dimanche 28 avril 2019
samedi 27 avril 2019
The World Federation of Trade Unions
(WFTU), expresses its sadness for the loss of the great militant, Giorgos
Gkotsis, who died in Sydney, Australia, and devoted his entire life to trade
union and social struggles.
Organising (in) education unions
today: how can Antonio Gramsci help?
Posted on April 14, 2019 by admin
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Howard Stevenson, University of Nottingham
Introduction:
The attacks on public education in England have been as bold
and as radical as almost anywhere in the world. A New Right project that can be
traced back over more than three decades has sought to radically reconfigure
schooling in the English public system – opening the system up to privatisation,
but also seeking to embed traditionalist notions of schooling intended to
reproduce and reinforce structural inequalities in society.
Central to this project have been efforts to undermine
teacher union organisation, recognising that the collective strength of
organised teachers has always been an obstacle to the New Right achieving its
objectives in education. Teachers in England have had national collective
bargaining rights abolished and seen the architecture of local authority
industrial relations systems largely dismantled. An aggressive managerialism in
schools has created a hostile environment for school level trade union
organisation. This deliberate and sustained attack on teacher organisation has
transformed the landscape for teachers and their unions.
In this article I want to draw on the ideas of Antonio
Gramsci to think through how education unions can respond to the attacks they
face. Gramsci’s legacy is mostly
concentrated in the extraordinary intellectual project he undertook while
incarcerated in fascist prisons and which he produced in the most difficult
conditions. However, in this article I want to connect the ideas contained in
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks with his pre-prison writings, most notably those
associated with Gramsci’s time involved in the Turin factory council movement,
and argue that seeing Antonio Gramsci’s work ‘in the round’ provides rich
material for understanding what actions can open up the possibility of
mobilising successfully against the New Right’s hegemonic project in education.
The article begins with a brief insight into Gramsci’s
thinking in relation to trade unions and the politics of working-class
resistance based largely on his journalistic writings while living and working
in Turin. I then discuss how Gramsci’s ideas provide a valuable framework for
considering trade union strategy in the English school sector and set out five
strategies for union renewal that can help support a reinvigorated trade union
movement work in counter-hegemonic ways.
Antonio Gramsci and trade unions
On 1st May 1919, 100 years ago, Antonio Gramsci and a small
number of political collaborators published the first edition of L’Ordine Nuovo
(‘The New Order’) in Turin. At the time Turin was centre of the Italian
working-class movement, located as it was in the industrial base concentrated
on the city’s car manufacturers. For some time levels of working class
militancy had been rising in the city and when L’Ordine Nuovo was published it
seemed to capture the revolutionary atmosphere that gripped the city through
1919 and 1920 (the biennio rosso or ‘two red years’).
Gramsci saw great potential in the movement in Turin and the
specific form that it took. Much of the working class resistance focused around
‘industrial commissions’, or factory councils, that had been developed within
workplaces by the employers to provide some limited voice for workers on a
narrow range of issues. However, as organised working class resistance
developed, the factory councils assumed much greater significance often acting
as the focal point for the workers’ movement in the factories. For Gramsci the
factory councils provided a practical alternative to control of the labour
process by the capitalist employers. At times of intense struggle, when there were
strikes and lockouts involving tens of thousands of workers, the factory
councils assumed responsibility for maintaining factory production under
workers’ control. It was the ability of the factory council movement to pose
fundamental questions about the control of work, and to transcend more limited
demands for improved pay and conditions, which Gramsci identified as
potentially revolutionary. He also appreciated the ability of the councils to
represent all the workers in a workplace, rather than specific sections such as
skilled workers. Both of these features of the factory council movement
contrasted with the trade union movement of the time which Gramsci considered
to be conservative and overly cautious.
Throughout Turin’s ‘red years’ L’Ordine Nuovo, with Gramsci
as editor,played a key role in developing strategy and mobilising workers.
Ultimately however the movement was defeated. In September 1920 a major strike
ended in defeat and to all intents and purposes this marked the end of the
factory council movement. Many blamed the failure of the Italian Socialist
Party (PSI) and the trade union movement (CGL) to adequately support the waves
of strikes and occupations at a crucial moment, and this was clearly a key
factor. However, it is also important to recognise that the defeats reflected
the isolation of the Turin working class, both from the wider working class
movement in Italy but also the separation of the industrial working class
(based largely in the North) from the peasant class (overwhelmingly concentrated
in Italy’s South).
Gramsci’s dissatisfaction with the PSI during the red years
in Turin led him to work with others to form the Italian Communist Party in
1921, but by this time Italian fascism was already mobilising and in the years
that followed the Italian labour movement found itself fighting a rear-guard
action against an increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic fascist
government. Gramsci himself lived a largely clandestine life (including spells
abroad) but was eventually arrested and imprisoned in 1926 (despite having
parliamentary immunity). At his trial Gramsci’s Prosecutor famously said that
it was necessary to ‘stop this brain from working for 20 years’. As it
transpired, Gramsci’s incarceration provided the opportunity for him to reflect
deeply about Italy’s historical development and to locate his own experiences
as a political activist in this broader analysis. The key ideas he developed
during his imprisonment, and specifically the relationship between economic
forces and political action, represent one of the greatest contributions of the
twentieth century to Marxist thought.
Gramsci’s intellectual legacy is largely contained in the
Quaderni del Carcere (‘Prison Notebooks’) published several years after his
death. The central concepts set out in the Notebooks provide us with powerful
tools to help analyse contemporary developments in education policy, including
the New Right’s educational project. However, I also want to argue that
Gramsci’s legacy offers us most utility when his writings from his years in
prison are not disconnected from his earlier writings, but are rather seen as
the development of a way of thinking that was rooted in Gramsci’s experiences
in Turin, in particular during 1919 and 1920.
Strategies for education unions today: thinking with Gramsci
In this section I want to set out five ways of thinking
about trade union strategy for those who work in education, specifically the
English school sector, but hopefully others may also see a usefulness in the
ideas. It is not my intention to identify the detail of specific issues on
which unions should campaign, that must be a matter for those active in
particular unions and who are best placed to identify the precise issues in
individual contexts around which mobilisation becomes possible. Rather my
intention is to ‘think with Gramsci’ and to use Gramsci’s conceptual tools to
help think through what might constitute effective union strategies for
activists if unions are to assume the key role they must in the movement for a
transformed system of public education in England.
Organise at the workplace: build at the base
Gramsci’s experience of the factory council movement
highlighted the importance of organising in workplaces as it is at work where
the contradictions of capitalism, and the exploitative nature of the capitalist
labour process are exposed. This experience may look different in the context
of a public service in the public sector (nominally at least), but there are
now many studies that demonstrate that the experience of public service workers
are not materially different to those working in traditional private sector
profit-driven enterprises. Education workers experience the same pressures to
produce ‘more for less’ as private sector employees and they also feel these
pressures intensify as the organisation they work in increasingly mimics a
private sector corporation. The workplace is an obvious place to organise
because this is the place where the contradictions of the capitalist labour
process are experienced most sharply. However workplace organising is also
critical because it is at the workplace where the union, and collective
organisation, become ‘real’ to education workers. When the union has a
meaningful presence in the workplace then education workers literally ‘see and
feel’ the union in their working lives. Workplace organisation provides a
‘counter-culture’ to the individualism, isolation and competitiveness that is
the experience of contemporary work in educational institutions. The union is able to provide an alternative
experience and a different way of seeing the world that stands at odds with the
‘common sense’ that prevails elsewhere in the system.
The challenge for education unions is to make ‘union
culture’ a reality in the lives of their members and this requires a relentless
focus on developing workplace organisation. Most obviously this involves
recruiting, supporting and developing those who act as union workplace
representatives in every workplace. Without this basic building block in place
it is not possible to see how workers experience the union in a meaningful way
and therefore how solidarity is developed.
Organise around work: every issue a union issue
Much union activity in education workplaces continues to be
based around what might be called ‘traditional trade union issues’ such as pay,
pensions and working conditions. These are obviously critical aspects of any
worker’s experience of work and I am not minimising their importance as key
issues around which to mobilise. However, they are only a part of an education
worker’s experience of work and a failure to organise around the totality of
the labour process fails to recognise the myriad of ways in which education
workers experience the twin pressures of labour intensification and
de-skilling.
The ideological nature of education work, and the centrality
of the education system to the New Right’s hegemonic project, mean that
education workers often experience managerial pressures at their sharpest in
relation to so-called ‘professional’ issues, relating to the curriculum and
pedagogy. Is there anyone who doubts that at this moment in England the
curriculum is the key battleground on which the New Right is currently seeking
to drive forward it’s agenda? In recent years education workers have
experienced increased control over what is taught, how to teach, how students
should be assessed and how, and by whom, judgements about teacher performance
might be made. These are the processes of deskilling that have stripped
teaching of the creative aspects of teaching as work and that have demoralised
and alienated education workers. These are core trade union concerns.
Gramsci’s experience in the factory councils made him
appreciate the need for workers’ collective organisations to transcend narrow
bargaining agendas and to think about questions of control of the labour
process much more widely. Education workers must do the same. Creating an
artificial bifurcation between so-called ‘industrial’ and ‘professional’ issues
is not only unhelpful but it limits the capacity of unions to make a meaningful
difference in the working lives of educators on the issues that matter
fundamentally to them.
The challenge for education union activists is to overcome
this unhelpful divide and to ensure that so-called ‘industrial’ and
‘professional’ issues are two aspects of a single entity – educators’ work. The
urgent need is to cohere both these elements and to place the whole in a wider
political context. For example, the proliferation of standardised testing in
education forces teachers’ workload inexorably upwards while simultaneously
reducing professional autonomy. It is intimately bound up with push to
privatise and the influence of powerful edu-businesses in education.
Challenging any single development, such as workload, without addressing the
wider issues and drivers, will only ever achieve limited and temporary
advances.
Organise everyone: connect the workforce
Gramsci’s criticisms of trade unions often focused on their
sectionalism and the tendency to seek to advance the interests of their own
members even if this might be at the expense of others. Given the nature of
trade union organisation in Italy at the time, but not so different elsewhere
today, this often meant the privileging of sections of the labour force that
were already relatively better off.
Within capitalist labour markets there can be something of
an inevitability about this process.
Those who are more highly skilled typically enjoy greater labour market
power and when such workers organise collectively they can use this advantage
to press for improvements in pay and conditions. Such an approach is a
legitimate trade union strategy to advance the interests of members, but it is
also limiting in the sense that it seeks to work within capitalist labour
markets and their logics, rather than aiming to transcend them. Well organised
workers may be successful in securing a larger share of the wealth their labour
generates, but such actions do not always pose more fundamental questions about
how that wealth is generated and how it is distributed. In such circumstances
those with little labour market power, and those most marginalised at work
(divided by the intersection of occupation, gender, race, disability, age and
sexual orientation) are those who are most exploited and who often see the
inequalities within the workforce widen at their expense.
The challenge for education unions is to break out of the
narrow sectionalism that relies heavily on exploiting labour market advantage
and to develop a wider set of solidarities that pose a more fundamental
challenge to market logics. Such an approach prioritises those most exploited
and marginalised in the labour market.
In this regard the amalgamation of the National Union of
Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers must be seen as a major
step forward. The formation of a single union able to represent the whole of
the workforce is a significant advance in uniting the interests of all those
who work in the system rather than trying to play one section of the workforce
off against another. There will no doubt be significant challenges for the new
union as it seeks to build unity across different occupational groups, and
there will be many instances where inequalities are reinforced rather
challenged, but there can be no doubt that establishing a new organisation
capable of transcending these divisions is a major step forward and a
significant opportunity.
A linked challenge for the new organisation is to seek to
develop membership among those in leadership roles. A key element of the New
Right’s strategy has focused on separating this section of teachers from the
wider profession and intentionally seeking to co-opt those in leadership roles
into the alliance driving forward neoliberal restructuring in schools.
Reconnecting this section of the labour force with the wider community of
education professionals remains an important task, if a difficult one.
Strategic alliances with headteacher unions provide an important medium term objective
in this regard, but the longer term aim must be for all those working in
education to organise collectively through a single organisation.
Organise beyond the union: build alliances
New Right strategy in education has focused on the dual
approach of developing its own broad hegemonic alliance, while simultaneously
seeking to disrupt and divide those forces committed to the concept of
education as a public good provided within a democratic, public system. The
deliberate fracturing and fragmentation of the state school system has now been
pushed to an extraordinary degree and it is becoming increasingly evident how
this is making it difficult to develop united responses on key issues
confronting education workers. These challenges have been compounded, deliberately,
by the anti-trade union legislation and most obviously the 2016 Trade Union
Act.
Gramsci’s experiences in the factory councils had made him
realise that the Turin working class movement did not have sufficient allies in
Italy’s wider labour movement, but also that the industrial working class was
disconnected from Italy’s agricultural workers. Gramsci’s personal experiences
(born in the South, politicised in the North) gave him a particular insight
into this problem and an appreciation of the fundamental need to unite workers
across North and South. The imperative for such alliances is set out
brilliantly in an essay Gramsci was writing before his imprisonment (‘The
Southern Question’) but that was never finished. For Gramsci, the need for such
alliances was essential if Italian workers were to break out of their
isolation.
There is now an urgent need in the fractured English
education system to build broad alliances around an alternative prospectus for
education. Any effort to cohere around a different vision for education
requires education workers in their unions to work with others to build a broad
base of support that challenges current ‘common sense’ with an alternative
vision of ‘good sense’ (to adopt Gramsci’s language). Fortunately, there are
already powerful examples of where such alliances are being forged. This is
most obvious in relation to the National Education Union’s ‘School Cuts’
campaign which is widely acknowledged as having reframed the narrative on
school funding and has clearly put the government on the defensive regarding a
key issue that is fundamental to the notion of quality public education. In
this instance the work with other unions (particularly headteacher unions) and
parent groups, combined with school level initiatives, has proved formidable
and demonstrates what is possible when hard work is devoted to coalition
building. Similar work is evident in the broad-based campaign opposing
standardised testing, but also the myriad local campaigns currently challenging
school academisations, many of which involve impressive alliances of parents,
community activists and education workers.
Building alliances such as these is critical although it is
seldom easy and often requires long term, patient work to develop relationships
and build trust. It is however work that cannot be avoided if those working in
education unions are to overcome the fragmentation that has been deliberately
encouraged in order to undermine them.
Organise around ideas: transformation through education
The New Right’s education project has depended on displacing
a particular vision of education (one based on collective and democratic
values) with an alternative vision that is grounded in individualism and market
values. The aim has been to embed this model of schooling as the new orthodoxy
– the ‘way things are’. We are encouraged to believe, as Margaret Thatcher
exhorted, that ‘there is no alternative’.
This marketised and privatised view of education has never
gone unchallenged and remains contested in myriad forms, in multiple locations,
every single day. From the subversive actions of individual teachers in their
classrooms to the major national campaigns on funding and other issues, the
vision of education promoted by Michael Gove, Nick Gibb and others is
constantly being contested. Nevertheless, it is also important to acknowledge
how successful this project has been. The English school system has been
changed dramatically and many of the ideas that underpin it have become
embedded within sections of the workforce. Many education workers may feel that
something is intrinsically wrong, but they cannot necessarily imagine an
alternative or they do not believe they can bring about change. Many feel they
have no option but to ‘keep their head down’ and ‘play the game’.
Transforming this vision of how many education workers see
their world is the fundamental challenge confronting those active in education
unions.
Gramsci made clear that establishing hegemonic leadership
was in essence an educational process – stating in the Prison Notebooks that
‘every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relationship’.
This is why in the Prison Notebooks Gramsci is so concerned with the role of
intellectuals in society. For Gramsci these intellectuals were not ‘traditional
intellectuals’, such as university academics, but ‘organic intellectuals’ –
people who were capable of shaping how others see the world and who offered the
possibility of change by opening up alternative possibilities for imagining how
society might be structured. Such people organised around ideas and were
typically rooted in workplaces and communities. For Gramsci it was self-evident
that if the working class was to challenge the hegemonic project of the
dominant class then it had to develop its own cadre of ‘organic intellectuals’
– a person based in their workplace or community and capable of acting as
‘constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”.’
Gramsci’s work serves to remind us of the importance of
‘ideas work’ and the need to constantly engage in the battle of ideas whereby
current ‘common sense’ is challenged and alternatives are made real. This
requires those working in education unions to take this type of work much more
seriously – our own education as activists, the education of those not yet
engaged in union activity but who are future activists and, more widely, the
education of education workers and those in communities. This is difficult, but
essential work. It is difficult because the intensification of teaching leaves
little space for critical reflection while those who are also engaged in union
activity face the additional pressures of inexorably increasing casework. Ideas
work can seem at best a luxury that cannot be afforded, or worse, an
unnecessary irrelevance that is remote from immediate struggles. Such attitudes
are understandable, but must be challenged.
Developing this type of ‘ideas work’ can take many forms.
There is no single initiative that can meet the needs I have identified. On the
contrary, ideas work must assume myriad forms because such activity works best
when it becomes absorbed into the daily discourses that shape how we experience
and understand our work. The task must be to develop multiple approaches that
work in different contexts and at different levels. Formal union education
programmes are an obvious starting point and it is good to see education unions
developing their programmes for activists in ways that are more grounded in
radical traditions of trade union and worker education. One excellent example
is the University and College Union’s (UCU) ‘Transforming UCU’ programme for
branch activists. This programme has a very explicit focus on workplace
organising and mobilising, but also on developing workplace leadership. Another
example is provided by professional learning and development programmes that
are not immediately focused on union building, but on wider professional
issues. These also provide an important opportunity to develop an alternative
agenda for education. We know for example that Continuing Professional
Development is a key mechanism by which utilitarian agendas in schools have
become embedded (‘top tips to hit targets’). The imperative must be to identify
how professional learning and development opportunities can be mobilised to
present a very different agenda. This may be in the form of union provided
professional learning, but might also involve taking control of the
professional learning provided within schools whereby education workers are
able to decide for themselves, individually and collectively, what form they
want their professional learning to take (Union Learning Representatives have
an obvious role here). One further approach is to promote self-organised
activity in union branches and districts around ‘ideas work’. This might be a
meeting on a specific topic, a local conference or even a reading group. The
possibilities are endless and will depend on what will work in specific
contexts. The key is that such events create the spaces in which alternative
ideas can flourish. They provide the oxygen to keep alive different ways of
seeing the world and as such they open up possibilities for challenging current
orthodoxies.
The approaches suggested are quite different, and not at all
mutually exclusive, but all work most effectively when those engaged in the
processes take their learning and their thinking back to their workplaces and
communities. Equipped with a different way of seeing the world, they have the
confidence to challenge orthodoxies and the agency to bring about change. This
is how current ‘common sense’ is disrupted – when everyday discourses and
practices do not pass unchallenged and when alternative visions of how things
might be are articulated with clarity and confidence.
Conclusion: opening up the politics of possibility
The first edition of L’Ordine Nuovo, published on May Day
1919, carried the following on its masthead:
Educate yourselves because we need all our intelligence
Agitate because we need all our enthusiasm
Organise yourselves because we need all our strength
Even today this must act as a reminder that there are no
short cuts to building the movement necessary to turn the tide on more than 30
years of Thatcherite ‘reform’ of England’s schools. Long, sometimes slow, work
needs to be put into developing workplace organisation so that education
workers not only see the union in their place of work, but they experience it
providing them with the opportunity to act collectively to make change happen.
There is however also a need to connect these experiences with a broader
analysis of why work is as it is, and how it might be different. Education
workers, students, parents – must believe another world is possible, and that
collectively they possess the agency to make change happen. This requires us
all to organise around ideas – to act as the ‘organic intellectuals’ that
Gramsci saw as central to bringing about real change.
The challenge for the Left is to build the movement that can
disrupt the hegemony of the Right and to develop the alliances around
alternatives that can make this happen. One of Gramsci’s great contributions to
our thinking was to help us understand how it is possible to connect grievances
rooted in our experience of work with the need for wider ‘ideas work’ that can
challenge current common sense. In this article I have set out some ways this
activity can be developed, but in so doing I am not suggesting anything that is
not already happening. The process of renewal and transformation I have
described is already clearly underway in many forms and in many places. My
intention here is to try to present these developments in a way that can
encourage critical reflection and which, in turn, might inform and shape
further action.
In conclusion, Gramsci’s method
was always built on a forensic and objective analysis of the world as it was,
with all its problems and difficulties. There is nothing to be gained by
underestimating the scale of the task that confronts us. However, any such
analysis today cannot fail to recognise that the cracks and contradictions in
the New Right’s educational project are daily becoming more apparent. Academy
school scandals, a teacher supply crisis and the scale of the mental health
emergency confronting young people increasingly point to a dysfunctional system.
All of these developments create new possibilities to prise open the cracks
that are appearing in the system and to break it apart. Significant
opportunities now exist to mobilise around an alternative vision of what is
possible (helped enormously by Labour’s commitment to establish a National
Education Service). The challenge for those organising in education unions is
to connect this everyday discontent with a new politics of possibility to help
make change happen. Antonio Gramsci’s intellectual legacy helps us understand
how such aspirations can be made real through every day practical activism.
Optimism of the will. Always.
Canada’s new far right: A trove of private chat
room messages reveals an extremist subculture
An analysis of 150,000 chat room messages paints a picture of a group
that is actively recruiting new members, buying weapons and trying to influence
political parties
SHANNON
CARRANCO AND JON MILTON
SPECIAL TO
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED
APRIL 27, 2019UPDATED 4 HOURS AGO
Watch: A window into Canada's far
rightTHE GLOBE AND MAIL
They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student
teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in
every province, in communities large and small. They gather on the internet to
strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic,
anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized.
They are the new far right in Canada.
The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted
between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications
of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of
their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of
white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old
multicultural consensus in this country.
The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on
a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is
also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super
Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.
CODED
LANGUAGE
Members of the chat concealed
themselves by posing as a club of video-game enthusiasts.
BELLADONNA LORD 2/8/2017
This is good, it looks more like a generic gamers chat, which in the
current year is probably better
WHITEKNEE 2/8/2017
We wiz incognito an sheeit
AXE IN THE DEEP 2/8/2017
WE WUZ affected by GAMERGATE
AXE IN THE DEEP 2/8/2017
anyway yes this chat is about GAMING and GAMING ACCESSORIES, especially
about meeting up in real life to PLAY VIDEO GAMES, and ensure that we can
propagate VIDEO GAMES across the country.
The messages were given to The Globe and Mail by Montreal-based
anti-fascists, who infiltrated the chat room in order to gather information on
the far right and disrupt their activities.
The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They
contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of
participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those
propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.
While the news media traditionally avoid publishing such offensive and
inflammatory material, in order to prevent giving extremists a platform, The
Globe has chosen, for the sake of transparency and accuracy, to reproduce a
limited number of examples of the ideas expressed in the online discussions.
The selection omits the most gratuitous slurs and images, but the result is a
disturbing portrait of a virulent subculture that speaks in a graphic,
hate-fuelled vernacular.
The size of this particular group discussion is modest, at 180 users. But
its members do more than simply engage in online talk. They meet in person,
spread propaganda and encourage each other to recruit and expand the movement.
They purchase weapons and discuss training. They have also attempted to join,
influence and volunteer for Canadian political parties, usually adopting a
restrained and more palatable guise.
The hatred exchange
Number of chat-group members from the
Canadian Super Players who referred to a home province or state at some point
during their online conversations
U.S.SaskatchewanNew
BrunswickManitobaNova ScotiaQuebecAlbertaBritish ColumbiaOntario3113511121848
THE GLOBE
AND MAIL, SOURCE: RESEARCH BY SHANNON CARRANCO
DATA
SHARE
×
|
Location
|
Chat logs
|
|
Ontario
|
48
|
|
British
Columbia
|
18
|
|
Alberta
|
12
|
|
Quebec
|
11
|
|
Nova Scotia
|
5
|
|
Manitoba
|
3
|
|
New
Brunswick
|
1
|
|
Saskatchewan
|
1
|
|
U.S.
|
3
|
THE HATRED EXCHANGE
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White nationalism has become a growing concern around the world, especially
in its extreme and violent forms. Last month’s terrifying attack on mosques in
Christchurch, N.Z., in which 50 people were shot to death and 50 more injured,
and which were livestreamed by the alleged killer on Facebook, ignited a
worldwide surge of anxiety about the simmering threat of white-nationalist
terrorism. David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service (CSIS), said earlier this month that his agency is increasingly
preoccupied by the threat of right-wing extremists.
His remarks came shortly after Facebook banned a number of people,
including former Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy and Canadian
white-nationalist campaigner Kevin Goudreau, for promoting organized hate.
Other internet giants are also feeling pressure to crack down.
The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has
become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader
Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally
as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial
statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called
the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but
the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a
signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the
upcoming election.
Regardless, it is evident that an internet-based extremist subculture
has spread across the globe. What to do about it is an urgent question, both
for politicians and for the leaders of some of the world’s biggest social-media
companies. The group chats reviewed by The Globe provide rare insight into who
and what is behind this movement, and serve as a sober reminder that Canada is
among the global breeding grounds of hate.
Not long ago, the far right seemed a negligible force. In 2014, CSIS
declared on its website that right-wing extremism was not a significant problem
in Canada. In part, that lack of concern reflected a view of the far right as
self-defeatingly fractious. Groups tended to spring up – and disappear – with
regularity, often destroyed by infighting. They were dismissed as an
ineffectual rump of high-school dropouts who couldn’t effectively organize
anything.
According to Barbara Perry, a professor at the University of Ontario
Institute of Technology and a leading expert on the far right in Canada, the
threat of far-right violence here is often underestimated. Between 1985 and
2015, her research shows, roughly 120 violent incidents in Canada could be
attributed to far-right groups and individuals. That compares, she says, with a
relative handful of incidents that can be attributed to Islamist-inspired suspects,
who tend to draw far more intense scrutiny from police and intelligence
agencies.
Among the most horrific examples in recent years were a deliberate
attack on police in New Brunswick in 2014, in which three officers were killed;
and a shooting at a Quebec City mosque in January, 2017, that left six people
dead. In both cases, the men convicted of the killings had been radicalized
online.
Dr. Perry says that the makeup of the far-right ecosystem has also been
changing: Over the past four years, the number of groups associated with the
far right in Canada has, by her count, roughly doubled, from about 120 to more
than 200. According to Statistics Canada, in 2017 alone the number of reported
hate crimes jumped by 47 per cent from the year before.
And numbers tell only part of the story, says Dr. Perry. Skinhead and
neo-Nazi groups comprising, for the most part, socially marginal members of
society, have been supplemented by a new cohort whose recruits tend to be
better educated and better off financially. They are also better organized, and
are willing to embrace a range of new tactics.
George Ciccariello-Maher, an American academic and outspoken
anti-fascist, told The Globe and Mail that anonymous platforms – such as the
Discord server reviewed by The Globe – are part of a crucial radicalizing stage
for today’s alt-right, a term he uses to differentiate the current generation
of white nationalists from previous ones. “Anonymity, as we know, goes all the
way from this level of basic recruitment and outreach in the alt-right, to the
organizers and activists themselves,” he says.
For Dr. Ciccariello-Maher, infiltrating the communications
infrastructure of the far right is an important step in stopping the movement’s
rise. “The communications network,” he argues, “is an essential part of the war
that needs to be carried out against them.”
In a statement, Discord said that its rules specifically prohibit the
promotion of hatred, calls to violence or any illegal activity, and that it
investigates and takes action against any reported violations. It added that it
does not read each of the billions of messages sent on Discord every day,
because it respects the privacy of its users; instead, Discord says, it relies
on human and computer intelligence to bring violations of company guidelines to
its attention.
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/EQ6UZ23OJZB33G6NIKKEKEIBAM.JPG)
A far-right protester clashes with
counter-protesters during a far-right rally on Parliament Hill.
CHRIS
WATTIE/REUTERS
TEACHABLE MOMENTS
The overarching goal for many in the Canadian Super Players chat group
was the eventual creation of a white ethnostate. In the meantime, one aim was
to begin slowly gaining a foothold in a range of institutions and professions,
including law, education and the military.
One member described himself as a graduate student and an active
far-right recruiter with a keen interest in grassroots political organization.
Another said he worked in a small Ontario city at a blue-collar job where he
was trying to gradually increase his “power level,” or overt racism, to convert
his co-workers to his world view. A third was a middle-aged father who bragged
that his teenage children seemed to be adopting his attitudes.
Yet another, who went by the online moniker Dank, described himself as a
University of Toronto graduate who was now training at another institution to
become a teacher. Like other members of the group, he took care not to reveal
his name, but he shared an image of what appeared to be course material with
the logo of Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont.
He said that at one point he was working as a student teacher at a
school with children in Grades 6, 7 and 8, whose ethnic makeup was almost
entirely white. “It’s the ethnostate basically,” he wrote.
Dank told the online group that he was using his position as a student
teacher to influence young minds. He described one classroom scene in which the
students were learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust. “In a
moment where the actual teacher wasn’t in the room, I casually asked them their
thoughts and opinions,” he wrote.
The children, he continued, generally saw the Holocaust as “really bad,”
but one of them asked why it had happened. Dank asked the young girl, “What was
the point of the train cars and the deportations if it was just to kill them
all?” He then encouraged the students to look into it on their own if they were
curious.
SCHOOL OF
THOUGHT
One participant described his work as
a student teacher, where he tried to encourage his class to ask questions about
the Holocaust.
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
When I was in my placement in a small school back in the fall, the kids
were given a book of holocaust fiction to read
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
in a moment where the actual teacher wasn't in the room, i casually
asked them their thoughts and opinions
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
there was a lot of casual 'it seemed really bad' kinda comments but with
no real emotion to it, but one girl asked the "why" question and that
apparently the book didnt explain it good enough
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
i just told her it was a really complicated issue that would 'take hours
of lecture' to explain, but i asked her "what was the point of the train
cars and the deportations if it was just to kill them all?"
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
she fucking froze in place and admitted she had no idea
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
but I gave a pretty basic "my guess is because of the forced labor
for the war effort, since they were working in the camps, but I encourage you
to look into it on your own if you're curious"
DANK✓ 1/9/2018
that way I'm delegating research to her and not telling her anything
Dank told the online group that he hoped his charges would stumble upon
the same sources that he did in his formative years. When he was in high
school, he said, he had a history teacher who “always spoke about ‘the Jews’
and used a funny voice referencing them.” Such actions had persuaded Dank to
research the Holocaust himself, which ultimately led him down a rabbit hole of
Nazi-sympathetic websites.
He also said he made sure to use a discussion of Indigenous identity to
explain to the children that they were white and European. One girl asked if
that was racist.
“She didn’t react negatively when I told her you are European and white
and there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he wrote.
“I told one kid of what Toronto is like … sometimes, not only are you
the only English speaker, but you’re also the only white person,” Dank wrote.
He was adamant that the far-right movement required a presence in the
teaching profession, because, as he put it: “we absolutely need to have our
guys in the institutions.” He said he thought he had a good chance of remaining
undercover, although he was worried about getting too close to any colleagues,
lest they betray him.
“l’ll play their game and recite what they want to hear,” he said,
adding that he was “acing the diversity class because I know all their
narratives.”
He implored his peers: “We can’t just give over education to the people
who hate us.”
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NXQBA6PWEZHH7PEJWF3CAK4AIU.jpg)
Guns and weaponry are a recurring
topic of discussion among members of the group. They share photographs of
arsenals – at home, in the gun range and out in the wilderness. They weigh the
pros and cons of makes and models, and trade tips about where and how to buy
them.
RUSTY WITHIN THE RANKS
Although the Canadian Super Players forum was populated mainly by fairly
young men, a handful of older participants were influential in defining its
goals and strategies.
One man, who went by the online handle Rusty and who described himself
as an experienced member of the Canadian Armed Forces, was seen by other
members as a leader and his advice on training, weapons and tactics was sought
after.
Rusty told his friends in the Canadian Super Players group chat that he
had joined the Forces in 2007 and trained as a field troop engineer. At the
time of his 2017 postings, he said that he and his wife were living in Nova
Scotia and gearing up for the arrival of triplets. He was planning to leave the
army and start a new life, raising his children in an “ethnically pure” area
near his family home in British Columbia.
Rusty described his time in the Forces with fondness, but also with
evident disgust at what the army, in his eyes, had become: “We spend more time
taking classes about how to not offend special snowflakes than we spend time
training, shooting, in the field or on deployment.”
He encouraged group members to join the reserves in order to benefit
from training in firearms and strategy. Several members of the group posted
messages indicating they had either done so or were considering it.
A number of current and former Forces members have been tied to the far
right in recent years. In 2017, Forces members who also belonged to the anti-feminist,
all-male group Proud Boys disrupted an Indigenous-led protest in Halifax. Among
the founders of La Meute, the largest far-right group in Quebec, are military
veterans. In media interviews, Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance
has admitted that extremism is present in the Forces – and has said he is
determined to stamp it out.
The perils of sending racist members of the Forces into the field was
starkly driven home by the scandal that led to the dismantling of the Canadian
Airborne Regiment following the racist killing of a Somali man by Canadian
soldiers during Canada’s deployment to Somalia in the 1990s. Rusty described
his own foreign deployment in a way that suggests he was part of the disaster
response in Nepal following the earthquakes there in 2015. He described the
locals as “shitskins” and said he used the clothes of the dead as toilet paper.
He also described an incident in Canada in which a Jewish military
colleague complained that Rusty and other soldiers were being anti-Semitic.
Rusty said he responded by arranging several handguns in the shape of a
swastika on the Jewish soldier’s desk.
Women could also be his target. While discussing his relationship with
his wife, Rusty declared that women should have a say only in what’s served for
dinner and what’s planted in the garden.
He also described how he and fellow soldiers punished a female colleague
for having the temerity to join the Forces: “We eventually started putting tons
of pure salt in her boots. Rotted the skin off her feet. She properly became
unable to walk and had to be carried everywhere.”
Whether those incidents occurred or not and whether his behaviour was
ever discovered by military authorities, is, in the absence of a surname,
difficult to verify using official records. The Globe spoke to several military
members in Nova Scotia and was unable to corroborate his account.
But the views Rusty expressed online clearly had an influence on the
younger members of the chat group, many of whom seemed frustrated or insecure
about their relationships with women. Both they and older members, some of whom
were married, appeared to see women’s larger purpose as helping to fulfill “the
14 words,” a far-right phrase calling for the protection of the ostensibly
threatened future of the white race. The slogan was coined by American white
supremacist David Lane, a member of the terrorist group The Order.
Like the others in the chat room, Rusty yearned for a Canadian white
ethnostate. He and the others talked eagerly about RaHoWa, or the Racial Holy
War, the day when whites would rise up and take back what was, in their view,
rightfully theirs from non-whites and feminists in Canada. When members asked
which guns to buy in preparation, Rusty – who described owning seven firearms
of his own – pointed them to sturdy, reliable weapons that could be used for
hunting as well as defence. It was the deer hunters, he said, who would survive
a societal collapse.
In an e-mail response to questions from The Globe and Mail about radical
elements in the ranks of the Forces, spokesman Derek Abma said that the
organization takes a strong stance against hate.
He said recruiters are trained to spot and flag applicants whose
suitability is questionable, and that when complaints are made about the
conduct of serving members, such complaints are investigated. “Hateful ideology
threatens operational integrity and undermines the unwavering trust and
cohesion required between our members,” he said.
Mr. Abma added that, since January, 2017, there has been one administrative
review related to extremism and that it led to a member of the Forces being
expelled; there were also five reviews related to accusations of racism and, in
one of those cases, as well, a member was expelled.
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/3C3WLFDX2NCOZI5X66YCXFWNKI.JPG)
A protester at a far-right rally
against the UN migration pact on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, December 8, 2018.
CHRIS
WATTIE/REUTERS
EXPLORING CONSERVATIVE PARTY INROADS
In early 2017, members of the Canadian Super Players chat group set out
to make their mark on mainstream politics. Their vehicle for doing so: the
leadership race of the Conservative Party of Canada.
The first candidate they rallied behind was Kellie Leitch, who was
proposing screening immigrants for cultural values. When her leadership
campaign stalled, they moved en masse to support Maxime Bernier.
One person in the chat room, who went by the name of Cyrus online and
who described himself as a law student, said he attended a Bernier event in
March, 2017, and described the politician “dog whistling pretty hard. He
mentioned western values and western civilization a lot.” But Cyrus was less
persuaded by Mr. Bernier’s libertarian policies and was unhappy that he did not
take a stronger stance against asylum seekers crossing the border on foot.
A few other chat-room participants praised Andrew Scheer, but the consensus
was that Mr. Bernier was the better bet. Dank, the student teacher, even
expressed dismay that he couldn’t cast more than one ballot for Mr. Bernier.
After Mr. Bernier was defeated by Mr. Scheer in May, many in the group
expressed their frustration with a broader political process that delivered no
candidate worthy of far-right voters. One chat-room member, a high-school
student in B.C., used a slur to describe Mr. Bernier as a puppet “designed to
make Conservatives complacent over the destruction of our country by giving us
a few virtue signals here and there.”
And yet, there remained a recognition that turning their backs on
mainstream politics was not an option. One member wrote that “Bernier had
perks, but I don’t think he was going to save us either. We have to work inside
the party and change people one way or another.” Another member put it this
way: “We need to dedicate our movement to gaining power through party
politics.”
Their first aim was to shift the Overton window, a term used to describe
the ever-changing limits of what is considered acceptable public debate. They
reasoned that if they could pry open that window further – and push those
limits to the right – their own views might not so easily be dismissed as
reprehensible.
The record of their discussions ends before Mr. Bernier announced the
launch of his breakaway People’s Party of Canada in September of 2018. (Neither
the party nor a representative of Mr. Bernier responded to requests for
comment.)
Before that, however, members of the group had targeted Conservative
Party events to try to recruit young white men into their online group. Members
especially encouraged each other to attend the Hamilton Conservative Christmas
Formal in December, 2017, for “recruitment purposes.”
A few days after the function, new users introduced themselves as having
been invited to join the Canadian Super Players chat room while they were at
the formal.
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/S4MYAA36ZJAZNBTWNYRGGI33IY.JPG)
Adam Strashok's since-deleted
LinkedIn page.
LINKEDIN
A VOLUNTEER WITH A DOUBLE LIFE
In the fall of 2017, Adam Strashok was working for Jason Kenney.
Alberta’s Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties had recently
merged, and their leaders – Mr. Kenney and Brian Jean, respectively – were
competing to see who would lead the new United Conservative Party, and,
eventually, the province itself. Mr. Strashok was running Mr. Kenney’s call
centre and its team of volunteers.
And keeping busy with other matters, too. On Oct. 28, the very day Mr.
Kenney was elected party leader, Mr. Strashok posted anti-Semitic and
anti-migrant messages in the online chat room.
The previous July, Mr. Strashok had derided Mr. Kenney himself. Under
the pseudonym GuyNumber7, he called the politician “such a cuck” – a favourite
alt-right slur for men deemed to lack backbone – because he had criticized
Canadian neo-Nazi Paul Fromm on Twitter. Mr. Strashok also encouraged the
others in the chat room to attack Mr. Kenney’s tweet.
A month after that, and shortly before he joined the Kenney
leadership-campaign team, Mr. Strashok applauded the actions of a man who had
killed a woman by driving his car into a crowd of counterprotestors during the
Unite the Right white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
In the chats obtained by The Globe, GuyNumber7 also made himself out to
be an important figure in the neo-Nazi movement in Calgary: He described his
work “vetting” individuals who wished to join the ranks of the city’s alt-right
and wrote about how he had hosted alt-right activists from elsewhere in Canada.
He claimed, as well, to have started a “big catch-all Canadian alt-right
[Facebook] group.”
Somehow, despite all that, Mr. Strashok managed to keep his public and
private identities separate. He maintained an alias-free blog site where he
posted about Canadian military procurements; and he was a part of the
Conservative Club, and the student-run firearms club, at the University of
Calgary. By all appearances, he was a fairly run-of-the-mill conservative.
That façade began to crumble in the fall of 2018, when an investigation
by Ricochet Media revealed that Mr. Strashok was helping to manage Fireforce
Ventures, an online store that sold coded white-supremacist symbols in the form
of military-surplus gear.
That revelation, in turn, led to the unmasking of his involvement in
various pseudonymous online accounts. Mr. Kenney said he was shocked and
disturbed by the reports of what he called Mr. Strashok’s “hateful and extreme”
online activity. He cancelled Mr. Strashok’s party membership and said he had
asked the party board to develop a screening process for those seeking to join.
All of Mr. Strashok’s known social-media profiles have disappeared since
his identity was revealed. The Globe was unable to reach him for comment.
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/EGIQAOMEYREHHPPMRMIV5O4STQ.JPG)
Adam Strashok – identified as a
director for a University of Calgary gun club in a photograph posted to its
Facebook page in 2014 – ran Jason Kenney’s call centre during the UCP
leadership contest. Mr. Strashok, whose LinkedIn profile touted his
political-organizing experience, was eventually denounced by Mr. Kenney and
expelled from the party after his online activity was exposed.
FACEBOOK/
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY FIREARMS ASSOCIATION
A MEETING IN THE WOODS
Even as they shared prejudices, gripes, conspiracy theories and dark
strategies, most of the chat-group members had never met in person. But in the
spring and summer of 2017, they were ready to take things face-to-face.
Renting a cottage near Algonquin Park in Ontario, they planned to spend
a few days in July together in the woods. They called the gathering
“Leafensraum” – an amalgam of leafs (their slang for “Canadians”)
and lebensraum (the Nazi policy of territorial expansion).
Leafensraum was taking place at a significant time. Donald Trump had
been in office for a few months by then and had energized the group. The
alt-right was, however tentatively, moving from an online subculture to what it
envisioned as a more street-fighting, real-world movement. In the United
States, demonstrations were taking place in such liberal strongholds as
Berkeley, Calif., and Portland, Ore. This was the alt-right’s moment, members
of the chat group surmised and they wanted to capitalize on the momentum, in
Canada.
Nearly 40 members showed up at the event, according to a podcast that
was recorded on site. They came from all over the country, with the biggest
contingent arriving from Montreal.
Some of the organizing was done by a member who went by the online
handle LateofDies – and whom watchdog group Anti-Racist Canada has identified
as Athan Zafirov – and by Gabriel Sohier Chaput, a neo-Nazi known online as
Zeiger. (Mr. Zafirov could not be reached for comment.)
They brought plenty of food and booze, sparred with one another and made
big breakfasts after long nights of drinking. They made speeches, too, filled
with hate for their perceived enemies and engaged in long conversations that by
all accounts only radicalized them further. When one of the podcast hosts
yelled to his audience that the weekend was a “huge deal,” one audience member
shouted back: “Sieg Heil!”
As their recorded podcast wore on, members became increasingly
intoxicated, drinking moonshine supplied by Rusty, the Canadian soldier, and
slurring their words. They talked about the Quebec City mosque shooting,
referring to it as the “holomosque.”
As their sojourn in the woods ended, the administrators and leaders of
the group promoted everyone present to important roles in the Canadian Super
Players chat room.
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/YYJM4V3XEFA5XN5M24E244PWJA.JPG)
The Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville, Va., in August, 2017, was initially deemed a huge success by
some in the Super Players chat group, but the mood shifted after a young woman
was killed by a demonstrator and police shut the protest down.
EDU
BAYER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
IN THE WAKE OF CHARLOTTESVILLE
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, 2017,
marked a turning point of sorts for the online group, some members of which
attended the two-day event. On the first of those days, some hailed the event
itself, and the images of a torch-lit march of white nationalists, as a huge
success.
But the mood shifted on day two, after James Alex Fields Jr., who had
previously espoused white-supremacist and neo-Nazi beliefs, drove his car
into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer
and prompting police to shut the protest down. Talk online turned to failure,
against a backdrop of a broader collapse in the far right’s street-level
activities.
A week after Charlottesville, SLUG2, one of the founding members of the
chat room and a host of the white-nationalist podcast This Hour Has 88
Minutes, announced a change in tactics. “I personally want to ask everyone not
to use swastikas or other obvious National Socialist imagery [publicly],” he
wrote to the group. “We are not changing any of our beliefs or opinions, just
how we present publicly. Sorry.”
REBRANDING
After the disastrous ending to the
Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the far right sought to
broaden its appeal by sanitizing its language and imagery.
SLUG2_ 8/21/2017
We want to do a minor re-brand of the alt-right. I personally want to
ask @everyone not to use swastikas or other obvious National Socialist imagery
(publicly). We are trying to become more mainstream of an ideology, and in the
eyes of the normie, Natsoc imagery is pure evil. While the vast majority of the
alt right disagrees with what the average normie believes, we need to keep in
mind that we are nothing without numbers. We are not changing any of out
beliefs or opinions, just how we present publicly. Sorry.
He was not alone in his call for circumspection. Many felt that the
group, and the broader far-right movement, needed to appear less extreme if
they were to gain widespread acceptance.
Dr. Perry, of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology,
describes the shift as typical of that segment of the far right that dubs
itself the alt-right – and which presents itself as closer to the mainstream
than it really is, avoiding, in particular, racially charged language.
But however segmented the movement may be – and, historically, the
far-right in Canada has been fractured – members of the online chat group
appeared to be building ties with far-right organizations across the country.
One member seemed to be organizing with the Calgary chapter of Blood
& Honour, a neo-Nazi group with a history of violence. Mr.
Zafirov, the co-organizer of Leafensraum, claimed to be a high-ranking
member of real-world “identitarian” formations, including the white-nationalist
group ID Canada (formerly Generation Identity). Identitarian groups have been
in the spotlight recently because the accused shooter in the Christchurch
mosque killings had made a donation to a European wing of Generation Identity,
which has led authorities in Europe to open investigations into their
activities.
A few months after the Charlottesville rally, Mr. Zafirov described a
shift, not unlike that advocated by SLUG2, in the strategy of Generation
Identity (as it was then still called), saying it would become less “edgy” in
order to appeal to a more mainstream Canadian demographic. He told the Canadian
Super Players group that Andrew Anglin, the creator of The Daily Stormer – the
largest neo-Nazi website in the world – was also moving in this direction. “We
are on a crusade against bad optics,” Mr. Zafirov wrote. “Think of it as the
clean image wing of the movement, we believe there’s some value and historical
success behind the strategy.”
But not everyone agreed with the more sanitized approach: Many in the
online group said they were suspicious, in general, about less extremist
branches of the Canadian far right. They disliked the Proud Boys, for instance,
for being too friendly with Jews. Some also castigated La Meute due to its ties
with the Jewish Defence League. (One member, though, who went by the username
FriendlyFash and who was identified by the Montreal Gazette as Shawn
Beauvais-MacDonald, claimed he worked as La Meute’s anglophone recruiter.)
Although members berated far-right individuals whose public persona was
less extreme than their politics, they occasionally made an exception for
people who had a large following. Ms. Goldy was among those exceptions.
Ms. Goldy is a Canadian media commentator who was fired from Rebel Media
for speaking on a Daily Stormer podcast at the Charlottesville rally. She ran
for mayor in Toronto in 2018, and received 25,000 votes. This month, she was
banned by Facebook for promoting hatred. Members shared her tweets and
discussed her value to their movement, lauding her for speaking “the 14 words.”
In their eyes, Ms. Goldy knew her “place” as a woman in society and could be
held up as an example.
When contacted by The Globe, Ms. Goldy said she is not a white
nationalist or neo-Nazi; nor, she said, does she associate with them.
The chat-group members extended a similar détente to University of
Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, a famous and outspoken critic of
academic orthodoxy, the use of gender-neutral pronouns and incursions on free
speech.
One member wrote of the professor: “He’s not 1488 but his ideas are
valuable for the movement.” (The term 1488 refers to “the 14 words” and to the
HH of Heil Hitler, H being the eighth letter of the alphabet.)
Canadian Super Players members also spoke of using the professor’s
events as venues for recruiting. Mr. Zafirov posted a link in the chat room to
a Peterson event at the Manning Centre in Ottawa, saying, “This might be worth
attending for recruitment and networking purposes.”
Another online member, who went by the name Orwelliandoublethink, wrote
that he was at a panel discussion on the topic of free speech at which Prof.
Peterson was appearing. Ms. Goldy was initially on the panel, but was excluded
after her appearance on a far-right podcast.
Orwelliandoublethink, who was messaging the group during the event, said
he was about to ask the panel why Ms. Goldy was removed. He later shared a link
to a video of the exchange, in which Prof. Peterson and the other panelists say
Ms. Goldy had become too controversial and could detract from the discussion.
In the chat, Orwelliandoublethink referred to the video as, “My question
to Peterson that made the Daily Stormer yesterday.” The neo-Nazi website had
posted the exchange.
Two people who spoke with The Globe identified the young man asking the
question in the video as Jesse Sanderson, whom they had known from his
high-school years in Toronto. Mr. Sanderson did not respond to several attempts
to contact him.
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/Y2BX77QKQ5HGHHIPAE4LVPAK5E.jpg)
A man kneels facing the Masjid Al
Noor mosque on March 19, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
MARTY
MELVILLE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
RADICALIZED FOR THE REAL WORLD
The chat room and its conversations exist in a digital world one step
removed from reality, which can make it difficult to assess the threat they
represent. But the participants were also taking concrete steps in their
communities to advance their political aims; the chat room emboldened and
encouraged them, and gave them a place to report their progress and be held to
account.
There have been several examples of online radicalization leading to
lone-wolf attacks in recent years. The gunman in the New Zealand massacre
posted a 74-page manifesto on social-media platforms and in an online forum,
outlining his hatred of Muslim immigrants in Europe, and his admiration of
American white-supremacist movements. U.S. prosecutors said that Dylann Roof,
who killed nine black people at a South Carolina church in 2015, was
self-radicalized online. The man accused of killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh
synagogue last year had posted dozens of anti-Semitic messages on social media
before delivering a final post that read, “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
In the Canadian Super Players chat group, it was often the younger
participants who were most eager to take some kind of real-world action. The
outward signs could be mild – a student who criticizes political correctness or
who puts up posters that defend Western civilization. But the discussions
behind those actions reveal a troubling, insidious process of radicalization.
In the fall of 2017, a spate of postering campaigns around the
University of Toronto campus attracted attention on social media and the
student press. The posters carried a simple but provocative slogan: “It’s Okay
To Be White.” The thinking behind that slogan was articulated in a post that
appeared on 4chan, the image-based internet forum, which called for followers
to distribute such posters as part of a co-ordinated North America-wide effort
to spread white-nationalist propaganda.
“5 words. Simple, elegant, effective. The plan is working. Stick to the
plan. There is no phase 2,” the 4chan post read. “Work at night. Work with
hoodies and sunglasses. Work quickly and move on.”
On Nov. 1, Orwelliandoublethink wrote, “We hit a good amount of the U of
T campus on St. George,” referring to a main thoroughfare that runs through the
university. He shared several photographs of the posters. (That same week, a
small group of young men were photographed by anti-racist activists at the U of
T campus. One of the men in the photographs was identified by anti-racist
activists and bloggers as Mr. Sanderson.)
Orwelliandoublethink said had been active in the free-speech movement
while he was a student at the University of Toronto. When someone in the chat
forum asked why there were so many racists at the university, he replied, “U of
T is where white men go to have their dreams crushed by a Marxist professor who
is likely Jewish.”
After the postering foray, members of the chat room discussed how they
hoped that some people who saw the posters, and who would otherwise be averse
to a white-supremacist message, might regard the five-word slogan as
reasonable. They talked, as well, about how they hoped the media would
inadvertently spread their message.
Similar posters were plastered on campuses across the country, including
at the University of Alberta, the University of Regina and the University of
Victoria. Soon after, the group shared links to articles in newspapers and on
Reddit threads that discussed their handiwork. Participants were excited by how
their dog-whistle campaign had gained such coverage: “Bigger and bigger papers
are publishing. Like dominoes. Hopefully we’re just getting started.”
/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/VI6EZ72GBVHUXNV6XHVYDIZ5MY.jpg)
This photograph was posted by a
British Columbia member of the Canadian Super Players online group, who shared
the image as he told others about his conversion to extremism and his attempt
to recruit others: ‘I was red pilled at late 14 and immediately began
converting my friend circle at that time. ... Now our group is large and still
growing fast and is its own unique thing. We are a strong community called the
Northern Order.’ (The Globe has not digitally altered the image, which was
posted with the faces obscured.)
YOUTH OUTREACH
It was not only on university campuses that the chat group found, and encouraged,
student members.
In the fall of 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump won the U.S. presidential
election, a student at a Vancouver high school wore a Donald Trump mask to
school. Mr. Trump’s victory troubled many students and teachers at the school,
and the student wanted to provoke them.
Going by the pseudonym National Traditionalist, he told fellow members
on the Canadian Super Players chat group that he “hated” his high school and
most of his peers, using epithets to describe gay people, trans people, immigrants
and refugees in his classes. He said he resented living in a multicultural
society. He blamed “Jewish lobbyists” for the decision to open Canadian
immigration to “non-whites.” Perversely, he claimed to enjoy reading about
Indigenous people who had gone missing in places such as Winnipeg.
Over the course of the year-long group chat, he also revealed a lot
about his life. He came from a “normie liberal household” in the Vancouver
neighbourhood of Kitsilano, a place known for progressive politics. He claimed
that his process of radicalization had started early. In elementary school, he
said, he wrote a fairy tale that mocked the idea of “the Big Bad White Man.” By
the eighth grade, he said, he was questioning everything his teachers and
parents had taught him. “My parents were lefties, everyone I knew [were]
lefties, but I felt something was wrong,” he wrote.
Then he found the far right online. At age 16, he contacted The Daily
Stormer website, and inquired about their meetings. He put together white-supremacist
videos for his YouTube channel and alt-right Instagram accounts. Beyond his
video-editing efforts, he used social media to propagate his views, including
running a white-nationalist Facebook group that ultimately boasted over 4,000
followers.
He even posted to the Canadian Super Players chat room while sitting in
his high-school classroom, giving a live description of his heckling of a
presentation given by a trans person. He also spread the word the analogue way,
printing fascist posters in the school’s computer lab and putting them up in
the hallways.
In early 2018, among the final alt-right chats obtained by The Globe,
the young man shared a picture with his fellow fascists. In it, 10 young men
and one woman pose in front of a large, white house. He himself stands in the
middle, holding the red ensign – Canada’s flag until 1965 and, for many on the
far right, a symbol of a time when the country’s population was whiter than it
is now.
Beneath the photo, he wrote of how he and some “friends from school went
to the [Daily Stormer’s] first Vancouver meeting. Over time I started to
organize the book club group” (a reference to face-to-face meet-ups of local
Daily Stormer online-forum dwellers). He added that, later on, he “started
assimilating other white nationalist groups into it. … We are a strong
community called the Northern Order.”
According to Vice Canada, Northern Order is affiliated with the
Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group that has been classified as a terrorist
organization in the United States and been linked to five race-based murders
there since 2017.
This past November, the young man posted a picture illustrating his
deepening involvement as a volunteer for a B.C. political party. He has also
been outspoken on at least one local issue, opposing a measure related to
reconciliation with First Nations peoples.
The Globe has chosen not to name the former student, who is now 19,
because he was a minor at the time he wrote many of the messages contained in
the chat room.
He says he is now a member of the Canadian Forces – there is, in fact, a
photo of his swearing-in ceremony on his Instagram account – and is training to
be a carpenter.
He denied being the person behind the National Traditionalist account,
and described himself as a “Canadian patriot who wore a Trump mask as a joke.
It is unbelievable you would accuse me of these things. I am not a racist or
extremist.”
He added, “If you want to know, I joined the Army to serve.”
Shannon Carranco is a freelance journalist whose work on the far right
has appeared in the Montreal Gazette and the National Post.
Jon Milton is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the
Montreal Gazette, the National Post, Ricochet, Rabble and the Media Co-op.
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