You can’t drink an apology

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

A somewhat cynical column by Scott Gilmore on apologies. While I agree that an apology by itself may not address (or redress) historic injustices, their symbolic value should not be discounted:

Canadian parliamentarians are so chronically petty and partisan they typically cannot agree on the colour of the sky. Yet, all but 10 were able to agree on one seemingly important issue yesterday. They voted in favor of an apology for the now infamous residential school system.

Our political leaders have already made two previous apologies for the residential schools. A decade ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in the House of Commons to express our collective regret and then nine years later his successor Justin Trudeau repeated the apology, this time while in Newfoundland. For this third time they’ve opted to kick it upstairs to a higher authority, the Pope.

Our MPs were unified in believing that since we’ve already done our bit and apologized, and given that the corrosive legacy of the residential schools continues to persist, obviously it’s now someone else’s turn to sort this thing out. Amen.

It has been theorized that there are 12 different types of Canadian “sorries,” including the “sympathetic,” the “ostentatious,” and even the “libidinous.” There is, in fact, a thirteenth type: the “political.”

Abroad, we have the reputation for being chronic apologizers. Compared to our politicians, though, the average Canadian looks callously unrepentant. An incomplete list of their official apologies includes Acadians for being deported in the 1700s, Japanese-Canadians for interment during World War Two, Chinese-Canadians for imposing a head tax, Sikh-Canadians for turning away migrants, and gay and lesbian Canadians for discrimination.

All these official “sorries” have two things in common, which explains why our politicians are so eagerly remorseful. First, the official apology is the least expensive thing they can do. In many of these cases the legacy of the original sin is so vast and pervasive there would not be enough money in the federal treasury to fully repair the damages done to the victims or their descendants. By comparison, apologies are cheap and in full supply. Here, have another.

Second, these statements of regret are for sins committed almost entirely by white, male, straight Canadians. We, as a group, have done very well over the last few centuries. And while our position of power and wealth is no longer unassailable, we’re still on top and would like to stay there. When public values shift, and we are forced to acknowledge that our previous behavior was utterly criminal, we really don’t want to do anything too dramatic.

In light of this, and the low cost, it is obvious why our political leaders like to apologize so often. But it’s well past time we recognized these rituals for what they are: distractions. The politicians making the apology (or telling the Pope he should), are probably genuinely remorseful for the sins of the past. But sincerity will not right past wrongs. Even worse, it just reduces the pressure to prevent future ones.

Consider the fact that just hours after the House voted on the Pope’s apology, the Prime Minister was across the river in Gatineau speaking at the Assembly of First Nations. There he pledged (again) to fix the water problems plaguing Canadian reserves for decades. There are currently 76 Indigenous communities without clean drinking water. Since coming to office, the Liberal government has managed to remove 61 communities off that list, but another 32 were added.

If the people of Rosedale or Westmount woke up this morning to discover they had to boil their tap water, the problem would be fixed by the end of the day.

Given this indisputable truth, standing in front of a room of Indigenous leaders to promise yet again that we are eventually going to fix this should be so unbearably humiliating that it would render Trudeau speechless from shame. Instead, he walked up to the podium with a smile. He had just voted for another apology (via the Pope). That’s something. It’s a step in the right direction. Sure, you can’t drink an apology, but it’s progress. Right?

Source: You can’t drink an apology

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ICYMI: After a massive refugee influx, Germany is confronting an imported anti-Semitism

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Good balanced overview:

Bullied students. Crude rap lyrics. An ugly confrontation on an upmarket city street.

In another country – one less attuned to the horrors wrought by anti-Semitism – evidence that the scourge is once again growing might have been ignored.

But this is Germany, a nation that nearly annihilated an entire continent’s Jewish population. And after a series of high-profile incidents, the country isn’t waiting to sound the alarm on a pattern of rising hatred toward Jews.

In recent days, demonstrators have filled the streets, a first-ever national coordinator to combat anti-Semitism has taken up his post, and officials from Chancellor Angela Merkel on down have spoken out.

Germany is also doing something difficult for a country that sees itself as the open and tolerant antidote to the prejudice-driven murder machine it once was: acknowledging that the problem’s resurgence has been fueled not only by the far right, whose views have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream, but also in significant part by Muslims, including refugees.

“The nature of anti-Semitism in Germany is definitely changing,” said Sergey Lagodinsky, a member of the assembly of the Jewish community in Berlin. “We’re having a lot more violent, everyday confrontations that come through incidents with immigrants.”

That’s not an easy admission in Germany, where Merkel led the push three years ago to open the country to more than a million asylum seekers – many of them Muslims fleeing conflict. At the time, the move was widely seen, at least in part, as a grand gesture of atonement for the worst crimes of German history.

Since then, Merkel has rallied the nation around the slogan “We can do it,” brushing away suggestions that Germany will suffer for its generosity.

But she’s also been forced to concede the link between the new arrivals and creeping anti-Semitism. This month, she told an Israeli broadcaster that Germany was confronting “a new phenomenon” as refugees “bring another form of anti-Semitism into the country.”

That’s something critics have warned of for years, given that many of those who arrived in Germany came from nations where anti-Semitism is widespread, including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But officials, analysts and Jewish and Muslim leaders all say Germany has been slow to recognize the risks.

“The cultural dimension that is linked with the influx was always underestimated,” said Felix Klein, who started work this month as the federal government’s point person for combating anti-Semitism. “Now we have to deal with it.”

The first step, Klein said, is to understand the scale. But the data is surprisingly limited, and what is available has been called into question.

Police statistics, for instance, show that about 90 percent of the anti-Semitic cases nationwide are believed to have been carried out by followers of the far right – traditionally the bastion of prejudice toward Jews in Germany.

But government officials and Jewish leaders doubt that figure, citing a default designation of “far right” when the perpetrator isn’t known. The government also has no reliable means of tracking anti-Semitism that falls below the level of the criminal – something Klein said he’s determined to change.

A survey of victims of anti-Semitism commissioned last year by the German Parliament concluded that Muslims were most often identified as the perpetrators. A separate study found comparatively high levels of anti-Semitic thinking among refugees with a Middle Eastern or North African background.

The number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in Germany has remained fairly steady over the past decade, at around 1,500 every year, although researchers think the actual numbers are much higher, said Uffa Jensen, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. One recent survey found that 70 percent of Jews said they would not report an anti-Semitic incident because they feared the consequences.

Even if the overall numbers are relatively stable, the behavior behind the data has changed, said Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

“The incidents are more aggressive, more pronounced, and directly affect Jewish people with insults or attacks,” Schuster said.

German schoolchildren have reported the word “Jew” being thrown around as a taunt on the playground. Some have said they have been threatened with death.

“There are incidents that go so far that kids have to leave their schools because it’s no longer possible to stay. I can’t remember that happening in the past,” Schuster said.

Beyond the bullying, two high-profile instances of anti-Semitism have spawned outrage in recent weeks.

A German rap duo won the top honor at the country’s most prestigious music awards this month for an album that included lyrics boasting of bodies “more defined than those of Auschwitz inmates” and threatening to “make another Holocaust.” Amid a backlash, the awards program was terminated.

Meanwhile, cellphone video footage emerged of an assailant shouting anti-Semitic slurs and whipping a belt against a man wearing a kippa, or Jewish prayer cap. Police arrested a 19-year-old Syrian refugee in connection with the assault, which took place in the trendy Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg.

“When I watched the video, I looked into his eyes. I don’t understand how a young man can be so filled with hate,” said Sigmount Königsberg, anti-Semitism commissioner for the Jewish community of Berlin.

Königsberg deals with hundreds of incidents each year and said a substantial majority of the cases involve an alleged Muslim perpetrator.

Far-right assailants are less common, he said. But that makes sense, if only for geographic reasons: Germany’s Muslim and Jewish communities are both concentrated in big cities, such as Berlin. Far-right supporters are more likely to live in the countryside.

The German far right has been emboldened lately, winning seats in Parliament last fall – the first time that’s happened since the 1950s. Authorities say elements of the far right have grown more vocal in their anti-Semitism. But they have been even louder in denouncing Muslims, capitalizing on resentment toward Merkel’s decision to let in the refugees.

Ironically, far-right politicians have used concerns about anti-Semitism to make their case against the refugees – a logic that many Jewish leaders reject.

“The world doesn’t revolve around Jews. If people are dying in Syria, you can’t let them die because you may face more anti-Semitism in a couple years,” said Lagodinsky, the member of the Berlin Jewish assembly.

Rather than bar refugees, Lagodinsky said, the solution starts with being more honest in talking about the problem – something he said mainstream German society is often afraid to do for fear of targeting a Muslim minority population that already feels under siege.

Aiman Mazyek, for one, welcomes the conversation. The president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany emphasized that it’s only a small minority of Muslims who are taking part in anti-Semitic acts. But he said there is no doubt that some newcomers – and some who have been here far longer – have failed to integrate into a society that has put “Never Again” at its core.

“If people come here and want to integrate, they need to understand the DNA of the country. And part of that DNA is the legacy of the Holocaust,” he said.

Mazyek said it will take effort to educate people who may have grown up in countries where anti-Semitic rhetoric is rampant and others who may have been raised in Germany but who nonetheless feel drawn into “the unresolved conflicts of the Middle East.”

But he said there is also reason for optimism.

“Many of them came from countries where there was dictatorship, where they weren’t free. There’s the potential there for much more empathy when they visit a concentration camp,” he said.

Josh Spinner, an American-born, Berlin-based rabbi, said Germany also needs to keep its problems with anti-Semitism in perspective.

“There’s nowhere in Europe where there isn’t a sense of unease” among Jews, said Spinner, who is also chief executive of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, an education-focused philanthropic group.

German unease was reflected vividly this past week in a Berlin protest that drew about 2,000 people, who came wearing prayer caps. They listened as speakers warned of a rising threat and insisted that the country would not tolerate a return to its anti-Semitic past.

But Spinner said Germany still has it better than most places on the continent – in part because its past has taught it to be vigilant and aggressive in responding to signs of hatred.

Spinner said that he has walked Berlin’s streets wearing a kippa for years without any serious problems and that he will continue to do so. Warnings that Germany would become inhospitable for Jews after taking in so many refugees have, for the most part, not come to pass.

“Relative to the perceived threat, not much has happened,” Spinner said. “And that’s a relief.”

Source: After a massive refugee influx, Germany is confronting an imported anti-Semitism

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Exclusive: Major Neo-Nazi figure recruiting in Montreal

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Long read on a Canadian connection:

One of North America’s most influential neo-Nazis lives in Montreal and is organizing a white supremacist network on the island.

“Zeiger” is the pseudonym for the second-most prolific writer on the Daily Stormer, an extreme right-wing news website that attracts upwards of 80,000 unique visitors a month.

The site traffics in conspiracy theories, refers to African-Americans as “nogs,” to gay men as “f***ots” and devotes coverage to what it calls the “Race War” and the “Jewish Problem.” Along with the Daily Stormer’s other authors, Zeiger has helped spread this ideology to a new generation of young white men across North America.

Since emerging as a key figure in the movement four years ago, Zeiger’s identity has been a closely guarded secret. But an investigation by the Montreal Gazette has linked Zeiger to a local IT consultant in his early 30s.

Gabriel Sohier Chaput lives in an apartment in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie. That same apartment was listed by Zeiger as his home and as a rendezvous point for a local neo-Nazi group, according to documents obtained by the Montreal Gazette.

The group also met at downtown bars, apartments and a hotel between August 2016 and January 2018. At various points, members self-identified as alt-right, alt-reich, Nazis, fascists and white supremacists.

They acted on the instructions of a man referring to himself as Zeiger from the Daily Stormer. Zeiger co-ordinated the time and place of most meetings.

“Zeiger is probably second to only Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist,” said Keegan Hankis, the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s senior analyst. “[Zeiger] has been very influential in the strategies behind it.”

The SPLC monitors the online presence of hate groups throughout North America.

Zeiger used his infamy as a recruiting tool, sharing a manifesto he authored as well as hyperlinks to his Daily Stormer articles and podcast appearances with the local group.

They first met at an Irish pub on Prince Arthur St. in August 2016. Shortly afterward, he introduced them to another Montreal-based fascist group.

Over a one-and-a-half-year period, a core of between 10 and 15 members gathered in bars and apartments around the city. Only men were allowed to attend their official meetings, but they opened up some events to women and “normies” — a term they use to describe people outside the movement.

The information that links Zeiger to Sohier Chaput comes from anti-fascist activists who monitor neo-Nazi and other far-right groups online.

The anti-fascists cross-referenced Zeiger’s profiles on white supremacist websites like Iron March, the Right Stuff and the Daily Stormer with information Zeiger provided to a closed Montreal-based chat room.

A home address Zeiger shared with the chat group matches the corporate listing for GSC Gestion, a consulting firm whose owner and sole employee is Sohier Chaput.

Ironically, two key pieces of information linking both men came from Zeiger himself, who, during a March 11 appearance on a white supremacist podcast, revealed that he attended high school in Outremont. Although Zeiger did not name the school, it narrowed the activists’ search down.

They also believed his real first name was Gabriel after digging into Zeiger’s profile on the neo-Nazi website Iron March. The profile was connected to a Skype account registered under the name “gabriel_zeiger.”

The anti-fascists then found and combed through a small library of yearbooks from Outremont high schools. They were searching for someone whose first name, age and appearance matched Zeiger’s.

They found a 2002 yearbook from Paul-Gérin-Lajoie-d’Outremont, which Sohier Chaput attended in Grade 10. They saw a resemblance between the 2002 photo of Sohier Chaput and Zeiger’s online profiles.

Compared to Zeiger’s enormous digital footprint, there are only traces of Sohier Chaput online.

He was an IT manager at a UPS store before branching out as an independent contractor in 2016, according to his profile on a job networking site.

A Google search for his name yields a Soundcloud account and an entry noting his second-place finish in the 2012 St. Lawrence Toastmasters public-speaking competition.

He does not appear to have public profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media.

Instead, the anti-fascists claim, he exists under a Nazi alter ego: Zeiger.

Neither Sohier Chaput nor Zeiger responded to the Montreal Gazette’s request for comment.

Sohier Chaput’s brother hung up the phone twice when called by the Montreal Gazette. His father did not respond to email and telephone requests to pass along contact information to Sohier Chaput.

The Montreal Gazette also sent a letter to Sohier Chaput’s apartment by courier and rang his doorbell twice to no avail. His landlord agreed to pass along a message but as of Wednesday, he has not replied.

On white nationalist forums, Zeiger and other Montreal users brag about beating anti-fascist protesters and pasting Nazi stickers on the métro and co-ordinate their attendance at far-right rallies.

They also refer to a 2016 meeting with a representative from Students for Western Civilization, which led a campaign in 2015 for the creation of white student unions on Toronto university campuses.

One of the Montreal group members claims to have hosted a lecture by Ricardo Duschene, a University of New Brunswick professor who believes mass immigration is causing the ethnocide of European Canadians, in the summer of 2017.

Duschene denies any association with the group.

“I spoke at a meeting in Montreal last summer but it was for another group that does not identify as ‘alt right,’ ” he wrote in an email to the Montreal Gazette. “I don’t identify myself as ‘alt right’, and less so would I ever speak at a meeting organized by Daily Stormer.

“I am aware that someone by the name ‘Charles Zeiger’ posted one of my talks, but this was done without my knowledge, and I have no idea who he is.”

Zeiger’s reach extends beyond the North American movement. When the British government disbanded the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action, the group’s final communiqué
personally thanked Zeiger and Andrew Anglin for their work in spreading propaganda.

Anglin and Zeiger have repeatedly claimed their goal is to use internet culture as a way of making extremist ideas more palatable to a mainstream audience.

“(Young men) can go onto these forums and … they’ll be immersed in fascist culture, Nazi jokes, meme culture and (it) gradually breaks down their inhibitions toward the most despicable forms of violence,” says Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University. “Forum culture in general has helped to draw people into this fever swamp of fascist ideas.”

Reid Ross is the author of Against the Fascist Creep, a sweeping history of post-Second World War fascist ideology.

Before founding the Montreal group, Zeiger claimed responsibility for the resurgence of Siege, a 1980s manifesto that calls for individual acts of terrorism as a means to create a white ethno-state. Posting on the forum the Right Stuff, Zeiger wrote that he digitized the book to help it reach a wider audience.

Siege’s resurgence within white supremacist circles is mostly “self-marginalizing,” Reid Ross said, adding that the book is “a thing 14-year-old boys read when they’re angry at their moms.”

“However, for those few people who do pick it up … it is definitely extremely dangerous. It points to a movement of leaderless resistance that’s been growing since Charlottesville.”

Zeiger attended the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last summer with a small group of Quebecers. At the end of the march, a right-wing extremist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The rally in Charlottesville marked a turning point for the neo-Nazi movement in the United States. Before Heyer’s death, white supremacist ideology had been creeping its way into mainstream politics.

But the violence from that day triggered a backlash that forced the movement back underground, according to Reid Ross.

“It showed that you can’t get a (large) group of Nazis together in one place without there being some kind of murder, attempted murder, assault or things like that.”

After Charlottesville, the Daily Stormer published an article titled “Heather Heyer: A Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident Was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” They were subsequently removed from web hosting by GoDaddy, Google and a series of international domains.

The site was hosted on the dark web for a brief period, but has re-emerged on the open internet through Eranet International Limited, a web hosting service based in China.

Hankis says there’s a link between the ideology espoused on sites like the Daily Stormer and acts of mass violence in the United States.

After murdering nine people at a predominantly African-American church in South Carolina, Dylann Roof released a manifesto outlining his racist views. Verbatim sections of the manifesto appeared in the Daily Stormer’s message boards in the months leading up to the 2015 massacre.

James Harris Jackson, who was charged with murdering a black man in New York City with a sword last year, told reporters he was an avid reader of the Daily Stormer.

Andrew Anglin and Zeiger did not respond to the Montreal Gazette’s email request for comment.

However a disclaimer on the website says it opposes violence and seeks “revolution through the education of the masses.” Further, it adds, “anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned.”

One expert cautions that while Quebec’s extremist movement is still relatively small, it is attracting a growing number of angry, disillusioned young men.

Maxime Fiset is a reformed neo-Nazi who now does outreach work for the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence. He estimates that active support for “alt-right” groups in Quebec numbers in the hundreds or thousands.

While the rise of far-right groups like La Meute and Storm Alliance have made waves in local media, Fiset says Zeiger’s movement targets a much different demographic.

“La Meute is an older crowd, between 40 and 65 years old,” he said. “With the alt-right, it’s more like between 15 and 35. They’re not as structured and organized but they’re becoming more and more visible.”

Fiset’s job is to try to understand how young men are indoctrinated with hateful ideology in hopes that they can be rehabilitated.

He said that the process of radicalization often begins with a feeling of injustice and sense of isolation. This leads to the person questioning why they are unhappy, and then either coming to terms with their situation, or seeking retribution for their distress.

“The person usually begins a path of questioning, which is legitimate, because injustices are corrected by some of those who challenge them at first,” Fiset said. “But it may become something much more dark when the person eventually arrives to more violent answers. That could be as common as hate speech or as dire as terrorism.”

For Zeiger, the “path of questioning” began early. In a white supremacist podcast, he describes his process of radicalization.

“I think I was about 14 when I was reading about the Holocaust and realized that it was a hoax,” he said. Later, he was exposed to a blog post that was “anti-semitic from a liberal perspective,” in that it described Jewish people as racist.

“This resonated with me, because my sister she had dated a Jew for a while, but his family forbade him from marrying her.”

From there, Zeiger fell deeper into the online rabbit hole of anti-Semitic propaganda, binge-consuming hundreds of hours of white nationalist radio shows and YouTube videos.

“I saw a video … and I wasn’t that right-wing at that point so I thought ‘Oh my God, this is so extreme, this is racist.’ But I thought it was interesting,” he said, on a December 2016 podcast. “So after that I listened to (hours of these) radio shows, one after the other.

“It took like a few weeks but I listened to all like 300 of them. After that I was like, ‘Gas the k****, race war now.’ ”

Fiset says he doesn’t believe that radicalized youth are irredeemable. He is living proof that a person can be drawn away from the extremist fringe.

But he worries that, left unchecked, the spaces that Zeiger inhabits can move beyond internet hate speech and into real-world violence.

“We need to address this because they’re living in very dark corners of the web, without any boundaries, without any limits, without any structure or counter narrative,” Fiset said. “These guys are just alone, evolving together, in what becomes more and more violent ideologies, and it’s not getting any better. We’re just starting to realize that we have a ticking time bomb on our hands.”

via Exclusive: Major Neo-Nazi figure recruiting in Montreal | Montreal Gazette

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Given all its other apologies, when will Ottawa finally apologize to the Jews? Farber

2018/05/04 Leave a comment

Bernie Farber on the need for an apology (one apology understandably leads to another ….). The Conservative government-funded projects under the Community Historical Recognition program to commemorate the MS St. Louis (along with funding to other communities affected by wartime internment or immigration restrictions); the Liberal government has focused more on apologies (e.g., to Indo-Canadians for turning back the Komagatu Maru):

Ethical nations must confront their history with moral rectitude. It is time for Canada to offer an official apology to Jewish Holocaust survivors, their families and the families of those who were murdered. Because our hands are not clean.

May 13th will mark 79 years since the ill-fated MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, on a journey to Havana, Cuba. Aboard the ship were 937 passengers, mostly desperate Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, a country consumed by vicious anti-Semitism, controlled by a raving, genocidal dictator who vowed to rid the world of its “Jewish problem.” Each passenger possessed a valid travel visa to enter Cuba. They had every reason to believe they’d escaped.

As the St. Louis made its way across the Atlantic Ocean, unbeknownst to the passengers, the Cuban government, facing a huge anti-Semitic backlash and beset by a corruption scandal relating to visas, cancelled the entry permits for the refugees. When they finally arrived, after a week at anchor offshore, the vast majority of the passengers were told they would not be permitted to disembark.

Their choices were limited. The MS St. Louis was barely a 90-minute sail from the shores of Miami. Surely, thought the ship’s German captain — Gustav Schroeder, a decent man who understood the plight of his distraught travellers — the United States, a country which held the hope of sanctuary for so many, would extend a hand of freedom and safety to his passengers.

A photo of Jews aboard the MS St. Louis.

Instead, the American government rejected any request for asylum. To ensure that this message would not be misunderstood, a Coast Guard vessel was ordered to very visibly follow the ocean liner.

Like today, the media became the moral watchdog of a willfully blind nation. The New York Times wrote in a heartfelt editorial, “We can only hope that some hearts will soften somewhere and some refuge be found. The cruise of the St. Louis cries to heaven of man’s inhumanity to men.”

Prominent Canadians began calling for the refugees be admitted here. But the prime minister, William Lyon McKenzie King, accepted the position of his director of immigration: “No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere.” The St. Louis, although only two days from Halifax on its way back across the Atlantic, sailed on, forced by necessity to return to Europe. Some passengers allowed into the United Kingdom found safety. The others landed in Holland, Belgium and France,. Those countries were later overrun by the Nazis. They rounded up the Jews and send them to concentration camps. More than 250 of those passengers that Canada, and others, refused to help, were murdered.

Professors Irving Abella and Harold Troper have studied this grim part of our history, and noted our anti-Semitic immigration policies during the Holocaust in their seminal study None is too Many. “It was a Canada,” as Abella wrote elsewhere, “with immigration policies that were racist and exclusionary, a country blanketed by an oppressive anti-Semitism in which Jews were the pariahs of Canadian society, demeaned, despised and discriminated against.”

Today we have a different Canada, one that values diversity and pluralism. Canada today is offering official apologies for policies that were bigoted, racist and homophobic. It has been a steep learning curve for Canadians. Yet with historic apologies to Indigenous peoples for a cultural genocide committed against them through the residential school system, and with  similar national apologies to the Sikh, Japanese and LGBTQ communities for historical wrongs, Canada has become a leader in teaching the world of the power of a simple phrase: “We’re sorry.”

A recent poll by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, a respected Jewish organization, shows that fully “one-fifth of millennials either haven’t heard of or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust.” And recently released hate crimes statistics collected by Canadian police have once again placed the Jewish community on top of the haters lists. An official national public apology for Canada’s actions against Jewish refugees during the Holocaust would be a powerful lesson for all, especially the young Canadians who are most at risk of forgetting the painful historical lessons we were supposed to have learned. Owning up to the errors of our past will help ensure that such evil, discriminatory policies never again see the light of day.

Source: Given all its other apologies, when will Ottawa finally apologize to the Jews?

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The foundational misogyny of incels overlaps with racism | Paradkar

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Hard to understand and comprehend the extent and nature of such hatred:

The more things change, the more they stay the same, sometimes dangerously so.

In all the discussions around Incels or involuntary celibates — a term violently wrested out of an obscure internet subculture and thrown into mainstream lexicon after last week’s van rampage in Toronto — a less talked about aspect is the overlap of its foundational misogyny with racism.

There’s a reason for that. It’s complicated.

“When you have these communities that don’t have coherent ideologies on a lot of things, they’re united in their misogyny, not necessarily united on the racial stuff,” says Arshy Mann, a reporter for Xtra, a Toronto-based LGBTQ magazine, who has been surfing the larger “manosphere” subculture for a decade and researching Incels for the past six months.

Taking a virtual gander through some of these Incels threads is like entering the byzantine paths of a twisted mind. Whatever adjectives cross your mind, “healthy” is unlikely to be one of them.

Mann has come across East Asian men upset that white men have an easier time sleeping with East Asian women. He has come across brown men who fetishize whiteness.

Often, the racism is specifically anti-Black, he says.

“All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger,” says the now-deleted Facebook post on the wall of Alek Minassian, the man charged with murders after the Toronto van rampage.

Rodger, the half-Asian 22-year-old Santa Barbara, Calif., killer of six people (and then himself) in 2014, hailed as some sort of patron saint for the Incels, was so fixated on whiteness he bleached his hair and fantasized about tall, blonde girls. He saw their rejection as a rejection of his non-white parts. So he reserved in his so-called manifesto particular venom for boys of colour who got attention from white girls.

“How could an inferior, ugly Black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more …”

Rodger’s rage wasn’t reserved just for Black people, though.

“How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl, while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin?”

“How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?”

While experts caution against assuming that it was Minassian who authored his Facebook post, its content offers a window into this miserable world.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!” it says.

Chads are the attractive white men who get all the attention from Stacys, usually white women. But if Chad is the hated white guy in this warped world then “Tyrone” is the Black Chad, even more to be reviled.

Yet, there is a large non-white, or “ethnicels” participation on these forums.

“A significant number of these people who self describe as Incels identify as non-white,” says Mann. “I see a lot of South Asian and east Asian men and boys — or people of south Asian and east Asian origins.”

The currycels and ricecels.

And, of course, there are nazicels.

“There’s a real overlap with other parts of the alt-right,” says Mann. “The “manosphere” more broadly is an entry point into more racist, anti-Semitic and white nationalist ways of thinking.

“Because these are parallel subcultures there is a lot of movement from one to the other.”

On one incels.me thread, there is a discussion on “should Incels and alt-right form an unholy alliance?”

Not everyone is on board automatically. “They get some pushback,” says Mann. At the same time, he says, it’s a topic placed “within the window of legitimate discussion.”

On that same thread, a poster asks: should anti-miscegenation laws be enforced globally or should prostitution be made legal around the world?

It’s difficult to take seriously what appears to be juvenile jockeying around, a venting if you like, a play for who is worse off, who is uglier, who has it tougher — until there’s an actual body count.

“Of course, not all of them are violent,” says Mann. But the groups create a permission structure to engage in violence, he says. “They’re explicitly saying this is a good thing to do … It’s a way to prove their masculinity to engage in public violence.”

In one discussion on Minassian, a poster calling himself “blackcel” says, “While I do not condone killing or rape, I would be a lot more proud of a methodical Incel serial killer who carefully picked his victims and possibly raped them before death.”

via The foundational misogyny of incels overlaps with racism | The Star

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Eating while black in a Chinese restaurant: a grim lesson in racist division: Balkissoon

2018/05/03 1 Comment

Denise Balkissoon on the implicit heirarchies of racism and prejudice:

It took four years for Emile Wickham to get official confirmation of what he already knew: that the treatment he received on his birthday was racist.

Mr. Wickham is black, as are the friends he went to dinner with one night in May, 2014, at the Chinese restaurant Hong Shing in Toronto, just north of City Hall. There, they were asked to pay their bill in advance – a request that Mr. Wickham suspected hadn’t been made of the non-black patrons around them.

After confirming this, he confronted the server, who refunded the group’s money. They walked out, no longer hungry or in the mood for celebration. The incident so bothered Mr. Wickham that he was still thinking of it a year later, when he filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

This week, the proprietors of Hong Shing were ordered to pay a fine of $10,000 for violating section 1 of the province’s human-rights code, which guarantees equal treatment when accessing goods, services and facilities. The tribunal’s adjudicator said that Mr. Wickham was treated as “a potential thief in waiting.”

There are many unpleasant truths confirmed by this story, including that black people in Toronto face consistent prejudice when going about their daily lives. Another grim reality it proves is often hard to talk about: the persistent racism between groups of non-white people, especially that directed at black Canadians, and how it works to maintain white supremacy.

On Monday, a Globe and Mail tweet about Mr. Wickham’s story attracted hundreds of comments, many of them racist. The vitriol was pointed at the group of black friends, but also against the restaurant: Toxic tropes about Chinese people’s relationship to money, or the quality of their food, were common.

The owners and staff at Hong Shing have likely experienced anti-Asian racism personally, perhaps many times. This doesn’t excuse them in any way from participating in anti-black racism – in fact, it might be the cause of it.

For centuries, pseudo-scientists have attempted to categorize human beings by race in a ploy to justify unjustifiable behaviour. Participants in this embarrassing game include philosophy celebrity Immanuel Kant and storied botanist Carl Linnaeus.

On the very worthwhile podcast Seeing White, American scholar Ibram Kendi dates the earliest attempts at racial categorization to the 1400s. That’s when broad, global slavery practices – in which many cultures enslaved basically whoever they could get their hands on, including their own people – evolved into overwhelmingly European enslavement of predominantly African people.

Where previously the justifications for erasing other humans’ basic rights were equally varied, those excuses began to narrow. Racial classifications denigrating dark skin tones and African origins became the dominant narrative.

That doesn’t mean that those who were neither black nor white were given equal status to white Europeans. Instead, a divide-and-conquer hierarchy emerged, in which a chance at a marginally less subjugated life was offered to those who participated in black oppression.

This hierarchy existed in many forms, in many places; apartheid South Africa’s “racial classification” was less harsh on those who were “coloured” than “native.” Convincing those of mixed race or Asian ancestry to help police black people made the system stronger and took some of the work out of white hands.

Today, this often plays out as the “model minority” trope, in which particularly skilled or educated East and South Asian immigrants are granted visas and citizenship to Western countries, including Canada. Their successes (which, yes Uncle, still require hard work) are used against other racialized people who live in entrenched poverty, including the Indigenous.

This, too, is a weapon that non-black, non-white Canadians often carry of their own volition – the fear that it could be turned against them adds incentive to use it.

Records show that the current owner of Hong Shing is 25-year-old Colin Li, who took it over from his parents. He hasn’t spoken with any media since the tribunal’s ruling, nor offered Mr. Wickham a private apology − in fact, he’s stated that he plans to appeal.

That’s a shame. There are many bridges to be built over the gulfs created by this ancient tactic of division, and Mr. Li could help, if he has the courage.

via Eating while black in a Chinese restaurant: a grim lesson in racist division – The Globe and Mail

Arti Patel’s take: 3 reasons why anti-blackness still exists in multicultural cities like Toronto

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Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Not helpful:

Remarks by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust have been condemned as anti-Semitic by Israeli politicians and rights activists.

Mr Abbas told a meeting in the West Bank the Nazi mass murder of European Jews was the result of their financial activities, not anti-Semitism.

He described their “social function” as “usury and banking and such”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said the remarks were “anti-Semitic and pathetic”.

Michael Oren, Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, remarked in a tweet: “Mahmoud Abbas says money-lending Jews provoked Holocaust… Now there’s a peace partner.”

In New York, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Mr Abbas’s “anti-Semitic assertions”.

In its attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe during World War Two, Nazi Germany murdered some six million of them, building death camps to expedite the mass slaughter.

Driven by fanatical nationalism, the Nazis regarded Jews as a threat to Germany’s “racial purity”.

What did Abbas say exactly?
He was addressing a rare meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Monday.

It was a rare meeting of the PLO’s legislative body

Carried live on Palestinian TV, the 90-minute speech in Arabic included a section on the Palestinian leader’s view of the history of European Jewry, based on what he said were books by “Jewish Zionist authors”.

Jews in eastern and western Europe, he said, had been periodically subjected to massacres over the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust.

“But why did this used to happen?” he asked. “They say, ‘It is because we are Jews.’ I will bring you three Jews, with three books who say that enmity towards Jews was not because of their religious identity but because of their social function.

“This is a different issue. So the Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion but against their social function which relates to usury [unscrupulous money-lending] and banking and such.”

Mr Abbas also denied that Ashkenazi Jews – Jews from Germany and north-eastern Europe – were actually Semitic, saying, “They have no relation to Semitic people.” Ashkenazi Jews make up one of Israel’s biggest communities, giving the state a long line of prime ministers, including Mr Netanyahu.

It is not the first time the Palestinian leader’s views on the Holocaust have caused offence.

A student dissertation he wrote in the early 1980s argued there had been a “secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism” before the war, and appeared to question the death toll of six million.

He later played down allegations of Holocaust denial, saying in 2003: “The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.”

How did the Anti-Defamation League respond?

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the ADL, which campaigns to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people”, dismissed the Palestinian leader’s “ahistorical and pseudo-academic assertions”.

“The Palestinian President’s latest diatribe reflects once again the depth and persistency of the anti-Semitic attitudes he harbors,” he said in a statement.

“With public speeches like these, it is not surprising that under Abbas’ leadership, the Palestinian Authority has failed to renounce and combat Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement, including narratives that Jews are to blame for the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic persecution, and which deny or diminish the millennial Jewish presence in and connection to the Land of Israel.”

via Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

My friend and Mid-East expert Arun recently posted on the Arte film, Israel-Palestine: one land, twice promised, link here, noting the balance and comprehensiveness of this two hour doc.

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Haidt’s Theory Vindicated at MIT

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Further to yesterday’s post (Heterodoxy Academy: Encouraging diversity of thought), this example of interest.

One could likely just as easily find an example of “free market U” driven by ideologies of the right, with comparable blind spots and biases:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology deserves some sort of research prize for confirming NYU professor Jonathan Haidt’s theory that the social sciences suffer from a deficit of viewpoint diversity.

Last Monday, several social scientists from prestigious universities gathered in a state-of-the-art theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts for MIT’s conference on Israel’s 70th anniversary. While enjoying trays of free cookies and drinks, the mostly upper middle-class audience got to hear speaker after speaker complain about the Jewish state.

Of the six academic speakers who were invited to participate, not one depicted the creation of Israel as anything other than a moral calamity. Only MIT professor Stephen Van Evera dared to criticize Yasser Arafat for turning down a generous deal put together by Bill Clinton in 2000. All the rest of the panelists seemed to agree with University of Massachusetts professor Leila Farsakh’s assertion that peace negotiations failed—and continue to fail—because of “Israeli intransigence.”

The near uniformity of opinion was a powerful instantiation of Haidt’s theory that the “American Academy has–arguably–become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution,” where “people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.”

Participants in the conference also lent credence to Haidt’s other big idea: that two incompatible “sacred” values are currently colliding on university campuses. One sacred value goes back to John Stuart Mill’s famous maxim, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”; the other sacred value is rooted in Karl Marx’s injunction that intellectuals shouldn’t just interpret the world but seek to change it.

These two pedagogical visions, Haidt believes, are at loggerheads on college campuses because they aim at different goals. “Marx is the patron saint of what I’ll call ‘Social Justice U,’ which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege,” Haidt argues. “It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what I’ll call ‘Truth U,’ which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In the process, all become smarter. Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.”

Viewpoint diversity is, nevertheless, widely valued in broader American society. So much so that even dogmatic political activists must pretend to embrace it. Before MIT’s Israel conference, for example, the organizers felt the need to market the event as if it would offer a Millsian “array of narratives” by bringing together “Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans to discuss and debate the history, the politics, and the current critical moment.”

But it was false advertising. The conference was squarely in the “Social Justice U” camp. Tellingly, one of the conference organizers, Israeli philosopher Anat Biletzki, argued fervently for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority country. That might explain why her selection of voices on the panel seemed deliberately intended to convey the notion that Israel’s existence was a historical blunder and that the Arabs were wholly innocent victims of it. None of the social scientists raised any uncomfortable truths that might challenge that storyline—truths such as Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Nazis; Islamist aspects of the 1948 war to destroy Israel; historic persecution of Jews in Muslim-majority lands, culminating in the almost total ethnic cleansing of indigenous Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

Echoes of Marx’s injunction to change the world could also be heard at the conference. Activist-historian Irene Gendzier, a BDS supporter, seemed to channel the spirit of Marx when she claimed that history only matters if “in some way it paves the way for changing not only the perception of the present but the future.” Her own historical publications, presumably, therefore have an a prioripolitical agenda. If not, her thinking suggests, why study the past?

She also said: “although we are consigned to talking about the past, it seems to me that we here [at the MIT conference] are really talking in disguise about what we would like to see for a different future.” Judging by the overall message of this conference, that future involves the Jewish state’s paying in some way for the crime of its existence.

Source: Haidt’s Theory Vindicated at MIT

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ICYMI: Fringe internet culture can’t stay in the fringes

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Useful and insightful commentary as usual Amarnath Amarasingam on “incel” radicalization:

Combine powerful online echo chambers, the perceived decline of the white male, a surge in online troll culture and groups of angry and alienated men, and you have a powerful cocktail for dangerous radicalization.

As of yet, we don’t have proof that these conditions led to the horrific van attack in Toronto that left 10 dead and 14 injured. But we do have a clue: a Facebook post on the page of Alek Minassian, charged in Monday’s attacks, talking about the “Incel Rebellion.”

Incels or “involuntary celibates” are those who are essentially forced into celibacy because they cannot find a sexual partner. Many of the young men who join this movement feel ignored, and the groups of which they are a part have likewise been ignored by mainstream society. That’s why many of us hadn’t heard the term “incel” until this week.

As we learn more about Minassian’s history, it might very well turn out that the incel movement was not the primary factor in his decision to get behind the wheel. But it’s worth discussing regardless, because as many of us are beginning to realize, fringe internet culture can cause real social harm.

Incels operate across the same platforms as a range of extreme right activists — platforms such as Reddit, 4chan and 8chan, and use communications channels such as Discord, the gaming chat application noted for its use by activists seeking to influence European elections in favour of far right groups.

In fact, the movement plays off of similar tropes and language as the extreme right, using terms like “cuck” and “feminazi.”

The ideological nexus that ties these groups together is the perception of (white) masculinity being under threat from external forces such as women, people of colour, refugees and the political left, combined with a hatred of social progressive values that empower previously marginalized communities.

Normies, Chads and Stacys

These incel individuals, who often suffer from a range of vulnerabilities including anxiety and autistic spectrum disorders, flourish in digital fora that provide them with the opportunity to embrace their identity as outsiders, relishing in their role as “beta male.”

In the confines of these incel echo chambers, they blame their social misfortune on their peers who have fewer issues engaging in social activities — people they label as “normies,” “Chads” and “Stacys.”

Normies, a term originating on 4Chan and referring to anything and anyone who is mainstream, includes Chads, a nickname used to describe good looking men who have no difficulty finding women who will sleep with them, and Staceys who are women who always reject incels in favour of Chads. The behaviours that the “betas” feel incapable of achieving offline — such as social confidence and intimate relationships — are projected onto these imagined boogeymen.

Many of these youth needed support, though some of them may have turned to established social institutions already for help in the past. Today, they’re increasingly finding it in these closed-off online collectives, talking with like-minded and equally alienated individuals, which ends up amplifying and reinforcing — rather than addressing and counteracting — their angst and anger.

As with all cases of radicalization, under the right set of psychological and personal conditions, individuals can be pushed to violence. Thousands of youth may feel these grievances, but only a few may ever decide that violence is a necessary way to express themselves. Even after decades of research in terrorist radicalization, the question of who might ultimately turn to violence is still beyond our grasp.

Elliot Rodger is the primary example of an incel radicalized to the point of violence. In 2014, the 22-year-old killed six people in Isla Vista, California, after posting a manifesto about his hatred of women and desire to punish them for rejecting him. His violence was later lauded on the fringes of the internet, fostering a range of distasteful memes and helping to reinforce the mythos of the group.

Academic discourse around “fragile masculinity” has long pointed out that we need to start taking these grievances more seriously, particularly among youth. Many of these online discussions are overflowing with worrisome levels of toxic masculinity and anger. In the mindset of those who occupy these spaces, they are trapped between the strong men they cannot become, and the weak men who reinforce the feminism that they see as ostracising and oppressing them.

Ultimately, these communities are providing a home to those who feel unable to find a place in mainstream society. The attitudes espoused therein must be challenged, but more importantly, these individuals must be offered an opportunity to engage with those outside of their echo chambers, through meaningful interventions and support.

 

Source: Fringe internet culture can’t stay in the fringes

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Is Canada a nation or a notion? Kingwell

2018/04/30 Leave a comment

As always, Kingwell both amusing and serious ruminations on Canadian identity (“nation as conversation”), with some worthy suggestions on how to strengthen it:

Those of a certain age may recall the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, aired on the BBC in October of 1969. It was called “Whither Canada?” Canada doesn’t actually figure in the episode, naturally. That interrogative, seminar-style phrase was also among the finalists for the legendary comedy troupe’s name. Why? Well, you have to imagine that the question was so inherently hilarious that it seemed appropriate for a gang of clever English absurdists in their 20s.

I think that’s funny, but not everyone does. And we’re still whithering on. You go to bed one night thinking that the existence of Canada is a more or less a settled issue, or at least one of those things, like Donald Trump’s hair, that are no longer open questions. And then you wake the next morning to headlines about cross-border beer disputes reaching the Supreme Court, and fuel-pipeline arguments that threaten to overturn the confederation. Hands are suddenly wringing. Canada: nation or notion? Provinces: evil or just standing up for themselves? How many best-selling Québécois authors can you name? How far north have you ventured?

We have been on this cultural merry-go-round so many times before that this semi-hysterical discourse about Canadian identity might in fact be what constitutes Canadian identity. In polite Canadian fashion, I acknowledge that this meta-level argument is not original to me. I also note, reputation aside, that Canadians are often more passive-aggressive than polite.

And so the grab-bag of clichés and stereotypes opens, with everyone taking a hockey slash at everyone else’s list. Poutine, hockey, canoes, toques, Ski-Doos (not snowmobiles), distance in klicks, the Hip, couches (not sofas), garbage (not trash), beer, maple syrup, hating Americans, hating Americans hating us, hockey again, maybe some duck-confit poutine this time, snowshoes, anything winter really, eh, oot-and-aboot (in fact, more like oat-and-aboat) and the Mounties always get their man. He shoots, he scores.

You can now add a couple of other parlour games of identity-insecurity. Famous Canadian who succeeded elsewhere! Bieber, Jepson, Rogen, Mitchell, Young; Trebek, Nielsen, Carrey, Meyers, Sutherland, The Shat and all those people who run New York magazines. For the olds, Hume Cronyn, Raymond Massey and Mary Pickford. Spot fictional Canadian characters – Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Frances in The Sun Also Rises. Keep a chart!

Next, map your national travel. As a brat of the Air Force and a blessed adult traveller, I’ve been lucky to go from St. John’s to Tofino and lots of places in between. As a teenager, I was a guest of the Bloodvein First Nation in central Manitoba, which felt a lot farther north, at 51 degrees, than Edmonton does at 53, or Lake Waskesiu at just under 54, two other stops I’ve made. Sadly, I was only ever north of 60 in Reykjavik – hipster north. This game is what Glenn Gould called “northmanship,” one of those competitions that you can’t win for losing. I’m pretty sure that my neighbours in Toronto’s Regent Park won’t feel they ever need to play it, for example. The local basketball team, meanwhile, claiming the motto “We the North,” is actually situated farther south than two of its American competitors. Canada, where north is a state of mind.

Nation-states may be defined many ways, from textbook-version ideas such as a distinct land mass defensible at the borders and an identifiable citizenry. Or shared bloodline, ethnicity, history and culture. Or an enforceable monopoly on the legal use of force. Or maybe the set of laws themselves which govern a populace. Or even, at a minimum, a scheme of swapping taxes for services in a more or less reliable way.

As a loose confederation of regions and jurisdictions, assembled over a period of more than 80 years, Canada is an unlikely country, yet not an impossible one. The optimists among us find it impressive that such a place exists at all, let alone with sustaining vitality. Like so many other Western states, it was founded on force, money and colonial bigotry. There are deep wounds in our body politic, but so far they fall short of fatal ones. There is no monoculture here, as we all know, nor even a myth of one when vast differences become obvious, marked in red and blue.

This vaporous quality of the country has led many people to label Canada a postmodern, or postnational, or postpatriotic country. We might debate the possible meaning of those terms forever. I prefer to think that Canada survives as a collective act of suspended disbelief, a feat of constant reinvention. Call it the discursive state, or the nation as conversation – not always polite conversation, indeed, yet civil in the sense of confronting disagreement without violence.

Even the current pipeline dispute is subject to the judgment of the courts, after all, and while a decision there could leave nobody happy, that’s how liberal justice works. Parties to dispute accept the authority of an outcome because that is what a just regime demands. Equalization payments and national pensions enrage some citizens, just as threats of secession have done and may well do again. Even secession could not be achieved by provincial fiat, however. We came together through deal-making and discussion, and so far the deal continues.

A country can’t be all talk, though. What would bolster the national consciousness practically? Well, there should be compulsory national service for young people, as in Austria, Switzerland and other countries. Those not willing to serve in the military can opt for national parks, tree planting or community assistance. Guaranteed basic income is likewise essential, even if flawed. Wealth inequality is a much more divisive force in Canada than provincial haggling will ever be – not that the two aren’t sometimes related.

Although education is a provincial file, college and university tuition should be equalized from coast to coast. Likewise – sorry Alberta – we need a consistent sales tax, not just GST. A civics and history curriculum must be standardized for every high school in the land. National debating and youth-parliament programs, which already exist, should be funded lavishly. Subsidies should be available for all students to visit Ottawa.

The list could go on, and some are dreams destined for failure. But no practical measure will matter unless there is decisive leadership in Ottawa and respect for the rule of law everywhere else.

The current Prime Minister’s father was much criticized for his staunch nationalism. Cranky Westerners can still be coaxed into apoplexy with mention of the National Energy Program, official bilingualism or progressive immigration policies. (Not just Westerners.) What we should remember is that Pierre Trudeau’s vision of the Just Society was a powerful vision of equity without leveling differences or diminishing opportunity. It was an idea to connect the country in a manner more concrete than the airwaves of the CBC ever could – and can still less now.

Justice is long and hard work, never-ending, the work of citizens. In our increasingly networked and decentralized lives, we may only rarely consider citizenship the most important fact about us. Metaphysically speaking, it’s probably not. “Canadian” is not an identity; it’s a relationship.

I have a PhD student, from Whitehorse, who chaffs me for saying I’m proud to be Canadian. I see his point: Despite our habitual complacency, there are depredations and deficits of trust, systemic injustices and cultural bigotry that must be acknowledged. Also poverty and misery everywhere from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to the streets of Inuvik and the dirt roads of Nova Scotia’s South Shore.

No nation is perfect. Our job is not to make Canada perfect, only better.

via Is Canada a nation or a notion? – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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