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Politics of Identity

Originally an article series, this category covers Stuart’s writing about identity and self-making in contemporary capitalism.

Why Do We Think Doing Crack in the Hospital Is Okay?

Anxiety in the Age of Trump
Whether or not one was a Donald Trump supporter, the end of the primaries in the summer of 2016 inaugurated a new age of vigilance, anxiety and outrage for Americans. Whether by virtue of Trump’s boorish norm violations, intentionally provocative communications strategy and general emotional dysregulation, or whether due to the near-constant attacks on the Administration’s functioning and legitimacy, a new baseline level of rage and fear took hold in Anglo America and much of the Global North, a pervasive psychosocial state we have yet to shake-off eight years later.

America’s stand-up comics were, for the most part of group of liberals already skilled in mocking and belittling America’s populist conservative movements. And many did a great job of skewering the Trump administration over the president’s apparently unhinged public behaviour and revolving door of officials, each greasier and more bizarre than those they replaced.

But the comedian who best expressed the sense of anxiety that pervaded America was John Mulaney. He offered the following metaphor: “It’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital… And nobody knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse. It’s never been in a hospital before.”

I quoted that bit many times during Trump’s four years in office and have a few times since, especially as that feeling of anxiety has not gone away, what with the Bumpkin Putsch, followed by the failed impeachment, the prosecutions, the efforts to disqualify Trump based on a crime the impeachment trial had acquitted him of. The feeling that there is a horse loose in a hospital has never gone away.

But the reason this description of the situation plays so well with people like me who were steeped in progressive culture is that it plays to an unconscious belief that society, as a whole, is just one gigantic hospital.

The Rise and Fall of the Giant Agora
At the zenith of neoliberalism in the late 1990s, no matter what party one supported at election time, no matter what church one attended, no matter where one was located, socially, when neoliberalism enjoyed cultural and ideological hegemony, we saw society as a gigantic marketplace. The agora had swallowed the whole city. The schools, the hospitals, the council chambers, everything existed in the context of the marketplace. If we wanted to say that something was good, we looked around for words of praise and said things like “profit,” “efficiency,” “competition,” etc.

But as we entered a period of socio-political realignment in the early 2010s and the commissar class who dominate the Pharma and Data sectors began to eclipse the neoliberals as our cultural hegemons, our understanding of the world began to shift away from seeing everything through the prism of the market. Covid and the opioid crisis helped in this shift but the re-categorization of all pain and unpleasantness as “trauma,” and all responses to it as “triggering,” was just as important.

What had begun in the 1990s with the huge-scale prescription of third-generation SSRI anti-depressants reached its culmination as we came to redefine feeling bad as inherently problematic. Our identities began to shift, too. Those who have embraced the new progressive culture of the commissar class, have come to engage in self-fashioning behaviours of self-diagnosing oneself into a series of pathologies, with the assistance of the ubiquitous online psychiatric diagnostic quizzes, funded by a pharmaceutical industry eager to receive more orders for psychiatric drugs.

In British Columbia, the government’s policies of steadily reducing and restricting citizens’ access to free medical care have resulted in the normalization of psychiatric self-diagnosis, presented by telephone during ten-minute appointment telephone windows at clinics that charge cold hard cash to see a physician in person. More and more British Columbians are on speed as internet ADHD self-tests have come to be accepted by the province’s overloaded clinics and Adderall and other amphetamine prescriptions are dispense by phone and online. One doesn’t need to tell the government one is an addict to be prescribed meth substitutes, although that works too; one can just say that it’s tough to concentrate, what with a horse being loose in the hospital.

But it is not just during a doctor’s appointment that your average progressive British Columbian announces a set of psychiatric self-diagnoses. This is how people who have adopted the culture of the commissar class talk about themselves all the time; within a few minutes of meeting someone at a fashionable party, one begins to hear one’s new acquaintances list of mental illnesses, even before they get to their preferred pronouns.

Indeed, psychiatric self-diagnosis has become the linchpin of self-fashioning in the progressive world. As being unique and special in the sight of God is not a culturally or emotionally available option, the language one uses for both describing one’s uniqueness and begs not to be bullied in this, one of the most judgemental and predatory social orders of recent times, is to “identify into” a series of neurological disabilities and sexual fetishes.

The term “neurodiverse,” one that initially made sense only at the population level, has become conflated with “neurodivergent” and applied at the individual. If one can no longer be unique in the sight of God, one can at least be unique and special in the sight of an imaginary all-seeing doctor.

That is because what Mulaney was telling us is that we have stopped believing that society is a gargantuan, all-encompassing marketplace and has become one huge world-containing hospital.

However rational, well-intentioned and even life-saving Covid policies were, when the state began to regulate the size of the crowd you could meet for drinks, have over for dinner, even host at a backyard barbecue, a consequence was that the hospital made your home one of its rooms, your street one of its wards. The reason we have re-described ourselves as a bag of diseases and other conditions necessitating medical intervention is that we have accepted the logic of the commissars, that society is now an all-encompassing hospital.

Brad West and Doing Crack in the Hospital
It is in this context that we must approach Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West’s recent interview with the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer. In response to the BC government announcing a review of its new policy of letting hospital patients carry weapons and buy, use and sell illicit drugs while in hospital, West suggested that the government could save its money. His review was done, “In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”

What baffled those outside the Progressiverse was how this could even be a thing, how it was that, in an environment where powerful drugs are being administered by highly trained professionals, trained in predicting and managing drug interactions, how addicts shooting up street drugs of unknown provenance or purity could possibly be remotely safe and not undermine the precise care they are receiving. How on earth did we get here? How could one reasonably administer opiate pain relievers when patients were also self-administering unknown types and quantities of opiates?

And weapons!? How could it be safe for people doing central nervous system stimulants and undergoing intensive, painful and disorienting medical treatment to be armed with hunting knives and boxcutters?

The answer is simple: if society is a hospital then the hospital is society.

And in the giant society-spanning hospital, everyone is a doctor or a patient, and as evinced in the increasingly ubiquitous signage about not upsetting and “triggering” receptionists and medical personnel at clinics, both.

If everywhere you go is the hospital, then whatever you are free to do in the world, you are, axiomatically, free to do in the hospital because if the world is the hospital then the hospital is the world.

Generally, when a society idealizes something, whoever or whatever is being idealized is actually being singled-out for special punishment. No society idealizes female virtue like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Similarly, our society grows ever more shabby in its treatment of people genuinely neurologically disabled. Autistic people have been pushed out of self-advocacy organizations and the public square by people who are merely a little quirky or socially inept. Their spaces have been invaded and their silencing has enabled, as Hillary Cass’s review most recently pointed out, a mass sterilization campaign to be waged against autistic youth in the name of genderwang.

Similarly, mental healthcare has all been all but withdrawn from people truly disabled by addiction and madness. Treatment has been replaced by “supportive housing” and tent cities. It seems that the only right of the addicted and insane we defend is their right to be miserable, to sleep rough, to defecate in the streets, to shoot up in parks and to scream at passers-by. And there is a logic to this too. The more ill health there is, the more society really does seem like a gigantic understaffed hospital.

Medicalized Societies Are Sick Societies
We are not the first society to decide to see everything through the prism of medicine and disease. In recent studies of Franciscan and Jesuit catechisms written in Iroquoian languages, we find that the societies embroiled in the “mourning wars,” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein Huron and Iroquois warriors engaged in endless capture-oriented military campaigns to replace population lost to smallpox and other Eastern Hemisphere diseases also saw the world in medical terms.

Almost every positive thing Christian missionaries promised new indigenous converts was described in the Iroquoian languages, as a form of medicine. Every good thing in the universe, grace, salvation, sustenance, community was presented as “medicine.” That is because a society only decides it is a gigantic hospital if those living therein know that sicknesses of body and mind have metastasized into a social sickness, a society-wide cancer, in the case of the Iroquois, an epidemic not just of smallpox but of something they called “false face disease,” a consequence of centuries of continuous war, disease and martial law.

The way out of such a society, such a state of being is not more medicine. It is not categorizing more things as sickness and categorizing more activities as medicine. Prescribing chemical castration and lobotomization drugs to children may be called “medicine” but there is nothing healthy about it. Offering to murder disabled, homeless and depressed people through the MAID program is called “medicine” but it is anything but. Amputating people’s healthy body parts or adding prostheses and fake orifices so they can better resemble the Japanese cartoons they believe to be their “true selves” is not medicine by any reasonable definition, nor is secretly prescribing fentanyl to teenagers as part of some sort of Opposite Day “harm reduction” plan.

You see: the thing that makes our society sicker, more dangerous than the late-stage Iroquois Confederacy is that a hospital is a hierarchical, authoritarian bureaucratic institution that conflates power, expertise and medicine into a single authoritative principle. In this society, whatever the state does, is, by definition, “medicine,” irrespective of whether it makes you more or less healthy, irrespective of whether it makes you suffer, irrespective of whether it even kills you.

If there is a solution, I would suggest we can find it in the Tao Te Ching:

“He who is sick of sickness is well.”

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Theorizing the Current Debate in Gender Critical Land

If you are here to read about movement strategy and theory, read the whole thing. If you’re just here for the theory, skip ahead to the section called “Social Constructions.”

The Current State of the Gender Critical Movement
For most of the past decade, the gender critical movement, for lack of a better term, i.e. opponents of genderwang from all quarters in society, have been against the ropes taking punch after punch after punch, just trying to keep our careers, homes, jobs and kids, with, at best, mixed degrees of success.

However, beginning in Red State America and England, places where there are long-term, albeit different, cultural traditions that enable dissidents and popular classes to push back against elite hegemony, we have started chalking up the odd victory. By “victory,” I don’t mean actual gains for gender critical thinking in culture and law but successful resistance to ambitious, novel changes to culture and public policy that have been forced-though elsewhere but are stalled in particular regions within the two largest and most venerable countries of the Anglosphere. And I have offered some reasons for the greater resilience of Dixie and England in my writing previously.

Perhaps it is the luxury of occasionally winning something that is allowing a coalition of people and organizations largely forced together by our adversaries that is causing us to begin squabbling more vigorously and loudly about our differences in public. We are an extraordinarily broad coalition, encompassing a range of opinion from deeply anti-feminist religious traditionalists to communist lesbian separatists.

But it is not the merits of feminism and nor of traditional partriarchal religion that forms the locus of the conflict. In some ways, our movement is showing its health because our divisions are not playing out along those lines. In fact, radical feminists and religious conservatives are likely to be on the same page whereas people who have been pulled into the debate over questions of child safeguarding or free speech are more likely to be in the opposite camp, along the small but important community around which much of the debate swirls, a group I will call “legacy transsexuals.”

So, what are the camps? First of all, the framing and naming of the issue indicates which side is winning. The camps are those who oppose using “wrong-sex pronouns” and those who believe we should award the honour of third person pronouns not matching sex to adults who underwent gender reassignment surgery but are on our side, politically, regarding pediatric gender medicine, free speech and other issues.

The Problems of Grand Coalitions
One of the reasons I feel qualified to contribute to this debate is that I have experience with working in anti-establishment grand coalitions from days as leader of the BC Green Party. In the 1990s, I played a founding and leadership role in the BC Anti-Casino Coalition and BC Electoral Change Coalition. The former group included conservative and far left municipal politicians, trade union leaders, social conservatives, people of faith from both liberal and conservative churches and was led by members of what we might call the “NIMBY Left.” The latter comprised liberal academics studying the voting system, the anti-abortion movement, the neo-Jeffersonian taxpayer movement, environmentalists and Maoists.

Unlike the current grand coalition that has been corralled and herded together by the establishment, these coalitions formed voluntarily. As such, we built institutions and processes for working together as our coalition coalesced. One of the challenges we face today is that we are in a situation more akin to the coalition building work of the United Nations powers in the Second World War. Having discovered that we are under attack by the same powers, we now have to figure out how to cooperate because we’re stuck with each other until the end of this war.

Due to the highly effective retooling and escalation of the cancelation campaign waged against me since 2020 in 2022, work I wanted to do in sharing my practical knowledge from the grand coalitions of the 1990s mostly went nowhere. I simply was not able to participate as much as I wished in the organized coalitions that haltingly emerged in 2023. All I was able to do was get my otherwise-Marxist institute to sponsor a monthly multi-partisan gender critical meet-up and bring in conservative intellectual Karin Litzcke as its co-chair.

The first thing this undignified public debate should tell us is that we need national and supra-national institutions where these things should be, if not agreed upon then, at least clarified and fought over by trusted movement leaders outside immediate public view. Twitter is a suboptimal location for us to be hanging out these questions, especially when, because we are struggling to find language to describe our disagreement, it is all the easier to descend into expressing our disagreements in interpersonal or sectarian terms.

Gender criticals need spaces to fight with each other and make necessary agreements at a high level. And I commit, if I decide return to Canada this fall, to building such spaces.

A word on such spaces before we get to the theory: the people from whom I learned the most about how to sustain unity in a coalition in which there is only agreement on one issue are now deceased and deeply missed by me: Kathleen Toth, the anti-abortion activist and leader of the Family Coalition Party of BC and Charles Boylan, the Maoist and leader of the BC Marxist-Leninist Party. There was almost nothing other than the need for proportional representation on which I agreed with either of them but I learned a lot not just about the practicalities of broad coalition work but about how to see goodness and experience friendship with people whose politics and worldview one deeply opposes.

Social Constructions
I want to suggest that, as with so many of the problems our movement faces, the origin of our difficulty is that even we internalize too many of the cognitive distortions the genderwang Newspeak project is pushing into our consciousness every minute of every day through legacy media, social media and compelled speech in our homes and workplaces.

When gender ideologues state that they believe “gender is a social construction,” we mistakenly believe them. Their argument is that their gender is whatever they personally think it is at that moment of that day, that whatever they believe in their heart of hearts about their gender is necessarily true.

Except: that is not what “social construction” means. You do not need to read Michel Foucault or Judith Butler or any other poststructuralist thinker to know that. Just look at the words. A construction is something that is made, built, fashioned in the real world, not merely fleetingly imagined in one’s private interior life. What genderists today mean by “social construction” is actually “personal fantasy.”

To give an example of a social construction, let’s pick something neutral, like time zones. Until the advent of long-distance passenger rail, time was what one might call “objectively determined.” In every place in the world, one could discover when the shortest shadows were cast in all directions and deduce that the sun was at the highest point in the sky. Whenever the sun reached its zenith, that was noon. It was then just a matter of dividing the rest of the time into twenty-four hours of equal length and dividing those hours into sixty minutes of equal length. As one moved around the circumference of the earth, what time it was was both objectively discoverable and slightly different from everywhere else.

But it was impossible to fashion railway schedules on that basis. So, strips of the world were arbitrarily selected and turned into “time zones.” And what was originally called “railway time,” soon wholly obliterated the objective experience of time human beings had been living with for millennia. Instead, all time was determined relative to when noon happened at the Greenwich Observatory east of London. Time ceased to describe one’s position relative to the sun or surface of the earth and now described which zone one had been arbitrarily placed in and the centre of that zone’s position relative to Greenwich.

We now find this so natural that we use the communications technology we now have not to measure what time it is objectively where we are but to instead make sure that everyone’s clock knows what zones it is in and reports the time in that zone identically, down to the nanosecond. This is what a social construction is, something that is based on physical and observed realities and constructed out of them based on widespread, near-unanimous social agreement. It feels like part of the physical world but as actually something we build, maintain and constantly rebuild and reinforce at the level of mass culture.

Legacy Transsexuals vs. Autogynephiles
Before the rise of the current theory of gender that has seized control of our institutions at the elite level, there were very few people who underwent medical procedures in order to resemble individuals of the opposite sex. We called these folks “transsexuals” or “female impersonators,” as the vast majority were male. The men and women who engaged in these practices were almost all same-sex-attracted people who desperately desired to be beautiful to opposite sex-attracted (i.e. straight) people of their sex.

These individuals did not desire, require or possess a legal regime to force others to behave as though their impersonation was working. Sometimes the impersonations and surgeries were so flawless people were, at least consciously, fooled. Sometimes the impersonations and surgeries were “good enough” for more sexually flexible but straight-identified people to be attracted to transsexuals. Sometimes the impersonations were failures but people went along with them out of pity and the desire to make the transsexual feel better.

The point was that if the room agreed with you about the gender you claimed, you possessed that gender, not the sex you were impersonating but you got people to act and speak as though you were that sex. That is what any plain understanding of “gender is a social construction” means.

And a minority of the community today called “transgender,” mainly older members thereof understand their gender in this context. These individuals tend to be vigilant about how others react to them, often becoming amateur cold readers so they can modulate their body language, tone of voice even claims about what they believe or have experienced emotionally so as to best impersonate someone of the sex they wish they were. They are mostly older and tend to be same-sex attracted. And one can see the logic of some of these individuals having been part of the long-term gay pride, gay rights movement.

But we face today is a very different situation with younger trans-identified people, along with opposite sex-attracted trans-identified males who have eschewed the red sports car and instead chosen to act out their midlife crisis by sexually traumatizing their wives and children, individuals we call autogynephiles. Until recently, it was viewed by the medical profession as wrong to transition children, young adults or autogynephiles. But thanks to masses of Big Pharma investment, the “do no harm” ethos has been broken down, as it was during the opioid crisis.

Trans-identifying autogynephiles, who, today, commit rapes at somewhere between 250% and 400% the rate that other males do, tend to have certain psychiatric comorbidities along with their sexual arousal at imagining themselves as a woman engaged in same-sex relations, such as preferential rape. And it is these individuals who dominate the leadership of pro-genderwang organizations and movements. It is from them that young, gender-confused people take their cues.

What autogynephiles desire is not to sincerely convince people they are women, through acts of credible impersonation but to force people to behave as though they believe they are, when they know they are not. When people interact with militant autogynephiles, they claim to believe these guys are women, not because they think they are but because they know they are violent, coercive men who will punish, harass, beat, rape or even murder them if they don’t pretend to be convinced. In other words, autogynephiles’ power to make people call them female comes from those people’s recognition that they are actually potentially physically dangerous men.

And many autogynephiles are as aroused by the force, the lack of consent, the lack of true belief as they are by the pronouns they compel and the silk panties they wear.

Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity
When I teach courses in both economics and philosophy, at the core of my teaching is the “three kinds of reality” model. Every person has three concurrent experiences of what is real. There is the subjective experience, which is how that person is internally, personally and individually seeing and experiencing the world. There is the objective experience, how the world actually is, as measured by instruments, senses and direct engagement with physical reality. But then there are intersubjective experiences, like our experience of railway time. Or like a bank loan, where $1000 today is worthy $1100 next year, where powerful social agreements and observations about others’ behaviour condition our reality.

Our community is fighting against people who believe gender is subjective, who simply want to force us to describe the world as they see it in their mind’s eye, irrespective of our actual perceptions or experiences. But our community contains two groups: those who see gender as intersubjective and those who see it as objective. Free speech, anti-authoritarian and refugees from the pre-genderwang trans scene, all constituencies I identify with, are intersubjectivists: our views are best expressed by my slight elaboration of Bill Maher’s words on the “bathroom debate:” “If you look [and act] like a man, go to the men’s; if you look [and act] like a woman, go to the women’s but you there, with the beard in the dress, you can fucking hold it.”

On the other hand, religious conservatives and feminists tend towards the objective side, which makes sense on a number of fronts. Feminists, especially survivors of men’s violence, are much less interested in splitting social hairs to describe tiny numbers of outliers within an already tiny demographic group than ensuring basic physical fairness and safety in women’s spaces and activities.

And I think they probably are in the right, here, in articulating a position that we need to stop focusing on people’s, usually men’s, thoughts about things and focus on material reality. But we also have to recognize that in debates about gender, courageous legacy transsexuals on our side punch massively above their weight. The establishment goes to great lengths to suppress their voices because when legacy transsexuals say “there is no such thing as a trans child” or “save women’s sports,” people who would not otherwise listen do.

On one hand, I think that we probably should speak for objective, material reality. On the other hand, the idea of gender as intersubjective reminds of a past détente with the trans community and points to ways of living together that are more harmonious. When this war ends, there will be a lot of people in bodies disfigured by “gender medicine” who will need better models, non-bullying, non-coercive models for interacting with the rest of society and we will need models for treating them with the kindness and respect their behaviour warrants.

Personally, I hope that people who have been bamboozled by genderwang build more resilience and become less concerned about how others talk about them, an enterprise that is probably the biggest, hardest and most incomplete work of my own life. And I also hope that this essay has provided a little more precise language and a little more perspective so we have, at least, a more constructive debate.

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Colonized By Wankers: the Unique Vulnerability of the Anglosphere to Progressive Authoritarianism

In my last essay, I had some words to say about why Canada was uniquely susceptible to becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent Wokeistans. Because it was near the end of a 3500-word behemoth of an essay, rather than making you find it in the original text, I shall just begin by reposting it here:

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionistic self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Many found this section to be the most engaging part of the essay because it helped to account for what Canadians are experiencing as a unique vulnerability to the most bizarre forms of Woke social and political behaviour and the lack of any apparent cultural or institutional capacity to resist them. But I cannot let this story of Canada’s incomplete or superficial secularization stand as a sufficient, or even primary, explanation of the state of my country.

For one thing it does not account for the fact that Canada is not one nation sticking out within the Global North put part of a particular set of places that exhibit near-identical vulnerabilities to and comorbidities with the key themes and obsessions of Wokeness such as a celebration of censorship, placing certain groups of perceived villains (e.g. “TERFS, Zionist Jews, etc.) outside the social contract and state violence monopoly, essentialization and fetishization of race, combined with a theory of sex and sexuality primarily premised on some combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and the Mister Potato-Head Fallacy.

If one thinks of Wokeness like Dante’s circles of Hell, Canada is not the only member of the outer circle. Out here with us are Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; the next most dramatically Woke places are Wales and Scotland and it is only then that places outside the Anglosphere enter the running, with Norway, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. Yet, although first target and most heavily invested-in in the progressive authoritarian project, the United States and England have, after many early capitulations are looked-to, the world over, as places where social movements, from feminists to Muslims to conservative Christians, are offering some of the strongest, most courageous grassroots pushbacks against Wokeness.

Clearly, there is some relationship between Wokeness and the Anglosphere but one that is complex and must be thoroughly understood because, understanding the variegated susceptibility of English-speakers to Wokeness, can reveal important things to us about progressive authoritarian identitarianism.

Now, to past! In Richard Bushman’s most underappreciated book, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, the grand old man of American history reminds us that hijacking revolutions is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, it is in the nature of revolutions to inevitably be hijacked. That is because a revolution must assemble a substantial majority of the population to succeed; the vast majority of a population has to believe that rolling the dice on a revolution is more likely to improve their lot than not for one to happen.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution originally included socialists, students, feminists, liberals and all kinds of people it would eventually turn on. Similarly, Lenin’s, Mao’s, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s, Robespierre’s, Castro’s and most other successful revolutions entailed the assembly of a vast and variegated groups of constituencies with conflicting interests but who found the destruction of the regime to be a shared interest.

It should not surprise us, then, that the first modern revolution, Washington’s Revolution was just this sort of thing. Bushman exposes, in his study of war propaganda from the 1770s and 80s that people favouring the creation of an independent liberal republic in America were a small portion of revolutionaries who fought in the American Revolution but were over-represented in the military and political leadership largely thanks to George Washington’s personal sympathies with liberalism.

When the British Empire conducted a ruthless internal inquiry as to how they lost the Thirteen Colonies, not a thing every empire can do, and a significant cultural reason that British Empires have been global hegemons for the past 260 years, a quarter of a millennium, they engaged in a truth-seeking process more interested in imperial success than protecting decision-makers. Their conclusion: the reason they had lost America was that they had made the mistake of settling it with Englishmen.

The British Caribbean, full of Irish indentured servants and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Québec, populated primarily with French Catholic colonists, had not joined the revolution because its master discourse was not a doctrine of republican liberal independence but the assertion of the Common Law right, granted all Englishmen, to rise up against and slay the king’s evil courtiers who have falsely counseled him into misgovernment.

In other words, most American revolutionaries were as bewildered as Iranians in 1980 and Russians in 1918. They had risen up, as loyal subjects of King George, to slay his evil counselors based on their rights as free Englishmen, propounded in every constitutional document from the Salic Law to Magna Carta.

So, the British Empire made an important decision: henceforth, no colony would be run by Englishmen; it would be run by a group the British had already colonized, a group already disentitled, and members of that group already comfortable in the role of stooge. That’s why Canadian British imperial pageantry is full of kilts, bagpipes and tartans… or at least it was until Justin Trudeau’s raceplay fetish got control of it and filled it with Vanishing Indians and settlers doing Aboface, with their drums and feathers.

So, the British Empire re-thought Ireland. The people to colonize Ireland were not the English but the Irish Scots, Scots who, for one reason or another, factual or not, believed that they were the true, pure Irish. Not a surprise in an era governed by the discourse of fictive etymology to re-describe the Irish colonial project not as Englishmen civilizing the Irish but as the Ulster Protestant Scotsmen returning to their homeland and reclaiming it.

Have you ever wondered why Indian accents sound so similar, whether the native speaker speaks an Indo-European/Aryan language from the North or a Dravidian/Tamil language from the South, like Malayalam? There is a reason for that: the thing that unites Indian accents from Kerala to Punjab is the “Welsh lilt.” Because the Welsh, like the Scots, people conquered by the English, were disproportionately sent to India.

In this way, every post-1787 white settler state in the Anglosphere (New Zealand, Canada, Australia) was colonized by an already-colonized people, as was Ireland, the original template for the project. The US, Scotland and Wales were merely, as so brilliantly expressed in Trainspotting, merely colonized by the English, who are wankers. But what happens when those colonized by wankers colonize others?

I would suggest that our deep colonial consciousness causes a constitutionally supine nature to enter a populace that has never even met its oppressor but instead only encounters, as authority figures, members of peoples also conquered by its oppressor. This also helps to explain the cases of Mexico and Brazil. Brazil, it must be remembered: produced the greatest black slave-hunters in the world, escaped and manumitted African slaves in Brazil who still had enough cultural knowledge to sail back to Africa and enslave African war captives in the Sertão around Luanda (the first place to legally define whiteness as—the possession of shoes).

This supine nature suffuses the cultures of the outer Anglosphere. It is no coincidence that the strong leaders of Canada’s twentieth century were overwhelmingly from outside Anglo culture, Laurier, St. Laurent, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien all grew in French-majority communities that threw off the culture of stoogery during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, to declare that Quebecois were “masters in our own house.”

Anglo Canada, Australia and New Zealand, furthermore, are all places designed to toady to whoever the hegemon is. The position of stooge transcends one specific empire. Once the British Empire entered terminal decline, all three rapidly realigned their politics to serve the interests of the United States over the interests of Britain. And it is no coincidence that, since the Chinese Empire has regained its belligerent swagger under Xi Jinping, each of these countries has had a major Chinese political interference scandal, in which their national governments were beginning to hedge their bets, and, not knowing whether to kowtow to Washington or Beijing, began doing both.

Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand are proceeding in lock step to return to their colonial past, transferring power from democratic institutions to technocrats within government or within the regulated oligopolies with which their governments are fusing. All three are increasingly in love with censorship, gun control and the transfer of parental rights to the state. Unlike Westminster, parliamentarians have discarded all pretense of representing their constituents to the government and now brazenly represent the government to their constituents, always voting with the party whip and belittling local voters who demand better as victims of “Russian disinformation” or bigots.

And it is not so much that these countries are becoming newly authoritarian. It is that their essential nature, carefully baked-in by the nineteenth-century British Empire is coming to fore. This is how they are designed to respond to stress, uncertainty and threat; they are returning to their roots, rediscovering their inner toady and petty enforcer. What was mistaken as cultural conservatism in these countries a hundred ago is being mistaken as a kind of illiberal cultural liberalism today. But the reality is that these things are both simply expressions of fundamental weakness, a desire to conform, a desperation for approval from whoever appears to hold the hammer, a nature intentionally built into these societies from their founding.

Progressive Canadians and New Zealanders, especially, are playing up their white guilt colonizer myths to histrionic proportions. There are many reasons for this, which I have been exploring on this blog for more than five years. But let us not discount what this myth is being used to obscure: that Canadians and New Zealanders were never the big, tough, warlike colonizers we have made our ancestors out to be. Part of the core of the myth of intentional genocide is a myth of our colonial ancestors possessing a strength and a ruthlessness they never did. We love to compare ourselves to Israel these days because part of us wishes our nation had been forged by truly great men, by powerful, ruthless, proud figures like David Ben Gurion and not a bunch of colonial administrators and mediocre lawyers at a genteel booze-up in Charlottetown.           

To turn things around the people of the Outer Anglosphere must finally find their courage. At its core the crisis we face is not an information problem; it is not an ideological problem; it is not a public opinion problem; it goes much deeper. It is a problem of courage.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Self-Harming Elect and the West’s Long-term Problem with the Athletes of God

This essay is a “big think” essay that makes a multi-part argument. If you have a background in metaphysics or religious history, you can probably skip more than half of it and just read later sections but it is present in its long form so that readers without any such background can trace my arguments about why social movements celebrating self-harm and led by self-harming people constitute the threat that they do in our present moment.

If you don’t want to read a bunch of philosophical and religious background, either because you already know it or because you just don’t care that much, I urge you to move ahead to the section entitled “Canadian content.”

The Mind-Body Dichotomy in the West

One of the most significant problems the Church faced in Late Antiquity prior to and during its incorporation into the Roman imperial state was that of the Athletes of God. Philosophical and religious movements whose intellectual genealogy includes Plato and Platonist readings of other philosophers has a very real problem based on something that does not actually exist: the body-mind dichotomy.

Possibly due to some sort of mild autism, one of Plato’s most influential philosophical contributions was the idea that our material reality was an inferior and corrupted reality, a distorted shadow of what he called the “World of Forms.” God, the true creator, had created and inhabited a perfect, immaterial world composed of pure and perfect ideas. But unfortunately, creation had got all screwed-up by a being called the Demiurge, which had created the material world, as a mistake. The World of Forms, the immaterial world, was actually more real than the physical world.

Unfairness, stupidity and suffering were caused by this state of affairs, in which human beings were uniquely positioned because our bodies resided in the inferior, material reality but our intellects, our thoughts, existed in the world of forms. This generated a form of Greek junk science so popular that we see it influencing even the earliest Christian texts, the Pauline Epistles, the idea of immaterial “spirits.”

The Pharisees’ (of whom Paul had been a follower) knowledge of this popular Greek belief likely came from the Samaritans, who had used the idea of “hypostasis,” the fusion of a spirit and a body into a single being to explain their own messianic tradition of the God-man, a title claimed by Samaritan holy men like Simon Magus and Dositheus. But whereas this idea was likely originally used to cast Jesus in terms comprehensible to the Greeks to whom Paul was selling Christianity on commission, early in his ministry, he adapted the Platonic idea that being a union of spirit and flesh was actually the universal human experience.

But this did not mean that all people were equally spiritually gifted in the ad hoc cosmology Paul sold his converts in the third quarter of the first century. “Spiritual gifts” were unevenly distributed in the human population, with those most able to distinguish and separate mind and body being the most gifted. These gifts were also variegated depending on the nature of one’s spirit, making some healers and others, speakers in tongues. This framework was propounded in his first epistle to his Corinthian followers in direct response to political exigencies.

The letter, after all, was a response to inquiries from his flock about how to handle dissident members within and the Petrine faction of the Jesus movement, without. In an effort to maintain control of his flock, he explained that he could detach his spirit from his body and instantaneously send it to Corinth to surveil his followers and make sure that they remained loyal and followed his instructions. That is the origin of the expression Christianity has long sought to deliteralize when one asks the meaning of “I will be there in spirit.” At the foundation of Christian tradition, in what is likely the earliest book of the New Testament we have (circa 51 CE), is the idea that the most spiritually gifted among us are actually able to sever their spirits from their bodies at will.

This naturally intersected with pre-existing traditions of asceticism prevalent throughout the civilized world. Christianity by no means invented fasting and other ways of physically punishing the body to achieve some kind of greater union with the divine. Holy men might walk across hot embers, swear off food or water or draw their own blood both to seek and hold the attention of crowds and to achieve union with the divine. And it is in Buddhism, before Christ’s birth, that we see the first critiques of this behaviour and the rejection of asceticism in favour of “the middle way,” of limiting asceticism to prevent self-harm.

From Gnosticism to the Athletes of God

There is little question that Christianity’s unique fusion of the Platonic theory of the body-spirit dichotomy with universal and pre-existing traditions of asceticism amplified the dangers internal self-harm movements posed. The Gnostic movement within Christianity suffered persecution by the other sects for a variety of reasons, ranging from its magpie-like heterodoxy, to a predilection for creating pseudonymous scripture, to its rejection of institutional authority in favour of charismatic claims of special revealed knowledge. But we should not understate the importance of the fact that it most thoroughly rejected the material world in favour of the spiritual and the greater tendency on the part of its adherents to engage in acts of self-mutilation, starvation and other forms of self-harm.

As Christianity drew closer to the state in the third century, prior to Diocletian’s persecution which responded to this development with violence, Church Fathers were looking beyond the Gnostic heresy, one whose appeal was largely limited to the most urban, literate and intellectual adherents to a related phenomenon that had a true popular following and which implicitly contested the authority of the bishop-centred hierarchical institution they were building. That problem was the Athletes of God.

The Athletes of God were individuals considered to be more blessed with spiritual gifts than others and who displayed these gifts through public acts of spectacular self-deprivation or harm. An example sufficiently moderate to retain his recognition as a holy man, by the Church, was the hugely popular Saint Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, who lived atop a small platform atop a pillar for thirty-seven years. Simeon was a hugely popular figure who drew thousands of pilgrims as a popular saint, while still alive. In his day, many considered him a Church Father and co-founder of the Church, itself and small fortunes were made by Aleppo merchants selling his effluvia and counterfeits thereof to pilgrims.

Monasticism and the Leashing of the Athletes of God

But the exhibitionism, self-harm and disruption of institutional authority all led the Church to recognize a social movement that would either replace or contain the Saint Simeons of the future: the followers of Benedict of Nursia, a contemporary of Simeon. As I briefly mentioned in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, some Christian ascetics like Saint Anthony the Great had already begun separating themselves from society and becoming hermits or forming small collectives in ecologically marginal places with little permanent human habitation. Following in the larger Judean-Samaritan tradition that included groups like the Essenes, these communities were not unlike the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. They tended to feature a sole, almost always male, leader who propounded a set of specific teachings and established some form of hierarchical communitarian mini-society. These mini-societies tended to collapse with the death of the leader, such as the community led by Saint Anthony the Great who spent his life wrestling the Devil in the Egyptian desert.

Benedict, with the endorsement and assistance of the Church, transformed these phenomena in several key ways through his compilation and publication of the Benedictine Rule, a codified, standardized set of written instructions for how such communities should run without the necessity of a charismatic leader and with a built-in succession process for leadership. The Church’s adoption of the Benedictine Rule, which spawned the Benedictine Order, the first order of monks in Christianity, did a number of important things designed to make the likes of Saint Simeon the exception in Christian asceticism, primarily a relic of the past. Ascetics were increasingly evicted from the public square and sent to become part of monastic (first Benedictine and then other orders with approved rules, like the Dominicans) communities.

Like the Buddhist traditions before them, “reasonableness and moderation” were at the core of these communities’ practices. In addition to prohibiting extreme acts of self-harm and instead forcing regular meals, rests, etc. on the monks, Benedictine monasticism moderated the Athlete of God tradition in other important ways.

First, their status within the church and the status of individuals in the monasteries were not determined by something as volatile as personal charisma, flair, endurance or daring but instead by bureaucratic promotion processes that placed abbots within the ecclesiastical hierarchy but not at its top.

Second, acts of asceticism were out of public view. Whatever social currency or charisma might be gained from astounding stunts of self-harm was limited to an audience of other monks engaged in the same program. What happened at the monastery stayed at the monastery and this was not simply limited to sodomy but to any other weird antics the men there might be getting up to. Placed out of public view, many of the exhibitionistic payoffs associated with the Athlete of God tradition fell away.

Third, monasteries were supposed to be self-sufficient. This entailed breaking land and engaging in a lot of practical physical labour. Shoveling shit and digging ditches do not leave a lot of energy for protracted acts of exhibitionistic asceticism. If you starve yourself, you don’t have the energy to carry out the menial duties spelled-out for you in the Benedictine Rule. If you injure yourself, again, this may impinge on the basic duties that are required of your by your community. This meant that engaging in acts of self-harm too extreme actually compromised one’s status as a Christian ascetic.

What this effectively meant was that during the centuries of Catholic hegemony in the West, those prone to acts of exhibitionistic self-harm were institutionalized and required to sleep regularly, take regular meals and engage in forms of work designed to make their asceticism as ordinary and uncharismatic as possible.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Social Contagion of Self-Harm

Of course, this tradition stared-down many challenges. One of the most significant was the Cathar movement, a neo-Gnostic movement that went further even than Plato himself in declaring that God created our spirits, angels and the heavens but that the Demiurge was, in fact, Satan himself, and that the material world was intrinsically evil, a creation of the Enemy. Anorexia and other epidemics or self-harm and body hatred followed Cathar teachings as they spread through present-day France and Spain. Human sex and sexuality were also understood to be part of Lucifer’s curse, something of which we would be cured if administered the appropriate magical rituals at the time of death. The body was a prison, as was the earth itself.

By 1209, the movement had become sufficiently threatening that the Kingdom of France redirected many of their crusaders from the Middle East to the Cathar-controlled areas, hastening the demise of the last Crusader States, already suffering from the Fourth Crusade’s betrayal of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There were many ironies to the Albigensian Crusade, the name commonly given to the Pope’s decision to declare those armies a formal crusade of equal weight to the various invasions of the Levant that had been undertaken under the same name and to formally affiliate the Holy Inquisition with it. Whatever brutality the Crusaders meted out in the Middle East paled in comparison to the savagery of the first “crusade” inside Catholic territory; far too popular among the Church’s strategies for preventing people dying by their own hand through starvation or flashier forms of suicide was to pre-emptively execute them.

But the urgency of the Crusade and the desperation of the Church in prosecuting it indicates that the prospect of facing whole armies of Athletes of God was something Rome thought could bring Christianity itself down, that self-harm contagions, leavened by Plato-influenced ideas of body-mind dualism, was an existential threat. Further evidence of this belief is evinced in the decision by the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon to pull many of its troops out of its protracted war with the Spanish Muslims, the Moops (couldn’t resist), and send them North to assist in the Crusade after France experienced some military setbacks.

But the lack of troops also proved a problem, making the Crusade dependent on local mobs more interested in settling scores and seizing the property of their neighbours than in enforcing any particular religious orthodoxy. But, again, the level of panic on the part of common people may also indicate not just a simple intolerance but a response to a harmful social contagion that might cause a friend or relative to suddenly begin engaging in acts of radical self-harm leading to premature death.

And people really were starving and mutilating themselves en masse, swept up in a religious enthusiasm that was shattering families, disrupting communities and shutting down economies.

And Now Some Canadian Content

Following the costly and brutally savage victory over the Cathars, the church became programmatically vigilant about self-harm movements, about the resurgence of the Athletes of God, not just because the “spiritually gifted” charismatic leaders of these movements were a competing locus of religious authority but because they appear to have had genuine humanitarian and theological concerns.

There is no reason to doubt that Catholic intellectuals, who comprised the overwhelming majority of thinking people in Europe for much of its history, did genuinely care about people’s physical and mental health. They constructed large, elaborate, hospital systems, ran medical schools and crafted “penitentials” which served as almanacs of suggested treatments for recurrent psychiatric problems in parishioners. Similarly, theologians appeared motivated by the genuine desire to see the natural world as a key piece of evidence of God’s existence, his grace and his love for his creation. The beauty and abundance of the natural world were clear, unambiguous evidence both of his power and his love.  

That is why the church was especially vigilant, as it expanded across the oceans, beginning in the fifteenth century, that it not permit anti-life, anti-creation or anti-body ideas enter it through the conversion process. As early as the fifth century, the Church had seen mission and conversion as a complex social process in which converts could only adopt new ideas and practices if they were allowed to bring some of their pre-existing beliefs and practices into the church with them. Indeed, the foundational document for missionaries was composed in the sixth century by Gregory the Great, who exhorted his missionaries not to build new churches but, instead, to gradually redecorate pagan temples so that converts’ habits of worship be disrupted as little as possible.

For this reason, after experiencing huge initial successes, the Jesuit mission to Japan was scaled-back and little opposition was offered to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s expulsion of missionaries and confinement of Christianity to Nagasaki. This was a direct result of reports from missionaries that Catholic traditions of martyrdom and imitatio Christi (embodying Christ) were being too easily and frequently conflated with pre-existing traditions of ritual suicide. While being indifferent to suffering and death was noble and Christian, self-inflicted harm for religious purposes, especially exhibitionist self-harm, set off alarm bells. Missionaries began meting out punishments and withdrawing the Eucharist from enthusiastic Japanese self-harmers.

In colonial Canada, missionaries faced a similar challenge with Iroquois traditions of conversion-by-torture, a tradition that was amplified by the “mourning wars,” whereby the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian military powers, such as the Huron Confederacy, were increasingly motivated to absorb members of adjacent ethnic groups to replace population lost through the Virgin Soil epidemics of European disease. War captives were tortured until, according to Iroquoian cosmology, their spirit left their body and the spirit of a dead comrade entered and replaced it. Thereafter, the war captive took on the name, job and, often, family position of the deceased person whose spirit had entered their body.

Consequently, endurance of torture and the stigmata left behind had a double meaning in Iroquoian society: the marks of torture on the body of a stranger might indicate that a miraculous event had taken place and that body was now actually the body of a beloved comrade, relative or friend; or, the marks of torture on the body of an escaped or ransomed war captive might indicate that will was so strong that their spirit refused to leave their body despite excruciating pain and that they had remained true to their people under the worst duress.

The first indigenous Canadian, Kateri Tekakwitha, to become a Catholic Saint attained this status because she became involved in something that should seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers:

Like many young women in Iroquoian society, exhausted by continuous martial law, and political crisis, and enticed by Catholic promises of a quiet, peaceful life Kateri chose to leave her community and become part of a church-organized settlement where young, indigenous women could try out the ascetic life and see if they wanted to become nuns.

Kateri and the other girls soon became subject to what we today term a “social contagion,” whereby they entered into a concurrently solidaristic and competitive pact of egging each other on to engage in increasingly extreme acts of self-harm. Although she was initially an instigator of these practices among the girls, Kateri grew increasingly uncomfortable as they facilitated and participated in each other’s acts of physical mortification, doing increasingly severe injuries to themselves and others, in a syncretic crescendo of extreme acts that concurrently fulfilled both Iroquois traditions of public torture and Catholic ideas of imitation Christi.

Eventually, Kateri took it upon herself to exhort the other girls to stop and, when they persisted, she appealed to the clergy running the compound to shut down what had become a danger to both the bodies and souls of the girls. Despite her best efforts, Kateri was unable to convince most of the other girls to stay within the community, abandon their vicious cycle of self-harm and comply with the moderate asceticism inspired by the Benedict and the monastic tradition.

Today’s Athletes of God

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionist self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Religion Without God

To understand why the grip of self-harm movements is so especially tight in English Canada, it is important to recall a salient feature of the Cathar worldview: that God was not god of the material world, that Satan was its god. Material creation was not just as mistake, as in original Gnosticism, but an evil, a wrong that merited correction.

It is only by depriving our worldview of the idea that the material order is good or divine but still using Christian cosmology and habits of thought to structure it, can we reach the conclusion that those who are most spiritually gifted are, naturally, those who are “born in the wrong body.” Of course it would be the spirits most at odds with their material being that would be greatest spirits in the world, to whom we should defer, morally and politically.

Those seeking escape from the material world through drugs, those seeking escape through surgery, those seeking escape by fusing with the machines through which they communicate are the most spiritually gifted. One can see this by the stigmata tattooed on their bodies in the form of scars, amputations and prostheses. The more at odds a body is with physical creation, the more that body commands authority in the bizarre religious revitalization movement that has seized control of my country.

Wokeness Is An American Space Religion

Today’s Athletes of God have not come out of nowhere. The incomplete and superficial secularization of Canada only explains our unique vulnerability to this sinister neo-Cathar movement. A series of religious movements have been refining the key ideas we see gripping progressive society today, a group of organizations and belief systems existing at the periphery of Christianity.

Mormonism, as propounded by Joseph Smith from 1830-44, first put forward the idea of a universe in which God was not the creator but simply an intelligent being who learned the rules of a godless pre-existing universe, enabling him to create planets and people them with ensouled beings. Smith gave us the idea that before our conception or birth, we were pre-existent immaterial spirit beings who possessed an inalterable gender before they attached to a body. The idea of us as spirit beings, imprisoned in an inferior reality, on a prison planet was then developed in Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam and elaborated in L Ron Hubbard’s scientology.

These beliefs have been powerfully synthesized into a religious revitalization movement of fanatics and enthusiasts whose subconscious motivation is to undo the flawed creation that is Lucifer’s material world.

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

Canada Is And Must Be More Than Its Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Slow Decay of Pearsonian Nationalism 1993-2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Post-Harper Liberals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoser Nationalism and the Third Northwest Rebellion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Does Not Have To Be This Way

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

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

Rex Murphy Sings “Country Roads”: The West’s Brezhnev Era and Fossil Fuel Masculinity, Part VII of My Thoughts on the Trucker Convoy

From 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union from the zenith of its power and dynamism into its terminal phase, a tailspin so complete that none of his successors could extricate it. The Institute from Gremlins II studies, brilliantly characterizes public discourse in the USSR during those decades, “There are many eerie similarities between that time and our own – the government was largely run by a cadre of septuagenarians, wages had stagnated, yet all official narratives insisted that there was no alternative.  The horizon of possible futures was closed.”

During this time period, the USSR became increasingly dependent on petroleum exports for its economic viability. Although outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the USSR, like Canada (another non-member oil exporter of the 60s and 70s) benefited from the upward pressure on global oil prices that OPEC was causing through production cut agreements and other joint efforts to affect the pricing mechanism.

Over the course of Brezhnev’s time in office, the USSR became increasingly affected by the “resource curse” or “Dutch disease,” whereby the foreign currency garnered through oil sales functioned to de-industrialize the country. Wages remained stagnant while the country de-industrialized, meaning that there were fewer and fewer things to buy in Soviet stores as local secondary and tertiary manufacturing declined and global inflation and the Nixon shock currency reforms placed possible imports out of reach.

In other words, during the first half of the 1970s, the G6’s modifications to the world currency and trading systems did not merely lead to the ultimate demise of OPEC as an effective challenge to its hegemony; it sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin not unlike that suffered by OPEC member states. This was, politically, a wild and crazy time, when the state and its commissars still had money to burn but the populace lacked both the spending power and the access to non-essential finished products.

It was clear to the gerontocracy running the Soviet Communist Party that declining living standards, coupled with Brezhnev’s increasing infiltration and repression of Soviet civil society was making the regime unpopular. Action had to be taken. And this action was to make more steel. The USSR had already been producing more steel than any country on earth under Nikita Kruschev, Brezhnev’s predecessor. But under Brezhnev, the USSR went from producing roughly the same amount of steel per year as the US to more than 50% more annually. Soviet steel production went from 100 million metric tons annually to 150 million, even as the secondary and tertiary industries using steel shrank.

With local manufacturing in decline, much of that steel was never used. In some extreme cases, in the Soviet Far East, no real plan was made for it to be used following its manufacture, given the overproduction of steel in and west of the Ural Mountains, where Soviet secondary industry was based.

The effect was that, as Russia laid off industrial workers making finished consumer and industrial goods, it hired more steel workers. And this is precisely what the Brezhnev regime wanted. They believed that more effective than creating a personality cult around the Great Leader, the most effective way to save the Soviet Union was to manufacture the most important industrial good of all: Communists.

The Soviet Union had long held that not all industrial employment was equal and, despite the USSR having a far better record on the wage gap and reducing date rape and domestic violence than its competitors in the West, the best industrial work was the most manly. Since the days of Lenin, industrial, collectivized farming had been considered the least manly and least valuable form of industrial work, whereas nothing could be more manly that making steel, with all those big cauldrons, all that fire, and the roaring noise of the mill.

While the proletariat might be manufactured by any sort of coal-fired industry, from biscuits on up, the steel mill was where the workers most likely to be eligible for party membership (the 1% elite of Soviet society) were, quite literally, forged.

The thinking was that, while times might be hard, Russia, and the other nations under the banner of the USSR, would ultimately triumph as long as society contained enough loyal communists. And the single most efficient way to make them, more efficient and trustworthy than any propaganda campaign or personality cult, was as a by-product of steel manufacture. Except that even this interpretation ultimately came to be reversed: steel ingots became a by-product of manufacturing communists.

Following the Tiananmen Square and other coordinated mass mobilizations of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party adopted and, under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, intensified their commitment to this doctrine following the death of Deng Xiaoping. Despite being an importer of metallurgical coal, in the twenty-first century, China began to follow the Soviet approach to the steel industry. Hu and Xi shielded steelworkers from the stripping of industrial worker protections and wage guarantees that took place in other sectors, for as long as they could, and walked back some of these measures following major steelworker protests in the late 2010s.

The lack of repression, violence or even significant defamation of the steelworkers is just further evidence that China has bought its own propaganda, that the Central Committee, despite all its corruption and implication in the most retrograde forms of casino capitalism, has come to believe that the mills do manufacture communists and that, unlike other workers, these ones should be listened-to.

This kind of thinking arrived in Canada and the United States seemingly out of nowhere in the mid-2010s but it arrived with great force and for a different political purpose, as a tool of the fossil fuel industry.

What else can we make of Rex Murphy’s columns for the National Post about the extraordinary civic virtue of the people of Fort MacMurray and Lloydminster? The oil towns of Western Canada are not merely, for Murphy, rural communities meriting preservation; they are the Canadian Idyll. Only in Fort Mac, Murphy claims, can one see the kind of idyllic family life we associate with the Eisenhower Era, with its engaged parents enthusiastically driving their kids to hockey and playing catch with them on the weekend.

John Diefenbaker’s family-centred, civic-minded, law-abiding, respectful Canada does still exist, Murphy tells us, but only in towns shaped by the fossil fuel industry. Murphy and his ilk, because there is a whole faux journalistic genre dedicated to this kind of writing, are essentially making the same class of argument as Leonid Brezhnev and Xi Jinping: diluted bitumen and “natural gas” are mere by-products of manufacturing patriotic, virtuous Canadians.

It is the same rhetoric that Donald Trump used so effectively in West Virginia: coal is a by-product created in the manufacture of real, true, patriotic Americans.

And for a city like Fort MacMurray, the task of depicting it as the epitome of civic virtue and the last bastion of the single-income male-headed nuclear family is enabled by the city being one of an increasing number of communities I term “Jeckyllvilles” i.e. places where the patriarchal family unit is sustained by a man who lives far away from where he works, a violent, hypermasculine, encampment with a “stays in Vegas” ethos of stimulant use, violence and problematic behaviour absorbed by a typically Indigenous, isolated population. Many men in Fort MacMurray and towns of its ilk, the world over, find it easier to embody the mid-century self-controlled softball coach masculine ideal two weeks per month precisely because they live in bizarre remote atavistic compounds that vent their violence onto local on-reserve Indigenous populations the other half of the time.

I do not believe this nationalist rhetoric would have been so successful had it not been situated within a pre-existing struggle of competing nationalisms, if it did not locate and speak directly to captured nations within the US and Canada. The genius of the fossil fuel industry was in locating and patronizing the heirs to that “migrant worker culture” of the 1920s, the Métis and Métis-influenced peoples of Anglo America and dealing itself into and concurrently energizing a pre-existing socio-cultural framework.

The independent spirit of the Hillbillies of Appalachia, of the white trash of the Mississippi Delta, of the Northwest Rebellions—they are still there. But they are being distorted, changed by the energy source that is fueling their re-creation. By latching onto regional identities and grievances, the fossil fuel industry is attempting to construct a bulwark of loyal communities and workers. And it is then able to empower those communities to articulate an alternative nationalism that appeals not just in their core territory but across the country.

Having largely lost the hearts and minds of urbanites and progressives, the fossil fuel industry, especially its smaller firms, are investing in creating regional demographic bulwarks that will make it hard to assail their power, especially under the first-past-the-post electoral system of the US and Canada. And they have been highly strategic in find those that articulate an alternative national vision, not just a parochial, independence-focused one.

The adverse effects of this partnership are already evident. The practice of “rolling coal” is just one of a set of practices we associate with “petro-masculinity,” an effort to replace the ethos of frugality and conservation historically associated with these cultures with a politics of waste, of showing status through one’s personal abundance in resource that animates the region. With the combination of fracking and deferred cleanup, these shows of abundance are all the more necessary as soil contamination, deforestation and the corruption of water systems are destroying the sense of abundance that used to be associated with the hunting and harvest seasons of autumn.

Similarly, to the South the primaries in West Virginia have become a contest between the dream that no one’s kids would ever have to go down a mine because the mines would be closed, represented by Bernie Sanders and Paula Jean Swearingen, and Donald Trump’s promise to put more people down the mine than ever before. For the first time in more than a century, most West Virginian fathers see their son following them down the mine as a social good and not an evil to be averted.

The fossil fuel industry is not stupid. It has made an alliance with an interconnected set of cultures and peoples around Anglo America and is embedding itself in those cultures more thoroughly by the year. And urbanites and progressives and everyone else who mobilizes the “deplorables” discourse in writing off and stigmatizing the peoples it has chosen to patronize are doing its work for free. It wants them to know that they have only one powerful friend: the fossil fuel industry and that their alternative vision of mixed-race peoples co-governing the great nations of Anglo America rises or falls by oil and coal.

Louis Riel, in his final years, described himself as David to the Métis’ Judea. And today, the fossil fuel industry has decided to be Cyrus: the foreign tyrant who delivers a captive nation from suffering and persecution.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

“Does Todd Palin Exist?” and Other Questions Raised by the Ottawa Trucker Convoy – Part II

To understand the curious case of Todd Palin, it is necessary to understand that whereas all Indigenous people in North America have experienced and continue to experience a genocide, these experiences are variegated, diverse and regional in character. So, a few words on the historical experience of Alaskan Eskimos (yes, that is the term they use to describe themselves, as distinct from the Canadian Inuit and Inuvialuit who have rejected that term).

More than any other Indigenous group in the United States, the experience of Alaskan Natives was conditioned by a doctrine known as “termination,” the primary legal doctrine of the US and Mexican governments with respect to Indigenous peoples for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although proposed for Canada by Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Stephen Harper, the policy has never been enacted here. It entails the abolition of Indigenous governments and reserves and the privatization of reserve land.

In 1906, Alaska became the last jurisdiction in the US to enact termination. But unlike Mexico (1922) and the rest of the US (1934), termination was not repealed during the Interwar period. It would not be repealed until 1971. This means that for the majority of the twentieth century, Indigenous Alaskans were legally indistinguishable from the colonist neighbours.

Furthermore, its repeal was less comprehensive. Instead of restoring Indigenous polities as an order of government as the Roosevelt Administration had done in the contiguous US in 1934-36, it followed the Mexican path and converted Indigenous governments into corporations without significant law-making powers.

There are some important reasons for these substantial differences. First, unlike most US states, public land in Alaska is primarily owned by the state government and not by the federal government, meaning that, following statehood, the federal government lacked a significant base of public land from which to unilaterally compensate Indigenous groups that had lost their land. Second, and much more relevant, there has been a much greater degree of demographic parity between Indigenous people and settlers through much of Alaska’s history than there has been anywhere between the Arctic and the Yucatan. Not only were settlers less likely to move to Alaska than other regions of the US due to its climate and unsuitability for farming and other pre-industrial settler occupations but colonization of much of the area of Alaska took place after the development of vaccines, substantially reducing the impact of the virgin soil epidemics on Indigenous populations.

This meant that, given the pre-existing mixed Russian-Indigenous population and the phenotypic differences between Alaskan Natives and those further south and east, significant numbers of Indigenous people were able to engage in intermarriage and racial passing that were off the table or significantly more challenging in other parts of North America. In other words, termination produced successful political, social and economic outcomes for a far larger portion of the Indigenous population.

Also, we also must recognize that the Roosevelt government’s repentance of termination and re-creation of the Reservation system was not simply an altruistic move. A significant challenge to both capitalist labour discipline and American settler culture emerged from what scholars term “migrant worker culture” because the effects of termination converged with other social forces to produce what became the effective container of significant parts of Indigenous culture.

Indigenous people were an important part of migrant worker culture for a variety of reasons. First, for many Indigenous people, especially in Oklahoma (formerly Indian Territory), termination had produced dispossession and landlessness; those who had been involved in subsistence agriculture and other forms of settled rural life now found themselves not just without homes but without communities. Second, many Indigenous people had been settled in regions unsuitable for sustainable habitation and food production as part of the unfair treaties that created the original reservations. Third, many Indigenous people came from non- and semi-sedentary cultures that saw seasonal migration for work not as a new capitalist imposition but as consistent with an Indigenous past. Fourth, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous people especially on the Pacific Coast and the Great Basin had successfully and in large numbers incorporated themselves into American capitalism through migratory work in seasonal industries, such as fishing and cannery industries that had displaced fur trading as the basis of the Alaskan economy.

But these Indigenous people were joined in migrant work by increasing numbers of settlers with their own reasons for moving into more seasonal, short-term work. First of all, the putative boom of the 1920s was sustained in large measure by two things: economic stimulus financed by high-interest consumer borrowing that increased aggregate demand and economic deregulation and abandonment of anti-trust and other prosecutions of corporate collusion and malfeasance. This meant that wages did not keep up with growth; working conditions degraded; employment security declined. As a result, an increasing number of Americans took to the road, fleeing debt and unemployment.

The devastation these policies would have caused anyway was exacerbated by the disastrous demobilization policies following the First World War that threw former soldiers into unemployment and often homelessness, while denying them sufficient health care for their grievous mental and physical injuries. Many former soldiers passed became part of the migrant worker community.

At the same time, strong social movements that had not only organized radical and marginalized most likely to be forced to move to stay in work lost strength as a result of Red Scare policies amplified by the government’s war powers to shut down dissent and socialist organizing, policies that were continued post-war to prevent America from facing the kind of revolutionary threat that had toppled the Russian government and come close to doing so in Germany.

The International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and US Socialist Party lost members, votes and power. This did not just mean a loss of political influence and muscle on the picket line. It also meant a loss of cultural and social programs and mutual aid networks.

Finally, in 1926, the year the Socialist Party entered terminal decline due to the death of Eugene Debs, its long-time presidential candidate, many of the predominantly mestizo (mixed Indigenous and white) and Indigenous Mexican migrant workers who had been migrating between Mexico and the American Southwest found themselves trapped on the US side of the border year-round as immigration policy changed.

Taken together, this meant that there was a substantial growth in the number of migrant workers, that those workers looked to this new community not only as a source of sustenance and reciprocity but as a source of culture. And that this culture was strongly, and scholars argue, disproportionately influenced by the culture of Americans and Mexicans of Indigenous heritage.

The onset of the Great Depression only increased the number of migrant workers and this group presented a challenge to the American government in two important ways. First, the nigh-universal Western triumphalist, Social Darwinist idea of sedentary life being the bedrock of civilization and republican citizenship, that had been used to justify so much of the genocide, war and dispossession visited on Indigenous people was suggesting that American was literally de-civilizing. This fear was amplified by the fact that migrant worker culture was so heavily inflected by Indigenous culture. It was as though white people were literally being transformed into Indians as America looked on. Second, migrant worker culture constituted a threat to the American capitalist social contract because it was a form identity and community that class-based and cut across the racial divides that had been intentionally set up to prevent workers from uniting. What the organizing practices and high ideals of the Wobblies and Socialists had not been able to maintain in the lead-up to the war, cross-racial class solidarity, was now being created by the material conditions of the age.

Pulling Indigenous people out of the centre of the migrant worker culture and community was just one part of Roosevelt’s comprehensive New Deal to prevent the rise of revolutionary movements in the US.

Except in Alaska.

Not only was Alaska a backwater; its occupational mix was overwhelmingly migratory. And it was left alone, largely because the influence of migrant worker culture was not seen as either as threatening or as solvable as the culture of the Lower Forty-eight. And, consequently, the normative culture of Alaska has been much more influenced by migrant worker culture, strongly conditioned by Indigenous culture, since the beginnings of the cannery system following its purchase from Russia in the nineteenth century.

The many factors I have detailed above help to explain why only one in three Alaskans of Indigenous heritage chose to join the tribal corporations created in 1971; many accepted cash payouts for personal termination instead; others simply did not engage with the process at all.

In large measure, that is because Indigenous Alaskans generally, even those who joined in 1971, identify far more with Alaska and as Alaskans than Indigenous people of the contiguous US.

This might help to explain why the only 2008 Palin family election scandal associated with Todd Palin was his long-time membership in the Alaska Independence Party, the state’s separatist party. And he was certainly not the only Indigenous person in the state to believe that Alaskan sectional nationalism and not membership in an Indigenous polity was the best expression of his cultural and political aspirations. Because Alaskan Natives have more ownership of Alaskanness, more see being Alaskan as the way to express their distinctively less-sedentary, more wilderness-centred culture.

As we have seen in great Latin American leaders from Benito Juárez to Evo Morales, establishing a powerful stake in regional and national cultures and movements is a solid tactic for Indigenous people to achieve real cultural and material gains. And we might do well to think about how this kind of tactic has been in intermittent play within Canada since Confederation.

Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

“Does Todd Palin Exist?” and Other Questions Raised by the Ottawa Trucker Convoy – Part I

This is going to be a long essay, likely published in multiple parts. Making the argument I am making will entail, as my English friend Tony would say, “going ‘round the houses.” So, please be patient; I promise a significant intellectual payoff by the end.

The moment I began to fully understand the collective unhinging of progressives over the unruly protest that occupied Ottawa through much of February this year was when I read a seemingly unrelated and, I initially thought, laughable editorial on National Public Radio.

Until I read the piece, I had been blissfully unaware that, since 2014, the emojis available on social media and messaging platforms have been available in an increasingly large number of possible skin tones, that the thumb in a “thumbs up” could be in a range of colours if I just scrolled down more.

NPR’s piece argued that we can better challenge “white privilege” by being more conscious of each other’s skin colours in online communication and that communication that does not foreground the race of each interlocutor is somehow problematic. The thinking seemed to be that not reminding one’s interlocutor of one’s race at every opportunity would somehow recapitulate racial oppression through online communication.

Leaving aside the intellectual legitimacy of the argument, what the piece and the various responses it touched-off in other media made clear is that people we might call leftists or progressives today (labels I have personally renounced, as a socialist and materialist) are deeply concerned by what I will term “racial transparency.”

When we talk about progressive Identiarianism, we often, myself included, focus on its novel beliefs about sex and gender i.e. that gender and sex are highly mutable characteristics driven by personal choice and individual consciousness. Furthermore, sex and gender are understood to be things about which one cannot trust one’s eyes, ears or nose, that a person with a deep voice, full body beard and a penis has an equal chance of being a man or a woman.

But, coupled with this belief in the flexibility of gender is an increasing belief in the immutability and visibility of race. Unlike sex and gender, race cannot be changed through cosmetic surgery, changes in costume, etc. because it lives in the blood and is tattooed unambiguously on the body. Acts of racial passing have gone from a virtual irrelevance in the late twentieth century to issues of global importance for the Woke. Half a decade later, everyone still knows the name of the Spokane NAACP president who got a perm and spent some time in a tanning bed to appear black, when, in fact, she was from a white family. Rachel Dolezal remains a notorious and despised person around the globe for impersonating a black person in order to hold a volunteer position in a third-tier industrial city in Eastern Washington.

In the world of the Woke, there is a clear system of incentives and disincentives instructing one on how to be a racialized person. The more one’s speech, costume and behaviour telegraph one’s non-whiteness, the more one accentuates one’s racialized status, the better-received one is. On the other hand, the more one focuses on non-racial aspects of one’s identity and minimizes differences in appearance, costume and behaviour, the more one is viewed with suspicion.

In other words, progressive Identitarians have come to see the effacement of racial difference and practices of passing as increasingly transgressive.

American progressives love black people of faith, as long as they are members of the Black Church, special religious denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church that only serve black congregants. Black Catholics, black Mormons, not so much, especially because black Mormons and Catholics often assert that their Mormonism or Catholicism is more important and relevant to them than their blackness. Similarly, Canadian progressives love and celebrate and patronize Indigenous people who are members of neo-traditionalist movements that seek to re-create pre-colonial religions like the Sundance movement and Handsome Lake Church. But those same progressives will lecture you on how it is offensive to even speak to Indigenous people about mainline Christian churches, even though far more of them are members of churches like the Catholics, Anglicans and United Church of Canada. Indeed, white progressives will sometimes depict the Christian majority of Indigenous Canadians as traitors to their own people but, more commonly, they will describe them as victims of something called “cultural genocide.”

While we now understand that efforts to coercively strip Indigenous people of their culture through institutions like the Canadian residential school system were wrong and did incalculable damage whose consequences still ravage Indigenous communities up to the present day, framing this as genocide has its own set of problems.

First, there is a problem with conflating the actual murder of people with efforts to make them change their views and values through pressure or force. Both things are clearly bad. But are they really appropriately conflated? Is changing or challenging who someone believes themselves to be really the same as killing them? That viewpoint is certainly popular these days. Saying “you are not who you say you are” is understood by progressive Identitarians as an act of genocide or attempted murder when employed to keep natal males our of women’s changing rooms.

Second, there is the problem of the many Indigenous societies that have adopted Christianity who now see it as part of their identity. The Zapatista movements of the 1920s, 1990s and present understand the Mayan people as a proudly Catholic people, who see their Catholicism as part of their culture and part of what they seek to preserve and restore, like their language and land. This should surprise exactly no one, given that every society that understands itself to be Christian has gone through this process, from the third-century Ethiopians to the fourth-century Greeks, to the ninth-century Saxons to the fourteenth-century Poles.

One of the moronic truisms of progressive thought is that cultural assimilation never works. That is because people who successfully assimilate become invisible and the only people one can find to ask about assimilation are those for whom it has failed.

But the most important problem is this: it suggests that the personhood of individual Indigenous Christians is incomplete. First, white people who choose to be Christians today are understood to be fully agentive in this choice; the choice to be baptized is wholly their own and their choice, if not respected, is at least understood to be their own choice. On the other hand, progressive Identitarians see the decision of Indigenous people to be baptized as Pentecostals or Catholics or whatever as resulting from without; they would never choose that themselves; their baptism must be a result of colonialism, capitalism or some other monstrous force that is making the choice for them. They could not possibly have chosen Christianity of their own free will.

Second, the Indigenous Christian majority are understood to be partly dead. They are the walking dead victims of the cultural genocide, people whose adoption of Christianity has killed all or a part of their spirit(s). Or maybe they are dead entirely.

Religion is not the only thing that Identitarian progressives believe renders Indigenous people dead or partly dead. White people, they believe, are uniquely “logocentric,” that the Enlightenment legacy is not a global one of which we all partake but rather a part of white supremacy. Indigenous people who reject the supernatural and champion science and classical philosophy, like BCIT’s Michael Bourke, are also victims of the genocide. So too are the Indigenous people who congregate at the Canada Day free concert at the Pacific National Exhibition to eat burgers and wave a flag or two are not so much Canadian citizens as genocide victims. Eschewing traditional dress for a business suit, moving off the reserve or out of the Indigenous ghettos in Winnipeg, Saskatoon or Vancouver into a white neighbourhood, all of these things are signs of damaged, incomplete personhood.

And that is because these Indigenous people are committing the sin of Rachel Dolezal: they are making a lie of the progressive belief in the heritability, immutability and visibility of race; they are not being racially transparent. The neo-Ottoman social order of twenty-first century progressive North America, with its aesthetically curated diversity, and its contemporary resurrection of the “a place for everyone and everyone in their place” ethos cannot be sustained in the face of widespread racial passing.

In the mind of the Identitarian progressive, there is one kind of bad non-white person: one who cannot be visually detected and consequently cannot be publicly aestheticized or tokenized.

In this context, the very worst sort of Indigenous person is the sort who refuses to construct their identity in racial terms at all, as epitomized by the husband of US vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Todd Palin. More about Todd in part two.

Politics of Identity 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 |