Scratch a Canadian and a fascist bleeds

yaroslav-hunka-parliament

The waffle SS 🇨🇦

I’ve been losing my mind recently over Canada’s love of former Waffen SS members and I promised myself I’d stop thinking about it… but I couldn’t. This may come as a shock if you thought the applause for Yaroslav Hunka in parliament was a bizarre accident but our country loves fascists. And it’s not a coincidence: Canada loves fascists for fascistic reasons.

The phrase “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” is popular on the political left because it helps us form a clearer image of our competition. It reminds us of the spiderweb-thin film of skin that is polite capitalism, which will allow screaming blood to seep out with but a single prick. Fascism is The Thing; we don’t know what it looks like itself but we know it comes to us with the face of human capitalism. But make no mistake, this does not mean that liberalism and fascism are identical. In fact, my point is the opposite: Canada commits crimes not as a fascist dictatorship, but a liberal democracy. There is no Canadian “National Socialist” party but we implement Nazi policies all the same.

For the purpose of this piece, I’ll define fascism as “the ultranationalist, hypercapitalist, reactionary ideology that swept Europe in the 20th century”. This is definitely not specific enough for many other purposes, but it suffices for this piece where I’d like to be more empirical than theoretical. Similarly, I’ll say Canada’s ideology is an example of a liberal democracy, considering we have a parliamentary system with several political parties that upholds capitalism (you’ll notice in this article that these “democratic” institutions have little to do with the injustices I bring up). Canada isn’t very special in this (or any) regard, but I do live here and naturally I’d like to air out my grievances, plus we’re pretty 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂.

What does Canada want?

Life; the bourgeois

Fascism is well known to be a middle class ideology, and Canada might have the middest of middle classes. Life in this country is how I imagine life in Germany in the 30s, except through the most boring fun house mirror ever. If you’ve ever wondered how Hitler got so many rabid anticommunists to treat their neighbours like scum, I’m guessing you’ve never met an upset suburbanite.

I think it is important to note the outsized influence of sprawling suburban hellscapes on the country. A telling example is the City of Toronto, which was a small urban area (now Old Toronto) until it was amalgamated with five suburbs. These suburbs had conservative political leanings, who now had an outsized say in the policy and planning of the core of Toronto. Furthermore, the amalgamation allowed the revenue from the productive inner city to be reinvested into financially insolvent suburbs, basically providing a subsidy to home owners (read: land owners).

Maybe you’ve heard of Toronto’s skyrocketing housing costs and the associated epidemic of homelessness. In The Tenant Class, Tranjan explains that this cannot be called a “housing crisis”, considering it is business as usual as opposed to an aberration - Canada has always legislated outsized power into the hands of landlords, and tenants have always had to engage in active struggle against them to survive. Tranjan explains in the book that yes, this includes “private landlords”, who own one or two houses to rent out as a source of income. Make no mistake - a rental property is a business, which is now usually valued at almost a million dollars in Ontario.

Unstated in this analysis is the number of home owners there are. So many people buy houses because it’s a great decision: home ownership has long been the way of passing intergenerational wealth. But this means that the wealth of ordinary middle class families is tied to land value, and so they are conferred bourgeois interests. Obviously I’m not advocating for the historical American alternative of redlining, or the modern American alternative of mass corporate accumulation of residential property - but maybe there’s a problem when ordinary people are working to preserve homelessness because a shelter might be bad for their bottom line. Maybe there’s a problem when ordinary people want to reduce the mobility of those who cannot drive because buses don’t belong in a high-value neighbourhood. Let’s not forget that suburbanism has always been a bastion of individualism, as part of the 50’s revitalized American dream, where even a worker gets to live with the pride of a yeomen pioneer, in a plantation house complete with a woman and children (I’m sure the uncanny resemblance to the Nazi idealization of the Volksgemeinschaft is purely coincidental). I just find it appalling how the main way of “being smart with your money” coincides with the main way of becoming a capitalist and misogynistic flavour of antisocial - becoming a fascist flavour of psychotic.

barbarian-suburbs

These are the particularly vulgar examples, but in Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State Stein explains how really, the entirety of city planning is now beholden to real estate capital. Other parts of our way of living are similarly captured by the bourgeois through the socialization of corporate costs. In Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti recalls the strengthening of austerity in post-WW1 Italy:

“To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut—measures that might sound familiar to us today.”

He goes on to recount how these measures created civil unrest, which had to be met with repression by Mussolini’s fascists. In Canada, we socialize our costs the same way. We face our health care being privatized in Ontario, funnelling our public health budget into the private sector, locked away from use for public services. We pay more in rent and more for groceries every year, to the enrichment of private property rather than working people. We don’t have terror squadistri of Black Shirts killing dissenters and unionists, but we do have drugs, the elements, common criminality, and the police killing homeless people. This is our final solution for the workers that the private sector doesn’t want to pay for. And it’s not as if the public disagrees: Sweeps are extremely popular in neighbourhoods with encampments and there is broad disgust in having to see people take shelter in the subway system.

trinity-bellwoods-sweep

The police in general is extremely popular. Our Gestapos enjoy an increasing budget each year, free to use it on murdering homeless people, black people, gay people, and more. It’s surprising to me that they haven’t been given the gas chambers they’ve been asking for. But Canadians are all buds, we’re too kind to each other to use one of those, eh?

Xenophobia, immigration; slavery

Canada’s foreign policy follows the USA’s, and thus its selection of xenophobias does as well. We must discourage great work by Chinese researchers who may want to steal our technology and cancel infrastructure upgrades with Chinese companies who may want to steal our information. We must not believe the disinformation presented by Russian news outlets. We must stop immigration from India.

But the truth is that we love having a cultural melting pot, where people of all nationalities can come to our country as international students, as Tim’s baristas, as SkipTheDishes cyclists, as Uber drivers, as off-the-books line cooks at restaurants, as farm hands, and more. Workers can come to Canada through programs that grant temporary immigration status conditioned on continued studies or employment; the Canadian lives of these workers are left precariously on the edges of the desks of managers, beaurocrats, phone apps, and the free market. Social relations follow from economic relations, and in this case it’s clear that racism follows from our underclass of precarious workers, who do our cheapest and most abuse-prone labour.

tim hortons bikes

Did you know that you can get fined $630 for not speaking English on the GO train? It’s true - if a fare inspector finds that you haven’t bought a ticket for the train, they’ll ask you for information. If you don’t provide it immediately, perhaps because you cannot understand the fare inspector, they might write a ticket describing your decision to

  • “Fail to obey instructions of proper authority” - $40 - for not understanding the instructions
  • “Wilfully obstruct or interfere with proper authority” - $295 - for taking too long to comply with instructions in a timely manner
  • “Knowingly provide false information” - $295 - for pulling up the wrong document

This isn’t a hypothetical - I have watched these fines get added to a fare evasion ticket, as the conclusion to an hour of screaming in English at a passenger who only spoke Punjabi. Commanding someone to “speak English motherfucker” is so passé, we’re civilized now.

Did you know that you can also get fined for speaking very good English? I quietly and calmly told the fare inspectors what I thought of their actions. In return, they gave me the appropriate penalty for when you “Use profane language on Authority property” ($105).

Did you know that there is no minimum wage? That’s right, if you’re an immigrant your employer doesn’t have to pay you for your work. What are you going to do about it? Maybe you can do something if your community has strong labour organization, but if you’re on your own then… shit happens, I guess!

Did you know that Canada has slaves? Yes, if your career is as a Seasonal Agricultural Worker powering the fifth-largest agriculture industry in the world, you might be stuck in that career, paid less than you need to live, and “treated like [a mule]”. Your entire life may belong to our food industry, free to work you to death if it pleases. Galen Weston might not be as impolite as Hitler or Mussolini, but it looks like he has the same attitudes on work. (Maybe Salazar then?)

What does Canada do for it?

Anticommunism; the Galicia division of the Waffen SS

Class Action, Andy Hanson’s excellent history of teachers’ labour organizing in Ontario, draws a clear line through Ontario’s continuing subjugation of teachers. The right to organize was not granted easily, and today the government does everything in its power to scapegoat labour power in schools for our poor education system. Strikes are, every single time, met by a government media campaign explaining to parents that their children’s education is being compromised by greedy teachers (i.e. publicly funded propaganda against its own labourers). It isn’t as if teachers are in a particularly good spot in their bargaining with the state. Teaching is a prime example of the socialization of costs - not only must teachers pay for their supplies and transportation, but also their own continuing education. Ontario has historically modernized[citation needed] its education system by requiring teachers to meet increasing demands for certifications and degrees. Today teachers must pay for education in their teachable field, and then pay again for teachers’ college. Plus, they pay to teach their classes with their time. In Wage Labour and Capital, good ol’ Karl M. explains that surplus value is found in extra labour time: Wages must meet the cost of social reproduction (cost of living, more or less), but this wage is irrespective of the time spent in a day working, so surplus value is created by surplus working time. I’d like to meet a teacher who doesn’t spend extra time working every single day on creating and revising curricula, preparing lessons, grading homework and tests, giving students feedback and advice, supervising student clubs, and critically reflecting on the needs of their students. (“But they get summers off!!!” honestly just shut the fuck up.)

Teachers do not produce commodities and so do not produce surplus value in the traditional sense. However, a capitalist economy requires a workforce that is educated enough to work, and the state is trying to provide that to its businesses as cheap as possible. (I am not arguing against public education just because it also serves capital “c” Capital, only that it is in Capital’s interests to exploit the labour of teachers rather than in the social interest.) Furthermore, it is not as if these costs are set by a rational market, considering the high demand and low supply of teachers in Ontario. This is a government intervention to give teachers less.

Ontario’s teachers are not the only example of labour’s head being held below the water in Canada, similar struggles can be found across all industries. Of course, this is typical of a capitalist system, but my point is that we delineate fascism’s anti-labour militancy from “regular” capitalism by its violence and brutishness. In Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti characterizes fascism by “all-out government support for business and severe repression of antibusiness, prolabor forces.” Maybe we don’t see Canada deploy violence to this end, but we’ve seen it in the past.

ss oakville

Let’s look back at the 1950s, a time of global reconfiguration. There was a prominent Ukrainian-Canadian community across the country with a militant labour movement. They had social institutions for union organizing as well as community organizing and social events, such as children’s dances. Meanwhile, Ukraine proper had a recently defeated ultranationalist faction which overlapped with the Nazi party. The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) was the Ukrainian branch of the military wing of the Nazi party - joining this wing required an oath of loyalty to the party and Adolf Hitler. Some members you might recognize are Yaroslav Hunka who was applauded in Parliament to national embarrassment and Peter Savaryn who was president of the University of Alberta and received the Order of Canada. (Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather, Michael Chomiak, narrowly escapes this list by merely running a party propaganda newspaper which was expropriated from its Jewish owners. He even lived in the owner’s house!) We can find more examples in lists of people memorialized as “victims of communism” (try Googling the dedications), or etched into plaques on various monuments dedicated to them such as the one in Oakville, ON (recently “removed for repair”). These SS officers were world experts on anticommunism militancy, and had earned their stripes fighting patriotically against communists and Jews in their home country. So naturally, Canada turned to them when it wanted to quash its domestic labour movement, and allowed thousands of war criminals to immigrate, free to be hired as pinkertons by the state or by business.

Canada willingly imported perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust; it imported them to continue the work they did in their home countries during the Nazi holocaust; it imported them to help in the anti-labour activity that it was already doing; it imported them to do something that the government still does.

Settler colonialism; genocide

I recently read Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend and, thoughts on the main subject aside, I found clarity in Losurdo calling the founding of this country the “Canadian Holocaust”. Canada is a settler colony on land that used to belong to the First Nations peoples of the continent - who no longer live here! I’m sure everyone has heard the details about this, and knows about the historic brutality of our national project. I’m sure everyone has heard about how recently the on-the-books genocide ended, and how it continues through the lack of clean water, the supremacy of drugs and alcohol, individual displacement, abuse, and murder, repression and violence at the hands of police, expropriation of land and the means of living, and more. I don’t need to explain the parallels between this and Nazi Germany’s racism.

Maybe this foundation of our nation and ideology is what makes it so easy for us to join the holocaust in Palestine. And we do this with our chest, vehemently - even students who unobtrusively express mild disagreement are forced into line. This exportation of genocide and white supremacy is just as natural to us as was the rapid exportation of German supremacy into the lands of the Slavic peoples. Same shit, different untermenschen.

I’m keeping this section short. My blog is not aimed at readers who find this topic contentious.

al-shifa

Why does Canada do this?

Much has been written on the connection between the liberalism and fascism: on their enabling of each other, on their antagonism, on their merely being different aspects of capitalism (you can probably guess what my opinion is). I can’t present a full investigation into their connection, so I’ve tried to at show you that Canada’s wars against labour, lesser races, women, etc are comparable to those of any fascist state (and I barely even touched on Canada’s international behaviour). I began this article by explaining the liberal-democratic character of Canada and explicitly positioning it against fascism - this is how we’re taught to understand politics by school and by culture. My arguments respect these lines drawn in bourgeois theories of history and politics, and yet we still find on our side the exact atrocities we condemn. Perhaps these are not the lines we should be considering.

Major sources

Here are some sources that I drew upon for big-picture ideas, if you would like to learn more about the things I touched on here:

  • TrueAnon podcast and Canadian star Dan Boeckner’s excellent two-part investigation into Holocaust revisionism and terrorism in Canada: part 1, part 2
  • Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti, a clear view of the “rationality” of fascism
  • Class Action by Andy Hansen, a history (using the feminist methodology) of Ontario teachers’ labour organizing, and so also on the history of Ontario’s suppression of labour and upholding of patriarchy
  • Canadian imperialism’s fascist friends, the World Socialist Website’s five part series on Canada’s strong alignment with Ukrainian ultranationalism and fascism
  • My friends :]