Articles
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ArticleHolograms, or, Learning from 70 Years of Resistance in Myanmar
I remember June 2, 2012, the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited Mae Sot, on the Thai-Myanmar border, as one of the best days of my life. It was the kind of day where everything oozes exhilaration and reverie; simple acts like eating breakfast and getting dressed feel ceremonious. On such a monumental day, you carefully curate the comrades you want to be with, choosing those who’ll understand. I remember collecting my best friend, both of us barely able to speak as we walked into a crowd of thousands of other reverberating, nervous-laughing souls. Grinning ear-to-ear together, donning red National League for Democracy (nld) hats, we waited hours for her car to drive by. When it did, we seemed to dissolve with jubilation, clutching at our hearts and the people around us, fists pointed toward the sky and toward children perched on shoulders, children for whom the day meant everything, as we allowed ourselves to believe, for once, that things in Myanmar would get better.
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ArticleHistory Never Ended
The Far-Right Revival, Trump, and the Anti-fascist Renaissance
In the summer of 2017, Rebel Media, a Canadian crowd-funded website politically positioned to the right of Breitbart, posted the article, “Eight-Year Old Drag Queen the Product of Antifa Parenting?”2 This came on the heels of a slew of news articles associating everything and everyone with anti-fascism, from the actual anti-fascist “black bloc” to liberal professors unduly called “antifa” organizers. This pattern has become commonplace in right-wing media: use bait words like “communist” or “anarchist” to label aspects of the Left that are feared or scorned, then turn them into talking points and petitions for the far-Right to further their agenda. The liberal language of “extremism,” which was used previously to raise money by non-governmental organizations (like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union) to fight white supremacist terrorism, was turned on the Left.
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ArticlePolitical Policing and the Surveillance Matrix
Reflections for Organizers
On May 18, 2010, a group calling themselves the fffc1 claimed responsibility for the firebombing of a Royal Bank of Canada (rbc) branch in the Glebe, an upper-middle class neighbourhood in Ottawa. The incident occurred three months after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and a month prior to the g8/g20 Summits in Toronto. The rbc was targeted by activists as part of a campaign to raise awareness about the bank’s role in funding the Tar Sands and the Olympics, as well as other socially and ecologically harmful investments.
One month later, Matt Cicero—one of the co-authors of this article—and Roger Clément were arrested and charged with arson. Clément ultimately pleaded guilty and received a sentence of four years for arson and mischief over $5,000 for two separate actions against different rbc branches. Cicero’s charges were stayed and then dropped as the Crown did not have enough evidence to proceed with a trial. Additionally, part of Clément’s plea agreement with the Crown involved the Crown dropping the charges against Cicero.
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Article
Fallout from the June 2009 Protests in Iran
Political Inconsistencies and Pressing Questions
The fraudulent election results of June 2009 have now become a social fact in Iran. Fueled by a series of violent clampdowns by the security forces of the Iranian state, the convergence of dissenting elements within the Iranian population led to the development of a national opposition, popularly re…
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Article
Protection Without Police
North American Community Responses to Violence in the 1970s and Today
After successfully stopping an intruder from raping his sister, Antoine Dodson appeared on the local news warning the community, “obviously we have a rapist in Lincoln Park… hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your husband.” Addressing the assailant, Antoine warned, “we’re looking for you…
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Article
Blood and Soil
Notes on Lierre Keith, Locavores, and Death Fetishism
I Until recently, the terms of what we might call human species right – our perceived, autogenous R echt to appropriate, exploit, torment, and kill other sentient beings for any and all human purposes, forever – were seen as natural and immutable, and so went unquestioned. In the late 20th-centu…
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Article
Care as Colonialism
Immigrant Health Workers at Canada’s Frontiers
A tiny street in the northeastern reaches of Montréal is named for Denis Jamet. His role in Canada’s history is central, although the inconvenience of this truth has now relegated him to an obscure crescent in the city’s suburban periphery. In 1615, he was plucked from the upper echelons of the…
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Article
Dalit Liberation and the Shadow Cast(e) by Class
India’s caste system is often incorrectly viewed as a relic of the past. When confronted with evidence of discrimination, harassment, inequality, and violence caused by casteism, both outside observers and upper-caste Indian citizens brush it off as a “backward” practice, subscribed to only by…
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Article
Fighting Form
Beyond the Party in Kurdistan
The monsters that have risen to define the post-crisis epoch are the formidable new authors of unimaginable dread. The current state of politics almost everywhere is defined by the rise of Trumps, Le Pens, and Erdo?ans. Yet since the fissures and fault lines of neoliberalism became visible in the op…
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ArticleSpoiled Opportunities
Insights from the 2015 Strikes at York University and the University of Toronto
Employers are clever. They use the fact that public services are increasingly financed through regressive user fees instead of progressive taxation to divide us—we are either taxpayers wanting more services for every dollar we pay, or workers defending undue corporatist privileges causing defici…
