It is vital to see this vitriol for the nonsense that it is, but dispelling myths and propaganda on a subject is only the first step — lies must be displaced by facts rather than emptiness. In the interest of seeking “truth from facts” about Hamas, we sought resources that interviewed Hamas leaders, Hamas members, and Palestinians not affiliated with Hamas. A stark contrast from much of the material casually available or presented algorithmically in the West, Hamas: From Resistance to Regime by Paola Caridi, Decolonizing Palestine by Somdeep Sen, and Gaza under Hamas by Bjorn Brenner all treat both Hamas as an organization and the Palestinian struggle as a whole with the respect these subjects deserve.

Hamas: From Resistance to Regime is a general history of Hamas, covering its foundation in 1987 until the book’s 2012 publication. It’s worth noting that the text was originally titled “Hamas: From Resistance to Government.” We can speculate as to why this change was made. The text addresses the zionist lie that Hamas is not a democratic organization and that its leadership is somehow disconnected from the Palestinian people. Caridi illustrates  that Hamas functions according to the principle of freedom in criticism, unity in action, and that its commitment to democratic principles is so rigorous that it has even been a detriment to the organization. For instance, Caridi explains how contents of the 1988 Hamas charter, the Mithaq, were brandished by the zionists as proof of the organization’s commitment to antisemitism, as well as the proof that Hamas were Islamic ideologues who could not be negotiated with and needed to be destroyed. Rather than discard or even revise the charter immediately, which would have been politically expedient, Hamas strictly followed its democratic principles: they didn’t create a new charter until all four of their member constituencies — Gaza, the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners, and Palestinians living abroad — had been extensively consulted.

Another of the zionist’s frequently-made false claims is that the leadership of Hamas lives abroad, siphoning aid money meant for Gaza, and living lavishly while the masses are left in abject poverty. Caridi’s text explores the pragmatic origin of Hamas’ dispersed leadership, demonstrating that the practice emerged as the organization’s survival mechanism against continuous assassinations and arrests by the zionists. As proven by the January 3rd, 2024 martyrdom of Saleh al-Arouri by a zionist strike in Beirut, the cowardly zionists have no qualms about killing Hamas members, even on foreign soil and in flagrant transgression of international law. The practice of dispersal prevents the organization’s leadership from being annihilated in any single zionist attack.

Similarly, the importance of prisoners’ political lives to Hamas, to the extent prisoners have their own constituency within the organization, also emerged from necessity. Caridi notes that, since over 700,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned by the zionist entity at some point since 1967, “the experience of jail, therefore, is so widespread, so common, and so constant in the history of Palestinian society that particularly as far as political party militants are concerned, it is never considered a hiatus from active political life.” 

 Politically, Hamas adheres to the principle of freedom in criticism, unity in action. Decisions and actions undertaken by the organization are subject to debate and critique by its membership, but once a collective decision is made, “everyone is committed to abiding by it, irrespective of their own positions.” Although the zionists tout their project as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” members of their political system aren’t bound to democratic principles of this nature. Political gamesmanship, as it transpires in the U.S. when one or two senators dissent against their party in order to stymy legislation, is not possible within Hamas.

In addition to its analysis of Hamas’ political workings and history, Caridi’s text also examines the role of women within Hamas, and Hamas’ conflict with one of the most prominent Palestinian parties, Fatah. 

For anyone seeking a text that examines the organization from a more theoretical perspective, Decolonizing Palestine by Somdeep Sen may be more enticing. Decolonizing Palestine draws upon the works of Frantz Fanon, particularly Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, to explore the challenges that Hamas faces as an anticolonial group who must govern as though they are no longer colonized. This is a unique position, as opposed to many of the familiar revolutions where the oppressors were entirely or mostly overthrown prior to the oppressed group seizing political power.

The text is primarily a reflection on what it means to be colonized and what it means to be liberated through the lens of the Palestinian struggle. The Palestinian focus is not to the exclusion of other examples; the author is Bengali, and brings their perspective on the oppression of the Bengali people into the text. In present-day India and Bangladesh, Bengali Muslims may be considered a liberated or post-colonial people, since the region achieved independence from Britain. However, vestiges of colonial control remain in the form of economic dependence, as well as in transference of the role of oppressor to India and Pakistan. Sen utilizes these comparisons to grapple with questions of how Palestine will look when the zionist occupation falls.

The author applies Fanon’s conclusions on the colonized subject to the Palestinian struggle, arguing that liberation cannot be condensed to the singular moment when the colonizer leaves or suffers an intractable defeat. Instead, the moment the zionists are defeated will constitute the beginning of the Palestinian peoples’ emancipation. Sen emphasizes that anti-colonial and post-colonial conduct are lived and continual modes of existence, rather than singular events. Hamas, as a dynamic and multifaceted organization that operates in the interstice between government and resistance group, and between secularism and theocracy, not only represents Palestinians in the literal sense, but also demonstrates that “liberation is not just about liberation. It is as much about the colonized’s perceptions of who they were, who they are, and who they ought to be in their liberated future.”

The book’s appraisal of violence is also firmly rooted in the Fanonian tradition. Too frequently, assessments of violence are either dismissive or superficial. But Sen correctly explores the roles violence plays in forming the Palestinian identity. The zionist’s fervent need to erase the Palestinian people — both physically and metaphorically — is struggled against through both physical and symbolic acts of violence. Acts of violent resistance are given a sacred status by the colonized because they are proof that their suffering can be unmade, and actions towards unmaking that suffering are under way. Each act of resistance is emphatic proof, a declaration, that Palestine exists, that Palestinians exist. Despite their best efforts to ignore and erase the colonized, settlers can only live in fear and discomfort that boils out from the realities of their trespassing.

The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation enunciated Sen and Fanon’s theories about violence from theory into reality. The October 7th attacks unequivocally proved that Palestinians will not be erased — they will not quietly perish on their oppressor’s terms. No matter the level of surveillance, the strength of the walls around Gaza, the brutality of the prisons, or the defensive power of the Iron Dome, the resistance will ensure that settlers can only live in anxiety. Ultimately, it is not the military aspect of the Al-Aqsa Flood that was most successful, although it was a significant tactical accomplishment, but its psychological impact upon the zionists. The facades of colonial supremacy and invincibility are crumbling. Evidence is emerging that many of what the colonizer calls “atrocities” from that day were carried out by the zionists themselves, or are outright fabrications. It increasingly appears that many of the deaths on October 7th were caused either by disarrayed and panicked zionist forces or by active invocation of the noxious zionist Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the IOF to prevent the taking of prisoners through the indiscriminate murder of prisoner and captor alike, whether the prisoner is an IOF soldier or a so-called “non-combatant.” In subsequent months, the zionist military has been humiliated, has failed to achieve its objectives, tens of thousands of settlers have fled, and the entity is increasingly gripped by a burgeoning crisis between its military and political leaders. Every desperate strike by the zionists against the children, women, and men of Gaza only reinforces the justness and inevitability of the Palestinian cause to millions of people around the world. In this way, violent acts not only unmake the colonizer, but cause the colonizer to unmake themselves. The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on its own did not liberate Palestine in one dramatic punch, but marks a new development in what Sen would term Palestine’s “long liberation moment.”

Finally, Gaza Under Hamas by Bjorn Brenner is a contemporary examination of Hamas after the 2006 elections. It assesses Hamas’ response to what the author identifies as the three major problems confronting Hamas, beyond the obvious one which is the occupation of Palestine by zionists. These are: Hamas’ governmental conflicts with Fatah, its political rival which governs the West Bank, who have proven themselves to be complicit with the occupier’s agenda, Hamas’ handling of Salafi and Jihadist groups, and its general approach to social order within Gaza.

This text dismantles the common Western canards that Hamas are “Islamic supremacists,” “Arab supremacists,” or “authoritarian.” It examines in detail how serving the needs and interests of the Palestinian people has led to Hamas’ style of governance balancing between theocratic and secular, democratic and authoritarian. It showcases Hamas’ pragmatic and grassroots nature, and its responsiveness to the needs of Palestinians. This is contrasted with how the Palestinian Authority functions under Fatah’s leadership.

Brenner’s work examines Hamas’ conflicts with groups who ascribe to more fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, such as Salafi-Jihadist groups and ISIS, whose politics and compradorship are beyond the scope of this article. Drawing attention to these conflicts is important as it illustrates that Hamas are not the Islamic extremists they’re construed as in Western media. Notably, many members of the fundamentalist groups are former Hamas members who were disillusioned by the organization’s secular and democratic qualities, and its lack of radical nihilism.

Gaza Under Hamas also investigates the pragmatic balance that the organization must maintain between its own survival, the need for social harmony in Palestinian society, and respect for individual rights within Palestinian society. Brenner concludes that Hamas prioritizes communal security over notions of justice or individual rights as they’re commonly understood in the West. He describes how Hamas’ governance is a unique combination of Islamic customary codes (urf) and Islamic religious law (sharia). While the organization is democratic, they may act beyond democratic norms in order to resist the zionists and preserve Palestinian society.Overall, Gaza Under Hamas by Bjorn Brenner, Decolonizing Gaza by Somdeep Sen, and Hamas: From Resistance to Regime by Paola Caridi strive to paint a comprehensive portrait of a complex organization. The various analytical and theoretical perspectives utilized by the three authors are a welcome refrain from the reductive and bombastic drivel that permeates Western discourse on this subject. As the zionists come under increasing social, political, and military pressure from the resistance, so too will their efforts to slander Hamas and the Palestinian people intensify. In this context, texts like these, which humanize the resistance of the colonized and aspire towards an objective understanding of Hamas, become increasingly essential.

Danielle Smith is also an enemy of the people. As a serving Canadian politician, this status is almost automatic — she shares the gamut of genocidal opinions without which one is politically ostracized and removed from power. For instance, Smith believes that Israel should exist and has a right to defend itself, that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7th constituted a “terrible terrorist attack,” etc. What are the full historic depths of her depravity and crimes against the working classes, which are only increasing as she seeks to dismantle Alberta’s social security, healthcare system, and pensions?

Smith lived in subsidized housing growing up. She attributes her interest in politics to her father scolding her about the evils of Communism and the U.S.S.R in the eighth grade after a teacher presented them in a glowing light. One is forced to wonder what her father knows about Communismbeyond the usual misconceptions and propaganda. Indeed, that Smith ever had a teacher in McCarthyite Alberta during the height of the Cold War who portrayed Communism in a remotely positive light beggars belief.

Concerned about “Marxist indoctrination” happening in Alberta’s schools (don’t laugh), Smith’s father scared her back into politically acceptable anti-Communism. He taught her about the non-communist politicians of whom it’s considered appropriate to think highly, such as Ronald Reagan. Smith would become a libertarian who admired all the standard ghouls such as fellow social security recipient Ayn Rand and the queen of the ghouls herself, Margaret Thatcher. While she was in university, Smith was a favored student of disgusting reprobate and conservative thought leader Tom Flanagan. Flanagan is notorious for his affirmative comments about child pornography, his anti-Indigenous political positions and racism, and for once advocating for the assassination of Julian Assange. 

Today, Smith’s politics are a crude synthesis of Thatcherism and the ideas of what’s called the “Calgary School” in order to lend gravitas to its specific blend of Austrian economics and Straussianism; in other words, to validate it as a legitimate political and economic philosophy when it’s actually nonsense. Unfortunately, an elaboration of the many and varied deficiencies in this “school” would be beyond the scope of this article.

Even with no knowledge of Marx or the philosophy underpinning Smith’s actions, the span of her career illustrates the amorality and harm of neoliberalism and conservatism. What she lacks in original ideas, Smith makes up for in a mindless goferism for recapitulating conservative talking points. Even the fact that her own party thinks little of her individuality or autonomy does not discourage her from implementing their platform and pushing it further right. When the party was in danger of losing seats in the most recent Alberta election, they reminded voters that it’s the party’s principles that are important, and the party that makes decisions, not foot-in-her-mouth Danielle Smith. Still, neither the lack of propriety nor knowledge have dissuaded Smith. She’s often spilling out the shit that right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute fill her with — and spew she does. 

As a “Private Property Rights Advocate” in the nineties, she argued that private property rights trump all other rights, so protections for endangered species should be removed. Naturally, she’s vitriolically anti-Indigenous.

After a brief stint on the Calgary Board of Education, on which she operated as a poison pill against progressive interests, she became a journalist. She didn’t have any journalistic credentials, but was hired as a scab during the 1999-2000 Calgary Herald strike, proving that she has the most important journalistic qualification of all — the sycophantic zeal to regurgitate whatever garbage the Fraser Institute or tobacco lobby put on her plate. Her peers at the Herald didn’t call her “Trash Can Dani” for nothing. At the behest of both the Fraser Institute and the tobacco lobby, Smith famously lauded the “special health benefits” of smoking cigarettes — specifically that “smoking half a pack per day reduces the traditional risks of disease by 75% or more.” She also wrote an article entitled “Natives ultimate losers as reserves become ghettoes” in which she repeated Tom Flanagan’s perverse argument that increased constitutional protections and sovereignty for Indigenous nations encourage segregation and apartheid.

We must make abundantly clear what a bastardization and insidious framing of the issue this perspective is. Flanagan has written several historically revisionist texts which are meant to reframe and justify colonialism as beneficial to the colonized. He would have us believe that the problems which beset Indigenous reserves — from crumbling or non-existent infrastructure to the general poverty and social ills —  are all due to Indigenous mismanagement. For him, it’s the Indigenous unwillingness to peacefully integrate into the “superior, European-modeled society” that is the cause of their troubles — not the underlying issues of colonial trauma and apartheid. Of course, which society imposed the reserve system on the other conveniently slips his mind. This is so he can say any increased sovereignty for reserves, or any token acts of reparation by the Canadian state towards its Indigenous people are actually harmful because they incentivize Indigenous peoples to remain in their own inferior civilizations. Smith espoused this opinion as a journalist about the Nisga’a Treaty of 2000, and the same attitude has pervaded her political stances towards Indigenous nations since. For Flanagan, and, by extension, Smith, any money or support rendered by the Canadian state to Indigenous nations is self-defeating; he believes that corrupt Indigenous leadership will squander whatever is given so that they always have the pretense to ask for more.

In her career as a journalist, Smith enthusiastically propagated this nonsense — it’s a very comforting narrative to a certain strata of settlers who would eventually form her political base.

Flanagan also wrote a dubious biography about Louis Riel, which frames Riel as a millenarian in order to delegitimize Metis land claims. This is eerily similar to the zionist obfuscation that the Palestinian struggle is purely religious and existential, not rooted in the ownership and occupation of land. 

Flanagan and his mouthpiece Smith falsely equate the integration of Indigenous Nations into the Canadian state with the desegregation of the United States and the end of South African apartheid. This is a prevarication. An actual end to Canadian apartheid demands the dissolution of the legal fiction that is the Canadian state and the complete reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty by Indigenous nations.

Eventually, Smith turned her latent fascism into gold and became a politician. In this way, she made the leap from speaking and writing toxic waste to dumping it on millions of Albertans. Informed by her faulty understanding of sovereignty (thanks to having read and repeated Flanagan for so many years), her government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in December 2022. Though it masquerades as protection for Albertan interests against interference from the federal government, the only interests it truly defends are those of the same corporations and conservative political insiders we’ve been describing. The act was criticized by Indigenous leaders on the grounds that it could supersede their tribal rights. Smith even had the gall to compare the quibbles between Alberta and the federal government as comparable to the struggle between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Of course, she apologized for this.  

 The controversies and gaffes of her political career are well-documented and too numerous to get into, and are identical to those of any other fascist politician such as Ron DeSantis, whom she admires. She shares his COVID denialism, has compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler, and called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed.” Again she issued some lackadaisical apology, but the statement’s function as a dogwhistle had done its work. Ultimately, Smith’s apologies always take this insincere form — she says something that appeals to her base and is incendiary to everyone else, then hastily apologizes. But by the time Smith apologizes, whatever she said has already achieved its purpose, and the apology is comparatively meaningless.

If there’s one way Smith is unlike many similar figures, it’s her “live and let live” attitude about 2SLGBTQIA+ people and communities. But even this is not commendable. Although she is not vocally anti-2SLGBTQIA+ or “anti-woke” in the way many of her supporters wish she was, her desire to “depoliticize the issue” is functionally the same as theirs. By giving equal validity to oppressors and the oppressed, she is siding with the oppressor.

But this all pales compared to Smith’s latest neoliberal machinations, though we should stress one final time that these ideas do not belong to her, per se — she is merely the current, spineless functionary who must enact them. Smith wants Alberta to leave the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) in order to create an Alberta Pension Plan; she wants to dismantle the Alberta Health Service and cannibalize it into four new bureaucratic entities. Even Margaret Thatcher regarded the National Health Service as sacrosanct — if by “sacrosanct” we mean, “a line that even the bourgeoisie hesitate to cross, lest the masses come for their heads.” Though the details of what these nascent policies would entail are murky, history shows that their enactment can only have disastrous effects for the working class. Similar reforms, like those enacted by Thatcher and Pinochet in the eighties, only ever benefited corporations and the government officials who implemented them. They had deleterious impacts upon the social security of the working classes, and their effects remain apparent today.

Both AHS and the CPP leave much to be desired — they are meant to only benefit people as inexpensively and minimally as possible. But that even these programs risk vivisection by Danielle Smith and her handlers should still raise anyone’s alarm. For these policies, her anti-Indigenous attitudes, and for being the pliable tool of humanity’s most reprehensible elements, Danielle Smith is an enemy of the people.  

NIGHT-VISION – Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover first circulated in the activist underground thirty years ago. Despite presenting a scathing premonition of how capitalism and neo-colonialism would function in the 21st century — a vision that has only become more accurate since its publication — it remains obscure. The text has been relegated to a peculiar limbo. Its content is much harsher and more discomforting than the cultural criticism that resonates in liberal-academic circles, yet NIGHT-VISION also seems fairly unknown among its intended audience of queer-feminist Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists. In the only other review this author could easily locate, one written 13 years ago, J. Moufawad Paul argues that Marxists may disparage the text’s deviations from orthodox Marxism — for instance, its authors ascribe rationality to the anarchy of production and have an anarchistic enthusiasm for “autonomous struggles in the midst of chaos.” But while the text contains some un-Marxist conclusions and unwieldy notions, these are reasons to read NIGHT-VISION, rather than dismiss it. After all, for the immortal science to deserve its status, it should endure this kind of cage rattling.

NIGHT-VISION contains compelling analyses of gender, nationality, and race, and how these have created different classes and new class struggles beyond those typically described in Marxist texts. Even if some of what Lee and Rover have concocted is dubious, it remains worthy of interrogation. Their perspective, and fiery rhetoric, are a welcome change from the mire of discourse on these subjects found both online and in physical organizing spaces. 

Lee and Rover bake race, gender, nationality, etc. into a modern class structure, developing the idea that oppression forges only discrete classes, and that other identities are “class in drag.” For example, instead of using the standard historical phrasing, in which colonization created Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity as races, the authors argue they were created as classes. They argue for a deeper reading of how race, gender, and nationality alter relationships to production. For instance, they expand upon the Sakaist notion that the white proletariat constitutes a separate class from the Black, Indigenous, and Third World proletariat. They depict how the common exploitation of previously distinct African and Indigenous peoples, who had been of separate races and nations, homogenized them into the monolithic oppressed classes of the Black Slave and the Native. Black peoples’ shared experiences as slaves and the imposition of common languages like English or French created the nation-class identity of “New Afrikan.” Similarly, the experience of being marked for extermination through genocide, the cultural genocide against their languages and customs, and the enclosure on “the res” created the Indigenous nation-class, whose role in production, according to the settlers, is to go extinct.

This is a riff, or a logical extension to what Marx and Engels describe when they articulate how economic crises in capitalism are crises of overproduction — it is no longer just commodities, productive forces, or capital itself that are overproduced, and need to be disposed of, but entire societies and classes. This is worth pondering, even if it’s counterintuitive to scientifically break down how dying out is distinct from not owning the means of production.

NIGHT-VISION draws from an extensive theoretical basis. It cites heavily from the expected canon like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, but also draws on criminally under-read revolutionaries and theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin. The influence of J. Sakai’s Settlers upon the text is abundantly clear. But what Lee and Rover do with these texts is extend their analysis to the furthest peripheries of society — arenas of oppression that frequently go unacknowledged, even by the strata of would-be revolutionaries, communists, etc. The authors apply the traditional Marxist lens of historical materialism to neo-colonial circumstances such as the narcotics economy, the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the semi-slave operated semiconductor factories of Hong Kong. They emphasize, through visceral descriptions and first person accounts, the abhorrent conditions that make the Western standard of living possible. Again, their critique invokes Marx himself, in that it is, “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” 

Lee and Rover’s portrayal culminates with the assertion that neocolonialism consists of the squalorous 19th century conditions Marx described in the mines and factories of his time, magnified and permeating to the furthest corners of society, on a world scale. This sounds obvious, but they argue that some Marxists have benefited from their class position to the extent they now misunderstand key Marxist concepts, such as primitive accumulation and the basic definition of certain classes. In Capital Vol.1, Marx defined primitive accumulation as “the expropriation of immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner” that creates the first capital, and makes capitalist relations possible.  In NIGHT-VISION, Lee and Rover contend that most readers of Marx only understand the surface equation of what Marx meant — different Europeans conquering and enslaving first each other, and then broadening their conquest “outward in ever-widening circles of colonialism, in particular to Indian and Afrikan slavery” (185) — but NIGHT-VISION’s most compelling thesis is that primitive accumulation actually began as witch hunts in the 13th century. 

This claim is a bit of a historical oddity, as the historical consensus is that witch hunts didn’t begin until early modernity, i.e. the 16th century. The discrepancy is due to the authors’ conferral of witchlike qualities to the semi-monastic Beguine and Beghard communities that existed in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Though similar to convents, Beguine communes were not formally part of the Church. The authors denote efforts by the Church to expropriate Beguine property and persecution of Beguine women, such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, as the first witch hunts. 

Lee and Rover further describe how the witch hunts took on institutional form from the 15th century onward, and were social camouflage for the genocide, economic dispossession, and proletarianization of women. Due to the decimation of available labor from centuries of war and the Black Death, European countries and churches had an economic imperative to expropriate widows and any women who resisted their own commodification and their enclosure as the primary inner labor colony.

If you think this sounds exactly like Silvia Federici’s seminal 2004 text, Caliban and The Witch, you’d be right. But while Federici’s text received academic plaudits, was widely translated, and is taught in universities, scarcely anyone’s read 1993’s NIGHT-VISION, regardless of the texts’ sameness. Now, I’m not an intellectual property respecter, or someone who thinks plagiarism is necessarily wrong — in fact, different analysts using the same scientific tools should replicate the same conclusions about history. Still, the variegated treatment of Federici and her works, compared to Lee and Rover and their works, does speak to another of NIGHT-VISION’s conclusions — that the bourgeois classes are intellectually and materially parasitic upon the proletarian classes.

This seems like an obvious and redundant observation, but Lee and Rover use the framework they establish throughout the text to distinguish different class boundaries than those identified by orthodox Marxists. They take Marx’s observation that the first proletarians in England were women, children, and alien labor from England’s first colonies in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and carry it forward to the present. English men from every social strata resisted becoming proletarian for as long as they could, and constituted the first parasitic class. Today’s proletariat are the women, children, and alien labor of the Third World. It also includes the labor of the colonized and dispossessed who live in First World countries, who are collectively called the “Fourth World.” As capitalism expanded, first through colonialism and then neo-colonialism, access to membership in the parasitic classes also expanded, first to other “white” men, then to “white” women, and so on. With time, even formerly proletarian classes, such as the white working class, acquired the capacity for parasitism. After all, although the euro-American auto worker and the South African child semi-slave who mines Vanadium for pennies a day have the same relation to production, they clearly experience different degrees of exploitation. NIGHT-VISION claims that the gulf between these workers places them in different classes. It questions what meaningful solidarity western workers can possibly extend to the practically invisible and oppressed classes of the marginalized world, when their way of life is wholly dependent upon continued exploitation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” For these reasons, capitalism always contains the conditions for class struggle and its own inevitable demise at the hands of the oppressed. What NIGHT-VISION does best is describe the “disturbances of social conditions,” that it defines as new classes and class struggles. Its study of historic and modern conditions is riveting. It creates a compelling parallel between capitalist crises of overproduction and the capitalist overproduction of class parasites, both of which act in concert to foment capitalism’s destruction. Ironically, the fate of capitalist parasites is the same fate that colonialism and then neo-colonialism attempt to impose upon their subjects — namely, extinction.

Where the text is weakest, unfortunately, is “what is to be done” with the information it presents. Its advocacy for disunity with parasites is only decorative, evocative language for what in practice is a call for unity between oppressed peoples. A communist movement will obviously isolate and repress class parasites. Its construal of uncounted numbers of national, racial, and gendered classes, some oppressed, some parasitic, in a web of struggle, is ultimately facile. After all, “socialism means the abolition of class” — for that to be possible, oppressed classes must align along their common oppressions, and not exacerbate struggles between themselves.

Overall, NIGHT-VISION is a double-edged sword. Its depiction and indictment of neo-colonial realities, “the terrain upon which we’re fighting” is stark, necessary and unforgiving, but it doesn’t offer compelling tactics for fighting on that terrain. Its construction of class creates new questions and as many semantic obstacles as it seeks to overcome. The authors’ tendency to excerpt at length from other works — there’s a thirteen page excerpt from another Butch Lee work, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, for example — may be helpful to a reader who’s new to theory or is unfamiliar with the source material. Lee and Rover may have intended NIGHT-VISION as an accessible compendium of thought for their movement. However, I found the quotations excessive in both length and quantity. Still, NIGHT-VISION’s fiery rhetoric and observations will appeal to readers interested in decolonization and land back, queer liberation, and feminism. At the end I couldn’t help but feel reaffirmed and encouraged to re-read Marx and Fanon, whose indelible presence permeates the work, even if the authors achieved this in an unorthodox manner. Ironically, the white working class — and chauvinists like those at Midwestern Marx, who have recently been attacking the NIGHT-VISION’s theoretical tradition — would benefit immensely from reading it, but they are also the most likely to dismiss it outright.   

Some Canadians might remember the 2016 fire season. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire displaced close to 90,000 people from their homes and caused the most damage to business, property, and oil sands operations of any natural disaster in Canadian history (so far). Nevermind that, in terms of area burned, 2016 was less than even 2022. Although Indigenous nations were affected by the Fort McMurray fires, and Indigenous nations are disproportionately affected by wildfires generally, cynical observation suggests the fire became memorable only once it scorched the predominantly white suburbs of Waterways, Beacon Hill, and Abasand.

When the news consistently reports that something is in some way unprecedented, once in a blue moon, once in a generation, once in a lifetime, etc. the effect is that people fail to notice the gradual deterioration in the normal condition of that thing. Suddenly, the wildfire season starts in March when just five years ago it started in April, and five years prior to that, in May. Events that affect settler populations are magnified, while the same events are minimized when they affect Indigenous populations. This effect is called Shifting Baseline Syndrome, but one might be more familiar with the term “boiling the frog,” which is the propaganda technique that induces it. The technique isn’t restricted to news about wildfires, or even weather and climate — most subjects, from health to economics, are reported upon in this way. Eventually, everyone feels like the dog in the iconic 2013 meme and K.C. Greene comic, “This Is Fine.”

Things aren’t fine. In its insatiable hunger for profit, the Canadian forestry industry clearcuts swathes of ancient, biodiverse forests. When they replant trees, as part of so-called green capitalist initiatives, they plant only a few species. The result is that the new tree plantations are essentially kindling. They can’t rightfully be called “forests” because a forest is not just “many trees,” but a dynamic ecosystem of soil microbes, mosses, fungi, insects, and animals — the destruction of which is actually what renders environments susceptible to flames. Likewise, it was the clearing of the Canadian prairies’ complex meadowscapes to graze cattle, and monocrop canola and other cash crops, that increased the environment’s flammability. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, global warming has altered weather patterns and melted polar ice, resulting in widespread ecological change and, again, environs that are increasingly vulnerable to fire. These effects are cumulative and cyclical. Wildfires emit greenhouse gasses that warm the Earth, which causes larger fires to emit more gasses, drastically altering global weather systems and the seasons. Although these changes manifest first as fire and drought, they’re also to blame for the vicious tropical storms and monsoons that devastated Pakistan in 2022, and Libya in 2023, resulting in thousands of deaths. Eventually, this will all culminate in an oven planet that bakes all its living organisms to death. No, things aren’t fine, but it’s an existential imperative of the owning class, the bourgeoisie, to ensure the masses continue believing they are — to continue believing that these events are disparate and unconnected from the capitalists’ activities, and from capitalism altogether, when the opposite is true.

The ruling class likes things the way they are. As they exploit the environment (and us), they’re acutely aware of a great danger: that we won’t take it any more. They study their history books — well, to be honest, they don’t; they’re dissolute wastrels who don’t do much other than lounge on their billion-dollar-yachts. They pay people to study history for them. And what history teaches them is that they have to beware of violent revolutions, especially those with decolonial or communist character. 

One of the ways they work to stay in power is to delay the recognition of these impossible conditions for as long as possible, and one of their tactics is propagandizing people into believing that circumstances are relatively okay here, they must be worse elsewhere, and there’s no connection between here and there. In several works (i.e., “The Collapse of the Second International” and “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder), Lenin observed that a revolutionary situation can only occur when three conditions are met:  

1. when the oppressed classes no longer want to live in the current way
2. when the ruling classes are no longer able to rule and govern in the current way
3. when a crisis affects both the oppressed and ruling classes, spurring the former to action, and destabilizing the latter.

In May Day Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat, Lenin adds that “the bourgeoisie [does] everything in its power to back counter-revolution and ensure ‘peaceful development’ on this counter-revolutionary basis.” 

But a byproduct of technological progress under capitalism is that it has sufficiently improved the lives of westerners such that these conditions occur with increasing rarity. For instance, since the 1970s, the Canadian province of Alberta has been afflicted by drought with increasing frequency, yet this hasn’t manifested into widespread starvation due to improved technology that rescues food crops in otherwise blighted years. Furthermore, capitalist overproduction ensures that millions of kilograms of imported produce from the imperial periphery go to waste each year. Our so-called peaceful development and counter-revolutionary stability depends upon this waste and exploitation. We are a far cry from the mass poverty that galvanized the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution. The real danger and the real misery remain hidden from us (so far).

From the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, the riots in France over the murder of Nahel Merzouk in 2023, the murder of Tortuguita at Cop City, and to the refusal of the Canadian government to search Winnipeg landfills for the bodies of murdered indigenous women, events that could have been the straw that breaks the camel’s back come and go. This is just as the ruling class wants it — just as they have designed it to be. We can’t manage to grasp the moment and fight against them before the moment slips away.

But what does this have to do with wildfires? In a sane world, climate events such as this year’s wildfires and floods would represent a political crisis too unconscionable to ignore. The system that utilizes its police to terroristically execute thousands of people, and the corporate system whose practices condemn thousands to death each year are one and the same. But instead of a political crisis, we have political theater.  

Past wildfire seasons involved an expected amount of backbiting between bourgeois politicians, phonily accusing each other of not caring. For instance, Justin Trudeau was accused of apathy about 2016’s Fort McMurray fires. This year’s wildfires are especially noteworthy for the conspiracy theories about them. Conspiracies, such as the idea that “green terrorists” or “antifa” started the fires with the goal of justifying “climate lockdowns,” abound. It’s no longer that Trudeau is apathetic; now his agents are maliciously setting the fires to convince you that climate change is real so the World Economic Forum can control you (and he can justify his carbon tax). 

Belief and propagation of these conspiracies convolutes any serious conversation and delays any mitigation of climate change. Whether cooked up by the ruling class or simply amplified by them, conspiracy theories like this prevent us from seizing the critical moment; they prevent us, the working class, from even realizing the nature of our enemy, let alone drawing the sword.  Ultimately, it’s not the case that Trudeau is either apathetic or enacting a secret scheme — his purpose is to maintain the normal extraction of profit. Both obfuscations are part of the same strategy that gave us the term “climate change” to begin with. Recall that it was the notorious Republican political strategist, Frank Luntz, who advocated replacing “global warming” with “climate change” in the vernacular, since it’s a much less frightening phrase, and more malleable to the political agenda of the ruling class. This agenda is actually quite simple. In fact, it’s so simple it barely qualifies as an agenda at all; it’s to maintain the exploitation of people and nature for profit, aka the status quo, for as long as possible. This is the class interest of the bourgeoisie.  

They would have us believe it’s not the case that capitalism is omnicidal, that human exploitation of the planet and each other is gradually heating the planet past the point it can sustain life. The planet’s not warming, it’s changing. Are these changes natural, or caused by humans? Who can say?

They would have us believe that, even if the changes are caused by human activity, the activity is part of a plot. It’s certainly not an indictment of their mode of production, or system of governance. The world isn’t burning because of something they have participated in, or let happen — it’s obviously some other (((them))).

Historically, accusations involving a them are antisemitic. From the 1389 Holy Saturday Pogrom in Prague, to the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648 – 1657) in present day Ukraine, in which tens of thousands of Jewish people were massacred, Jews have been the frequent scapegoats for the ruling class, to use as a bulwark against the frustrations of peasants and oppressed classes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, incitements against Jews were given anti-communist flair by the Okhrana, the Tsar’s Secret Police, so that violence could be directed against would-be revolutionaries. Germany’s Nazis developed this strategy to its apotheosis, and the result was the Holocaust.

Just as it happened in Germany 90 years ago, people who believe these narratives are rapidly coalescing into an alt-right fascist movement in Canada. Although the victim group may change nominally, the tactics used to turn the working and oppressed classes against each other remain unchanged.

Scapegoating, deferral, and denial are more comfortable than admitting one’s entire way of life is murdering all life on the planet — but this is exactly what’s taking place. My comrades at USU have already written about the profitability of ecocide as it related to Maui’s fires and about how the bourgeoisie’s narratives about climate change are ruses. Their analyses are also true of Canada’s fires. 

Still, among many Canadians, none of this information causes the general alarm it should. The powder keg of mass resentment has not ignited, even while the country burns. Sure, every summer is a bit smokier than the last, but in the average Canadian metropole, everything seems normal. This is the ultimate boon of colonial exploitation — the privilege to live in normalcy while your internal colonies, and indeed the world, burns around you.   

State Senator Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, implored it was, “time for the Governor, the Attorney General of Maine, the Penobscot County District Attorney, and the U.S. Attorney to work on shutting these Nazis down and sending this guy back to Texas.” The Sheriff of nearby Aroostook county, Shawn Gillen, also suggested passing the buck to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Infer from their statements the character of these men — do neo-Nazis truly belong in Texas any more than Maine, and must federal agencies determine whether neo-Nazis are, “engaging in illegal activity or just doing their thing?”

That these men believe there is a place (Texas) where neo-Nazis could be free to “do their thing” as long as they don’t disturb the status quo betrays that they have an implicit, albeit unconscious understanding of their class position as settlers.

In the 1600s, settler-residents of Maine began the ethnic cleansing of the Wabanaki Confederacy. This was accompanied by pogroms and the eventual expulsion of its New Afrikan inhabitants into the early 1900s. Despite being a established in 1820 as a “free state,” in which slavery has never been legal, Maine’s economy still depended upon and contributed to the Atlantic slave trade — its weavers transformed plantation cotton into fabric, its shipyards built the ships that conveyed slaves across the Atlantic, and its timber fueled the boilers that transformed plantation sugarcane into sugar, molasses, and eventually the rum that was sold in New England’s taverns. Thus, while the state’s occupants found slavery morally objectionable, they were happy to reap its economic benefits so long as the visibly distasteful aspect occurred elsewhere. They were adamant that Black slaves should be free, so long as none of them actually came to Maine to undercut white labor. Similarly, although the Ku Klux Klan is often perceived to be a Southern or Midwestern phenomenon, Maine was a major northern stronghold for the “second” KKK until the 1930s, with some “klaverns” (local chapters) and women’s associations persisting into later decades. In the late 1970s, President Carter’s administration and the state government collaborated to deprive Maine’s remaining Indigenous tribes of the paltry federal rights available to them, through the legal decision Joint Tribal Council of the Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton. Although this decision resulted in a payout of $81.5 million, and the reclamation of some Indigenous land, the tribes ultimately forfeited federal aboriginal title rights that stood to benefit them much more over time. It also bound the tribes to the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, which reduced the power of Indigenous land claims to equal those of any settler or corporation. In July 2023 the Maine House of Representatives failed to overturn Democratic Gov. Janet Mills’ veto of a proposed tribal sovereignty bill that would have restored some of the tribes’ federal rights. 

To summarize this history plainly: the only reason Maine’s overwhelmingly white population can “do their thing” today is because of the Pohlhauses of the past, who ventured out from garrisons and forts, the compounds of that time, to slaughter and economically dispossess the land’s original inhabitants. Furthermore, this dispossession is ongoing and must be maintained by the state’s current administrators. Why else would the governor fear the legal and financial implications of tribal sovereignty for nearly eradicated people? Indeed, given this history it’s apparent why Pohlhaus chose chowder-white Maine to build his compound, compared to Texas which has the most Black people of any state, and the second highest Hispanic population. Knowing these statistics, it seems strange that Sen. Baldacci would send Pohlhaus back to a state where neo-Nazis “have lots to do,” compared to having him stay in Maine where their project is virtually complete… Unless one considers that, just as Mainers of the past were fine with slavery as long as it happened elsewhere, Baldacci is fine with race war so long as it doesn’t interrupt his spaghetti dinner. Ultimately, Baldacci and Gillen’s cowardice against stating unequivocally that neo-Nazis only belong in graves reflects their absolute unwillingness to comprehend, or even think about the bloodshed and economic violence that underpins their peaceful existence. They may also have an unconscious inkling that if they deprive Pohlhaus of the peaceful enjoyment of his Nazi compound, someone might justifiably deprive them of the land, wealth and privileges they acquired through the treachery and butchery of the past.    

Nonetheless, the appearance of new fascist subgroups such as Blood Tribe, which only formed in 2021, does disturb liberal settlers. It may even cause alarm for Communists and other leftists. However, to consider these groups the primary or significant fascist threat in the U.S. is at once both incorrect and chauvinist — the true threat is the U.S. police, who are the hostile garrison ensuring white control of the land. Sen. Baldacci actually lamented the possibility of violence between the state’s fascists and the neo-Nazis when he said, “This is a situation I can’t imagine any of our local law enforcement have had to deal with, and this is a situation they are going to have to deal with.”  Of course the local law enforcement officers have never had to fight themselves! 

The fraught claim that the presence of neo-Nazi groups is “new” is a frequency illusion; an erroneous framing of the present because it is happening now. Many of these groups aren’t new at all, but are the remnants, successors, and splinters of the infamous second Klan, which was a popular mass movement with millions of members and one that lasted from at least 1915 to 1950— a fact many liberals today either don’t know or would like to forget. 

Furthermore, while it may feel as if the number of groups and their activities are increasing, Blood Tribe’s hateful rallies are trite compared to the assassinations, kidnappings, and armed robberies perpetrated by groups such as The Order in the 1980s. There aren’t any more hate groups today than there were in 2011 — their numbers aren’t steadily increasing, but rising and diminishing according to the political progress and needs of ordinary Amerika. For example, due to his skin color and conspiracies about his religion, Obama’s presidency saw an explosion of new anti-Muslim and anti-Black hate groups, despite Obama doing more to globally advance these causes — by destroying Libya and conducting hundreds drone strikes against primarily Yemeni civilians — than many domestic fascist terrorists could dream. In the 1930s, groups such as The Silver Legion (Silver Shirts) and German-American Bund were founded as reactions to Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite it being a resounding death knell for revolutionary Communism in the United States. Today, the Blood Tribe and other hate groups primarily direct their venom against the LGBTQIA2S+ community, who are already reviled by one half of the Amerikan political spectrum, and wielded as a political cudgel against Global South nations by the other. Neither face of American fascism genuinely seeks liberation for the oppressed. 

Maine’s nickname, “The Polar Star State,” and motto, “Dirigo” which means “I guide” or “I direct” refer to how, in the same sense that mariners used the Polar Star to navigate, Maine should be the guiding star towards “the ideal America”, its citizens the exemplary patriots. The neo-Nazis understand and have taken this motto to heart. Even if the state’s administrators feign oblivion to the sameness of settlers and neo-Nazis, all those who seek to extinguish Amerika as the guiding star of world fascism should understand it. If there is a forthcoming war, distinct from the internal and external wars continually waged by the U.S. Empire, then its settlers, government, police, and hate groups will all be on the same side. And why wouldn’t they be? 

Pohlhaus is, after all, an ex-marine. Many terrorists just like him are active or former members of the police and U.S. armed forces. The U.S. garrison-police and armed forces are merely the foreign and domestic arms of the project of Amerikan genocide. Despite what the lofty rhetoric of high-school history teachers, so-called “Founding Fathers,” and government officials might claim, this continuous genocide is the real respresentation of Amerikan values. Settler-colonialism is the hard core of fascism, a kind of internal and domestic imperialist policy designed to annihilate the inhabitants of the land to make it available for a chosen ethnos — what the Amerikan race-scientists call “race.”

It’s no coincidence that the chosen ethos for both Mainers and neo-Nazis is the same — neo-Nazis are simply more honest about their intentions than most Amerikan politicians. They merely say aloud what Amerika does and has already done, but refuses to admit.

In subject and colonized countries, wars of national liberation sometimes take the form of semi-revolutionary or revolutionary military seizures of power. The putative “democratic” elements in countries deeply compromised by neo-colonial hegemony, like those of Niger, are a mere cover for imperialist control. National militaries, however, generally have long traditions of national pride; it is sometimes from the oppressed-national military tradition that national liberation finds its most fertile soil.

Upon receiving news of the coup, Macron decried it as, “completely illegitimate and profoundly dangerous for the Nigeriens, Niger and the whole region.” However, Macron, as the official representative of French imperialism, could never admit to the simple fact  that the Council’s seizure is not dangerous to Nigeriens, Niger, or the region; it’s dangerous to France and Western interests.

Niger has been a cornerstone of French imperial policy in Africa since the 19th century. It straddles the Sahel and Sahara regions, and shares an immense land border with Nigeria to the south. Niger has served as the military staging ground for French excursions into neighboring regions, what are now Chad and Mali, since the old imperial powers crassly divided Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884. Although Niger was granted nominal independence from France in 1960, there have been few years when French compradors, those among the neo-colonial ruling class who help siphon-off the wealth of the national economy and ship it to Paris, were not in charge.

Today, Niger supplies 25% of the uranium used in the EU’s nuclear power generation. 35% of the uranium for France’s nuclear reactors comes from Niger. Meanwhile, only 14% of Niger’s population of 25.25 million have reasonable access to electricity, while 62% have no access whatsoever. Hundreds of thousands of Nigeriens live exposed to radioactive waste leftover from the mining process. France has never displayed any alarm over the radioactive tailings its empire leaves behind. The French “alarm” over this coup is blatantly cynical and self-interested, not motivated by genuine concern for the Nigeriens, for whom the French government has never before displayed an ounce of sympathy. More accurately, France fears the loss of modern comforts, which are only possible due to its exploitation of Africa’s natural resources. The French may soon experience the rolling blackouts and brownouts that they’ve forced on Nigeriens for decades.

Perhaps even more alarming to France than the loss of access to resources is the potential disruption to its currency hegemony over West Africa. Mohamed Bazoum, the deposed president, had been a pliant and steady leader of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), which controls the West African Franc. Forcing its former colonies to use a currency pegged to the Euro locks African nations into accepting trade deals that any honest person would simply call theft. Recently, African radicals such as Julius Malema, President of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa, have proposed creating a Pan-African currency backed by Africa’s natural resources. The prospect of this currency terrifies the empire. Recently leaked emails of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton of the U.S. Empire revealed NATO killed Gaddafi in part to stop the formation of a Pan-African gold-backed currency like the one proposed by Malema. The U.S. and its NATO allies are willing to go to great lengths to stop a Pan-African union.

Significantly, this coup also symbolizes Niger’s rejection of American and French influence on its military affairs, and a rejection of the NATO client, Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) dominance over the region. Western mouthpieces such as Anthony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, have lamented the deterioration of the “security situation” in Niger, but his words sound hollow. After all, General Tchiani directly cited French and American ineptitude in conflicts with Islamic militants as one of the reasons for the coup in the first place!

The real concern for France and America is that Niger will follow Mali and Burkina Faso’s example: expel Western troops from its borders and turn to Russia’s Wagner Group for military assistance. Symbolically, the coup was carried out when Bazoum declined to personally attend the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg. After the coup, there were some pro-Russia demonstrations in the Nigerien capital, Niamey, and Wagner Group’s leader Prigozhin lauded the coup’s success. The loss of Niger as a Western client would be devastating for American military power in West Africa. America’s six bases in Niger, the most it has in a single African country, are strategically positioned to secure its share of uranium, and serve as the command hub for all American operations across Western Africa.

In a further act of hypocrisy, western powers also criticized the deleterious socio-economic impact that the coup could have on Niger, but supported the fierce sanctions that their puppet ECOWAS immediately imposed against the country. France, America, and ECOWAS are so panic stricken over their loss of control (and of uranium) that they are threatening a military intervention if Bazoum is not restored to power within a week. Meanwhile, Mali and Burkina Faso have pledged to militarily support Niger in the event of an intervention against the new government.

Sanctions and threat of military intervention, against an already impoverished and exploited nation, must be unequivocally condemned. Western pontification about Niger’s security and socioeconomic situation should be exposed as the sardonic ruse it is. Have no illusions — The United States Empire, and its partner, France, only care about Niger insofar as they can continue to exploit it. The people of Niger, all victims of French colonialism, and colonized people the world over, must be free to overthrow their oppressors, claim their national wealth, and seek national development on their own terms.

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of these women. The cracker government gives various excuses — all inadequate — for its inaction, such as the three years it would take to search the landfills, the expense of up to $184 million, the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals, and the sheer gruesome nature of what may be discovered. One excuse not invoked by the state: the potential to uncover many more corpses than those of the four aforementioned women, which would be a scandal for the police and government.  Meanwhile, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson bloviates about building a memorial, and about “feasibility studies.”

All of the above is reminiscent of a previous prominent Canadian serial killer, Robert Pickton. Pickton claimed to have murdered 49 women, of whom 26 were confirmed, but he was only found guilty and sentenced for killing six. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police originally only searched Pickton’s pig farm in order to score easy money by ticketing unregistered firearms. They dragged themselves to investigate further when they found two missing womens’ blood and property. It took five years and cost $70 million to unearth the remains of the 26 women on Pickton’s farm. After his conviction, the Canadian Supreme Court found no further reason to continue trying Pickton, as there was no higher punishment possible for him. It will be much the same for Skibicki, who is already charged with first degree murder. He will be quietly put away and the government will claim justice has been served. But the conditions that allowed him and Pickton to commit their crimes, to murder Indigenous women under the settler state’s radar, will remain for as long as the Canadian state persists. For example, Robert Pickton’s brother David Pickton, who was previously convicted for groping and threatening to rape and cut a woman into pieces, walks free today. His freedom only required his claim ignorance of his brother’s crimes, despite having worked on the farm where they took place.

None of this is accidental. Whenever Canada looks into its past, it always unearths more Indigenous bodies than it bargained for. In 2021, a search uncovered a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. More schools across Canada and the U.S. were searched. This resulted in the discovery of the bodies of more than 10,000 Indigenous children. The liberal Canadian media describes these events as “tragedies” and publishes reports of unheeded recommendations. For example, the government found many instances of what it called “police mishandling” in Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, a 2012 British Columbia provincial government inquiry into the Pickton murders. This report had dozens of recommendations for the police and provincial government, but none were taken seriously. Indigenous leaders accuse Canada of disregarding the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and children. This is true, but misses the full picture.

In actuality, the settler terror incarnate in the murder of untold thousands of Indigenous women and children is vital to the Canadian state. The settler government “cares” only insofar as the violence must continue. To accuse the police of “mishandling” these cases is an understatement bordering on injustice, for the police are not mere bumbling fools. True to their role in the history of Canada, they are active collaborators with settler terrorists! Some Canadian police admitted in the 90s that they would rather solve one murder of a white, bourgeois victim, than investigate the deaths of a dozen prostitutes — who are disproportionately drawn from Indigenous and racialized women. Police comments of this nature were documented in case studies into the Pickton murders, such as Stevie Cameron’s On The Farm. As for the perpetrators, liberals consider them monstrous, and rightly so, but fail to recognize that becoming a serial rapist-murderer is the logical apotheosis of settlerism. There are no acts more viscerally colonial than direct, individual sexual violence and murder against the colonized. To understand the causes of this violence, and its ubiquity in Canadian society, one must recognize the mountain of colonialist cruelty in Canada’s dark and genocidal history — the mountain these acts stand atop. 

The inability to recognize such grotesqueness condemns liberalism as a failed ideology. Even when some well-intentioned liberals document the atrocities in historic works such as Clearing The Plains, by James Daschuk, or true crime texts like Cameron’s On The Farm, the most they can accomplish is a grim witness-bearing. There is no prescription in liberalism to end the spilling of Indigenous blood by settlers and the settler state. The best liberalism can offer is some befuddled discourse and solemn “remembrance.” As Daschuk said in an interview with Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix news in 2016, referring to the deliberate mass starvation of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian government, “the stories were so profound and the truths, in some cases, were so ugly that we can’t turn our backs on them.” But what does it mean to not turn one’s back? In Canada’s case, not a lot — typically some mumbled apology and dead-end state “inquiries.” In that same interview from nearly a decade ago, Daschuk stated, “I think we’re at a moment. I think there’s enough momentum, and goodwill in the general population” to “examine how our society might right its inherent inequalities.” But in the years since, this hasn’t transpired, nor can it. The graveyard of failed bureaucratic endeavors surrounding Canada’s genocidal past and present, which includes the now-dissolved Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Forsaken inquiry in British Columbia, and whatever crib-strangled half-effort will soon emerge in Winnipeg, is only expanding, while the “inherent inequalities” remain and genocidal injustices continue.

Anti-colonial resistance must be found beyond liberal frameworks. On July 7th, the pig government of Manitoba told the families of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, to their faces, that they would not search the Brady landfill, despite the feasibility study demonstrating that a search was possible. In a hollow and tired deflection, Premier Stefanson cited safety concerns to workers conducting the search, and suggested that the search should be the federal government’s responsibility. In response, Indigenous activists, including Morgan Harris’s daughter, Cambria Harris, rightfully and immediately blocked access to the landfill, returning to a protest tactic first applied last year, when these murders first came to light. This people’s blockade against the settler government is continuing, even though the City of Winnipeg filed an injunction on Tuesday, July 11th to have it forcibly dispersed. Naturally, the demonstrators are unlikely to acquiesce to the city’s demand, and have every right to hold their ground.

The reoccupation and blockade of their own stolen land is an essential tactic for Indigenous resistance to colonization across Turtle Island. From present struggles in Wet’suwet’en and Landback Lane, weaving back through the “IdleNoMore” movement and “NoDAPL” protests at Standing Rock, Indigenous actions have been most successful when they impede the movement of the settler state, settler capitalist firms, and settler “private citizens,” and settler access to land. Looking only slightly further back into history, the settler government’s fear becomes palpable when it is confronted with armed land reoccupations, as occurred during the Kanesatake Resistance (Oka Crisis) in 1990, and Wounded Knee in 1973. These brave acts of popular anti-colonial resistance stand at the head of five centuries of Indigenous resistance, and will continue until settler colonialism is finally dismantled. The nascent actions to blockade Brady landfill are only a thread in this storied history.

Unfortunately, until they are united in a broad people’s anti-colonial movement, these actions can only delay and prolong the ongoing displacement and genocide regime of the U.S.–Canada settler empire. It is a death by a thousand cuts. The 1980–94 Clayoquot protests (The War in the Woods) did not prevent greedy settlers from harvesting old growth lumber in British Columbia for long — similar events unfolded only three decades later in the 2020–22 occupation at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). The capitalists, motivated by their unceasing, existential drive for endless profits, will never willingly stop; they will raze the whole Earth, if they are allowed to do so, and they will be aided at every step by the capitalist class-dictatorship state. Clayoquot and Ada’itsx demonstrated that the state has endless patience and capacity to jail peaceful protesters. The plaudits heaped by the state on acts of peaceful resistance, thereby condoning and denuding these actions of revolutionary impetus, are another obstacle. Still, it’s clear that while Canada, its police, and its corporations exist, there can be neither lasting peace nor permanent victories in the Indigenous liberation struggle. There can be no justice for the tens of thousands of children buried beneath residential schools or for the uncounted hundreds, if not thousands, of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Unfathomable cruelty characterizes the Indigenous experience in Canada and across Turtle Island. The settler state offers only this choice: they may live on the rez (reserve/reservation) and contend with an ongoing cultural and literal genocide, or they may leave. If they leave, however, they’re extremely likely to be criminalized, rendered homeless, victimized by physical, emotional, and sexual violence (including disappearance and murder), or any combination of these traumatic experiences and horrible fates. If they are murdered, their bodies can be buried in landfills or fed to pigs. Their spirits and families can find no peace. Yet liberal settlers dimly wonder why the phrase “Reconciliation is Dead” is popular.

The sum of this experience is sometimes called the “Fourth World” — in which primarily Indigenous and Black people, but also gender nonconforming and disabled people, live Third-World conditions in allegedly First-World countries like Canada or the United States. In this framework, Fourth World communities are understood to occupy a unique underclass, beneath the settler working class proper. Fourth-World workers are locked in a web of contradictions with the capitalists, the First-World workers, and the “Fourth-World” propertied classes all at once.

Fourth Worldism dovetails with Engels’ theory of labor aristocracy and Sakai’s theory that settler proletarianism is a myth. In letters to Marx in the 1850s, Engels worried that England, then the “most bourgeois of nations,” feeding itself on the spoils of hundreds of millions of people in its colonies, would soon have not only a bourgeoisie — its capitalists — but also a “bourgeois working class.” Marx and Engels feared that England’s colonial plunder would be sufficient bribery for its working class to betray their own class interests at the expense of racialized workers and workers abroad. Marx, for instance, wrote that the English working class would never free itself from “its own” capitalists until it stood in solidarity with liberation movements in Ireland, India, and other British colonies. The situation Engels described is sadly true in Canada and the U.S., where the settler proletariat has, time and time again, betrayed its class interest as workers to align with the settler capitalists, at the expense of  Turtle Island’’s colonized and other “Fourth World” peoples. Sakai takes Engels concept to its furthest extreme and claims, “Amerika [or canada] is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.” For Sakai, settlers only exist to brutalize the Indigenous proletariat, whose slaughter and dispossession built the luxuries they enjoy.

Regardless of whether we find these theories plausible and rigorous, or nonsense, the wretched lived experience of Canada’s Indigenous populations cannot be denied, nor can the solution to their predicament be avoided. The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island understand that the settler state will not change its colonialist character out of good will; it will only capitulate to any demands made from a position of power. As Mao said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The present mobilized resistance, while heroic, must spark the revitalization of Indigenous revolutionary anti-colonial organization, complete with the capability for armed struggle. When Indigenous nations make the settler pay in capital, real estate, political standing, comfort, and blood for his broken treaties and residential schools, his sprawling suburbs and golf courses, his oil pipelines and cleared forests — then and only then will the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty become realizable. The 1974 successful re-establishment of Ganienkeh as Kanienkehaka (a sovereign nation governed by its own laws and traditions) by the Mohawk, against the U.S. government, shows only an elementary hint of what could be. Let a thousand Ganienkehs overgrow the entirety of Turtle Island!

Among the settlers there is a desperate need for mass cultural upheaval. We must expunge the cultural and economic conditions that culminate in the violation and murder of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, and the thousands of other Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). This begins, at the community level, by terrorizing the terrorists — by keeping a vigilant watch on settlers who show any political inclinations toward fascism and any personal inclinations toward domestic, sexual, and other interpersonal violence. Pickton and Skibicki could never have gotten away with their crimes for so long, had they not been shielded by whole communities, who (at best) looked the other way and (at worst) aided and abetted them. But this is only the elemental level. The solution cannot be merely personal and communal; it must be political. Communists must heed the call of Indigenous liberation. Full decolonization, which can only mean the abolition of the existing settler state and the utter destruction of the U.S.–Canada Empire and its settler society, the total restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, and the prolonged reeducation of the settler population must be included in our minimum programme. This is the only way towards any semblance of genuine “Truth and Reconciliation.” Only the anti-colonial revolution can achieve anti-colonial justice. If projects cannot uphold this bare minimum, they will be eradicated in the forthcoming revolution. If we settler would-be Communists fail to reeducate ourselves, then we will rightfully reap the 531 years of rape and murder we continue to visit upon this land and its people.

Author’s Endnote: In this piece I have used standard capitalization for illegitimate place names, such as canada. Rest assured, this was only done for legibility, and I don’t consider canada to be a legitimate nation.

Though dismissed by some Marxists as abstract or arbitrary, this technique has merit and utility. After all, fascism does not flourish through political economy alone, and is the most metaphysical and symbolism-obsessed of bourgeois ideologies. A study of it that neglects these elements would be dangerously incomplete. At worst, neglecting the semiotics of fascism leads to the kind of rhetoric recently seen in the New York Times, whose propagandists launder the totenkopfs and sonnenrads of Ukrainian soldiers into harmless icons. Such purposive negligence encourages the creep of fascist rot until fascist tropes are ubiquitous in western culture; it soft-pedals the ideas associated with these symbols to liberal society at large. It’s exactly this phenomenon which Eco seeks to safeguard his readers against, when he counsels that “Ur-Fascism is all around us, sometimes in plainclothes,” and that, “Ur-fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”

Ironically, Eco’s perspective falls fatally short. His position, as someone who was liberated from Italian fascism by American troops, ultimately blinds him to the glaring, unavoidable truth of his own conception of fascism — that the United States is the progenitor and wellspring of it. Such blindness to ideology is quintessential of liberalism. However, all is not lost! Eco’s work, although limited by his liberal framework, still provides a useful tool to fill crevices in the materialist understanding of fascism. Furthermore, applying Eco’s lens back to the United States strikingly clarifies the meaning of fascism, especially American fascism.

Why is this necessary? Understanding fascism is requisite to eliminating it as a political possibility. American fascism is a cancerous blight that must be totally eradicated, lest even a germ of it survive, enabling it to regenerate. By introducing a Marxist framework, we can avoid these pitfalls and supersede Eco’s model of fascism.

Eco posits, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change,” and “Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” What are these features? Eco identifies fourteen signifiers of fascism, all of which are incandescent with Americana.

The first of these features is “the cult of tradition.” American “culture” possesses this feature in abundance. This is the fixation upon an imagined ideal past way of life, blended with paranoid xenophobia. The “American Dream,” encapsulated in the stereotype of an idyllic suburban American landscape —  a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a nuclear family, a dog, etc. — must be under attack from Black, indigenous, other racialized peoples, and LGBTQIA people. Conspiracy theories about  “crime rates” and “gangs,” “antifa” and their “shadowy” “handlers” and “financiers,” are inevitably modern substitutions for the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Eco at least realizes that historic fascists such as Julius Evola, “merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire,” but fails to condemn the verdant American tradition of doing exactly that. In Eco’s time, writers such as John Keel and Milton Cooper engaged in this practice through works like The Eighth Tower, and Behold! A Pale Horse. Today, the paranoid aspect of fascism is alive and well in the conspiracy theories peddled by figures like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan, and there’s no shortage of Petersons, Carlsons, Tates, and Shapiros to choose an imagined “traditionalist” culture from.

Eco’s first tenet reflexively suits the rightwing elements of American society, but it would be remiss to not point out that moderate, liberal America is also deeply embroiled in its own cult of tradition. Although the enemies are less abstract, less fantastical — China, Russia, and Iran are real geopolitical entities, and they really do pose “threats” to America’s imperialist hegemony — the mythologized America which confronts them is no less of a fiction than the American Dream described above, and the enemy’s characteristics are exaggerated to the point of caricature. America’s “enemies” are spoken of as a biblical “Axis of Evil.”

The second feature of Ur-fascism, closely related to the cult of tradition, is the rejection of modernism, but this might be better understood as “the seeming embrace of progressiveness, when one’s true ideology is lebensraum.” Eco correctly ascribes this quality to Nazi Germany, but fails to apply it to the United States, which was built on an eliminationist genocidal program against North America’s Indigenous peoples. In fact, when crafting their lebensraum policy — their plan to clear, by genocidal means, most of eastern Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus for German colonization — the Nazis took direct inspiration from the history of American colonialism. Eco failed to see this connection because he wrongly believed that America’s 1776 War of Independence was progressive, and so assumed, wrongly, that the resultant state must also be inherently progressive. To accept that the United States must be progressive apriori is a sign of irrationalism, and it is, ironically, irrationalism of this kind that is the third feature of fascism.

Eco conflates the notion of irrationalism with “distrust of the intellectual world [which] has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from the Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s alleged dictum, “When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun.” Irrationalism so permeates American culture that it scarcely needs elaboration. It is on every American television station, suffused through every piece of media. Every piece of red scare propaganda, of anti-vax propaganda, of anti-trans legislation, of anti-abortion legislation is justified within a miasma of irrationalism.

The fourth feature of Ur-Fascism is the idea that “disagreement is treason.” Due to fascism’s insidious nature, it’s easy to miss that no meaningful dissent is possible in American society. The subjugated populace believes they have the capacity to disagree, or even shape their society democratically, when nothing could be further from the truth. One needs to look no further, for recent and present examples, than the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, or the building of Atlanta’s “Cop City” against the popular will of Atlanta residents and over the bodies of murdered #StopCopCity activists. In America, the people’s democratic will is regularly stifled, criminalized, and, as in the case of Atlanta forest-defender Tortuguita, repressed by outright police murder.

Eco’s fifth feature of fascism is racism.

Sixth is the “appeal to a frustrated middle class.” Notwithstanding that the existence of “a middle class” already implies the presence of fascism, and is an ambiguous category that serves to obscure class exploitation, the sole political project of both major American parties is to appeal to “the individual or social frustration” of “middle-class” Americans. Rarely does an American politician make reference to a “working class,” and when they do, it serves only as a rhetorical tool to obfuscate real class character.

The seventh feature, (settler) nationalism, emerges from the appeal to the middle class. Characteristic of fascist nationalism, according to Eco, is “obsession with a plot”. Fascist politicians and fascist propagandists frequently speak of America as not merely a “nation,” but also a “story,” a “promise of opportunity,” and so on, with its own “destiny.” Even America’s “founding fathers” spoke of their project this way. Fundamentally, America is not a nation, but a colonialist project, built upon the mass enslavement of Africans, the eliminationist genocide of North America’s original peoples, a white supremacist legal regime, and centuries of racial oppression. This is connected to the cult of tradition’s paranoia and xenophobia — enemies, both internal and external, are attacking American “freedom” and “democracy.” Taking Russiagate and Trump’s January 6th, 2021 putsch as examples, it’s apparent that plot obsession is a bipartisan phenomenon.

The eighth feature relates closely to nationalism and nationalist plot obsession. It’s the necessity of describing fascism’s enemies as simultaneously pathetically weak and “degenerate,” yet simultaneously, overpowering, omniscient, and existentially threatening. For example, the western news landscape has been overrun with stories that portray Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a terrifying existential threat to western civilization, and yet equally commonplace are tales of the supposed ineptitude of Russia’s military leaders, the cowardice of its soldiers, its inability to follow-through on its objectives, and so on. “Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy,” Eco writes, aptly describing American strategic defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, and likely describing the forthcoming defeat of the NATO-led proxy forces in Ukraine.

However, neither victory nor defeat in any particular conflict matters to America. The United States is fascist, and for the fascist regime, “life is permanent warfare.” Thus, there was only a five month pause between the American defeat in Afghanistan in September 2021 and the ignition of the Ukrainian proxy war in February 2022. After that conflict, another will inevitably emerge, perhaps against the People’s Republic of China over America’s puppet state in Taiwan. Life as permanent warfare permeates not just the “hot” conflicts, but all elements of American day-to-day life and culture. Militaristic language and attitudes apply everywhere: the “war on cancer,” the “war on drugs,” the “war on crime,” the “war against family values,” and so on. America will never be at peace, internally or externally, because America can never be at peace. This state of “forever war,” Eco’s ninth feature of Ur-Fascism, is inescapably and unmistakably American.

The tenth feature, “contempt for the weak,” feeds America’s social militarism. Eco explains that in the fascist regime, “​​every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party.” In America, one merely needs to replace “the party” with the parties — the Democratic Party and the GOP — and everything becomes clear. Americans are all the best people in the world, and the best among those people are the ones who proliferate and defend the American political project, of which there is only one, despite the apparent duopoly. This category includes those who join the police or the imperial military, but it also includes those committed to ideological work, such as lobbyists and propagandists. It also includes the propagandized masses, whose mission is to assure the ascension of their guy to the president’s sacred office. As the fascist leader’s existence depends upon the weakness of the masses, and contempt for the masses so too does the president’s. Everyone in America must hierarchically despise their underlings, who are actually their peers, and those underlings must further subjugate their inferiors, who are actually their comrades. “This reinforces the sense of mass elitism” without mentioning American society’s contempt for the disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQ people, etc. who also have these strictures of loathing foisted upon them.

In the same fashion with which “the duopoly” previously supplanted the place of “the party,” “billionaire” replaces “hero” in the eleventh sign. “In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero” but in America everyone is educated to (want to) become a billionaire — an arch-exploiter. Such a desire is inhuman and ecocidal, and condemns billions of people to death as surely as if they’d been shot on the front lines.

Since becoming a billionaire is only a possibility for 0.00000218072% of Americans, fascism must “transfer its will to power to sexual matters.” The twelfth sign of fascism is sex and gender intolerance. There is a continual and increasing genocide against trans people in the United States. It is of no import that no Institut für Sexualwissenschaft has been razed on American soil – the slow corrosion of trans rights, access to medicare, ability to hold jobs, and increasing precarity of existence ensures that no singular explosive act is necessary. However, as general conditions deteriorate in the United States, the fascist frustration will increase, and there will be more socially condoned violence against trans people.

The thirteenth feature of Ur-Fascism according to Eco is selective populism — when individuals as individuals have no rights, when they cannot take action as individuals, but only roleplay as “The People.” Take, for instance, the normal course of an election cycle in the United States: The people ostensibly elect politicians to act according to their common will, and the leader of the elected political group, the president, becomes the arbiter of that will back to the people. Trump played this role with such bloated grandiosity and infamy that his personality eclipsed the truth that every American president performs this function identically. Trump’s “respectable” predecessors, Barack Obama and George Bush, also acted as personal embodiments of “the American People.”

Eco suggests, “wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.” This is true. However, because each American president already behaves identically to Trump, his dispute of the 2020 election should be considered adding more garbage to a smoldering dumpster fire, rather than sparking the first flames.

The fourteenth and final element of Ur-Fascism is “Newspeak,” an Orwellian term that Eco describes as an “impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax.” Eco himself failed to identify the impoverished anti-Communist fiction of Orwell with British fascism, just as he failed to identify American fascism. That said, Newspeak, as Eco defines it, is indispensable to American fascism. Take, for instance, the neologisms “woke,” and the derivative “wokeism” and “wokescold,” which in American fascist Newspeak means, more or less, “to be against racism, misogyny, and other bigotry.” Newspeak serves to turn what is unobjectionable to most people into something sinister and threatening. Examples abound: “critical race theory,” “J6,” “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” “gender-critical” — Newspeak continually invents new boogeymen and generates whole irrelevant discourses about how they must be destroyed to “save America.” In this way, Newspeak inhibits the masses from achieving even an elementary political literacy, which is essential for fascists to maintain their power. A population that lacks the political language to describe its conditions cannot liberate itself from those conditions.

Eco asks, “Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?” implying that fascism is akin to Marx’s famous “specter of communism,” haunting western liberal society. This is a false equivalency. Fascism is no ghost, nor does it haunt liberals. Instead, fascism is a ghoul that liberal society keeps hidden but well fed in its basement, and occasionally sets free to feast on the oppressed.
With this image in mind, it’s straightforward to see that Eco erred in quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt to conclude his essay:

I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

Eco fails to perceive FDR’s fascism. Indeed, there are even many Communists in the U.S. who fail to recognize FDR’s fascism. The same misunderstanding manifests more broadly in those who perceive only the GOP as fascist, and not also the Democratic Party, and those who deny America’s fascist characteristics altogether.

American democracy has never been a living force, but an undead one that feasts on the oppressed people of the whole world and mangles the potential of billions. Now that the ghoul of American fascism has been identified, the task of freedom and liberation shifts in focus towards killing it. It’s worthwhile to conclude with a quotation — not from Eco, nor a president, but George Jackson — a revolutionary who, via different means, also properly identified American fascism:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.