From Clash Mtl
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.
From the No Trace Project
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.
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.
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:
And we suggest the following discussion points, which we encourage study groups to supplement with their own:
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.
From the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival
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.
The FITAM collective
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A June post on the group’s channel shows member Mathieu Grenier in France, hanging out with nationalist militants from the Marseilles region.
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.
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.
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.
From the outset, Dinucci has distinguished himself by his intense activism, particularly on the streets of Laval, which he covered with stickers and graffiti.
When the article titled White Lives Matter: Neo-Nazi Project Has a Québec Franchise came 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 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.
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 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.
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.)
Martin Brouillette
https://www.facebook.com/martin.brouillette.7/
Telegram: @M_clean
Address: 5900 chemin Bélair, Rawdon, QC, J0K1S0
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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
///
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.
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.
From the F.A.G.S.
On Sunday, the F.A.G.S. and its queer and trans accomplices disrupted Fierté Montréal’s corporate, Zionist, colonialist pride parade.
We gathered at 1pm in drag bloc outfits and makeup in the spectator zone at Place Ville Marie. Nearly a dozen cops with SIS armbands mobilized to surveil our gathering, as clearly a group of queers at pride protecting each other from COVID is cause for suspicion. At around 1:30pm, towards the beginning of the parade, we took to the street as Helem, Mubaadarat, and Independent Jewish Voices’ Queer for Palestine float passed by. By marching behind their float as part of the parade for a short while, we managed to sooth the fears of the anxious piggies.
After briefly marching, we stood in place and deployed an extra-long banner to begin dispersing and disrupting the parade and deliver a speech on Fierté Montréal’s corporate pinkwashing. After this, we communicated with the members of the AGIR float behind us, allowing them and several other community floats pass and continue parading, before blocking the Bubly sparkling water float.
We continued marching and zig-zagging backwards through the parade, largely evading police intervention and briefly blocking various floats tied to Zionist corporate interests. Floats and contingents in solidarity cheered us on and raised their fists as we passed. A small contingent carrying Zionist flags approached. We attempted to block them by rapidly deploying a second extra-long banner, but police brutally pushed us to the side of the road and stole our banner.
As cop presence began to escalate, we decided to switch directions and march back towards the front of the parade, following and protesting the Zionist contingent. After halting the parade several times on our way back towards the front, we stopped at Jeanne-Mance and René Levesque. Here, we blocked the entire back portion of the parade, where almost all complicit floats were located.
During this time, police, Zionists, private security and Fierté marshals attacked and insulted us while bystanders cheered us on and chanted with us. Autonomous members of the Helem, Mubaadarat, and IJV contingent came back to join us after their successful and poignant die-in disruption. Other members of the community responded to our public call for support. Our numbers were boosted to around 150 demonstrators.
As pigs multiplied and donned their riot gear, as prisoner transport vehicles arrived, as Fierté begged us to allow their corporate parade to continue, as Zionists threw projectiles at us, as the hot August sun beat down on us, we stood our ground.
As cops shoved us, pulled us, hit us with batons, tried to steal our materials, threatened us, and brutalized us in front of a crowd of our fellow queers, we remained steadfast and defiant.
We blocked the parade at Jeanne Mance for nearly an hour before police and class traitor Fierté marshals worked together to redirect the parade to the other side of the median.
After the parade went by on the other side of the road, we marched down René Levesque chanting slogans against pinkwashing and police. The vast majority of bystanders cheered us on, while certain bystanders shouted racist vitriol at us, showing their true colours as Zionist, capitalist, colonialist white cis men. We eventually dispersed into the Metro. No arrests were made.
Though we didn’t manage to cancel the parade outright, we consider this action successful.
We blocked corporate floats long enough that many of their potential spectators further along the parade route left out of boredom. We showed queer bystanders and the media that police are not afraid to brutalize queers during a pride parade. We reminded the world that pride started as a riot against the police, not as a parade sponsored by corporate interests. We showed that as queers of conscience in Tio’tià:ke, like in Tkaronto, the Coast Salish territories colonially known as Vancouver, and elsewhere across Turtle Island and around the world, we will not accept a genocide in our names.
Fuck pinkwashing
Fuck Fierté Montréal
Fuck the police
No justice
No peace
Photo: @the_purple_line
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Those who make a profit off misery deserve nothing less than an open war.
War on landlords, power to tenants.
Seen in Sillery (Quebec City).
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On July 19th, under a calm night sky, over 60 people assembled in downtown Montreal to march for Palestine. The demonstration was publicized without using social media, resulting in no police presence visible at the gathering location. The account that follows comes from a couple of participants in the demo. We hope to share an understanding of what went down for those who weren’t there and make some suggestions for next time.
Around 10pm, the march set off, a front banner announcing “L’espoir c’est la lutte” alongside a circle-A, and a banner reading “Liberation to the people, liberation to the land” bringing up the rear. Snaking through streets beneath skyscrapers and chanting, the energy in the crowd gradually rose as we acclimated to the strange reality: no bike cops, no riot cops, no cops in front, in back, or on the sides, just us and our friends and comrades, and their friends and comrades, and theirs, our black bloc and keffiyeh bloc protecting us from the hundred or so surveillance cameras that would inertly record our stroll.
The march lasted sixteen minutes. Fireworks were set off upon reaching Square Victoria, site of the Al-Soumoud camp, dismantled two weeks prior. Demonstrators quickly began breaking bank windows, hitting a CIBC and Scotiabank. Heading against traffic on Saint-Jacques, we were greeted ecstatically by Friday night party-goers, who stepped into the street to cheer, and drivers who rolled down their windows to high-five black-gloved militants. Some supportive passersby began excitedly following the demo as it continued towards the Caisse de Dépot et Placement du Québec (CDPQ). The CDPQ, which had been singled out by the Al-Soumoud camp a block away, has $14 billion invested in companies complicit in the genocide in Palestine. Though its windows appeared challenging to break, several were tagged, several others shattered, and a smoke device was tossed through an opening into an office space, hopefully setting off sprinklers and causing water damage.
Police sirens could be seen and heard from multiple directions, but before SPVM commanders understood what was happening, the crowd dispersed and disappeared into the night. There were no arrests, and no one was injured.
While corporate media ignored the demo, video showing the march and direct actions circulated widely on social media, including on an arabic-language account with hundreds of thousands of followers.
The local struggle in solidarity with Palestine has seen a fair variety of tactics tested in short order over the past nine months. Night demos organized without inviting the police are a new one in this context. We may want to consider doing more of them.
A week earlier on July 12th, the SPVM sent riot cops to flank both sides of a small night demo announced on social media following the dismantling of the McGill camp. The cops entered the street alongside the march and pre-emptively attacked a side banner, ripping the banner out of people’s hands, swinging batons and deploying enormous quantities of pepper spray. The crowd’s tenacity was impressive, but it was not possible to overcome this degree of police violence and begin transforming the march into something greater. One role that a night demo without police can play is to respond to events like these, tending to our militant spirits and repairing our confidence, while showing that the SPVM is putting its units in danger for nothing by intimidating and brutally repressing demos, because our targets will get smashed regardless.
We also want to reflect on how different forms of demonstrations make it more or less possible to reach beyond our existing networks. What is striking in the interactions with enthused passersby on July 19th is how the normal police presence at a combative demo would have rendered these interactions impossible. Police doing traffic control typically redirect all vehicles away from a march, and the scale and aggression of police units on all sides of a demo is extremely intimidating, limiting the possibilities for action in the minds of onlookers – and objectively. No unprepared civilian in their right mind would try to join us. Without the separation imposed by the police, we can imagine doing more in the future to enable willing passersby to take the street with us. This could look like bringing a supply of masks to distribute to people, explicitly inviting them to join, and quickly sharing any important safety information in a friendly way with joiners.
A number of windows on the demo route unfortunately withstood the blows of hammers and rocks. This raises a question of tools. Chunks of porcelain as projectiles are more effective at breaking windows than either hammers or rocks. They’re also harder to source (ask a comrade), and more care must be taken when throwing to avoid injuring anyone. In the future, perhaps “hammer teams” could make the first attempt, and if a target proves too challenging, hand it off to a “porcelain team”.
The enthusiasm for this new tactic shows that the community is looking for a new format for demos. Beyond shattered windows, exploring what autonomous groups can do within demos without police suggests new horizons. We can test new tactics and mixes of old ones, or even police response times around different strategic areas in the city. We can also improve our speed and comfort level employing different tactics so we are not attempting things for the first time with cops breathing down our neck.
With the challenges of the past few months in demos announced on social media, even in contingents, perhaps this new format can also be seen as a mobilizing strategy. If we play our cards right, we can use it to speak to the public, spreading anarchist ideas and practices, so when we show up as a contingent in a public demo our orientation is known to those around us and they might be more encouraged to join us in actions. Hopefully, it will allow us to strike a balance, to be ready to raise the stakes and be strategic in enacting a successful plan, as well as being ready to respond combatively to police violence in bigger public demos alongside hundreds or thousands of others.
Friday raised morale, built confidence and strengthened bonds of complicity. We need to find opportunities to achieve wins even when they are small and celebrate them. The same tactic can be utilized at strategic moments like a major event in the city, or to achieve strategic goals on short notice, or in response to significant police repression.
