This article is the second in a new series on authoritarianism, an online companion to Los Altos Institute’s reading groups on the new authoritarianism and on global diaspora and migration. Starting February 2021. It is part of my efforts to open up a larger field for both comparative and connective analysis of authoritarian movements past and present and in the Global North versus Global South. If you would like to support more scholarship like this, please consider responding to our Institute’s annual financial plea.
Last week, I wrote about the dangers of historical blindness when it comes to the catastrophic legacy of Canada’s residential school system. Unfortunately, Canada’s white settlers need to stage a performance of tearful ancestor-blaming in order to continue those very ancestors’ despicable policies.
Today, I want to write about another of our forebears’ sins and how our narration of it is blinding us to rapid and dangerous changes in geopolitics that are fueling the rise of the “new authoritarians,” like Recep Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Narendra Modi, the elected leaders of some of the largest, most diverse states on earth.
Specifically, I am writing to explain why it is that remedying this historical blindness helps us to understand that, next to the Stars and Stripes and the Confederate Flag, the next most prevalent flags at the Trump movement’s storming of Washington were the flags of the Republic of India and of its ruling party, BJP.
The Problems of Canadian Nationalism
Canadian civic nationalism is truly progressive in that it buys into what historians call “the progress myth,” an idea that the things that liberal folks like about their societies, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, free markets, open borders, tolerance, universal education, ecological sustainability, technological innovation etc. are baked into history itself; that human beings are merely agents of an invisible force called “progress” that will inevitably triumph in shaping our societies into societies that progressives (i.e. most Canadians) like.
Part of the evidence for progress is the idea that the generations that are currently alive are the best people there have ever been. By best, we mean most thoroughly embody such progressive policies as pluralism. Those of us who are at the peak of our social influence, in early middle age, believe ourselves to epitomize those values better than any previous generation of human beings in the place where we live.
To progressives, Donald Trump and his cohort of authoritarians are a glitch, a blip, an aberration. Perfunctory, symbolic efforts are invested in getting rid of those folks because history will do that. The real work of being a progressive if how they use their time is anything to go by) when it comes to the civic nationalism of a place like Canada, is to prove oneself more progressive than other putative progressives. One could do this by calling them out for their insufficiently full-throated praise of a progressive value or cause or, maybe, less adversarially, making sure that the cans in the recycling blue box on one’s front porch shine brighter than those in one’s neighbour’s.
But the most important thing in Canada’s progressive civic nationalism, more than virtue-signaling or chastising one’s neighbours, is ancestor-blaming. There is only one area of ancestor-blaming that can compete with our crocodile tears for the Indigenous people whose land we continue to confiscate and poison, whom we continue to abduct and incarcerate from cradle to grave: Japanese Internment.
The Japanese Diaspora in the Pacific
Following the Japanese Empire’s bombing of the military base the United States was using to colonially occupy the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Canadian and US governments began stripping citizens and residents of Japanese extraction of their homes, their businesses and their civil rights, breaking up communities and relocating them to BC’s interior and the Prairies.
This process was not merely one of the most flagrant abrogations of human rights in Canadian history and, on top of that, nakedly racist (no such measures were taken towards Germans, Italians or Finns); it was clearly also commercially motivated. The strongest voices supporting internment were canneries and fishermen, and it was the white-owned parts of the fishing industry who benefited most from the resale of Japanese land, boats and canning infrastructure. Powerful Japanese businesspeople were suddenly penniless; powerful fishing and canning cartels were smashed.
There is no question that, as with the residential schools, our ancestors were on the wrong side of history. But, as with the residential school debate, flattening our forebears into no more than moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash facsimiles harms our ability to make sense of and ethically respond to the present.
In Canada and to a much greater extent, the US, Japanese immigrants were initially understood to be a kind of white or honourary white immigrant when they began arriving on the Pacific Coast and Hawaii in the nineteenth century. Newspapers, encyclopedias, school textbooks all sought to draw sharp distinctions between Chinese and Japanese people based on the geopolitics and racist pseudoscience of the day. The Japanese played baseball and wore top hats; their country was a formal ally of the British and French Empires; they had beaten a great power (Russia) in a head-to-head war in the twentieth century.
While Japanese settlers on the Pacific Slope faced a great deal of racism (and nowhere more so than British Columbia), their typical defense was their sharp racial difference from the Chinese, an indebted failing state that was exporting indentured servants to balance its books.
Like Jews, Turks, and Arab Christians, the Japanese existed at the margins of whiteness initially, with national laws typically recognizing them as white and local opinion typically not, in the early years of the twentieth century.
Ironically, it was following the war in which Japan was an effective ally of Canada and the US that the Japanese hold on whiteness grew more tenuous by the year. The failure of governments to demobilize First World War veterans, resulting in inflation, homelessness and major social upheaval (of which the Winnipeg General Strike was but one instance) was a global phenomenon. Eager to diffuse the emerging socialist consciousness that had toppled the Russian Empire, major corporations and media throughout the capitalist world began offering an alternative to socialism to cure the ills of demobilization and the early 1920s: racism and nationalism.
Always a strategy since the nineteenth century, major media and corporations began describing the workplace as a site of racial and national competition. Major manufacturers funded patriotic associations and conservative newspapers written in immigrants’ first languages and encouraged residential segregation of different ethnicities. In this environment, anti-Japanese sentiment hardened, especially because Japanese lineages were competing so effectively against Europeans. The more Japanese folks were pushed out of white society, the more they subscribed to cartels and buyers’ clubs, a local, practical economic nationalism.
But Internment was not simply produced by a rising tide of racism, segregation and economic antagonism. Something else had to happen to lead to this event:
The Maximato.
The Mexican Diaspora and Its Interwar Weaponization
Few people outside of the historical profession have heard of the Maximato and fewer still appreciate its global impact. In 1924, just as fascism was emerging as a distinct political force, two years after Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power and one after the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany, an admirer of Mussolini’s became president of Mexico.
In Mussolini’s first half-decade in power, prior to his 1928 reversal and creation of Vatican City, the centre of Il Duce’s agenda was anti-clericalism. Mussolini and Turkey’s Kemal Attaturk led political movements in societies that had traditionally been dominated by a single religion. Beginning in 1922, both governments began the violent repression of conservative religious leaders and enacted legislation like veiling bans to break the power of clerics over their followers. But the most ambitious of the 1920s authoritarian anti-clerics was Calles. Priests and bishops were prohibited from public assembly or wearing religious dress and the Callistas smashed the old church-led education system, just like Attaturk’s movement in Turkey. This ultimately led to the Cristero War in Mexico which spilled over the border in to the United States when US Catholic clergy and the Knights of Columbus began running illegal guns to the rebels.
Understanding that their longstanding control of education was the church’s greatest power, Calles and his fellow Mexican revolutionaries moved quickly to build a state-funded, secular, universal education system under the direction of the federal government and expelled or drove out thousands of clergy.
For Calles, the Cristero War was just one limitation of his power. Another was the Mexican constitution, which prohibited the re-election of a president who had served his full term. Recognizing the magnitude of his project of remaking Mexican society into a secular, authoritarian, one-party state (like what Attaturk would achieve in Turkey or Nasser in Egypt), Calles worked, from the beginning, on means to rule Mexicans via proxies. The term Maximato refers to this because, in this Save time and money by ordering from our convenient, discreet and in-expensive Indian online pharmacy.Our online medication store sells only brand-name prescription drugs, at the lowest prices let these sufferers to avail the viagra cialis on line treatment. It’s the devotedness and hard work done by Late best price on viagra Hakim Hashmi who dreamt of serving people by utilizing the healing power of mother nature. This novelty should uphold the following two rules (3 cialis online australia and 4). 3. In contrast, subliminal message experiments’ subjects display no effects whatsoever after the end levitra australia online http://foea.org/6-revision-v1/ of the experiments. system, like an early Roman Emperor, Calles’ true power came from his informal rather than formal position. Under his successors, Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio and Abelardo Rodriguez, he was still recognized, acknowledged and deferred-to as the Maximo Jefe.
While many appreciate the personal and temporal magnitude of the Maximato, our historical amnesia prevents us from fully seeing its spatial and popular elements. As much as the Maximato, as a project, was about governing beyond Calles’ 1928 term limit, it was also, especially in the context of the ongoing Cristero War, about governing beyond the US-Mexico border.
So, in the 1920s, Calles began the most ambitious campaign of politicizing a diasporic community the world had ever seen. Organizers for Calles’ party went beyond creating local associations across the border to vote in Mexican elections; these associations also participated in American elections, embedding themselves in the Democratic Party machine in Denver, Reno, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. Consulates multiplied and grew; soon consulates were partnering to create Spanish-language day and night schools. Organizing rallies, unionization drives and political education became part of the duties of a consul in the Mexican diplomatic corps.
This was a major innovation.
Because immigrants from a state were typically the most hostile to the rulers of their homeland, especially Sikhs and Irish Catholics who understood their homeland to be under a hostile occupation, Calles built on the fact that most Mexican emigrants had backed the revolution of which he had been a leader. But with a twist: the revolution was continuous, and taking place under his direction. Now emigrants could be equal parts in the building of a patriotic, secular, revolutionary state with not just members but with political aspirations outside Mexico’s borders.
This organizing played an important part in the rising tide of anti-Mexican racism in the US. But it also inspired other authoritarians to reimagine their movement as a global one, in which their diaspora played a central role.
The Failure of the Axis Powers at Diasporic Weaponization
For Adolf Hitler, this proved mostly a headache; diasporic Germans were cautious about proclaiming their sympathy for a hostile foreign power after the First World War and so most pro-Nazi parties outside Germany were those of non-Germans who had narrated their nationality into the Nazi myth of the “Aryan race.” Consequently, Hindu fundamentalist and high caste Hindus formed the majority of Nazi-tribute parties in the various electorates and principalities of British India. And many of these groups and individuals went on to form the Hindutva parties out of which the modern BJP was formed.
Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Ministers, looked to the example of the Maximato in their imagination of the role their diaspora might play in the coming global conflict but there is no evidence that the Japanese government put even a fraction of the thought and investment into creating something similar with their large diasporic populations in the US, Canada and Brazil.
Although they liked the idea that the Issei and Nisei might make a crucial difference in the coming war the British Empire and possibly the USA, aside from the odd proclamation, Hirohito and his prime ministers offered negligible material organization or inducement. But, beginning in California and traveling up the coast to Canada, many Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians reacted to increasingly restrictive laws and growing anti-Asian sentiment by publicly identifying with Japan and its imperial project.
And it is no coincidence that despite British Columbia being far more strident and extreme in our anti-Asian sentiment, the idea for Internment came from the South, from the US.
The thing is: there really were pro-Empire, pro-Hirohito activists and organizations within in the Japanese community on North America’s Pacific Slope, despite the negligible and ineffectual help from Japan.
Our forebears were not reacting to nothing, not acting merely out of a deep-seated racism, nor merely out their covetousness of their Japanese neighbours’ land and fishing fleet. Those things were no doubt preponderant factors in this crime without which it would not otherwise have taken place.
It is that our ancestors needed an alibi for that crime and that alibi was the false and exaggerated belief that the Empire of Japan had weaponized its diaspora as a political and paramilitary force.
So, how does the present change if we suddenly remember our excuse, our alibi and its origins in a real phenomenon that altered the politics of the American Southwest?
The Hindutva Movement in the Present
Maybe we would notice, then, the ways in which Narendra Modi is building his own modern Maximato, one that extends beyond the boundaries of India to encompass a larger Hindutva nationalist community and political project. One of the most striking moments of the 2016 Trump campaign was its celebration of Hindu nationalism in a nationally-televised event, presenting Trump and his movement as the Hindutva choice for America, something reenacted and reciprocated a hundredfold on his tour of India.
While including high-caste and Hindu fundamentalist Indians in mobilizing a transnational diaspora based on a shared Aryan mythic heritage disgusted Hitler, the Modi movement’s version of the project is not squeamish in this way. And we are beginning to see the kind of infrastructure the Maximato built appearing in societies around the world, an activist diplomatic staff of highly politicized consuls, working to build and strengthen Hindutva patriotic associations in our communities.
And we are not just seeing this phenomenon in far right parties. Like the Callistas, the Modi-ites are working in many scenes. Progressive and left parties with a predominantly white membership are especially susceptible, quickly placing Modi-ite entryists in key spokesperson and decision-making positions. Our hunger to tokenize brown bodies to demonstrate our legitimacy to other white Hindutva candidates for our supposedly socialist municipal party, Proudly Surrey. The BC Green Party, similarly, has nominated individuals aligned with far-right forces in India in the 2017 and 2020 elections. In the US, those trying to outflank Bernie Sanders on the Identitarian left welcomed the Modi movement into the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign.
Because today’s authoritarians have a different approach to diversity and cosmopolitanism, one that seeks to organize different peoples into a hierarchy rather than seeking to eliminate difference, Modi-ites often adopt discourses that superficially invoke unity and allyship among the autocthonous Indian religions Hindutva permits. This enables them to insinuate themselves into broadly liberal or progressive organizations, even as their primary agenda is to build a global authoritarian religious fundamentalist movement. That is because progressives, increasingly, see nothing but colour and reduce a person’s politics to what they perceive to be the interests of that person’s race, gender or sexuality.
The Modi movement and the Trump movement are increasingly organized and connected global movements that are self-conscious in their understanding that they are part of a worldwide struggle between a new and vibrant populist authoritarianism and a shopworn, exhausted and confused set of movements defending democracy. And so, MAGA hats appear at Hindutva rallies and Aryan supremacist flags fly comfortably next to those of the Confederacy.
And we are turning a blind eye, partly because our innate racism combined with progressive smugness makes us refuse to see differences of opinion among folks we do not consider white. Consequently, when activists like Surrey’s Gurpreet Singh, publisher of Radical Desi, or organizations like Indians Abroad for a Pluralist India, ask for our solidarity in standing against this Modi-backed program of institutional capture in the Indian diaspora, we fail them when we don’t show up; and, in turn, fail the global movement against the new authoritarianism.
But I also have to wonder if some of our unwillingness to make common cause with those calling this out goes back to the cartoonish image of Canadian ancestral villainy on which our civic nationalism is based. Our ancestors were wrong and evil to make so much of a handful of pro-Hirohito rallies and speeches, wrong to see these things being precisely organized and commanded by a force already present. Our ancestors were motivated by greed and racism to see an organized movement where there was none, and they then massively overreacted to this illusion. Therefore, we reason, any talk today of weaponized diasporas and global alliances among authoritarians must be both wrong and racist.
I would suggest that taking this position is grossly irresponsible. We need to stand in solidarity with our fellow citizens of all extractions against globalizing authoritarian movements. Canadians have been right to stage anti-Trump marches and protests over the past four years, against Trump’s foreign policy, against his domestic policy and against the actions of his supporters in Canada. I think our non-white fellow citizens deserve the same kind of solidarity when staring down a far more organized movement that makes no distinction in its murderous intent towards Indian Muslims, irrespective of the country whose citizenship they hold.
