Kevin, we are so sorry that after a life marked by state violence, you were deported. We had the potential to stop this violent deportation, and we didn’t show up sufficiently. As a movement, we need to do better.
Sunday morning, Kevin was deported to Haiti. Because of some public attention, Immigration Minister Marc Miller reviewed his file, but refused to intervene.
Words cannot begin to describe how violent this deportation is. Kevin came to Canada at the age of three and was soon forced into the child “protection” system. He was abused and traumatized by that system, and will suffer the consequences for the rest of his life. One of these consequences was his criminalization, and his experience of the full weight of the racist, anti-Black, colonial, penal system. Not satisfied with incarcerating this black man, the Canadian state then started proceedings to deport him to Haiti, a country to which he has few ties, having left at the age of three. Moreover, after centuries of Northern imperial interference, Haiti is now so unstable that even Canada has suspended deportations to this country – except, of course, for people it has criminalized. And so, Kevin was forced to leave his home and deported to Haiti Sunday morning.
Under current immigration laws and policies, it is next to impossible for him to legally return to Canada. Even if by some miracle, he can, it will take a minimum of five years.
We need to continue to fight against this racist, white supremacist system that wins electoral points at the cost of the most vulnerable and marginalized in the system. And we need to get more powerful – because this is what is at stake.
Political violence is a delicate topic—and not only because of how easy it is to find ourselves getting criminalized for conversations among comrades about violence.
Violence is something to take very seriously, since how we choose to use or respond to it shapes our struggles and ourselves. I do believe violence changes us, for better or for worse. We can’t choose to escape the violence of capitalism, and likewise the violence of colonization, racism, and patriarchy is inescapable for many. We can, however, choose how to use violence in our struggles against those forces.
Often, in anarchist spaces, I hear questions of violence being dealt with lightly, or even as jokes. But I don’t think we should joke about killing cops or nazis or whatever, because these are things revolutionaries around the world have chosen to do. They have done that after much serious deliberation. And those actions were not jokes, whatever else we might think of them.
When we treat political violence as a joke, we are saying it is unrealistic or impossible or ridiculous, which is the opposite of true. Every instance of revolutionary social change involves, in one way or another, overcoming the existing power system—and this always involves some level of violence. There aren’t a ton of examples of successful recent revolutions, but if we look at the Arab Spring revolutions of the early 2010s, we can get a sense of the different degrees of violence revolution can entail.
The Tunisian revolution and Egyption revolutions were on the less violent side of that cycle of uprisings, but still involved burning buildings and street fighting. Organized armed formations played a relatively small role, and the majority of activity looked like an exceptionally combative street protest movement. I’m going to throw a few numbers at you, just to give a sense of the scale of violence these revolutions entailed. 318 people were killed in 28 days Tunisia and 846 in just over two weeks in Egypt. These are shocking numbers and speak to the courage and determination of the revolutionaries.
Both these revolutions were successful in ending the political regimes in their respective countries, although they did not defeat the state. Today, Tunisia has a relatively effective representative democracy for its capitalist economy (though it does seem to be in a bit of a rough patch), while Egypt is back under military dictatorship and in a worse situation than before the revolution.
If we look at the Syrian revolution in terms of violence, though, we can see a totally different reality. By January 2013, almost two years after the start of the uprising, 60,000 people had been killed. This number rose to over 90,000 by April of that year, and one year later, in August 2014, it was at 190,000. This is right around the time major foreign interventions started, so as of this point, 90% of those killed had been killed by the Syrian state. We should also recall that at least 82,000 people were abducted by the state and disappeared, and about 14,000 are confirmed to have died under torture.i
The Assad regime was comfortable with demolishing whole cities that escaped its control, most famously Homs, which had been Syria’s third largest city. It also carried on lengthy sieges against revolutionary regions, such as the Palestinian refugee community, Yarmouk, in Damascus.
The Assad regime survived and today controls almost its full territory again. Still, I wouldn’t say that the Syrian revolution was a failure, because two major social revolutionary projects emerged out of it.
One is Rojava in the northern, Kurdish-dominated regions, which is inspired by democratic confederalism. This means it is not attempting to create a new state, but rather a tapestry of local democracies.
The other is the movement of local councils across the rest of Syria, which saw hundreds of autonomous self-governing councils emerge in liberated areas. This reached a peak in 2016, before the intervention by Russia targeting these areas, with at least 395 councils operating. These councils were politically diverse, with some being representative democracies, others direct democracies, and others based on volunteering for roles. The first local councils were started by anarchists, and the model was designed as an emergent alternative to a centralized state that was resilient in the face of repression.
Both of these projects were heavily shaped by the level of violence involved in the Syrian revolution and civil war, but especially the local councils. This is because the single-party in charge of political and military matters in Rojava struck a deal with the Assad regime early on and so never had to fight the state. I’m going to focus on the areas outside of Rojava today, and that’s for a few reasons:
One is this experience of unrelenting violence from the state, which helps get at some of the points I want to make. Another is the greater political diversity in the absence of a singular, militarized party. Finally, because the Rojava project was never trying to destroy the state, which, as one Syrian anarchist put it, is the most important thing if you want to have a revolution.ii
The Syrian revolution liberated millions of people from the regime and created a patchwork of autonomies across the territory in a series of experiments I think we should all think more about. But before we look more closely at the Syrian revolution, though, I want to circle back around to the title of this text: militancy vs militarism.
As anarchists, when we engage in struggle, we have a few special priorities. One is to struggle in an anti-authoritarian direction and avoid creating new leaders or representatives, and one part of that is avoiding specialization–especially around something as delicate as violence. My goal with this text is to present some ideas about why specialization in violence is a problem and how it favours authoritarian currents, undermining our goals as anarchists.
Rather than forming specialized armed groups, I think anarchists should encourage self-organization and the generalization of both tactics and the means of carrying them out safely. This means teaching people how to do things and also how to not get caught doing them. These tactics can include whatever tactics anarchists consider effective and appropriate based on a careful analysis of their context.
It is possible to wage a determined struggle in the face of state violence without copying military structures or reducing the rich terrain of social struggle to its military dimension. Put another way, it is possible for our struggle to be based on affinity and informality, even in violent contexts, and for us to understand the terrain of struggle as fundamentally social, even as social relations are also held up by material structures that may need to be destroyed.
Militancy means determination to go the distance, fighting spirit, uncompromising in our politics, commited to struggle, pushing the limits of what’s possible. As comrades in Common Cause pointed out in their journal Mortar, militancy is a collective reality, something that needs to be cultivated across large groups or even classes of people to allow them to become a force.iii
Militancy increases through self-organization—through the ways people organize themselves around action. This is in opposition to hierarchical forms of organizing, where those with power control how others are organized. Capitalism is one example of this, where economic forces and hierarchies determine social organization, and the state is another.
Militarization, on the other hand, refers to the forms of social organizing that stem from a military approach to struggle. A military approach to struggle focuses on the use of armed violence as the vector of social transformation, with a focus on winning engagements with the state, taking and holding territory, and winning through attrition.
A small group can choose to emphasize the military dimension of struggle independent from the class or communities they are part of, escalating their tactics into armed struggle without trying to raise the level of militancy of the class as a whole. This comes with various forms of social organization, like command chains and leadership structures, clandestinity, and vanguardism (the idea that a small group of dedicated people can lead a revolutionary force).
Militarization is a specialized approach to violence that de facto excludes that large majority of people who are unable or unwilling to be part of an armed struggle. It tends to reduce the terrain of struggle to a war of attrition with the state, which also serves to situate the armed resistance as the leaders over the resistance as a whole, further entrenching hiearchy and marginalization.
In their amazing book about the Syrian revolution and civil war, Burning Country, Leila al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab describe militarization as struggle becoming about “the scramble for weapons and money” that “transformed the revolution from a leaderless movement into a cacaphony of a thousand competing leaders, from horizontalism to a jostle of hierarchies.”
The shift to the military domain meant the struggle played out more on the state’s terms, as it had an airforce, artillery, and thousands of well-trained, loyal fighters. This led one Syrian revolutionary quoted in the book, Yara Nseir, to say that the idea of capturing land and building revolutionary territories was the wrong approach, since it favoured a more violent struggle and required support from foreign states.
We need to point out though that in Syria, the state really led the way in terms of escalation, deploying massive violence against demonstrators from the very beginning. This led Robin and Leila to conclude that: “Militarisation was not solely a natural human response to regime brutality; it also grew from the logical realisation that civil resistance was not enough, that the regime would only go if forced.” It is possible the Syrian revolution had no choice but to militarize, but it is still worth considering the consequences of being forced into this position.
In the book Revolutionary Echos from Syria, two anarchists from Aleppo discuss the first years of the Syrian revolution and how their areas came to fall outside regime control. They describe how armed struggle started with a handful of individuals who happened to have guns and who would come to defend demonstrations, exchanging fire with the security forces to give demonstrators a chance to get away. It was one role among others, and, in a country with mandatory military service, one a lot of people could fill. Other people pushed back against the security services with rocks and molotovs — guns weren’t the only tactic.
As armed struggle against the regime grew in intensity, the two comrades noticed that the majority of revolutionaries—themselves included—were losing their agency. The struggle was coming to be defined by the use of guns, and those with the guns were increasingly determining what happened. They covered their neighbourhood with posters calling for people to choose the molotov over the kalashnikov, to choose a violent civil resistance over militarization.
Soon, though, their area was liberated by the Free Syrian Army, a coalition of armed groups that came from outside the city. The regime forces were pushed out or withdrew, but then they surrounded the area with checkpoints and began shelling it. This forced the non-militarized revolutionaries into the role of humanitarian workers, trying to coordinate food, shelter, and medicine for people displaced by the mounting violence.
Armed groups felt they should be in control of liberated areas because of the risk they were taking. “There was a lot of conflict between the two groups, those who held onto the values and principles we had put forward at the start of the revolution, that this wasn’t a matter of vengeance, that it’s not a personal grudge against the regime, that it is not against the Alawite sect.” In the comrades’ opinion, the separation between the Free Syrian Army and the activists is what led to the collapse of the revolution—it became a movement of free generals, of army defectors, rather than one of free people.
It is not that these comrades were pacifists—far from it. They were militants who didn’t shy away from situations of violence. But the specialization of violence left them with no choice but to leave the country. This was especially true for a lot of women revolutionaries, as the comrades interviewed in the book experienced. As the armed struggle took over, so did conservative religious ideologies, and in many revolutionary areas, women found themselves struggling on two fronts — against the regime, yes, but also against the rigid patriarchy of the armed groups.
One of the comrades describes that as she fled to Turkey, a fighter stopped her car to check everyone’s passport, but then refused to look at hers because he didn’t want to see a woman’s face. To become literally invisible in a struggle you had sacrificed so much for must be devastating. This increasing role of religion might have been a dynamic anyway, but it was aggravated by the way militarization required support in money and weapons from abroad—and guess who the Gulf theocracies decided to finance.
The armed struggle and the rise of conservative religion within it laid the groundwork for the sectarian and religious turn the conflict came to be characterized by civil war. Some people like to write off the Syrian revolution by claiming it was always led by religious extremists, but this dynamic only became dominant as the level of militarized violence increased.
The political theorist and revolutionary Yassin al-Haj Saleh said it’s more accurate to think about there being three currents in the Syrian conflict rather than distinct phases: a revolution, a civil war, and a proxy war. All of these elements were present starting in 2011, but they were each dominant in different places and times and had a shifting relationship to each other. How long the revolutionary current held on is hard to say. If I had to say though, I’d say the door to revolution was closed after the fall of free Aleppo in late 2016 in the face of collaboration between the Assad regime, the Russian military, and the Rojava militias.
The anarchists comrades in Revolutionary Echos from Syria noted that revolution always contains contradictions and struggles between different currents, including between reactionaries and those who want to take the revolution further. This is echoed in a recent text from France responding to an article in the German anarchist journal Antisistema, where (discussing Ukraine) the authors argue that it is easy to position yourself above the messiness and contradictions of violent struggles when at a safe distance. But for an anarchist engagement to be possible, you have to wade into the mess, pick sides, and continue looking for liberatory potential even if collaborating with groups that aren’t liberatory in nature.
I want to pivot again and look at another example of armed struggle, this time in a western democracy. The Syrian revolution is a major reference point for my politics, and another big one is the autonomous movement in Italy in the 60s and 70s. This movement was strongly revolutionary and built a real counter-power to the state and corporations, going way beyond what was achieved in the short-lived but more famous May ’68 in Paris.
The autonomous movement was built in factories, universities, and working class neighbourhoods in an economic and social context shaped by rapid post-war industrialization and migration from the south into the industrial hubs of the north. The best book I’ve found on the subject is The Golden Horde. If you can get acces to it, I really recommend picking a few chapters to read to get a feel for the theoretical and tactical growth of the most powerful revolutionary movement in a western country of that era.iv
Two comrades, Franco Tomei and Paolo Pozzi, recalled a sequence of struggle in Milan in 1977. Many of the most prepared comrades had travelled to Rome for a major demonstration against a police killing there, but those who stayed in Milan wanted to take the streets too. Despite the lower numbers and lower preparation, some of the cadres in the march tried to push for a frontal attack on the police headquarters — and on the line of armed police in front of it.
Franco and Paolo write: “It only took a moment for me to realize that all the illegality that we had done so much to encourage as part of the movement was in the process of turning against the movement itself: it was becoming the exclusive domain of those who wanted to abandon any possibility of mass political organizing in order to follow the line of armed organizations and clandestinity.” This reminds me of the Syrian comrades I talked about before getting squeezed out of a movement they helped found.
Franco, Paolo, and their crew managed to convince the crowd to go attack an undefended government building instead, but they recall this was the last time the violence of the crowd focused on buildings or infrastructure rather than individuals. A cop was shot and killed during a demo shortly after, and gun fights at demos became the norm. Several demonstrators were killed. They write: “Mass participation collapsed as the level of confrontation and repression intensified.”
In the increasing absence of a mass movement, the most militant combattants were more isolated and were increasingly forced underground. There was a vibrant underground network in Italy in 1977. In just that year, there were over 2000 attacks, which ranged from arsons and bombings to assassinations and abductions.
Lucia Martini and Oreste Scalzone descibed armed struggle as an extension of the mass movement, as a way of fighting to the death against the capitalist restructuring that was breaking apart the mass element of the autonomous movement. But they admit this created a context where militants were left with fewer choices — either they worked with the official unions and the communist party to negotiate with the powerful or they went underground.
The Red Brigades were by far the largest underground group. They formed in 1970 and their first attack was a car arson against a company boss in January 1971, though they quickly moved on to larger arson attacks and then to abductions and the killing or injuring of company officials, politicians, and fascists.
In the early days of their existence, a common critique was that their actions were exemplary, meaning they didn’t do much on their own and just tried to serve as an example to other militants. This was a problem because the working class was so organized and militant at that period that they didn’t need some underground group to show them that violent struggle was necessary. Andrea Colombo notes that many of the Red Brigades’ claimed actions were similar to things that were carried out by other political actors or even spontaneously by working class militants.
Although the Red Brigades were still a major force in 1977, even going on to abduct and murder the head of a conservative political party and former prime minister the next year, 1975-1977 saw an explosion of small, nameless underground groups carrying out attacks. The large majority were targeting the property of fascists, politicians, bosses, and university leaders. Toni Negri wrote that “This practice of mass illegality was the best antidote to the existence of armed organizations and the strategy of armed struggle.” Small group, clandestine organizing to attack property succeeded in generalizing, while attacks on individuals did not. (Which is not to say that targeted attacks on individuals are wrong and should never be done.)
The article by Common Cause that I mentioned before goes on to argue that increasing militancy requires careful attention to conditions. Pushing for more violent tactics can actually undermine militancy if the mass of people participating in movements find them alienating or hard to understand, or if they push the state to ratchet up the level of violence experienced by all the people in struggle beyond what they are prepared to deal with. Italy in the mid to late 70s is a perfect example of that.
The state responded to the militancy of the autonomous movement through what it called the Strategy of Tension. This involved encouraging rather than suppressing violent struggle with the goal of creating a feeling of insecurity among the population that causes them to want a strong government — the state then used this atmosphere to pass new repressive laws. The Strategy of tension included false flag attacks carried out by fascists and cops targeting the population.v These attacks started even before the existence of the Red Brigades, who at one point went so far as to say that any attack claimed in their name that involved explosives was false flag.
The first major false flag attack was the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan that killed 17 people. It was determined to have been carried out by a fascist organization to delegitimate the left, but the state arrested over 80 anarchists in response to that event, and even executed one anarchist by throwing him from a fourth floor window during interrogation. (The police commissioner responsible for that execution was later killed by an underground group.)
Like in Syria, we can see that the state favoured a militarized conflict. It wanted to polarize the situation and reduce the terrain of struggle to either armed conflict or institutional reform, which, as we have seen, pushes out most participants.
Sometimes, resistance movements share this goal explicitly, though. One quick example of that is the FLN in the Algerian independence movement, who used attacks on the French civilian population to militarize the struggle, making it easier to consolidate power in their party. The strategy of targeting random civilians was meant to provoke a disproportionate response that only the FLN, as a clandestine armed party, was set up to survive. They even went as far as joining the French colonizer forces in killing other members of the independence movement who didn’t fall in line—the FLN killed thousands of their own supporters and other independentists. This successfully left them as the defacto leaders of “The Resistance” and therefore in the best position to capture the state when the French pulled out. The FLN went on to rule as a dictatorship for decades. (I don’t want to get into contemporary examples of this, but I’m sure we don’t have to think too hard to find examples of the FLN strategy being used by other groups.)vi
We’ve covered a lot of ground so far. I hope the arguments have been clear, but I’d like to spell out in simple terms some conclusions. To do this, I’m going to draw on a classic anarchist text, Armed Joy, which was written by Alfredo Bonnano in Italy in 1977.
Bonnano called for “the generalization of the armed clash” and warned against “the danger of specialization and militarization that a restricted minority of militants intended to impose on the tens of thousands of comrades who were struggling with every possible means.” He wanted “to prevent the many actions carried out against the men and structures of power by comrades each day from being drawn into the planned logic of an armed party, such as the Red Brigades.”
Bonnano wrote that “a practice of liberation and destruction can come forth from a joyful logic of struggle, not a martial schematic rigidity within the pre-established canons of a directing group.” He wrote that the vanguard armed groups fell into what he called the quantitative delusion, in which leaders feel empowered to make stronger demands based on the number of their followers. But he points out that in heightened moments of struggle like May 68, it wasn’t numbers that were lacking, but rather the qualitative dimension of struggle—the ideas, the self-organizing, the tactical versatility.
Bonnano calls for people to engage in struggle as though it were play, which is at odds with the quantitative logic of both capitalism and the military party. He imagines new structures based on the self-organization of struggle: these structures “take form suddenly, with only the minimum strategic orientation necessary. No frills, no long analytical premises, no complex supporting theories. They attack. Comrades identify with these structures. They reject the organizations that give power, equilibrium, waiting, death. Their action is a critique of the wait-and-see suicidal position of these organizations.”
He continues, “Joy emerges from the play of destructive action, from the recognition of the profound tragedy this implies and the awareness of the strength and enthusiasm that is capable of slaying the cobwebs of death.” So if the struggle is to be violent, it is best to engage in it directly, joyfully, without mediation and without the imposition of anyone else’s strategy. Because theory emerges from the experience of struggle, it follows action, and destructive actions emerge organically from the experience of oppression, because joy is the opposite of what this society imposes on us.
However, Bonnano cautions that, “Those who use these tools must not become slaves to them. Just as those who do not know how to use them must not become slaves to those who do. The dictatorship of the tool is the worst kind of dictatorship.”
This is eerily similar to a quote by Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz, who wrote the foundational text of the local council movement and who was captured and executed by the Assad regime in 2013. He wrote: “In the coming period, the movement will face different threats: that human beings will get tired of revolution and its impact on their material needs and family life, or that an increasing use of weapons will make the revolution a hostage of the gun.”vii
Omar, too, wanted victory through self-organization and by millions of individuals stealing back their daily life from the powerful—this is not done by winning battles. Omar wrote: “It’s clear that the more self-organizing grows in power, the more able those deep social bonds will be to defend themselves and others against the repressive violence of the authorities, against moral slippage, and against that the use of arms will slowly make the revolution and society as a whole hostages of the gun.”
2) From the 2016 text The Most Important Thing. “‘The most important thing,’ my friend said on our way home, ‘is to destroy the state. The Syrian revolution went very far and a big reason for this is that we were able to completely destroy the state in many areas. Even if we can’ t prevent the counter revolution, destroying the state makes whatever comes after much weaker.’” https://north-shore.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/themostimportant.pdf
4) I was working from the French edition of the Golden Horde, and all translations to English are mine. The same was true for Revolutionary Echos from Syria.
5) It’s tricky to talk about false flag attacks, since the contemporary left in North America is so quick to call any militancy false flag or provocation. However, this embarassing situation should not stop us from looking at how they state has approached militancy elsewhere. The Strategy of Tension was the policy of the Italian state, and many false flag attacks have been confirmed.
6) Most histories of the FLN or the Algerian independence movement will confirm their efforts to consolidate power, but one book is The Insurgent Among Us, by Remy Mauduit. Here is a short review (in an enemy publication) that summarizes it: https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/a-war-to-the-death-the-ugly-underside-of-an-iconic-insurgency/. The FLN notably fought a (rather one-sided) civil war against the Messalists, another Algerian independence party that refused to join them, in which at least 10,000 people were killed. They revealed information about rival groups to the French, so that they could be arrested (one example is the fate of the communist group, Red Resistance). The FLN also extensively used torture against its own members who were suspected of disloyalty. All of this is in addition to the use of indiscriminate violence against noncombattants in order to provoke massive retaliation against the population, liquidating the civil opposition and forcing people to pick sides between the FLN and the French.
Since the commencement of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, millions around the world have taken to the streets in support of Palestine against the genocidal Zionist entity. We are, globally, in an unprecedented moment of anti-imperialist mobilisation, which threatens not only the Zionist occupation but the colonial powers that uphold it.
This text was written through the summer and early autumn of 2024 from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory (so-called Southern Ontario, Canada), where people, many new to the left, have been facing intensified violence and harassment from both police and Zionists. Protests are regularly met with arrests and other attacks, which have created a climate of fear among attendees and organisers.
At the same time, that fear, combined with a disconnect from previous generations of struggle and an often-unchallenged fear of militancy, has led to practices that end up putting our comrades in more danger. This text hopes to address one such recurring issue.
what is bad-jacketing?
“Bad-jacketing” (or “cop-jacketing,” “fed-jacketing,” or “snitch-jacketing”) is the practice of accusing people of being a cop, informant, fascist, or other kind of bad actor on specious or non-existent evidence.
The term has been used since at least the 1960s, where it primarily described COINTELPRO operations that bad-jacketed legitimate members of the Black Panther Party and other organisations. It was, ironically, rumours from infiltrators consolidating their own positions that led to organisations not only isolating but, in some cases, severely beating or executing innocent individuals.
why is bad-jacketing a problem?
A 2015 text titled “No badjacketing: the state wants to kill us; let’s not cooperate” by the Twin Cities GDC, Local 14, says:
At the least, it pushes away people who have, or are willing, to do work and make sacrifices for the movements.
Worse, it silences entire groups by sowing mistrust within them and making discussion of strategy and tactics difficult.
Very commonly, those accused of acting as informants become so alienated from their accusers that they actually become snitches.
Worst-case scenario, people die. That worst-case scenario is all too common and real, and there is a famous regional history to it as well, in the case of Anna Mae Aquash, a Native American woman from Canada who had worked and sacrificed tireless for the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
Southern Ontario in 2024 is, of course, not the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Our contemporary movements do not act on false accusations of snitching by killing the accused. And while we know that the police are trying to infiltrate us and turn people into informants, the vast majority of these accusations are definitely not coming from people on the state’s payroll.
The biggest threat that bad-jacketing poses to us, here and now, is that it singles people out for state repression. Militants are more likely to be on the receiving end of these accusations, but also, anecdotally, people of colour, neurodivergent people, and anyone who “does not belong” (and, of course, people who fall into all of those categories). In doing so, the people who make these accusations in effect carry out the work of the state. They reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the outside world and push people out – often, the very people our movements are supposed to be fighting for. By pushing them out, bad-jacketing then denies support to people who are often already at heightened risk of criminalisation. It makes people into easy targets, signaling to the police that they can get away with brutalising, arresting, and jailing someone without outcry from the community.
During the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in the US, posts flooded our feeds, warning of “agents provocateur.” Decontextualised videos of police unloading bricks spread like wildfire among both far-right and far-left social media networks. Fascist fear-mongering about out-of-town “ANTIFA” inciting riots trickled down into leftist hyper-vigilance against “white outside agitators.” These warnings often ventured into the realm of conspiracy theories, where protests with unknown organisers or cop cars on fire were signs of a police set-up.
All this has had devastating consequences. The normalisation of this paranoid urge to see false flags around every corner has empowered people “on the left” to share images and openly work to identify individuals carrying out illegal actions. Contrary to what they may believe, these people’s efforts to “root out infiltrators” have in many cases now become the actual basis for the state to arrest and jail its opponents.
Beyond that, bad-jacketing leads to feelings of insecurity and distrust that can tear apart a movement – even without any real infiltrators being involved. Both online and on the ground, we can hear breathless accusations that someone at a protest is an undercover Zionist operative, often for no reason beyond that “they make us look bad.” Zionists, constantly on the lookout for ammunition against us, gladly stoke the flames. Projects like the “Shirion Collective,” a Zionist doxing campaign that claimed on social media to be training undercover operatives, see and celebrate when the left eats its own. We must be equally vigilant against these psychological attacks, which are more subtle and yet can do more damage than any one undercover’s testimony.
“professionally trained to make us look bad” – Kristina Beverlin on Isaiah Willoughby
On October 5, 2021, Isaiah Willoughby, a Black man, was sentenced to two years in prison for lighting a fire outside an abandoned police precinct in Seattle in June 2020. Willoughby acted because of the murders of Manuel Ellis, his former roommate, and George Floyd at the hands of the police.
When it happened, Kristina Beverlin, a white woman who now wears a kufiya and a “Free Palestine” hat in her profile picture, immediately blasted out a photo of Willoughby. She tweeted that he “just tried to start a fire at the abandoned precinct” and called on “everyone in Seattle to retweet the photo of this man.”
In subsequent tweets, she stated her belief that “SPD wanted the precinct to catch fire to make the peaceful protesters look bad, after SPD had looked like monsters for days.”
It was her initial tweet that appeared in a court affidavit against Willoughby, and her photo that the police disseminated to identify him. In other words, it was this white woman’s insistence that the police wanted someone to set fire to the precinct, and that anyone who did so could only have been directed by the police, that sent a Black man to prison. Like any other white vigilante, the self-deputised liberal peace police will discipline, with violence if necessary, Black or people of colour who step out of line. Unlike any other, she does it in the name of anti-racism, with an #ACAB hashtag in the same breath.
Similarly, social media users widely disseminated photos of a white woman suspected to have carried out the arson of the Atlanta Wendy’s where police murdered Rayshard Brooks. That she was white was proof to them that bad actors with no connection to the movement were behind property destruction during the uprisings, and that without those bad actors, the protests would have been peaceful. As it turned out, the woman in question was Natalie White, who Brooks had called his girlfriend on the night of his death. Two Black men, Chisom Kingston and John Wesley Wade, were later charged for the Wendy’s arson as well. As of December 2023, White and Kingston had accepted plea deals for probation, a fine, and community service, while Wade was scheduled to go to trial.
In both these examples, the people who sought to identify state agents “instigating” at protests were ultimately the people who acted as cops. The gravity of these actions cannot be overstated – they, and we, already know that police kill and torture Black people on the streets, and prison guards do the same against their captives on the inside.
Following the May 2022 leak of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Jane’s Revenge shared a communiqué about the fire-bombing of a predatory anti-choice “pregnancy centre” in Madison. The action sparked the usual uproar among the right about “woke ANTIFA terrorists” waging war against Christianity. But rather than defend the action’s righteousness, much of the left instead occupied itself with speculation about whether cursive graffiti and a “too-neat” circle-A meant that it was a false flag. The underlying logic here was that if something looked “too perfect,” if it made the right too angry, it couldn’t possibly be real. We may talk of rioting against the Supreme Court, but no one seriously means it.
In response to the right-wing outrage campaign about Jane’s Revenge, the FBI offered a bounty of up to $25,000 for information. Days later, in January 2023, the US Department of Justice indicted two people for graffiti on anti-abortion centres in Florida, actions that were also broadcast through Jane’s Revenge. The Florida investigation eventually produced in a total of four arrests, all but one of the defendants being women of colour. Worse, the Florida 4 were prosecuted under the FACE Act, a law intended to protect abortion access. Meanwhile, an investigation that involved 11 different state agencies and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force culminated in the March 2023 arrest of Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury for the Madison fire-bombing. Though the right jumped at the opportunity to gloat, widely publicising the defendants’ photos and personal information, charges against Roychowdhury and the Florida 4 received little attention from the left. Roychowdhury pled guilty after being denied pre-trial release and was sentenced to 90 months (7.5 years) in federal prison on April 10, 2024. Three of the Florida 4, after taking felony pleas that avoided convictions under the FACE Act, were also handed down prison time on September 12 of this year, ranging from 30 days to 1 year and 1 day. Popular support may not have prevented those prosecutions, but the significance of solidarity shouldn’t be understated. Instead, much of the left’s message to militants turns out to have been: “we’ll call you feds, and when it turns out we were wrong, we’ll abandon you anyways.”
Though we never had our own Third Precinct moment, left networks in Ontario fell victim to many of the same conspiratorial impulses. Reposted Instagram stories warned of “suspicious piles of bricks” left as bait near march routes and even “black blocs from Montréal” coming into town to start riots.
While, regrettably, no such riot materialised here in 2020, the bad-jacketing of the black bloc has a long history in Southern Ontario, as in other regions. A particularly egregious example came in the wake of the Toronto G20 in 2010, where liberals convinced themselves that the property damage was all an inside job and set out looking for proof. They singled out a muscular white man in combat boots and “cop-like” black pants for looking suspicious, digging up every image of him they could find. All of this crowd-sourced evidence built a convenient case for the police, who arrested and jailed the target of their suspicions.
A pattern emerges: subsequent repression draws only a fraction of the concern that the broad left had earlier put into interrogating the legitimacy of an action. This is one of the most insidious functions of badjacketing and disavowal – it aids the state project of disappearing people. Speculation about false flags, made exponentially worse by social media and algorithms that egg on endless engagement, steals away energy that could be spent preparing for the repression to come. It turns actions into abstractions ripe for every person to project their own arguments. That abstraction removes militants’ humanity from the picture, enjoining us to forget that real people, putting their lives on the line for the movement, must have lit the match or thrown the brick. The collective failure to adequately show up for each defendant and prisoner in this section – and many more not named – goes beyond a culture of disposability. It is a mass forgetting that makes each of us who partakes in it complicit in the work of the police, prisons, and the carceral state to not only extinguish our resistance but also erase our memory of its very possibility – and our memory and connection to the people who’ve sacrificed to keep that possibility alive.
when people are occupied, resistance is justified
The movement for Palestine has long been one of the most hyper-surveiled and attacked. Only when it comes to the Palestinian struggle will even the most mild, pacifist expressions of support land someone on McCarthyist blacklists like Canary Mission, extensive repositories of personal information stretching back years. It is no wonder, then, that people are – correctly – concerned about being targeted by our enemies, which include not just the settler colonial state itself but also Zionists who self-organise outside of it.
Unfortunately, this has once again meant a dangerous resurgence of bad-jacketing. In February 2024, social media posts from the “Shirion Collective” sparked mass outrage and panic among supporters of Palestine. Announcing an “Operation Global Insight,” the posts claimed to be launching an “undercover operation” in key locations such as Toronto. “Volunteers willing to wear keffiyehs and walk [masked] in these demonstrations” would “be provided an hour long basic training by one of [their] ex-Mossad team leads.” Further, “individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in [the] operation.”
Though the collective is, without a question, real, there is plenty of reason to believe that the reaction to the post was disproportionate to their actual abilities. Sensationalist claims of Mossad ties in an emoji-studded public tweet do not paint a picture of a sophisticated intelligence operation. Neither do their existing “exposés” on social media, which, despite techno-babble buzzwords about AI, are largely limited to reposting other people’s footage and open-source information that anyone with access to Google could easily retrieve. The description of walking around at protests and “law enforcement presence” suggests no actual knowledge of how Palestine solidarity groups organise or bring in new members. A few people with bad intentions joining a march of hundreds or thousands, where every angle is already recorded and streamed live on Instagram, can hardly be characterised as “infiltration.”
If that were not enough on its own, the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist research group, shared internal screenshots from Shirion’s Telegram channel that confirmed the post’s real purpose was to sow fear and distrust. One Shirion volunteer is quoted as saying:
We won’t need to do anything. They will:
Tone down
Police their own
Maybe even beat up their own just because they think those are us
That summary of their goals succinctly re-states the risks that bad-jacketing poses to our movements.
Even before the Shirion scare, claims that someone was secretly a Zionist or cop were already commonplace. People who wear the symbols or fly the flags of the Palestinian resistance have been accused of being “agitators,” sent by Zionist organisations like B’nai Brith to make protestors look bad. Over-the-shoulder glimpses of someone’s phone or poor fashion choices have been presented as evidence that a protestor is actually an undercover. Online, Palestinians have been accused of being Zionist sockpuppets off of little more than bad feelings. And, naturally, even minor disagreements or political critiques will end in allegations that so-and-so is a fed. While, thankfully, conspiratorial crowds here have not at least yet handed over one of our own to the cops, these accusations are sometimes accompanied by calls to act against someone. In one case recently, a queer person of colour known to other attendees was followed, harassed, and filmed aggressively at a protest because someone had decided for no clear reason that they were a Zionist in disguise.
As the police continue to crack down on us, it is all the more crucial that we learn from the mistakes of the recent past. We cannot let our rightful vigilance lead us to attack our own comrades. Nor should we water down our political lines, our demands, or our tactics for fear that the media and the right will smear us – they do that regardless. It may not be possible to eliminate some, faint chance that an infiltrator is behind a resistance flag, a punch thrown at a Zionist, a brick through a window, but far more likely is that some brave person, who has chosen to more boldly and unabashedly confront this genocidal system and its supporters, is responsible. For that, they deserve our support and our solidarity against whatever repression may come, not our condemnation.
knowing our enemies
An over-emphasis on undercovers may lead to an under-emphasis on other security vulnerabilities. Rather than acting according to a one-size-fits-all checklist or, worse, reacting to threats only as they appear, it’s important to proactively identify and individually study threats in order to understand how to address them. That is to say, what – specifically – is your enemy trying to do? How do they do it? The process of answering these questions is known as threat modeling.
Accounts like Shirion, Leviathan, or StopAntisemitism are real threats, as any of their victims know all too well. But OSINT, as well as everyday acquaintances, are much likelier to be the source of their information.
Your personal Instagram or TikTok page might already give away your identity, the protests you attend, your work or school, and the identities of your friends and family members. Your employer might publicly share profiles, including photos, of all of their staff on their website. Tools like PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID allow anyone willing to pay for them to run facial recognition technology and search the Internet for a given face.
If you’re a student, a Zionist classmate could easily recognise you from criticising racism in class and look up your personal information in a school database. A right-wing former colleague could remember you for being politically outspoken at your shared workplace. Knowing the true identities of everyone at a march will do nothing to prevent doxing if, for example, that march is being streamed online, your face is exposed, and your social media is public.
what about the real infiltrators and provocateurs?
Infiltration – actual infiltration, where someone comes into our organisations and our lives, pretending to be our friend, only to hand information over to the state – should not be taken lightly. But our baseline understanding of it often takes the form of a few convenient tropes, reinforcing existing biases against militancy and justifying dismissiveness towards criticism. These tropes prevent us from truly knowing our enemies.
The late Matt Cicero wrote that:
[there is a] misconception that all infiltrators act as agents provocateurs who try to manipulate activists into taking illegal, violent, unpopular, and ineffective actions. But as Gary T. Marx points out in his theory of social movement infiltration, social movements are damaged by “opposing organizational, tactical, and resource mobilization tasks.” In other words, infiltrators suppress social movements by fomenting divisions and internal conflicts, diverting energies toward defending the movement rather than pursuing broader social goals, sowing misinformation or damaging reputations, obstructing the supply of resources (money, transport, meeting spaces), or sabotaging planned actions. Many infiltrators are thus better described as agents suppressants, who are there to gather intelligence and channel groups away from militant action. […]
Incidents of provocation can be high-profile and sensational, such as undercover police posing as members of the black bloc at Montebello. This can lead activists to paint all militant action as the work of agents provocateurs, even if there is no evidence that this is true. Conversely, because of the low-profile of most agents suppressants, activists are often unaware of their role and impact in pacifying and controlling social movements.
The spectre of the provocateur itself, then, carries out the suppressant role of “put[ting] a damper on evolving movement militancy.”
The single-minded focus on the agent provocateur often goes hand-in-hand with a short-term view of state repression as having only two main goals:
Criminalising individuals in order to take them off the board while making an example out of them; and
Smearing the movement in the media, stigmatising it to the public, by associating it with criminality.
But as Cicero describes, the state is additionally engaged in a long-term project of suppression and counter-insurgency. The police cannot arrest every dissident – but they don’t need to jail us all to successfully maintain the colonial order. The central goal of counter-insurgency is to preserve legitimacy and control.
To that end, some further goals of state repression include, but are not limited to:
Exploiting existing tensions in the movement in order to sow discord and distrust;
Defanging the movement by discouraging forms of action that exceed accepted norms of protest; and
Collecting intelligence to inform repressive operations, for the purposes of criminalisation and suppression.
We should examine the issue of infiltration with all of these goals in mind. David Gilbert says, “[t]here is no simple litmus test to differentiate sincere militancy from provocation or honest caution from suppression.” The same extends to the search for infiltrators more broadly. Most of the time, the only truly conclusive proof that someone is a police infiltrator comes from seeing the evidence against you that they’ve handed over to the state after you’ve been charged. That isn’t of much help – by the time you have those court documents in your possession, the damage will already have been done. That is assuming that the information they collect ever goes to court at all. RCMP documents from the G20 suggest that there may have been as many as 12 undercover officers. Far fewer than that were ever exposed by name, and the remainders’ identities may never be known.
People who’ve experienced the profound betrayal of finding out that someone they knew was an undercover or informant often end up drawing conclusions that are diametrically opposed from one another. But a common thread persists through most of their takeaways: there are few ways to prove for certain that someone is a cop, and many ways that the hunt for infiltrators itself instead undermines our work and furthers the state’s goals.
Accordingly, we should turn our energies to proactively building a security culture that protects us from both infiltration and other security threats. Much has been written on this subject already. In short: solid security practices should mean that an undercover cop is prevented from gathering meaningful information even if we do not know who they are, and that security risks are dealt with regardless of whether an individual is specifically acting on behalf of the state. If you do everything right, a plainclothes still won’t know who among the bloc smashed that ATM, even if they saw it happen with their own eyes.
As the ever-green “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” reminds us, many of the greatest threats to our movements may not officially collaborate with the police either. In the Toronto anti-fascist scene alone, multiple people accused of misogyny and sexual violence/gender-based violence later went on to renounce the left, consort with their former opponents, and attack (verbally, physically, and with legal threats) their former comrades. None of those people, to our knowledge, were undercover cops, nor were they secretly fascists all along. Looking for a non-existent smoking gun to show that someone was lying about their identity would – and did – only delay people from taking necessary action against them when the myriad of other red flags should have been more than enough.
naming our enemies
The epidemic of bad-jacketing is inseparable from the problem of peace policing. Many organisers advocate for a policy of de-escalation at all costs, even in the face of potentially deadly violence from police and Zionists. They speak of “agitators” who disrupt and “escalate” “peaceful protests” – a nebulous euphemism that they apply to both the Zionist who shows up with a knife and the militant who comes prepared to fight back.
We should be clear: our enemies are not “agitators.”
Our enemies are the police, who brutalise us and lock us away to enforce settler colonial order. Our enemies are Zionists and other white supremacists, who assault and harass us in the streets, and stalk and threaten us in our everyday lives. Our enemies are politicians and other establishment liberals, who carry out colonial and imperialist genocides, here, in Palestine, and around the world, all the while crying crocodile tears about a so-called humanitarian crisis that they created. Our enemies are legacy media institutions, who smear resistance as terrorism and mobilise support for each of these attacks.
We must take care to differentiate between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and to distinguish between enemies and potential friends. Too often, we see organisers reject co-strugglers in order to appeal to liberal institutions that will never be on our side. They may frame the conservative path as the only strategic option, rejecting open support for armed struggle, militant direct action, and anything else that would create “bad optics.” Disagreements from co-strugglers are treated as threats worse than that of liberal media, who we must appeal to for sympathy, or Zionists and cops, who we must appease for our safety.
When our enemies attack us anyways, these organisers pin the blame not on the perpetrators but on the co-strugglers who deviate from their line. They forget that to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing. Our enemies do not strive for unity with us, knowing that ours is an antagonistic contradiction, knowing that our collective liberation requires their annihilation. It is better that we, too, abandon any notions of conciliation and recognise our enemies as enemies.
For all these reasons, we urge people to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. Abandon the euphemisms and name our enemies. When we struggle through our differences, let us do so with a shared understanding of what we are for and what we are against.
by every means necessary
Not only is bad-jacketing dangerous, it is disempowering and demobilising. It forecloses entire realms of possibility, insisting that we limit ourselves to the same set of legal, non-violent tactics. It threatens state violence against people who do not comply with those limitations being imposed upon their actions. Many people cannot take the risk of arrest. But something being risky does not make it impossible. Just because some of us cannot act does not mean that no one should.
While its meaning is sometimes lost, respecting a “diversity of tactics” means refusing to impose non-violence upon our co-strugglers and declining to condemn those that destroy property or take up arms. As a group of autonomous UCLA students writes in the wake of vicious assaults on their encampment:
We have noticed a trend of the desire to appear peaceful for the media taking precedent over the right of protestors to self defense, mirroring the world’s response to Palestinians’ right to self defense in the face of blatant fascist attacks and eliminationist violence.
We cannot allow our resistance movement to demand obedience over safety in the same way as western imperialist forces against the colonized.
Without drawing false equivalence with a people living under active bombardment and military invasion, the liberal urge that leads people to denounce burning precincts or fake clinics as “giving police an excuse to crack down” is the same that denounces the Palestinian resistance for “giving Israel an excuse to destroy Gaza.” We must refuse any invitation to distance ourselves as the “good,” “peaceful,” “innocent” ones. Instead, we affirm the right of Palestinians and all people to resist colonial domination by any means necessary.
We would remind our co-strugglers, too, that our enemies do not care about the truth, and they have no conscience. We see this in the viciousness with which the police enforce an unprecedented ban on overpass protests in Toronto, where people rallied on the sidewalk to wave flags and chant. We see it in the eagerness with which a long list of electeds, including the Prime Minister himself, leapt to denounce a protest of a Jewish hospital that never happened. We see it in the adamance with which Zionists call the very existence of Palestinians a terrorist threat against them, no matter how young, no matter how innocent, no matter how non-violent. Right-wing propagandists will fabricate scandals out of thin air, and the establishment will happily take up their version of the story. Even if each and every one of us swears to turn the other cheek to our assailants, as long as we challenge the colonial status quo, in our enemies’ eyes, we will never be peaceful.
Another path is possible, and the movement to Stop Cop City sets a powerful example. In February, a journalist asked spokesperson Mary Hooks of Vote to Stop Cop City whether organisers condemned arsons of police vehicles. She answered:
Hell no. No. Not at all, And to be honest with you, Atlanta deserves more than that. Real talk, they’re lucky, this city is lucky, this country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all.
But some of us, we cannot take that risk. And those who can, bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows, I’ll sit with my lighter and be like, damn. […]
We need every, every means necessary to deal in the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care, no, and I would imagine my comrades would say the same. No, not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every quote-unquote proper, democratic process.
The movement’s aboveground and clandestine elements are two parts of a whole. Both are necessary for our victory.
Listen to Isaiah Willoughby speak in his own words on Kite Line Radio:
A demo for Palestine attacked Concordia University Sunday evening. Many windows of luxury stores on Sainte-Catherine street were also broken. The police were kept at a distance with the help of molotov cocktails.
he No Trace Project is launching a new initiative, the Anti-Repression Talks, to encourage discussion of surveillance and security issues within and between informal anarchist networks, on an international level. We believe that many anti-repression practices are more powerful when they are carried out across a network, rather than only by specific affinity groups.
The Anti-Repression Talks will be a series of sessions, each on a different topic, and each lasting three months. During a session, participants are encouraged to form local study groups with people they trust to discuss the topic of the session — we provide resources and discussion points to help kickstart those discussions. At the end of a session, an international online chat takes place, where participants can anonymously meet to discuss their thoughts and findings. After a session, its findings are published on the No Trace Project website, including any materials contributed by study groups and a summary of the online chat.
The first session, Anti-Repression Talks #1, will address the topic of preparing for physical surveillance and will take place in October, November, and December 2024, with the online chat taking place on January 4, 2025. The findings will be published here.
Physical surveillance
In the past decades, the surveillance capabilities of State actors have greatly diversified, thanks in part to new technological developments such as video surveillance, mobile phones and DNA sampling. Despite this, physical surveillance — the direct observation of people or activities for the purpose of gathering information — is still widely used by State actors, in particular in cases where other surveillance techniques are not effective. Our Threat Library references examples of the use of physical surveillance against anarchists.
We believe that the State is likely to use some degree of physical surveillance in contexts where high-impact anarchist direct actions are being investigated — for example in a city where an arson recently took place and the news of the arson has been posted on anarchist websites. We also believe that in many contexts, anarchists do not sufficiently prepare for the risk of physical surveillance. Preparing for physical surveillance isn’t straight-forward, it requires developing a specific skill set, but it is possible, and it is the only thing that will help you if cops are tailing you on the way to a sensitive meeting or action.
Local study groups
We encourage participants to form local study groups to discuss the topic of the session, from October to December 2024. During the session, if they wish to do so, study groups can send us any materials that they deem relevant to the discussion. We will add such materials to the session findings where other groups will be able to see them.
We recommend that study groups read the following resources:
The zine Measures Against Surveillance for an overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by police in urban areas, with examples from Germany.
The book The Theory of Covert Surveillance for a more comprehensive overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by private investigators (and most police agencies), with examples from the United Kingdom.
The book Surveillance Countermeasures for a comprehensive overview of physical surveillance countermeasures: surveillance detection (including counter-surveillance) and anti-surveillance. Once you understand the logic of the enemy’s physical surveillance techniques, we highly recommend this book to start learning countermeasures that you can apply in your life and projects.
And we suggest the following discussion points, which we encourage study groups to supplement with their own:
From the recommended resources, what have you found difficult to understand or apply?
How can we support each other in developing and practicing physical surveillance countermeasures?
If you detect physical surveillance, which activities or projects would you want to continue and which would you want to put on pause? If you stop meeting with your friends to prevent the surveillance operation from mapping your social network, how can your network help you feel less isolated?
If you detect physical surveillance, how can you communicate this to your network in a way that doesn’t alert the surveillance operation that they have been detected? How can such communication happen in a way that doesn’t bolster paranoia?
International online chat
An international online chat will take place on January 4, 2025. It will be open to anyone, so we ask that you do not share any identifying information or discuss anything that you wouldn’t want to see published. It will be limited to text messages (no audio or video). Discussions will be held in English, with live translation available to and from French and Spanish — please get in touch if you are able to help with live translation in these languages or others.
For instructions on how to join the chat, see here.
After 18 years of incredible anarchist theatre, the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival collective has decided to stop producing the festival.
We want to thank all the artists, volunteers, former collective members and the public who attended, for their generous contributions and support.
This was an all-volunteer festival with no government or corporate sponsorship.
We will gladly assist other anarchists who would like to mount another festival.
Comments Off on How to Unload a Coal Train: A Simple Guide for Guerilla Coal Train OperatorsTagged with: How-to
Sep212024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Here is a zine detailing how anti-extractivists can disrupt coal rail infrastructure utilising the tactic of unloading coal trains. Each page has been uploaded as an image.
Comments Off on Montreal Summer Reflection: Liberalism, Its Counter-Revolutionary Dynamics & Peace Policing
Sep162024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
The summer of Montreal came crashing into full force as the encampment movement bloomed across university campuses around the world. For many of us, it was the first time being apart of something bigger than us, challenging the status quo and experiencing a level of violence both from the institution and state. Even with all of this, and the many strides that were made, the connections that were made, we aren’t without fault and mistakes.
As I write this, I made the conscious decision to submit this piece anonymously both because of fear of being tied to the encampment movement and because of organizational entities that deemed themselves as leaders, who made existing within the camps an increasingly hostile environment. I believe the act of anonymity will allow a more honest reflection.
Liberalism & Counter-Revolutionary Dynamics:
What sets our tactics apart from liberals isn’t simply a matter of “diversity of tactics” that many of us might believe, but rather a fundamental disagreement on how material societal change occurs.
Liberalism promotes change through established institutions and democratic processes, it advocates for reform, with the current existing system that we spend so much of our time protesting and resisting against. The liberal agenda hopes to stabilize and improve the current system rather than overthrowing it.
Contrasting this with our tactics of militancy and a framework built on direct action, we reject the premise of incremental approaches and reform. We are in favour of immediate and significant upheaval, we are driven by the belief that freedom will only come through material radical change. I.e. real disruptive protests, strikes and economic sabotage to name a few.
It’s liberalism that attempts to convince us that the rule of bourgeois law and so-called “democratic institutions” are worth engaging with.
When in reality these rotten, immoral institutions are what brought the indescribable suffering of Palestinians, these institutions are the very tool that finances and supports genocide.
The summer has left a mark of a revolutionary zeal that ought to be put to use. It’s liberalism that comes to us with empty fluffy words, that come to us in the form of three to four letter orgs, these are the entities that attempt to delay us and prevent us from the kind of radical shift that has been needed within the global north since ’48.
We will not be convinced that this system is worth saving. We have no intention to reinforce structures that exploit us and our comrades around the globe by coming to a negotiation table. We have no intention in saving this system, our intention is to overthrow it by any means necessary, exactly what has been asked of us by the resistance in Gaza.
Peace Policing:
What has been a common reoccurring protest method, something that is not unique to Montreal, is the role of Yellow Vest/Protest Marshals. What was originally supposed to be a shield between protesters and police, has now become the first line of offense FOR the police. Myself and many others have witnessed the way yellow vests work in unison with police by giving out protest routes beforehand, controlling the way protesters express their anger and to maintain the dominance of a unelected hierarchal leadership to a specific organization. This past summer, all that the yellow vests have had to offer us is the strangling of enthusiasm, effectiveness and the inability to exhaust police resources correctly.
Orgs and groups who use this method of crowd control offer no protections and no culture of de-arresting. What the yellow vests accomplish is creating an environment that allows the job of the police be done for them. These protest marshals actively sabotage efforts of escalation in the hopes that playing by the rules will have their movements be seen as more “legitimate”. Yet, when has any demand been delivered by legitimacy alone? The mere act of standing against genocide has left a sour taste in the mouths of our enemies, is this who we must legitimize ourselves to?
I will close this section off with questions I have yet to find answers to. Who do the yellow vests protect when their back is to the police as they face the crowd? Who do they represent when they pull people off of sidewalks and pick up the trash cans that were thrown on to the ground, snuffing out our ability to move freely, and who do they mirror when they deicide how we protest?
Closing Off:
These past months have put us in an incredible position, one where we can reorient ourselves not to be stagnant. The movement must come together from many different fronts, where we can stand united not as a single banner but rather a mosaic of resistance, where the final blow against those who stand against us be laid.
My comrades and soon to be accomplices, there is no shortage of work.
With everything we know now, with all the mistakes that have been made, let us embark in the next part of this act, and may we be better equipped to handle whatever is thrown at us.
On December 8, 2023, the RCMP announced that they had arrested two Ontario residents, Matthew Althorpe and Kristoffer Nippak, and laid a number of charges against them stemming from their activities in various neo-Nazi projects in Ontario. In the first instance, the two men were charged with “participation in the activities of a terrorist group,” namely the Atomwaffen Division, an organization classified as terrorist in Canada. In its press release, the RCMP also mentioned two lesser-known projects: the Terrorgram Collective and Active Club Canada. The former is described as “a group of Telegram channels that share neo-fascist ideology and that produce and share manuals on how to carry out racially-motivated violence.” The Active Club is described as follows:
The Active Club Network are decentralized cells of white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups, which are active in many U.S. states, with multiple chapters in other nations, including Canada. The network was created in January 2021 and it promotes mixed martial arts to fight against what it asserts is a system that is targeting the white race, as well as a “warrior spirit” to prepare for a forthcoming race war.
Active Club Canada, of which the two defendants are members, sees itself as a regional hub of the Active Club international network.
On December 1, shortly before the arrests, Vice News published a detailed exposé by freelance journalist Mack Lamoureux on Kristoffer Nippak and his key role in the Active Club network in Canada, particularly in the Ottawa region. In his article, Lamoureux mentioned a regional chapter in Québec, but, until now, this local group has not been the subject of close scrutiny. This article aims to fill that lacuna by shining a light on the core of the Frontenac Active Club (FAC), currently the main “militant” neo-Nazi project in Québec.
On December 9, 2023, Frontenac Active Club activists defend their Active Club Canada comrades after their arrests, calling the charges against them “fabricated political accusations.”
What Are Active Clubs?
Actives Clubs constitute a decentralized network of local groups rooted in white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. They represent a renaissance of the “white nationalist” movement (sometimes referred to as White Nationalism 3.0), picking up where the white power currents of the 1990s and 2000s and the alt-right movement of 2016–2020 left off and promoting a structure with no formal leadership. The origin of the movement is generally attributed to American militant Robert Rundo, who previously founded the Rise Above Movement (RAM) in California, in 2017, when the alt-right was at its zenith. RAM’s stated purpose was to physically attack enemies of the white nationalist movement.
Robert Rundo, founder of the Active Club network.
In line with this, the main activity of the Active Clubs is training in various martial arts techniques in preparation for the coming race war, deemed inevitable based on a perceived “white genocide,” effectively the deliberate replacement by means of “mass immigration” of the majority-white populations by non-white populations in Western countries (orchestrated by a nebulous elite generally presented as a cosmopolitan “international Jewry”). Active Club members unreservedly subscribe to this “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and are deeply rooted in contemporary neo-Nazi counterculture, for example, worshiping Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, as well as advancing a negationist interpretation of the Holocaust and World War II. They are, of course, steeped in a violent imaginary imbued with antisemitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia/transphobia and a visceral hatred of inclusive and egalitarian social movements—both liberal and radical—which are generally sweepingly categorized as “communist” (hatred of communism is a consistent reference point and a core value).
There is evidence of an Active Club presence in thirty-three US states and at least twelve countries, probably more by the time you read this. According to Vice News, there are at least eleven local Active Club chapters in Canada, including the FAC, which is based mainly in the Greater Montréal Area.
Despite his legal setbacks, Robert Rundo remains an emblematic figure in the movement, and Southern California still seems to be its epicenter, with a gathering of Active Club chapters expected there in August 2024 (the first such event was held in San Diego in August 2022). Rundo has his finger in a number of pies, including distributing Will2Rise (W2R) clothing, whose colors are often worn by Active Club members as a nod to their mentor.
This Active Club Telegram account links to the Will2Rise and Media2Rise projects, both hosted by Robert Rundo.
Where Does the Frontenac Active Club Come From?
The Frontenac Active Club was formed in early 2023 (the Telegram channel was created on February 16) and is the direct descendent of the local White Lives Matter (WLM) group, which we wrote about in 2022. One of the group’s two leaders mentioned in that article, Laval’s Raphaël Dinucci, would become the mainstay and motive force of the FAC. Dinucci immediately forged links with the movement’s Ontario chapters, while gathering a core group of five or six militants who formed what is now the FAC.
The Frontenac Active Club Telegram channel was created in February 2023. It now has nearly eight hundred subscribers.
We know that the FAC still maintains virtual links with other Canadian Active Clubs, notably with the group that was the subject of the RCMP raids, as well as with southwestern Ontario group Nationalist-13 (13 = AC, for anti-communist).
The Frontenac Active Club is close to the Southern Ontario–based white supremacist group Nationalist-13. Front and center, Raphaël Dinucci.The hand signal that Frontenac Active Club members like to reproduce, the Kühnen salute, is a neo-Nazi sign of recognition.
The group’s activities are centered in the Greater Montréal Area, with its members scattered across the south shore (Saint-Hubert, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), the north shore (Laval), and as far away as Lanaudière (Rawdon). There also seems to be a handful of members/sympathizers in the Québec City area, but they hardly constitute a section as such, since their activity last year was limited to stickering and a few social outings in the Capital.
Most of the Frontenac Active Club’s activity in the capital city consists of putting up stickers and taking photos. Here, Raphaël Dinucci poses in August 2023.A quiet outing at Taverne Urbaine 1500 in Québec City in December 2023.
To foster the racist and misogynistic fraternity spirit that underpins the movement, membership in the FAC is limited to white men.
The group’s Twitter/X account was created in April 2024. Raphaël Dinucci also has a personal account.
(This platform, under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk, has [re]become a safe space for neo-Nazi and supremacist individuals and groups, reversing the previous administration’s purge. It’s also a space where misinformation and hate speech have free rein, with virtually no countermeasures, to the degree, in fact, that it seems pointless for us to maintain a presence there.)
What Do They Do?
True to form, FAC members train quite regularly in martial arts—unevenly from member to member—usually in a public park near you, particularly on the outskirts of Montréal (Longueuil, Laval). Their other main activity is to showcase themselves on their Telegram channel, posting group photos documenting their activities. Last April, members of the core group photographed themselves posing after a workout in Mackenzie-King Park, in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, across the street from a synagogue and a Jewish school and a stone’s throw from the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
Frontenac Active Club members training in Mackenzie-King Park, in the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district, Montréal, April 22, 2024. From left to right: Mathieu Grenier, Martin Brouillette, Shawn Beauvais Macdonald, and Raphaël Dinucci.
Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, whom we had suspected was in contact with the Active Club, turned out on this occasion, confirming our suspicions. There’s nothing to indicate that Beauvais MacDonald had been a regular member of the group before this year, but it’s clear that neither he nor his cronies have any problem with the baggage he brings with him. Indeed, recently, Beauvais MacDonald appears to have taken on an increasingly central role in the group, representing it in a friendly boxing tournament against the Nationalist-13 Nazis and providing his personal contact information to people who want to get in touch with the FAC.
Shawn Beauvais MacDonald and Raphaël Dinucci wearing t-shirts from Robert Rundo’s Will2Rise project in April 2024.
The appalling ignorance of the group’s members is matched only by their extreme fetishization of a cult of the body that clearly reflects the toxic masculinity traditionally imposed in far-right circles. Overall, the FAC seems like nothing more than a social club for Nazi rejects, with its members organizing weekend nature hikes (Mont Gorille, Laurentides, or Montagne Noire, Lanaudière, for example) or a game of badminton at Laval’s Carrefour Multiport, generally followed by a beer at some nearby bar.
Frontenac Active Club nature outing on May 14, 2024. Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, center, face not obscured.Martin Brouillette and Mathieu Grenier of the Frontenac Active Club sparring in November 2023.Posturing and sparring on Mont Royal, July 2024. Center, Shawn Beauvais MacDonald.Raphaël Dinucci holding his group’s flag during an outing at Mont Gosford, in the Eastern Townships, in June 2023.
Along with its physical activities and ostentatious social media presence, the group also hopes to raise its profile around the city, taking a page out of the WLM playbook and heavily stickering in Greater Montréal and several other localities, including Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, home of FCA member David Barrette.
A Frontenac Active Club sticker in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, where David Barrette lives, in May 2023.Frontenac Active Club militants are particularly fond of this sort of staging, where they hold up a group sticker somewhere. In this case, Bromont in May 2023.Another Frontenac Active Club sticker in Montréal’s Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie district in November 2023.
As for public mobilization, Raphaël Dinucci and David Barrette had the curious idea of showing up at a demonstration against drag queen story hour and the queer and trans community, in Sainte-Catherine, on April 2, 2023. It didn’t go well for either of them; Dinucci was beaten and then arrested by police, while Barrette was charged with assault (dropped last spring). In a similar vein, FAC activist Martin Brouillette sent explicit threats to the organizers of the « Nous ne serons pas sages » demonstration last March, under his pseudonym “Martin Leblanc.” He failed to follow up on his threats.
David Barrette, aka “NatSocSiD,” or here “SuperFrenSiD,” boasts of his “exploits” on the Discord platform, in the wake of Frontenac Active Club members’ intervention on the sidelines of a transphobic demonstration in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.David Barrette, aka “SuperFrenSiD,” recounts his trials and tribulations in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.David Barrette, aka “NatSocSiD,” recounts his setbacks on the Undernet platform.Martin Brouillette, aka “Martin Leblanc,” explicitly threatens the organizers of the “Nous ne serons pas sages” event in March 2024.
A June post on the group’s channel shows member Mathieu Grenier in France, hanging out with nationalist militants from the Marseilles region.
Where Does the Frontenac Active Club Fit in the Far-Right Ecosystem in Québec?
Whether under the Active Club banner or its previous moniker White Lives Matter, it’s clear that this small core of neo-Nazi militants hopes to carve out a niche in Québec’s far-right milieu.
The FAC falls, first and foremost, within a North American white nationalist and neo-Nazi tradition, representing the most radical fringe of the alt-right and its historical predecessors. It also draws upon key North American conspiracy theories (“White Genocide” and the Great Replacement), including embracing the moral panic around freedom for sexual and gender minorities. It’s worth noting that WLM/FAC activists were spotted protesting when the Covid health measures were in place, and then from spring 2023 onward were found on the margins of transphobic activities organized by the usual suspects from the local complosphere. The FAC also maintains links with the Canadian Active Club network, including, as noted earlier, the neo-Nazi groupuscule Nationalist-13, and with the Diagolon network, primarily on Telegram in the latter case. During its recent “Canadian tour,” Diagolon stopped in Montréal, where its members fraternized with the boys from the FAC.
The Frontenac Active Club and the group Nationalist-13 recently took part in a friendly neo-Nazi boxing tournament. Note that Shawn Beauvais MacDonald is described in this publication as FAC’s “champion,” with his Telegram account listed as the group’s contact.Militants from the Frontenac Active Club and Nationalist-13 got together in Ontario during the week of August 5, 2024.Frontenac Active Club militants had the opportunity to fraternize with members of the Diagolon network in Montréal on August 3, 2024. Shawn Beauvais MacDonald appears to have become a key member of the group, speaking here in the first person.
FAC members also flirt with “arrow-sash” fascism. For example, they have participated at least once in the horrifying “Saint-Jean de la race,” organized by Alexandre Cormier-Denis’s ethnonationalist Nomos-TV propaganda channel. For the past few years, these festivities have taken the form of a Nomos live transmission on June 23, followed by an intimate fascist-fest. Raphaël Dinucci was present at the 2022 edition in Québec City (at Bar Le Duck), hanging out with members of the neo-fascist group Atalante and Sylvain Marcoux’s neo-Nazi Parti nationaliste chrétien (PNC),with whom FAC has been on friendly terms since the WLM days. We have good reason to believe that Dinucci was also present at this year’s edition of the Nomos Saint-Jean event, held for the second year running in Montréal at Lux Média, André Pitre’s “reinformation” project. (Beauvais MacDonald made an appearance last year.)
The key thing is that these neo-Nazi “militants,” who imagine themselves playing a leading role in an imminent race war—as white race crusaders, obviously—are an integral part of the far-right ecosystem in Québec. Although they remain relegated to the margins, they unquestionably play a role, if only as a foil for other far rightists who can take the opportunity to portray themselves as “less worser than.” While they may not be united on every issue, it’s important to understand that all the groups and currents mentioned in this article and in other recent Montréal Antifasciste material (from the Nazis 3.0 of WLM/FAC through the Nouvelle Alliance ethnic nationalists to the transphobic conspiracy theory adherents, the Nomos cryptofascists, and the wacky national socialists of the PNC) occupy a specific space in a single ecosystem, where they tend to reinforce each other.
It’s also important to remember the key role played by certain figures in the mainstream media (need we even name them?) in normalizing the far right—by repeating as often as possible that it simply doesn’t exist.
Who Are the Frontenac Active Club Hard Core?
Group photo of the Frontenac Active Club taken in Martin Brouillette’s Rawdon garage in January 2024. Left to right: Martin Brouillette, Mathieu Grenier (kneeling, “Free Rundo” t-shirt), David Barrette (standing behind Grenier), Steven Khazanov, and Raphaël Dinucci (front, “HTLR” t-shirt).
Raphaël Dinucci
Telegram: @Raph131 @adamm1313 Address: 5346 Pauzé, Laval QC H7K 2M5
Raphaël Dinucci is most likely the founder and primary mover of the FAC. He first appeared on our radar in 2022 as co-administrator of the White Lives Matter Québec Telegram channel, using the pseudonym “Whitey,” alongside Yannick Lachapelle, alias “Nord-Est.” Together, they formed the hard core of that short-lived group.
Raphaël Dinucci’s known Telegram profiles.Raphaël Dinucci’s current personal Telegram profile.
From the outset, Dinucci has distinguished himself by his intense activism, particularly on the streets of Laval, which he covered with stickers and graffiti.
We understand that this silly little goof turned twenty-three on July 22, 2024.
When the article titled White Lives Matter: Neo-Nazi Project Has a Québec Franchisecame out in March 2022, Yannick Lachapelle disappeared into thin air, and Dinucci found himself alone. We know that he went about building links with Ontario members of WLM and the Active Club, and that’s when he had the idea of upping his game and founding the FAC.
Dinucci takes a selfie for the Frontenac Active Club’s Telegram channel, quoting Belgian Nazi Léon Degrelle.Detail of Raphaël Dinucci’s tattoo: a wolf figure superimposed on the Tyr rune.
Dinucci appears in almost every photo of FAC activities and is in charge of public relations for the group, whether getting together with members of the Drummondville-based PNC or attending the various editions of Nomos-TV’s aforementioned annual “Saint-Jean de la race,” a major gathering of the fascist far right in Québec.
As mentioned above, he was present at the rally in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023, with David Barrette and Sylvain Marcoux (PNC), where they unfurled a banner reading “Sales pédos hors du Québec” [Dirty Pedos Out of Québec], which was torn out of their hands after a few seconds.
He lives with his father in Laval.
David Barrette
Telegram: @NatSocSiD Address: 863 rue Saint-Jacques, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu
David Barrette has been a hyperactive keyboard neo-Nazi for years, primarily under the handle @NatSocSiD (he has several others) on numerous virtual platforms, including Telegram, Discord, and the Undernet chat network’s #Montreal IRC server. He’s also active on YouTube, BitChute, TikTok, and several other platforms. He was a member of the WLM group in 2020 and, along with Dinucci and other sympathizers, naturally transitioned to the FAC at its inception.
Ladies, who’s going to be the lucky one?
His activity and involvement with the FAC are limited by a chronic ankle injury. However, this did not prevent him from accompanying Raphaël Dinucci on an “in real life” adventure in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023, which resulted in his arrest on assault charges (withdrawn last March, for reasons unknown to us). We believe these legal setbacks have dampened his enthusiasm for political activism, but he remains very close to the FAC’s core group.
David Barrette finds himself in a sticky situation in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.
David Barrette lives in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and works in Montréal for the information technology company Globotech Communications, which specializes in Web hosting. The information we have gathered leads us to believe that he uses his privileged position within this company to clandestinely host neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites and services on the company’s servers.
Profil Instagram of David Barrette, alias NatSocSiD.
Barrette’s employer would undoubtedly be interested to know about his employee’s extracurricular activities and may even be interested in scrutinizing the servers under his supervision.
Globotech Communications :
sales@globo.tech/support@globo.tech / abuse@globo.tech / NOC@globo.tech Telephone : (514) 907-0050 or 1 888-482-6661 (Note that Barrette receives messages requesting support and is likely to filter them; it is, therefore, advisable to write to several addresses to ensure that the message reaches the appropriate people.)
We first got wind of this sinister character last March, when Nous ne serons pas sages—a grassroots group formed to counter the anti-LGBTQ backlash and the CAQ government’s so-called “Comité des sages”—contacted us to share violent and hateful threats received from a certain “Martin Leblanc.” The latter said he wanted to “meet up” so that he could “remove pedophiles and trans people from this world,” and that he would “meet them on Fullum” (the location of the Committee’s demonstration). In another equally violent message he said he was “a fascist, violent, ready to clean house,” and that he had “already spit on Jews and gays” and would like to “continue [his] journey.”
We easily found a “Martin Leblanc” on Telegram (“My Ancestral Calling” channel), with a profile whose white supremacist character leaves no doubt (Hitler homage, etc.). His profile photo shows him in a gym with walls that are lined with neo-Nazi symbols and a flag from the FAC; this is the same gym seen in some of the photos posted by the group on its own channel.
Martin Brouillette in his private gym in his garage at his Rawdon home. À noter, le tatouage d’un faisceau (symbole du fascisme) sur sa nuque et l’arrière de sa tête.Martin Brouillette in his private gym in his garage at his Rawdon home.Martin Brouillette boasts that he built the gym in his garage during the pandemic.
This profile enabled us to find his real name, Martin Brouillette—his Facebook account has the same profile photo as the Telegram account of “Martin Leblanc.” On it, he bluntly describes himself as a “fascist” in his bio. (By the way, Facebook’s bots seem less and less able to recognize neo-Nazi or white supremacist posts or even to note profiles that spell out “fascist” in plain text and display hateful content. All of this goes undetected in this AI Brave New World).
Martin Brouillette’s Facebook account.
Photos posted by Brouillette on his Telegram channel tell us that he trained at a private martial arts club in Saint-Charles-Borromée (Joliette), whose managers were evidently unaware of his activism (see the update below). In the same way, we were able to determine that his private gym, where he invites his fascist buddies to roll around on the floor, is located in his garage on chemin Bélair in the municipality of Rawdon.
Martin Brouillette, a member of the neo-Nazi Frontenac Active Club, poses at a private martial arts club in the Joliette area.Martin Brouillette, a member of the neo-Nazi Frontenac Active Club discreetly displays his colors inside a private martial arts club, unbeknownst to the Sensei and other club members.
Update: Following the publication of this article and the steps taken to contact the managers at Karaté Kanreikai Joliette, we have been assured that they have taken the necessary steps to exclude Martin Brouillette from the dojo for good. This decision is to their credit.
Shawn Beauvais MacDonald
Telegram: @FriendlyFash
Holy fuck! to use a well-worn phrase. This drunken idiot is actually involved in every wrong thing, so much so that at some point the other Nazis will have to realize that he’s toxic, and that everything he touches turns to shit. In any case, he has no notion of operational security, and his trivial Nazi life is an open book, which sooner or later exposes his equally trivial comrades. What could we possibly say about this piece of shit that we haven’t already said a hundred times?
As noted, since 2023, we’ve suspected Beauvais MacDonald of playing some role with the FAC, whether a key one or on the margins, but we had no proof. Last April, however, he began posting photos with the group on his Telegram account, after which the group decided to make him a poster boy on its own Telegram channel. Recently, he has been an increasingly central figure in the group. It’s worth noting that his arrival on the scene coincided with the jiu-jitsu training session outside of a synagogue in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood mentioned above.
Shawn Beauvais Macdonald is now, quite literally, a central figure at the Frontenac Active Club.Shawn Beauvais Macdonald poses with Frontenac Active Club comrades in Montréal in July 2024.
Incidentally, it seems that Beauvais MacDonald has recently become even more of a loose cannon. We’re told he’s been seen more than once threatening members of the public who recognize him (whom he obviously presumes are the famed “antifa”). What’s more, he seems to have hooked up with young Sandrine Girardot from Châteauguay, who gained public attention last March for painting hateful graffiti in that town, including on the building she lives in. She has also posted a series of completely insane publications and videos on her social media accounts, the latter showing her and Shawn Beauvais MacDonald verbally assaulting passers-by with invectives and racist and homophobic insults in various neighborhoods and in the Montréal metro, as well as shouting their admiration for Adolf Hitler and throwing ridiculous Nazi salutes.
When we publicly reported this neo-Nazi tryst, Beauvais MacDonald responded with explicit threats:
It’s as if we asked a conversational robot to produce a threatening message dripping with toxic masculinity, as one would expect of a forty-year-old steroid-driven neo-Nazi salivating over an obviously mentally fragile twenty-three-year-old woman.
Mathieu Grenier
Mathieu Grenier uses the alias “@matthewattic” on Telegram. We don’t know much about him, apart from the fact that he has red hair and was once involved in Montréal’s (very short-lived and essentially virtual) Proud Boys group. He recently took a trip to Marseille, where he socialized with local fascists.
Steven Khazanov
Khazanov uses the alias “@stvjms” on Telegram. He lives on Montréal’s South Shore and has participated in several FAC activities over the past year.
His profile picture on Telegram shows him training in the outdoor facilities of Parc de la Cité, in Saint-Hubert. He resides at 3133, rue Ovila-Hamel, in Saint-Hubert.
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So as not to hinder our investigations, we have chosen not to include all the information we have in this article. We do, of course, continue to collect information on active members of the Frontenac Active Club. If you have any information about these or other individuals connected with or involved in the group, please write to us at alerta-mtl@riseup.net.
Comments Off on Rad Pride 2024: How a Night Demo Defeated the SPVM in the Village
Aug252024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Sunday, August 10th was the second annual edition of Rad Pride. Over 250 people gathered at Papineau metro, pink balaclavas mingling with black bloc and our gayest demo attire. Under the rallying cries of “No pride in genocide” and “Queerness is resistance”, the march set off down Sainte-Catherine. Now, a couple weeks later, we want to offer a look back at this evening from a tactical perspective.
On Side Banners
The conflict between reinforced side banners and “side cops” has become a mainstay of combative Montreal demonstrations. Montreal’s reinforced banners are banners with a wooden frame, held by screwed in door-handles, used to protect against riot cop charges and hits by police batons. Over the summer, with terrasses and crowds often obstructing the sidewalks, the cops have apparently received orders to enter the street alongside marching protesters. It is essential to show the cops that this provocation is a grave error. A multiplication of reinforced side banner teams may be one of the best responses, but where these teams position themselves and how others in the crowd complement them are important to consider.
At Rad Pride, a single reinforced side banner took a position at the front, left corner of the march, and it rapidly escalated into a confrontation. After side cops began pushing the banner and banner holders refused to yield, cops ended up squeezed against a low terrasse wall. They began striking people with batons. One demo participants’ flagpole was used to strike a cop in the head from behind the banner. Unfortunately, the position of the side banner at the front made it easy to cut it off from the rest of the crowd, and with enough pepper spray and baton blows, the group around the side banner had to disperse in a chaotic melee that flipped several tables on a terrasse and led to two arrests.
The decision to not move the reinforced banner with more fluidity led to entrenched positions by both anarchists, on one side of the banner, and police, on the other. A tug of war ensued. In such a stubborn situation, one side will be pushed back and have their position compromised. It may have been possible to flank the police on all sides as cops concentrated their forces on pushing back the banner. But without the determination, numbers, or abilities to use entrenched positions to our advantage, we will often benefit much more from encouraging a reinforced banner to move with more freedom, not committed to any specific place in the demonstration (especially the front or back where it is the most isolated). This approach complements one of the main advantages of street fighters versus an enemy as powerful as the police – the ability for militants to attack and retreat, to use the element of surprise, dispersing and reforming.
A Headless March
The SPVM might have hoped that the attack on the front of the march would result in the whole crowd dispersing, but they had a long night still ahead of them. More experienced protesters improvised a new front banner team, encouraged the crowd to stick together, and quickly looped back onto Sainte-Catherine.
It was evident that the SPVM wanted to avoid the PR nightmare of tear-gassing crowds of party-goers in the Gay Village during Pride. Since these crowds were heavily concentrated on Sainte-Catherine, the demo was able to avoid dispersal by staying on that street. On multiple occasions, riot cops formed lines blocking our way forward and to the south; each time, rather than turn north off Sainte-Catherine, the demo turned on its heels and reversed, with multiple banners able to swap in as the new lead.
This game of ping-pong gave demonstrators multiple occasions to take action against the handful of targets along our route. Windows were smashed at RBC, BMO, a Remax office, and Starbucks. The latter was attacked repeatedly on at least three separate passes of the crowd. After the early clash, it took the cops close to half an hour to re-establish flanking side units, showing us that an openly confrontational element in the crowd can function as a diversion, creating space and time for groups oriented more towards destruction.
As the night went on, the vibe became increasingly more festive. Towards 11pm, the demo had become a dance party of still over a hundred people, as a line of fully-geared riot police looked on. Making a laughingstock of the authorities is a calling card of successful mass resistance movements throughout history, and we certainly shouldn’t write off the potential of making the SPVM in particular look ridiculous. The night’s victory was topped off when the riot cops retreated and returned to their vans, and the crowd sang “We Are the Champions”.
This type of conclusion is simply extremely rare for destructive demonstrations in this city. It is the result first and foremost of the determination and fearlessness of participants.
