October 30th – a small crew broke into the all-too-warm night to recall the long tradition of mischief, rebellion, fear, revelry, and ritual often associated with this transitory time of year. Pry bars were wedged in the cracks of this rotting hellscape we call ‘city’ , holes in welded metal walls became new opportunities for exploration far beyond the eyes of security cameras, burnt out rooftops were made for cloudgazing if nothing else, and a beautifully abandoned wasteland of a building currently being converted into condos (corner St. Catherine and Leclaire) received a new paint job. We do this for the feeling of joy in criminality, to assist our bodies in remembering what it means to feel autonomous. If we practice enough, perhaps these ecstatic nights will imprint our actions on our bodies, so that they may become a part of our daily lives.
From November 22nd to 25th, NATO’s parliamentary assembly will be in Montreal for its mortifying circus. From a military alliance during the Cold War, NATO has today become the armed wing of Western countries, imposing its bellicose policies throughout the world. Faced with these war profiteers, it is imperative that we make our voices heard and combat their destructive logic.
The impact of NATO on our policies is huge:
Increases to military budgets: This summit comes at a time when NATO is pressuring the Canadian government to increase the share of its GDP devoted to the armed forces to 2%, a 50% increase, while the Canadian government has already increased its military investments by 41% from 2014 to 2021.
Destruction in the name of United-Statesian imperialism: Let’s not be fooled by the sterile language of Western forces; NATO’s interventions, far from being strategic and precise, are rather excessively powerful, disproportionate and imprecise. NATO destroys everything in its path, spreading misery and encouraging the multiplication of armed groups, all to preserve the interests of its member states, principally the United States, pillar of the alliance and giant of the military-industrial complex. This imperialist logic keeps the peoples of the Global South poor and dependent on the Global North.
Aiding and abetting the Palestinian genocide: So-called Canada is complicit in the genocide in Palestine by contributing to the supply of weapons, facilitating economic and academic partnerships and, above all, by its unwavering support for Israel, NATO’s central ally. It is through military support for Zionist forces that NATO is able to maintain a strategic foothold in the Middle East, in order to advance the political and economic interests of its members.
Peace will not be won at the point of a gun, but by putting an end to imperialism and capitalism. It is in honor of all the colonized peoples of yesterday, today and tomorrow, here and elsewhere, that we call on your courage and determination to walk the streets with us!
On November 22, let’s take it to the streets en masse to make our anger heard! Let’s unite to remind States the world over that their hands will always be stained with the blood of the exploited, no matter how much they try to hide it in velvet gloves or laughable summits!
Together, let’s block NATO and affirm our rejection of militarism, imperialism and colonialism!
Date and time: Friday, 22 November 2024 – 17:30
A journal written in 3 weeks in preparation for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly from November 22 to 25, 2024. The full document in pdf. Or just the English or French version.
The Messe des Morts (MdM) is a Montréal music festival that, according to the “About” section of the festival’s Facebook page, sets out to “satisfy those who like their metal dark and hateful!” The event is primarily organized by Martin Marcotte under the auspices of his label Sepulchral Productions. It is mainly devoted to black metal and its local scene, Québec Black Metal, a largely underground but highly developed music scene that is particularly fond of shocking themes, including Satanism and gore, reflecting a taste for non-conformity and an urge to provoke and transgress.
What we will be discussing below, however, goes far beyond mere provocation.
The 2016 edition of the MdM made headlines following the announcement of the participation of the Polish band Graveland, a black metal band associated with the National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) subgenre. The term “national socialist” refers to the German political party better known by its common abbreviation: the Nazi Party.
National Socialist Black Metal, as its name suggests, wallows in Nazi apologetics and explores dark themes that include the racial superiority of “white” Europeans and the glorification of the Holocaust (sometimes directly and explicitly, but often obliquely or implicitly), frequently accompanied by references to paganism, Norse and Germanic gods, Scandinavian mythology.
Following an outcry over Graveland’s inclusion in the MdM program and an intense campaign by anti-fascists in the weeks leading up to the event, culminating in a demonstration outside the Plaza Theatre on the evening and the intervention of riot squad, the band was prevented from playing and was forced to vacate the stage. In the end, the evening was cancelled.
After that, the festival, still organized under the Sepulchral Productions banner, became more discreet (although the 2017 edition was also problematic). . . until this year.
Sepulchral Productions seems to be making an unfortunate return to its roots this year: at least three bands belonging to the NSBM subgenre (or in some way adjacent to it) have been announced in the 2024 lineup (November 28-30).
Here’s an overview of this year’s bands and their NSBM links.
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Marduk :
This Swedish band is particularly fond of macabre World War II themes. Although the band denies any connection to NSBM or in any way glorifying Nazism, with its members describing themselves as nothing more than history buffs, oddly, they systematically explore “historical” themes from the point of view of the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht (the German army), and the SS (elite Nazi units, responsible in particular for the extermination of Jews). The show they intend to present on the third evening of MdM 2024 is entitled Panzer Division Marduk, the title of their 1999 album and a direct reference to the armored divisions of the German military during the World War II.
Marduk’s most recent album, Viktoria (2018), is a return to the themes explored on their previous records, revisiting various episodes from the World War II. . . always from the Nazi point of view. The song “Werwolf” refers to the clandestine resistance plan of the same name that the Nazis hatched in 1944 to address their potential defeat. “Equestrian Bloodlust” is in reference to the 8th SS Florian Geyer cavalry division. “Narva” evokes the battle of Narva and the Narva battle detachment known as “the European SS.” “Viktoria” refers to the Nazi military marching song “Sieg Heil Viktoria.” And on it goes.
Finally, a cursory search of the band’s online merchandise reveals, among other things, t-shirts adorned with the emblematic SS Totenkopf (skull and crossbones) and the Third Reich’s imperial eagle emblem, alongside the warrior imagery associated with the band’s records, including Panzer Division Marduk.
A sample of Marduk’s Nazi t-shirts, to give you an idea of the iconography you can expect to see at Théâtre Paradoxe on November 29 and 30….
Nazism and the glorification of German military during the World War II, SS units in particular, are clearly not incidental elements in Marduk’s work but consistent central and recurring themes.
The group has, in fact, had its share of controversies in recent years (see links below). In 2017, two of its members were identified as having purchased material from the Nordic Resistance Movement, Scandinavia’s largest neo-Nazi movement. As a result, a Marduk show was cancelled in Oakland, thanks to pressure from Anti-Fascist Action Bay Area. Last year, the band’s bassist was filmed giving a Nazi salute at a show, after which the band was forced to sack him.
This Finnish band has clear links with the NSBM scene. Horna’s former singer is the founder and main member of NSBM band Satanic Warmaster. Horna’s key member and guitarist has long managed a label that has signed other NSBM bands, as well as having himself been a member of a band whose lyrics advocate white supremacy. As for Horna’s current singer, he was keyboardist for the French band Peste Noire, one of Europe’s leading NSBM bands, whose song “La bataille de Sarcelles” [The Battle of Sarcelles], for example, serves up apologetics for a street brawl with Arabs in France (“les ennemis de nos terres”) [enemies of our country] with “battes de baseball et d’autres bâtons de guerre” [baseball bats and other battle clubs] making reference to “fanions à croix celtique” [Celtic cross pennants], a far-right identarian symbol (2021), while the song “Turbofascisme” rationalizes the “fascism” of the “race des Seigneurs” [master race] and the “race blanche” [white race] of “Vieille Europe” [ancient Europe] (2018).
A Quebec band whose stature is partly due to their past collaborations with NSBM groups. In 2004, they produced a split disc with the previously mentioned Finnish group Satanic Warmaster, which includes the song “Six Million Tears,” referring to the six millions Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
In an interview given in 2004, the members of Akitsa said they had no problem with the NSBM scene:
“[c’est] vrai que l’on doit mettre fin à l’immigration telle qu’elle est maintenant. La plupart de nos pays occidentaux sont envahis par des étrangers avec d’autres cultures que les nôtres. Ils détruisent la culture européenne. C’est la même chose pour les valeurs américaines (ce qui comprend les idées sionistes et les lois en matière de droits de la personne). La philosophie nationale-socialiste a des bons points concernant ces problèmes.” [It’s true that we have to put an end to immigration as it is now. Most Western countries are being invaded by foreigners with cultures different from ours. They are destroying European culture. The same goes for American values (including Zionist ideas and human rights laws). National Socialist philosophy had some good things to say about these problems.]
The slogan integrated into the band’s logo immediately above reads “Me ne frego,” a fascist slogan that is also the title of a split disc released in 2013.
Akitsa’s singer Pierre-Marc Tremblay, alias “Outre-Tombe” [Beyond the Grave], founded the still active label Tour de garde [guard tower] in 2001 and soon began to distribute music by Québec neo-Nazi artists (Arnstadt and Mors Summa). It’s worth noting that the Tour de garde logo clearly evokes SS military crests. Another coincidence, no doubt.
Additionally, Finnish bands Chamber of Unlight and Warmoon Lord, also on the Messe des Morts 2024 bill, are produced by the NSBM label Werewolf Records. Graveland’s former keyboardist now plays with Warmoon Lord.
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All of this clearly paints an extremely problematic picture.
Black metal fans themselves are not mistaken! Here are some of the reactions found on the festival’s and Sepulchral Productions’ pages after the announcement of Marduk and Horna’s appearance:
[Hell yeah. Don’t let antifa cancel this time.]
[Nice!!!! Will you have security in case “antifas” show up!]We strongly feel that these artists cannot be allowed to perform in Montréal. We also refuse to accept the festival’s organizers, first and foremost Martin Marcotte, hiding behind the idea of artistic license. They must be forced to take responsibility for what they are doing: inviting artists who promote and modernize hateful ideologies, year after year, artists who come to our multicultural city to glorify Nazism and fascism. We believe it’s absolutely vital to preserve Montréal’s welcoming, diverse, and inclusive character and, therefore, to make it clear that music with this sort of hateful content has no place in our concert halls.
So who is hosting this particular festival?
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Le Théâtre Paradoxe
Since the 2017 edition of the MdM, the Théâtre Paradoxe, a social economy enterprise in a refurbished church, has been hosting the festival. In an interview with the magazine Sors-tu? in 2022, Martin Marcotte expressed pride in this unusual partnership between blasphemous Black Metal fans and a former Christian place of worship.
“J’ai parlé avec la directrice, on a discuté des controverses, de la médiatisation, je lui ai donné ma version des faits, et elle était OK pour donner une chance à l’évènement.”
[I spoke with the director, we discussed the controversies, the media coverage, I gave her my side of the story, and she was okay with giving the event a chance.]
Three weeks ago, we contacted the Théâtre Paradoxe administration, requesting that, in light of the 2024 programming, they do the sensible thing and to sever their business relationship with MdM. At the time the management told us that they were concerned about the situation and were taking it seriously.
After a few e-mail exchanges, the theatre’s administration invited us to a meeting to discuss the matter with the various parties involved. However, from an antifascist point of view that would be completely pointless. There are situations where a clear-cut decision has to be made, and this is one of them. There can be no dialogue between apologists for Nazism and its enemies; that debate was definitively concluded eighty years ago.
In any case, we’ve already heard every element of Martin Marcotte and Sepulchral Productions’ line of defense ad nauseum. There would be the “freedom of expression” issue. We’d hear how these artists publicly deny being neo-Nazis and “don’t really” belong to the NSBM subgenre (although some have questionable backgrounds). Problematic lyrics would be construed as a matter of “second importance” and artistic license. Equally problematic imagery would be presented as an integral part of the subculture. The “real fascists” are those who seek to silence these artists. And so on, and so forth.
All these arguments are nonsense, little more than gaslighting, and are ultimately nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
Since 2017, despite muted hostility, the anti-fascist community had not acted against the Messe des Morts. This year, however, Sepulchral Productions is headlining bands that are widely recognized to be extremely problematic. In our opinion, this crosses a red line, and it’s clear that Martin Marcotte is testing the limits with Théâtre Paradoxe’s administration to see how far he can push this dubious material within the very walls of this socially-minded enterprise.
We understand, of course, that the Théâtre Paradoxe does not endorse the repugnant ideas promoted by National Socialist Black Metal and its apologists. However, the organization does have the power to act decisively by severing its business relationship with Sepulchral Productions, which would send a clear signal and have the Messe des Morts cancelled, or at least confront Marcotte with the consequences of what he is responsible for and force him to come up with a Plan B.
In short, now is not the time for dialogue, but for reasonable positions, consistent action, and consequences.
We invite our sympathizers to contact the Théâtre Paradoxe administration to (politely, but firmly) express their concerns.
At the end of 2010 an individual act of despair in the town of Sidi Bouzid ignited a daring, enraged, and joyful upheaval that travelled through North Africa into the Middle East and beyond. People defied the oppressive systems they had been immersed in for generations and came together in the streets to topple the political elites at their helm. The authorities, at first stunned by this courageous spirit that they couldn’t understand, then unleashed a cynical and brutal response.
This defeat is still being inflicted on the people in the region, and is also felt all over the world by those who stood in solidarity with the uprisings but were mostly unable to overcome their powerlessness as the uprisings were massacred.
The horrors in the region during the last decade are many. To name some that stick most in my mind: Sisi has turned back the clock in Egypt to military dictatorship with the material support of the US. The regimes in the other North-African countries are paving over any sign of freedom while being coaxed by European countries to shut down the immigration routes over the Mediterranean. Without the murderous military campaigns of Hezbollah and the IRGC in Syria, Assad wouldn’t have survived the uprising. The Iranian regime itself brutally oppressed three different uprisings in the country in the last decade. Most people in Lebanon are in a daily struggle for survival because of the greed of its political leaders while mobs at the orders of Hezbollah beat down street protests. Early on in the uprisings, Hamas, who has shot political opponents in broad daylight on the streets of Gaza, culled attempts at an uprising by rounding up protest organizers and threatening them with murder. Leaders in the region understood once again that they can use any means against the populations under their control without real push-back from outside. Indifference, cynicism and opportunism trump moral appeals, and strategic alliances are always in play. The world churns on. For those of us who have not looked away, how can we not see a connection between Assad bombing Syrian cities into obliteration and Netanyahu razing Gaza?
The authors of “Towards the Last Intifada” (Tinderbox #6) don’t acknowledge these experiences of the last decade. Instead, they propose to join the opposing side of an American geopolitical alliance (keeping true to American centralism in their own way). According to them, the Axis of Resistance shows the path forward for anarchists to struggle against empire. This article seems to confound resistance with ‘the Resistance’. That is to say, they collapse any form of resistance from people in Palestine, and more broadly in the region, into a particular representation, adopting an umbrella term used by states, militaries, para-state/para-military organizations to describe their own activities. The authors of the article warn anarchists against being too sensitive to hierarchy – as if that is the only aspect of ‘the Resistance’ anarchists might find difficult to accept.
It is now a year after the bloody incursion of Hamas into Israel. Apart from discourse, the accomplishments of the Resistance so far are: Hezbollah has launched ineffectual rockets that have only inflicted significant damage on a Druze village, Iranian leaders are busying themselves with making appeals to the West to reign in Israel, militias in Iraq attacked a couple of US military bases in the country early on and then fell silent, while only the Houthis seem to have taken Nasrallah’s “Unity of Fronts” seriously. They succeeded in disrupting global shipping routes and have carried out some unexpected aerial attacks on Israel. In the meantime, Israel has wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah, drops bombs on Lebanon on a daily basis, has regularly bombed sites in Syria without retaliation, and commits executions in Tehran. The Axis of Resistance and the Unity of Fronts are mere slogans that obscure the strategic dealings among political, authoritarian organisations and states with their own (often differing) interests. It’s delusional to see it as something else. And Israel is calling the bluff of ‘the Resistance’ with an exponential military escalation.
Israel’s massacres in Gaza, with the material support of the Western countries, are relentless. The apartheid regime in the West Bank and Israel has been built up for decades, leaving almost no oxygen to breathe for those living under its control. Faced with this bleak reality and an overwhelming powerlessness to put a stop to it, anarchists may be looking for an effective resistance (or rather, as it appears, an image of one). But if we want to fight against oppression, we can’t be content with any opposition. Choosing to join one authoritarian, militaristic system against another will not put an end to the horrors of this world – neither in this conflict nor in any other. It is neither inherently defeatist or a sign of privileged indifference to refuse to take sides between warring groups and states. That conclusion can only be reached if we would reduce reality to simplistic representations. Instead, by being open to complexity and specificity, anarchist action can be a liberating endeavor. It is here that we can find affinities, build relationships on a different basis, and muster the strength and courage – or perhaps, humility and passion – to attack. Anarchists find their effectiveness when they can undermine and destroy oppressive systems. We will not find it in a military prowess which, at the end of the day, produces more oppression and misery. And so those that have a spirit of their own and a memory of past rebellions will fight for another uprising.
From the northern coast of the Mediterranean, with a heavy heart and a soul on fire Early October, 2024
On the morning September 26th four vehicles were severely damaged as well as buildings nearby in an arson attack in Terrace BC.
With a little investigation we realized the vehicles attacked belong to McElhanney a company with a large portfolio providing surveying, engineering, GIS & remote sensing, landscape architecture, environmental services across western Canada. Near Terrace, McElhanney is working on the controversial PRGT pipeline, which has seen resistance via occupations and blockades. Further south the company has used GIS data to help plan work for the controversial TMX pipeline. In north eastern BC, McElhanney has worked on providing data and plans for the expansion of LNG well sites and pipelines.
We stumbled across this information via local media’s republishing of RCMP reports. It seems very little information has been shared by the RCMP. They chose to not publish photos or exact details. This is surprising considering the scale of the attack. Perhaps they would like to keep this news quiet.
Comments Off on Call for Autonomous Acts of Rage Against Colonization Everywhere on Monday October 14th 2024
Oct112024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
“We will need each other to make sure that the flames, if they were to come, clear the area that we will live in together. We will need to clear it of the fuel that would end up repeating the problems we are currently having. We will need to make sure that the seeds, nutrients and soil are scattered beyond our ability to control.” Aragorn
We don’t just want a cease-fire, we want the Right of Return for all Palestinian people, for water to flow, and the traditions to stay alive. We can’t get back the countless lives lost, but we can honor and avenge them. And we will.
For the end of the struggle that is settler colonialism everywhere. Where the land is stolen, consent violated, the old ways forgotten – let it burn.
We hope that every colonizer who robs the lives and dignity of the land and the people on it understands that their great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren’s children are not going to be here because of their violence and indeterminate destruction.
We will still be here fighting for the next seven generations, but we will never forget the slaughter, and we will remember to make sure those grandchildren stay afraid of all that is wild.
The united states government now “recognizes” indigenous people’s day alongside columbus day. We must make this impossible to reconcile. We will remain illegible to them, and unknowable to all but each other and the stars above, the water below, and all that of the earth fighting back. We call out to the brave and the humble – all that is striving towards life, while defying management, capture, and domestication with a strength they could never know.
Find the connections, funders, manufacturers, advisors, politicians, gentrifiers, and all enemies of the people and the earth. You know who they are.
Find some friends and haunt those motherfuckers ghosts.
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.
