate in something I have not put forward in over two years: a positive idea about where Canadians might direct their energies to create a society with the resilience to save what we can and share the losses equitably as we face the Extinction Event. Two of these posts are dedicated to specific conversations I had in 2021 that challenged me and reshaped my thinking in productive ways. The final post in the series will be dedicated to Quaker writer Arwen Brenneman who asked me to write something in this blog that was not merely critical but aspired to a practical action or goal. This one I dedicate to Zionist geneticist Jonathan Sheps who helped to realign my understanding of what radical politics is and is not.
BDS and the Rise of Hashtag Post-Politics
I am a socialist who opposes the current practices of the Israeli state and finds the continuous acts of dispossession, disenfranchisement and punitive expeditions into the West Bank and Gaza strip unconscionable, and Israel’s participation in the wider Middle Eastern practice of using non-citizen residents as right-less labour deeply disappointing. But I have struggled to support the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) movement, not just because, as a university instructor, its demands were uncomfortably close to putting a “No Jews” sign outside my classroom. There was something more on which I could not put my finger.
And Jonathan explained it. By appending “right of return” and other demands it would be impossible to meet to its list of reasonable demands, BDS had rendered its program not radical but instead functionally impossible. There is simply no way to get to the spatial and demographic order of the Palestinian mandate in 1948 from our present location in space-time. There is no remotely humane way to reverse all of the shifts not just in who lives where but how land is used, how land is legally held, how local hydrology and physical infrastructure have radically shifted, etc. There is no way to undo three quarters of a century of intermarriage, shifting political views and shifting economic aspirations.
By staking out, not a radical solution, like the idea of a multi-confessional, multi-ethnic unitary state of Israel-Palestine that Meretz, the coalition of Arabs and Jews, greens, socialists and the original kibbutzim movement that sits in the Knesset is beginning to articulate, but an impossible one, BDS actually confers a kind of permission on the Israeli government to continue its oppression of the Palestinian people. Because it refuses to advocate something that could actually happen.
BDS, which began as a campus campaign, was one of those political movements that functioned as a vanguard for many upsetting new political developments that are often grouped under the broad category of “wokeness.” Incubating in elite liberal arts colleges in the US and then diffusing out through the larger university system, a new kind of politics emerged, a post-political politics.
Post-political movements are, in my view, fundamentally grounded in despair. They are founded in an assumption that we, as a society, have lost the ability to come together, agree on a program for improving our collective lot and using democratic power to challenge the powerful interests standing in the way of those aspirations. Having given up on the idea of actually doing politics, post-political movements have two main foci: (a) punishing malefactors (bad people and bad institutions) and (b) describing an aspirational political order that, while appealing, cannot be reached from where we are currently located in the space-time continuum.
The Neo-McCarthyism or “cancel culture” of Wokeness is how the first is manifest. Demanding that the “right of return” whereby everyone descended from an Arab lineage pushed off their land in Israel-Palestine since 1948 be permitted to return and seize the property from its present occupant and that those occupants then relocate to wherever their ancestors were in 1948 is not just the worst game of musical chairs ever imagined; it is neither possible nor desirable. It represents not so much justice as it does an additional layer of somehow compensatory injustice in the spirit of Monty Python’s Dennis Moore.
The essential conservatism of BDS’s agenda is that while it advocates causing harm to those it blames for the Israeli occupation, it defends the status quo by arguing, via the impossibility of its demands, that there is no alternative. While BDS formed the vanguard of this kind of post-politics (as distinct from genuinely radical politics, like, for instance, declaring the Jubilee), its innovations have helped to deform popular movements into a post-political form.
Take, for instance, #MeToo. First of all, it is no coincidence that the movements I will be offering as examples henceforth will begin with hashtags. Remember folks: social media platforms are the tools of billionaires who wish to promote post-political behaviour, not just because actual politics would threaten their power but because their social media platforms are where most of post-politics takes place.
#MeToo entailed thousands of women singling-out men who had been sexually violent or abusive with them and calling them out in the public square, attempting to inflict reputational punishment on them. But when Mia Kirschner attempted to intervene in this debate by talking about the structural, institutional and procedural changes that could protect women from sexual and gender-based violence in the workplace, no one took much notice.
Kirschner, by seeking practical reforms, like contractual stipulations and changes in the law to prohibit the kinds of behaviours in which monsters like Harvey Weinstein habitually engaged, placed herself and her ideas outside the discourse of #MeToo. That is because #MeToo was post-political; no one really held out hope that we could change our culture, laws and institutions to prevent a future Weinstein, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen from abusing his power. So instead, we settled for doing patriarchy’s housecleaning for it, clearing out the men who had lost the continence necessary to keep their abuses sufficiently private and replacing them with more continent men, at least for now.
When people defend the #DefundThePolice movement to me, the conversation always starts off funny. Almost inevitably, one of the first things its defenders say is “of course, we don’t really want to defund the police. It’s really irresponsible of the media to portray us as people who want to completely defund law enforcement.” I feel like I have already made my point but I will continue. Obviously, if you do not want the police defunded, you probably should not call your movement “Defund the Police.” Except the movement only sort of made that decision, it was mostly made by Twitter moderators paid to do the bidding of the investor class.
But, these valiant defenders aside, many people like Kwantlen University Criminology Professor Jeff Shantz do argue that we should simply stop paying the police and allow volunteers to take over. But does anyone really think that is possible or desirable? There are many organizations, including a number of local motorcycle clubs who would love to take over that file. In fact, there are so many groups of young men with guns that would like to take this job on as volunteers that the state’s monopoly on violence would soon be a thing of the past and groups of “volunteers” would “compete” in a free and open marketplace for control of our streets.
Surely, nobody wants that. Nobody really wants to relinquish the small amount of public control we have over the cops because they need us to write their paycheques, surely. What we want are radical reforms to law enforcement with respect to training, promotion, recruitment and command structures; we want a broader, shared, interdisciplinary, cooperative first responder approach with firefighters, child protection workers, etc. What is needed is a way to arrest and begin to reverse Anglo America’s police forces incremental transformation into fascist paramilitaries indifferent to our democratic institutions.
But because defunding the police is the most effective way to most dramatically intensify and accelerate that process, everyone can rest assured that it will not happen, that even the most fascistic among us do not want to go that far that fast. And, as a result, demands for reform, even minor reform are effectively shouted down by a demand for that which is either impossible or undesirable.
The Rise of the #LandBack Hashtag and the Racism That Lurks Behind It
Much like the Monty Python debate between the Minister for Home Affairs and A Small Patch of Brown Liquid (probably a creosote derivative used in industrial varnishing), Justin Trudeau seems bewilderingly proud of his record on Indigenous issues, having promised to provide potable water to every reserve that lacked it back in 2015. As we approach the one-year anniversary of his third election victory, seven years later, his government has fixed the toxic water systems of exactly zero reserves. Nothing has been done. Not only has nothing been done; work has not even started.
Following multiple multi-million-dollar commissions and inquiries by the federal and provincial governments across Canada into murdered and missing Indigenous women over the past twenty years, rates of murder, rape and disappearance continue to increase. And following the key recommendations of every one of these commissions, not to mention the scholarly consensus in the field i.e. cheaper, more available interurban transportation and the elimination of fly-in worker “man camps,” we have systematically cut interurban transit and increased the number of man camps across Western Canada.
We have also invested in a special unit of RCMP officers who are deployed to deal with uppity Natives who seek to protect their land from non-consensual development. These officers have shown, time and again, a willingness to run roughshod over civil liberties, to gratuitously and punitively destroy Indigenous people’s property, sabotage trap lines, illegally hold journalists without bail and treat peaceful protesters with brutality.
It is into this maelstrom of colonial racism that #LandBack has appeared as a hashtag, a kind of BDS on steroids. The idea is that we should return land ownership to the Indigenous people whose ancestors held it before the arrival of colonists. Such an idea is both impossible and undesirable.
Does anyone really believe that 2% of Canadians should own all the land inhabited by the other 98%, that the 320 members of the Semiahmoo Nation should own all the land and make all the land use decisions for the 100,000 people living in White Rock and South Surrey? Does anyone believe that, for instance, Afro-Nova Scotians should lose all their land to the Mi’kmaq people because they lack the requisite seniority to own land in Nova Scotia? What about the Doukhobors and Jews who fled persecution and pogroms of Tsarist Russia? Or Punjabi refugees who fled Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s extralegal killings of those who desired a Sikh homeland? Or just regular working white folks who have saved, possibly across generations, to hold a single piece of land to provide some small modicum of physical and financial security against the troubles to come?
Also, let us remember that the way Indigenous people held land varied from place to place and time to time. On BC’s coast, society was highly vertical; land tenure was not equally shared within most polities; aristocrats held the land on behalf of commoners and slaves had no land rights at all. In many of these societies, there was extensive, programmatic body modification, often from birth, so that aristocrats, commoners and slaves could be recognized easily.
And because all other institutions in settler society have abdicated to the courts the entire settler burden of dealing with the land question, this has necessitated Indigenous people presenting themselves in ways that will be viewed most favourably by the court system. As a result, it has become a material necessity to maintain or, even, to reconstruct these systems of aristocratic status in order to obtain whatever limited land justice our judicial system sees fit to dispense.
It beggars belief that so many socialists choose to align themselves not with the egalitarians and levelers in Indigenous communities but instead with the neo-traditionalists and aristocrats whom our courts compel to continue putting on this show. Such alliances make sense to me as an environmentalist but the there is nothing socialistic to be found there.
But last summer we saw something lurking under the #LandBack hashtag that goes beyond the conservatism of simple post-politics and demands for the impossible. Lurking underneath is a real rage, a real hatred on the part of Wokes for Indigenous people who refuse to put on the neo-traditionalist show, people who have decided that Christianity or mathematical excellence or a love of motorized outdoor recreation, trucks and guns is part of their Indigeneity.
Because the reaction to the most recent rediscovery of the residential school graveyards was a wave of successful and attempted church arsons specifically directed at churches attended by Indigenous people today. It is here that we see the essential conservatism of Woke hashtag politics intensifying into a kind of Bizarro fascism. The message was clear to people like my friend Nathan, who spent nights last summer sleeping in the church he loves, guarding it from white settler arsonists, just as his Assiniboine ancestors had once guarded their homes in the Red River colony a century and a half before. The message is this: if you do not want to be an exhibit in our white guilt settler museum, you will be destroyed by fire.
The parasites who cheered those arsonists on with their #LandBack rhetoric have no real material interest in living together with Indigenous people or co-governing our country with them. Because they trade on a false otherness they assign to Indigenous people. Their tirades against “cultural appropriation” are actually insulation against themselves and others using their imaginative empathy to place themselves in the shoes of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.
They are leeches who need to keep open and bleeding the wounds of Indigenous Canada so that they can suck the blood of Indigenous people into their diversity and inclusion businesses, their endless government commissions, their “land acknowledgements” performed by white people for white people, all the while demonstrating their whiteness, the true basis of their entitlement to authority. Because to attain truly Anglo Canadian whiteness, you must wash your skin clean with those performative settler tears. And those tears will come less readily if we stop giving the children of Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning.
