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A Brief Remembrance of a Dream

Church’s Fried Chicken at 41st and Fraser

Last week, I moved back to Vancouver and into a neighbourhood in which I have spent little time since the 1980s. Back then, I spent a lot of time in the area centred on Memorial Park in the swath of then-working class homes between the city’s main cemetery and its second Little India because my friends Oscar and Terence lived here.

In 1987, Oscar had the first of a series of prophetic dreams that my friends and I attempted to use in our nascent political organizing. For many years, I have thought of this effort to integrate these dreams into our political thought as an adolescent practice we grew out of. But today, I am not so sure. In fact, I have come to believe that Oscar’s first oracular dream basically summarizes most of my experience of political organizing over the past thirty-five years.

So, now that I have an up-to-date photo of the Church’s Fried Chicken franchise that has, amazingly, survived the onslaught of gentrification that has destroyed nearly every fun commercial strip in this city, I thought I would share the dream.

The dream begins with Oscar driving a pickup truck up Fraser Street from the south when he begins to hear something moving around in the back of the truck. He pulls into the Church’s parking lot and gets out to take a look and discovers a half-dozen corpses in the back, whereupon, unbidden by his conscious mind, he takes a hypodermic needle out of his pocket. It is already full of Windex, which he injects into one of the corpses.

Immediately, it springs to life as some sort of contagious zombie and animates the other corpses. They run down Fraser Street and spread the contagion to the other pedestrians. Terrified, Oscar retreats across the parking lot to the northeast to survey the ghastly scene.

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Suddenly, he realizes he is not alone. A disheveled man in a grey trench coat is standing beside him. He stands on tiptoe and whispers into Oscar’s ear, “The answer’s in THERE!” He raises his almost skeletal hand and points to a ramshackle wooden outhouse in the middle of the parking lot that had not been there before.

Desperate to deal with the worsening zombie situation, he and Oscar rush over to the outhouse and begin pulling up the floorboards with their bare hands. And then Oscar catches himself and stands up. The man in the trench coat is still furiously pulling up the floorboards and angrily muttering.

“Maybe he’s sick too,” Oscar decides and abandons the outhouse. He goes to the bus shelter on 41st Avenue where the local transit map is conveniently refreshing every few minutes to show the progress of the zombie infestation, which has now taken over pretty much the entire region except for the town of Squamish to the sorth. A woman with a bunch of kids pulls up in her car and offers Oscar a ride.

The dream ends.

And no, I won’t be offering an analysis of the dream here or anywhere else. Now, back to regular blog posts.

Rest in Peace Oscar Bot, 1971-2014, true friend and comrade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

Fighting Back

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

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

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

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

But what followed was wholly unexpected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it does.

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

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

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why would Canada want to copy this?

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

More about that next.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

The Rise of the Canadian Porno Right: Making Sense of the Erin O’Toole “Poppers” Announcement

To some, Erin O’Toole’s “poppers” policy announcement this morning is just this side of a major political gaffe. Commentators are shaking their heads about how absurd and unserious the 2021 Canadian election’s campaign narrative has already become as the leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition made a special appearance and announcement today about the need to legalize a grey market party drug popular among gay men.

The highest per-capital carbon emitter on earth is holding an election in the wake of an IPCC report essentially describing the probable end of human civilization and the extinction of most animal species in my lifetime and the campaign narrative on day three is dominated by a discussion of the sex drug amyl nitrate and its ilk.

But I want to argue that as absurd as the announcement and associates discourse are, the Tories’ poppers promise tells us something important about the dramatic shifts our politics are undergoing due to new debates about gender and sexuality.

So often, in contemporary politics, we tend to see novel political phenomena as a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem, especially here in Anglo America, land of the endless culture war. But the reality is that almost all phenomena we see at the social movement level are actually mirrored pretty closely on each side of the political spectrum.

Many people on the left see the split between trans rights activists and gender critical feminists as a scourge uniquely visited on their side of the political spectrum, paralyzing and splitting every organization the conflict touches. But in fact, the gender identity debate is, in many ways, shaping politics on the right as much or more. Take, for instance, this federal election.

In 2019, Canada had two right-wing populist parties, the mainstream Conservative Party of Canada and the upstart People’s Party of Canada. But despite the Conservatives losing the election, and the People’s Party scoring only 1% of the popular vote, less than two years later, there are two upstart parties, the People’s Party and the Maverick Party, each led by a former Conservative cabinet minister, Maxime Bernier and Jay Hill, respectively.

The People’s Party, which holds that biological sex cannot be changed women should be permitted to have single-sex spaces and single-sex organizations, has not merely held rallies opposing the current Gender Orthodoxy, it has reached out beyond traditional Christian Right allies and is actively courting gender critical feminists, even fielding feminist activist Karin Litzke in Vancouver East and actively reaching out to feminist leaders like Amy Hamm. Meanwhile, the Maverick Party proudly proclaims its support for the Orthodoxy in Article One of its constitution, which it highlights on its web site, recognizing “gender identity” as an unacceptable basis for discrimination, effectively foreclosing sex-based protections for women’s spaces.

We see this split in American conservatism too. Donald Trump’s first two Supreme Court appointees voted against each other in the first gender identity case to reach the court, with Neil Gorsuch on the gender identity side of the debate and Brett Kavanagh on the biological sex side.

Perceptive commentators in the United States have, for some time, been referring to this as an emerging split between what they have termed the Christian Right and the “Porno Right.” Indeed, Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as Vice President can be seen as a direct strategic response to this emerging split.

While, until recently, the Christian Right utterly dominated the fiscal conservative, libertarian, isolationist and protectionist wings of the Republican Party, the victory of Trump and his allies in primaries over the past four years shows that it is this new alt-right approach to the politics of gender and sexuality that has presented the first true challenge to Christian Right ideological hegemony.

So, what is the Porno Right?

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While degenerate and pornographic patriarchs who treat their dinner guests to their private fantasies of sexual violence against their daughters, men like Donald Trump, are certainly the figureheads of the movement, they are not the primary constituency. The foot soldiers of the Porno Right are typically single or otherwise sexually unfulfilled natal males whose online world focuses on Reddit (the platform that banned de-transitioners and gender critical feminists for “hate” but continues to feature misogynistic porn in abundance, including an anal rape subreddit), 4Chan, 8Chan, Pornhub and its affiliates like XHamster.

In other words, the core of the Porno Right are Incels.

Incels are heterosexual natal males who believe that every heterosexual natal male deserves to have a sexually compliant female body awarded to them upon reaching sexual maturity and that some force is screwing up the rationing protocol, thereby causing an uneven distribution of those bodies and their hoarding by the undeserving. Some Incels focus their anger about this on wealthy, sexually successful males with more than one female sexual partner and inveigh against these men’s hoarding behaviour. Others focus their anger on the women from whom they want sex and who are withholding it from them for unfair reasons, maybe due to feminist propaganda, maybe due to being superficial about men’s appearances or caring too much about men’s wealth. Usually there is plenty of anger to go around.

Because Incels consume a great deal of pornography and often have very poor self-images, particular of their own bodies and finances (the things they think determine men’s attractiveness to straight women), many are autogynephiles i.e. men whose autoerotic activity is based on imagining themselves as women engaged in same-sex interaction. While autogynephile men have, for the past decade, been a key target of trans activists and the pharmaceutical industry in marketing gender transition as the solution to their woes, it must be understood that, even today, the vast, vast majority of autogynephile Incels have not undergone and do not intend to undergo any gender confirmation procedures. But this majority nevertheless identifies with the politics of gender espoused by its vanguard minority with respect to the unimportance and/or nonexistence of biological sex as a category.

Now, back to the election. Today, Erin O’Toole surprised and confused many by introducing the legalization of amyl nitrate and other “poppers” in the Canadian election. Poppers became known as a gay party drug in the 1980s and, until the past decade, was primarily associated with the gay club scene and online casual sex through applications like Grindr.

But in the past decade, the use of poppers has increasingly become associated with autogynephile Incels, used as an aid in autoerotic activity. Pull up Pornhub and any of their affiliates and search for “poppers” (if you dare) and you will find that autogynephile poppers content vastly outstrips gay content on most of these sites.

So, why would O’Toole get his health critic Michelle Rempel to raise the legalization of poppers in correspondence with the Minister of Health last week and follow up with a headline-grabbing poppers legalization announcement today?

Let me assure you: he is not going after the small overwhelmingly urban, overwhelmingly culturally liberal constituency of gay men who like to party. That’s just his cover. O’Toole is making his first intentional, programmatic, planned play for the Porno Right, the notoriously hard-to-poll, low-turnout constituency that turned out massively for Donald Trump and pushed him over the top in 2016.

Poppers safety is also a bigger issue for Incels than members of the gay party scene because, in the rare event that they cause cardiac events, solitary users are much more likely to suffer serious harm or death than social users. And you can bet that O’Toole is turning heads in online communities of frequent porn consumers as this announcement spreads to the darkest corner of the web.

Now I am all for legalizing poppers. They are not the drug for me but they shouldn’t be a grey market item like they are now.

But let us recognize that O’Toole’s announcement has very little to do with the health of gay men or even that of career masturbators. But it has everything to do with the Porno Right coming of age as a political constituency that, like its adversaries in the Christian Right, must mostly be courted through coded communication and dog-whistles, dog-whistles that arrived in Canadian politics this morning in Ottawa.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

The Diversity of Christianity in the Roman World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And many, many did.

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

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

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

The Council of Nicea, Worst Corporate Retreat Ever

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

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

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

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

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

The Donatist Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Third Way as Diocletian’s Persecution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are the Donatists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Paradox of Disability and Self-Help: An Homage to Dungeons and Dragons

Six years ago, I was asked to bring my insights as both a social scientist and avid player of tabletop role playing games to a University of Calgary project that was researching the use of computer games as mental health and life skills interventions for children and youth living with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, autism and other neurological disabilities. At the time, they were considering expanding their study to examine in-person, tabletop games. After I did some initial work on the project interpersonal and academic politics caused the team and me to part ways. Now that I am out of the formal academy, it is one of the projects I am dusting off. This essay is the first step in doing that.

We live in a society that denies that etiquette is important, that we do not have hard and fast rules for communication and social organization. But this denial is just one reason our society’s system of etiquette is one of the most challenging ever to exist. Not only are our rules of interaction not codified or explicit; we deny they exist and instead ask people to act based on their innate talent and social intuition.

We are not exactly being dishonest when we emphasize the role of unconscious intuition in our systems of etiquette. Intuition and innate social talent are important because our etiquette is so faddish and requires a great deal of guesswork because no person can successfully amass all the necessary information to execute it correctly.

And with each passing year, etiquette grows more occult, more faddish, changes more rapidly. And we are not always conscious of the strategies we use to cope with the burden each of us bears in keeping up with all the new rules that we must learn to avoid offense, ostracism, professional demotion or even loss of work.

I think this helps to explain the continuing importance of the situation comedy in our cultural life. Beginning with Seinfeld and Friends, a long parade of both mainstream and off-beat sitcoms have functioned only secondarily as exercises in humour and primarily as etiquette pedagogy, constructing narratives around breaches of novel etiquette practices and their resolution. Curb Your Enthusiasm exists at the margins of this discourse because it routinely questions whether these etiquette fads are positive social developments, rather than treating them as inherently good, or amoral, like the weather.

This increasingly volatile and opaque direction our etiquette has taken since the end of the Second World War has had profoundly adverse effects on those with average or below average social intuition.

And they can be measured in what can only be described as the mass pathologization of fairly ordinary folks. Autism is now a spectrum inclusive of millions of people who are really just a bit obtuse and quirky, Asperger’s Syndrome now a disease; Tourette’s syndrome is increasingly expanding into a spectrum inclusive of all people who struggle with social restraint and conversational impulse control. We have also seen an expansion of mood disorder diagnoses as our faddish systems of etiquette make social situations both increasingly difficult to navigate and increasingly consequential. “Social anxiety” was once descriptive of an inappropriate fear of the consequences of mismanaging a social encounter; now it also describes accurate and reasonable fears.

To make matters worse, more and more jobs have come to include a sales or human interaction component. Corporations route hostile customer communication through telephones precisely because telephonic communication is more fraught, more arduous, more exhausting, more dependent on follow etiquette rules and keeping one’s cool in the face of provocation. That results in fewer product returns, fewer maintenance calls, fewer refunds and exchanges. And all sorts of jobs have had a sales component appended to them.

There have traditionally existed certain kinds of jobs set aside for people with significant social disabilities but these are increasingly under threat as “sales” becomes a duty incorporated into more and more jobs. Shelving jobs in retail space, for example, now almost always include a customer service component and usually a sales component too.

What this means is that an ever-increasing portion of the population is now understood to suffer from neurological disabilities affecting social interaction; and, at the same time, the need to mitigate or overcome these disabilities has never been greater.

For those of us who are just a little quirky and unintuitive but who are now understood to occupy the top of the Tourette spectrum or the autism spectrum, there are some proven strategies that have worked for us: we can often learn social competence and even develop a significant degree of intuition through practice in less hostile environments.

For me, that environment was Dungeons and Dragons. For those who have never played the game, each player (except one) plays a “character,” a fictional person both like and unlike them whom they operate in the game, whose intentions and speech they narrate. D&D is a cooperative game, which means that even if one’s character dies, one has not lost the game but instead must imagine a new character into being. Characters are described on “character sheets,” which list and quantify the character’s innate talents, learned skills and other proficiencies.

While physical combat in the game is resolved solely by rolling dice, the social interactions, both among player-characters (PCs) and with non-player characters (NPCs) (other people one encounters not represented by one of the players) are resolved by acting-out the social interactions and then rolling dice, based on the character’s in-game social apititudes, to determine how well-received these words have been.

D&D is also soothing because it is full of measures of status. Characters gain “levels,” commensurate with their powers in the game and as they experience more success, there are steady incremental rewards. Furthermore, characters specialize into classes, with warriors wielding swords, clerics healing wounds, warlocks incinerating foes with eldritch blasts. Having clearly quantified hierarchical ranks with transparent criteria for attaining them and areas of specialization allowing everyone to be the master of something is not just soothing.

D&D creates a social microuniverse that is fairer, more transparent, better quantified, more clearly ordered than the chaos of modern social interaction. Furthermore, the game makes that micro-universe just consequential enough. Screwing up at D&D is still a screw-up. Your character may even die but none of those consequences leave the table.

My childhood D&D table, like so many others, consisted of a bunch mildly autistic kids practicing social interaction governed by a stable set of rulebooks, hour after hour after hour, week in, week out. It worked. And it continues to work.

It should not surprise us, then, that when Canada and the US unexpectedly invaded Afghanistan in 2001, many of us were hit up with a subcultural “support the troops” request: with the new edition of D&D (third) coming out, could we spare our first and second edition rulebooks and scenario packs for the troops? Because of course D&D players are well-represented in the military; because, in a way, the military is a gigantic tabletop RPG that never ends. As you gain levels, you get access to cooler and cooler, more expensive weapons, just like in D&D and there are even names for the different class levels like “admiral,” just like those tables in Gary Gygax’s original Player’s Handbook.

More than any D&D group or military battalion, the organization that truly epitomizes this kind of intervention is MENSA. A superficial observation of any MENSA chapter board tells us that MENSA is not an elite organization for the super-intelligent; it is a self-help group for people with Asperger syndrome. In fact, I learned recently from a former MENSA director, that their conventions include a set of coloured badges to indicate each delegate’s level of tactile defensiveness (coded as receptivity to hugs), one of the most common Asperger’s comorbidities.

But what would happen to MENSA, to your average D&D group, if they understood themselves to be self-help groups for the disabled? What would happen if MENSA activists began to explain their struggles to get into romantic relationships as arising from their status as disabled people and not because they are “too smart”?

I would argue that a great paradox of autism and Tourette’s self-help projects is that they use the lack of social intuition of participants to conceal the true function and purpose of the group. Essentially, we are coping with our disabilities better and working more industriously on them because we have hidden from ourselves the fact that we are disabled.

It has saddened me, the past decade, to watch similar movements, like Deaf Culture and Mad Pride, wither when the positive effects of transforming one’s disability into something other are so clearly evident in my corner of the world.

Because it is my view that ordinary, decent people would rather be a screw-up than a cripple any day of the week. I have a couple of friends whose lives are severely circumscribed by neurological disability whom I watch make that choice week-in, week-out, even though it brings shame and a sense of failure because that all those screw-ups are a lighter burden than a permanent, crippling brain defect.

Ordinary, decent people want to be heroes; they want to focus on helping others, not asking for help for themselves; they want to feel like their unique ideas and perspectives come from a rare intellectual talent, not brain damage.

The white failures of Trumpism, who blame affirmative action, reverse racism and the International Zionist conspiracy for their lack of a mate or a job are of a piece with the progressive failures furiously pathologizing their personalities and appropriating minority sexual and racial identities to explain their failure. What both groups need is more D&D. It is not natural or healthy to build one’s identity around victimhood or disability, even—nay—especially  when one is genuinely disabled or genuinely a victim.

In other blog posts on this issue, I have emphasized neurodiversity themes and talked about how many disabilities, like restless leg syndrome, produce personal ill health and population-level good health. But that is a well-ploughed furrow these days.

So in this piece I am making a case that is supplementary: if we want to actually benefit from the neurological diversity of our population and unlock the potential within the human race, we need to begin de-pathologizing our quirks and others’ quirks. And, in my view, a key early step in that must be to resist more strongly efforts to change and complicate our systems of etiquette, investing that energy not in making new social rules but in more transparently explaining and documenting those we already have.

Because not everyone is lucky to have grown up at a D&D table.

This blog post is dedicated to Jens Haeusser, Kenneth Lieblich, Michael Airton, Oscar Bot, Steve Lyons, Tara Fraser, Philip Bot and Terrence Willey, the best damn D&D group a guy could have.

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Wokeness, Intersectionality, History’s “Wrong Side” and the False Progressive Consciousness of Time

From the moment the word came into being, the term “progressivism” brought with it a false consciousness of time. The great global meta-ideology that arose in the 1890s packed with it a set of false, mystical beliefs about the nature of time and how it interacted with human societies.

When I say “meta-ideology,” what I mean is that progressivism has never been an ideology; rather, it describes a set of beliefs that underpin multiple ideologies from Marxism to Comtian Positivism to Modernization Theory to Postmillennial Protestantism. These various belief systems came to be collectively categorized as “progressive” following the publication of Francis Galton’s Eugenics and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, both of which sought to transform the recently published works of Charles Darwin from a scientific theory of biological evolution into a social science based on the junk science of race.

Reasoning by analogy, Galton and Spencer decided that human civilizations would, like terrestrial lifeforms, gradually evolve into increasingly complex, refined, intelligent societies, and that every “race” was, just like Darwin’s species, slowly, inexorably evolving towards perfection. The intellectual hegemony of progressivism was evident in the encyclopedias and atlases of a century ago, in which a diagram akin to a number line appeared on the opening pages showing the different races whose civilizations comprised the world in order from darkest to lightest.

On the far left, there would be a diagram of a black-skinned man with a protruding jaw and a large, sloping forehead and below him, “Caveman” and “100,000 BC.” On the far right would be a light-skinned man in a morning suit and top hat with the caption “Englishman/German” and “the present.” Between these two were other faces depicting the great Progressive Chain of Being, going something like, “Negro… Indian… Red Indian… Chinaman,” and below each face would be dates “4000 BC… 2000 BC… 0 AD… 500 AD.” In this way, progressives reimagined all racial, cultural, political, artistic, scientific, technological, military, really any form of difference as a differences in the progress of a race. There were no other peoples in the world for white Europeans, just themselves at different moments in the past.

While not all progressives conflated their worldview with the junk science of race, there nevertheless existed a meta-consensus across almost every major ideology that the more “advanced” a society was, the more complex, the more technological, the less violent, the more secular, the more just, the more educated, the less superstitious, the more egalitarian. In this way, political disagreement could be recast as a difference of opinion about how to achieve progress, not about what progress looked like or whether it was good.

There is something beguiling about an ideology that tells you that your future victory is both inevitable and fully knowable, that the ultimate triumph of good over evil is baked into the structure of the universe itself.

This idea was not just a consequence of Darwinism but of the whole cultural zeitgeist that permitted Darwin’s work to be so rapidly accepted. After all, progressivism’s most popular aphorism was composed Unitarian Universalist minister Theodore Parker, who died the year Origin of Species was published. Parker’s church, the one in which I was raised, was so progressive that its ministers took to blessing the openings of new factories and railroads. And the saying, often falsely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” The shortened version quoted today tells us much about how this idea underwent a kind of karma to “instant karma” transition.

How, then, did one comprehend the victories of one’s political opponents if one were a progressive? Obviously, one’s opponents had done something unfair or unnatural that had temporarily reversed the flow of time itself. If Marxists did well in an election, liberal progressives would bemoan or slide back into despotism. If liberal progressives did well, Marxists would understand this to heighten the contradictions in capitalism and produce a kind of slingshot effect whereby the magnitude of today’s defeat was commensurate in size to that of tomorrow’s inevitable victory. One’s adversaries’ victories were ephemeral, one’s own, inevitable and permanent.

Over time, the march of actual, real history with all its messiness, ambiguity and surprise began to challenge the progressive theory of time. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 shook the world as one of the most educated, secular countries of the Middle East suddenly became a theocracy. But more influential on people’s thinking in the long term was the mid-1970s reverse in the gap between rich and poor, which began widening again. In the 1990s, it was joined by the gap between male and female wages and, around the same time, black and white. More and more concrete indicators of “progress” began to disappear.

As societies took stock after crossing Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the twenty-first century,” the forces of progress and progressivism were in disarray. Marxist governments and parties were a spent force. Parties of the right the world over began to purge progressives, driving right-wing progressives like David Frum, Kim Campbell, Arlen Specter and Hugh Segal into parties that still espoused progressive beliefs.

Although I have spilled much ink about the economic and political effects of the Third Way movement in social democratic and liberal parties in the 1990s, I have said little about their impact on discourse. In both parties of the right and parties of the left, the universal neoliberal policy consensus effectively foreclosed any genuine political debates or contests of investor rights, privatization, austerity and the other aspects of the emerging neoliberal order.

This meant that for parties of both the right and the left, politics had to be expressed in largely immaterial, cultural terms. Parties of the right created moral panics around abortion, the rights of linguistic minorities and announced that they would be defending Christmas against the putative war against it by progressives.

The War on Christmas is, in key respects, the core of the efforts by progressives to regroup in the twenty-first century. It is not exactly that the beleaguered forces of progressivism holed-up in their Third Way parties opposed Christmas or conducted any kind of intentional war on public Christmas celebrations. But it is true that a state or large corporation appearing to favour Christian religious observances over those of minority faiths began to be understood not as a minor inconvenience or a harmless breach in church-state separation. No, it was an offense, an affront, almost a form of violence against religious minorities that were not Christian.

Oddly, though, it was not representatives of Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism who spoke out against public Christmas celebrations, nor was it members of small autocthonous movements in the Anglosphere like the Handsome Lake Church or Nation of Islam. No. Those who rose to the bait and combatted conservatives in their efforts to “put the Christ back in Christmas” were progressive white secularists, either atheists or practicing their “spirituality” outside of organized religion.

While it might seem silly to engage on an issue on which conservatives enjoyed not just majority support but broad indifference to the issue among non-supporters, this behaviour seems more rational if one considers the discursive straitjacket in which progressives now found themselves. The idea that every political triumph is actually a wind-assisted victory is a great one when you’re on a winning streak. But it becomes worse than useless when one is taking an absolute pasting. Perhaps, if one keeps losing, this might indicate one is on “the wrong side of history.”

For this reason, left progressives (and now suddenly all the progressives were in parties of the left) necessarily had to transform their political program into one that did not just contain victory in the future but victory in the present and recent past. In essence, progressivism necessarily sanctifies the past and present orders as manifestations of a divine will, a secular faith more effective than any religion at collapsing what God intends and what God permits into a single thing.

Necessarily, then, left progressives joined right progressives in seeing the expansion of free trade agreements, economic migration, investor rights as positive forces; globalization was progressive; nationalism, regressive. Similarly, right progressives soon joined left progressives in celebrating gay marriage, the rise of “gender medicine,” increased parliamentary representation of women and minorities and the secularization of public space; civil liberties were progressive; tradition, regressive.

For something to be progressive, it was necessary that it have a nigh-uninterrupted record of incremental victories, one building on another. But as our societies have become more divided and volatile, these things are growing fewer and further between. As with the Third Way politics it produced, progressive culture switched from deciding what is desirable and figuring out how to make it possible to figuring out what is politically possible and arguing for its desirability.

We can see this in the politics that preoccupy progressives and the cultural left today: condemnation of and sanctions against Israel, reduced regulation of sex work, reduced drug prohibition, more gender medicine for kids and adults. Why would these be the things that capture the progressive imagination in ways that climate justice, wealth inequality, etc. do not? Why do people wrap themselves and festoon their identities with signs of their politics on these issues? Because these are the things towards which evidence shows incremental, inexorable progress. If they become our primary proxies for human goodness and development, the false time consciousness of progressivism can be maintained.

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But this was a strain, an effort. Progressivism could not carry on in this state. Something else had to shift to save progressive time consciousness. Enter: Wokeness.

It is weird that “Woke” has taken less than a quarter of a decade to change from a compliment to a pejorative. That stated, both those who cling to the title and those who use it as an insult share a belief in the immense power of the term. And I concur.

“Wokeness” fundamentally changes progressive time consciousness and functions as a countervailing force against the ever-narrowing optic of possible futures that progressive time consciousness has been producing.

What the term “Woke” implies is this: the reason that major problems in our society have not been adequately addressed is that nobody noticed these problems or tried to solve them until very very recently. This is revealed in the less powerful, less seductive term that preceded “Woke” in the progressive imaginary, “Intersectional.”

Although its creator Kimberlé Crenshaw has never made such a claim, those who purport to be adherents to intersectionality believe that until Crenshaw published her two articles on the term, one in 1989 and one in 1994, no one had ever theorized or even thought about how class, race and gender oppression function synergistically. Intersectionalists argue that all feminism before 1994 was “white feminism” until an obscure legal scholar published an article on the ways in which gender and racial oppression interact.

In the mid-2010s, whenever I argued with people who demanded that I support intersectionality, I would argue that Friedrich Engels, bell hooks, Richard Wright and others had much more sophisticated, descriptive models of how race, class and gender oppression interact than Crenshaw did. The rebuttal was always the same: before intersectionality, nobody had considered these synergies of oppression, never mind carefully and painstakingly theorizing them. The fact that Engels wrote a book in the nineteenth century arguing that class oppression originated in patriarchy was so far outside the discourse that Intersectionalists could not integrate this datum into their progressive worldview; it was beyond the pale, outside the discourse.

Instead, they chose to believe that prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, all feminism was white supremacist; socialists and communists never considered race or included racialized people; all racial equality movements were nationalist; etc.

Wokeness is simply the generalization of the false Intersectionalist premise to all politics. In this way, failure, regression, the lack of progress on human equality can be redescribed as arising from the fact that, until a generation ago, no political philosophers or political movements had theorized, desired or worked for true human equality.

In Woke time consciousness, everything is happening for the first time! Everything is unprecedented! While progressive time consciousness had been slowly, relentlessly, circumscribing possible fields of political action and possible loci of victory, Wokeness can reverse this declension with one single grand fallacy: the belief that no one has ever really wanted to or tried to pursue social justice until just a minute ago.

And the best thing about Wokeness is that it can be individualized, personalized, consistent with the neoliberal subject, which comprehends all political failures as failures of individual virtue.

Because of this, the ability of Wokeness to short-circuit progressive time consciousness radically opens the horizon of future possibility in the progressive imagination. But, at the same time, it circumscribes and distorts that field because it casts future justice in terms of personal individualistic fulfillment or punishment.

Consequently, new “rights” and “freedoms” are attached to it that make no social sense and are indicative of a pathologically narcissistic or solipsistic consciousness, like the right to control who others perceive one to be, the right to be sexually attractive to whoever one is attracted to, the right to be talked about as one imagines oneself, when one is not even there, the right to move in and out of a protected class of person, based on mood. Even the fallacious conservative idea of first responders being replaced by ephemeral associations of one-person militias is an increasingly Woke proposition.

Furthermore, political outcomes are, themselves, radically individualized. Woke political “victories” are about removing a TV ad or billboard from one’s field of vision, silencing words one does not wish to hear, firing individual malefactors, blacklisting others, throwing folks out of restaurants and storefront businesses for wrongthink and beating them in the streets if they won’t shut up. While Wokeness turns the past into a slate grey canvas devoid of detail and the future into a colourful panorama of wild shapes and exotic, unique beings, it has no theory of how to translate a series of putative victories into a possible future. And it shows no interest in developing one. Political action in the present is disconnected from the project of creating a just future.

And because it is still part of a nominally progressive time consciousness, one need not ask whether these outcomes pass tests of human decency or rational strategy. Wokesters do not even understand themselves to be perpetrators of these acts; “history” is doing this violence with the back of its hand, running roughshod over those on its “wrong side.”

This kind of time consciousness is the death knell of revolution. It replaces progressivism’s inability to fully embrace a true sense of hope in the first place with a false, cartoonish, childish, counterfeit hope. A mockery of hope itself.

At the very time we most need to be reading the literature of the Cold War, writers from the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe and Latin America, we are instead enthusiastically throwing in with the very project they denounced: the political project of Forgetting.

Because we must be able to remember a different past in order to imagine a different future, Forgetting is core to every authoritarian project. That is Milan Kundera’s argument in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of the deepest, most audacious literary explorations of the totalitarian project inspired by the Cold War dictatorships. That kind of thinking is desperately needed today; we need to go back and read our Kundera, our Isabel Allende.

Because if we allow the past to become nothing more than a fading, half-remembered dream of the Woke, darkness will fall.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the resentments remained.

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

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

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

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