Montréal Contre-information
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Montréal Contre-information

Hostages of the Gun: On Militancy and Militarism

 Comments Off on Hostages of the Gun: On Militancy and Militarism
Oct 082024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

This text is based on a talk given at the 2024 Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair. It is available as a printable zine.

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.”

End Notes

1) The figures in this paragraph about deaths in Syria come from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/SY/HRDAGUpdatedReportAug2014.pdf. The figures about those disappeared are from the Syrian Network for Human Rights: https://snhr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/By_Acknowledging_the_Death_of_836_Forcibly_Disappeared_Syrians_at_its_hands_the_Syrian_Regime_Convicts_itself_en.pdf. The figures from Egypt and Tunisia are just from Wikipedia though.

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

3) In the article Canadian Bacon: Opposing policing and state power in Mortar #3: https://north-shore.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/mortar3.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.

7) Here’s an English translation of Omar’s text with an introduction that puts it in context: https://north-shore.info/2020/09/30/to-live-in-revolutionary-time-on-the-formation-of-locals-councils-by-omar-aziz/

Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop: On Bad-jacketing

 Comments Off on Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop: On Bad-jacketing
Oct 082024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

Read the full text, including visuals, online as a PDF.

Find the full text ready for printing as an imposed PDF.

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:

  1. At the least, it pushes away people who have, or are willing, to do work and make sacrifices for the movements.
  2. Worse, it silences entire groups by sowing mistrust within them and making discussion of strategy and tactics difficult.
  3. Very commonly, those accused of acting as informants become so alienated from their accusers that they actually become snitches.
  4. 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:

  1. Tone down
  2. Police their own
  3. 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:

  1. Criminalising individuals in order to take them off the board while making an example out of them; and
  2. 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:

  1. Exploiting existing tensions in the movement in order to sow discord and distrust;
  2. Defanging the movement by discouraging forms of action that exceed accepted norms of protest; and
  3. 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:

kitelineradio.org/tag/isaiah-willoughby/

Support defendants and prisoners from the George Floyd Uprisings:

uprisingsupport.org

Contribute to the Florida 4’s commissary and find other ways to support through the Anti-Repression Committee of South Florida:

linktr.ee/sfl_arc

more on peace policing

“ACAB Includes Peace Police: Three Report Backs from Palestinian Solidarity Actions” (November 2023) on Archive.org, online at archive.org/details/acab-includes-peace-police-en-print-8/page/2/mode/2up

“Peace Police are Police: How Protest Marshals Sabotage Liberation and Protect the State” (December 2023) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2024/03/11/peace-police-are-police-new-zine-classic-image/

more on security

“Confidence. Courage. Connect. Trust. A proposal for security culture” (November 5, 2019) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2019/11/05/confidence-courage-connection-trust-a-proposal-for-security-culture/

“Doxcare: Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment” (August 26, 2020) on CrimethInc., online at crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment

The Threat Library by the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/threat-library/

“Threat Modeling Fundamentals” by Håkan Geijer on Riot Medicine, online at opsec.riotmedicine.net

more on infiltration

Fuck the (Hamilton) Police, online at fuckhps.noblogs.org

“Infiltrated! How to prevent political police from undermining grassroots solidarity” (May 1, 2017) in Briarpatch Magazine, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/infiltrated

“Living among us: Activists speak out on police infiltration” (July 1, 2011) by Tim Groves, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/living-among-us

“Stop Hunting Sheep: A Guide to Creating Safer Networks” (2011) on Sprout Distro, online at sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/security/stop-hunting-sheep/

“The G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges and How They Came to Be” (2012) on the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/resources/#toronto-g20-main-conspiracy-group

“Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” (Spring/Summer 2010) by Courtney Desiree Morris on Incite! National, online at incite-national.org/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/

Anti-Repression Talks #1: Preparing for Physical Surveillance

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Sep 272024
 

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.

Physical surveillance

In the past decades, the surveillance capabilities of State actors have greatly diversified, thanks in part to new technological developments such as video surveillance, mobile phones and DNA sampling. Despite this, physical surveillance — the direct observation of people or activities for the purpose of gathering information — is still widely used by State actors, in particular in cases where other surveillance techniques are not effective. Our Threat Library references examples of the use of physical surveillance against anarchists.

We believe that the State is likely to use some degree of physical surveillance in contexts where high-impact anarchist direct actions are being investigated — for example in a city where an arson recently took place and the news of the arson has been posted on anarchist websites. We also believe that in many contexts, anarchists do not sufficiently prepare for the risk of physical surveillance. Preparing for physical surveillance isn’t straight-forward, it requires developing a specific skill set, but it is possible, and it is the only thing that will help you if cops are tailing you on the way to a sensitive meeting or action.

Local study groups

We encourage participants to form local study groups to discuss the topic of the session, from October to December 2024. During the session, if they wish to do so, study groups can send us any materials that they deem relevant to the discussion. We will add such materials to the session findings where other groups will be able to see them.

We recommend that study groups read the following resources:

  • The zine Measures Against Surveillance for an overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by police in urban areas, with examples from Germany.
  • The book The Theory of Covert Surveillance for a more comprehensive overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by private investigators (and most police agencies), with examples from the United Kingdom.
  • The book Surveillance Countermeasures for a comprehensive overview of physical surveillance countermeasures: surveillance detection (including counter-surveillance) and anti-surveillance. Once you understand the logic of the enemy’s physical surveillance techniques, we highly recommend this book to start learning countermeasures that you can apply in your life and projects.
  • Other resources can be found on our website.

And we suggest the following discussion points, which we encourage study groups to supplement with their own:

  • From the recommended resources, what have you found difficult to understand or apply?
  • How can we support each other in developing and practicing physical surveillance countermeasures?
  • If you detect physical surveillance, which activities or projects would you want to continue and which would you want to put on pause? If you stop meeting with your friends to prevent the surveillance operation from mapping your social network, how can your network help you feel less isolated?
  • If you detect physical surveillance, how can you communicate this to your network in a way that doesn’t alert the surveillance operation that they have been detected? How can such communication happen in a way that doesn’t bolster paranoia?

International online chat

An international online chat will take place on January 4, 2025. It will be open to anyone, so we ask that you do not share any identifying information or discuss anything that you wouldn’t want to see published. It will be limited to text messages (no audio or video). Discussions will be held in English, with live translation available to and from French and Spanish — please get in touch if you are able to help with live translation in these languages or others.

For instructions on how to join the chat, see here.

Montreal Summer Reflection: Liberalism, Its Counter-Revolutionary Dynamics & Peace Policing

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Sep 162024
 

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.

Frontenac Active Club: The Militants behind Québec’s Neo-Nazi Revival

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Sep 132024
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

On December 8, 2023, the RCMP announced that they had arrested two Ontario residents, Matthew Althorpe and Kristoffer Nippak, and laid a number of charges against them stemming from their activities in various neo-Nazi projects in Ontario. In the first instance, the two men were charged with “participation in the activities of a terrorist group,” namely the Atomwaffen Division, an organization classified as terrorist in Canada. In its press release, the RCMP also mentioned two lesser-known projects: the Terrorgram Collective and Active Club Canada. The former is described as “a group of Telegram channels that share neo-fascist ideology and that produce and share manuals on how to carry out racially-motivated violence.” The Active Club is described as follows:

The Active Club Network are decentralized cells of white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups, which are active in many U.S. states, with multiple chapters in other nations, including Canada. The network was created in January 2021 and it promotes mixed martial arts to fight against what it asserts is a system that is targeting the white race, as well as a “warrior spirit” to prepare for a forthcoming race war.

Active Club Canada, of which the two defendants are members, sees itself as a regional hub of the Active Club international network.

On December 1, shortly before the arrests, Vice News published a detailed exposé by freelance journalist Mack Lamoureux on Kristoffer Nippak and his key role in the Active Club network in Canada, particularly in the Ottawa region. In his article, Lamoureux mentioned a regional chapter in Québec, but, until now, this local group has not been the subject of close scrutiny. This article aims to fill that lacuna by shining a light on the core of the Frontenac Active Club (FAC), currently the main “militant” neo-Nazi project in Québec.

On December 9, 2023, Frontenac Active Club activists defend their Active Club Canada comrades after their arrests, calling the charges against them “fabricated political accusations.”

What Are Active Clubs?

Actives Clubs constitute a decentralized network of local groups rooted in white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. They represent a renaissance of the “white nationalist” movement (sometimes referred to as White Nationalism 3.0), picking up where the white power currents of the 1990s and 2000s and the alt-right movement of 2016–2020 left off and promoting a structure with no formal leadership. The origin of the movement is generally attributed to American militant Robert Rundo, who previously founded the Rise Above Movement (RAM) in California, in 2017, when the alt-right was at its zenith. RAM’s stated purpose was to physically attack enemies of the white nationalist movement.

Robert Rundo, founder of the Active Club network.

In line with this, the main activity of the Active Clubs is training in various martial arts techniques in preparation for the coming race war, deemed inevitable based on a perceived “white genocide,” effectively the deliberate replacement by means of “mass immigration” of the majority-white populations by non-white populations in Western countries (orchestrated by a nebulous elite generally presented as a cosmopolitan “international Jewry”). Active Club members unreservedly subscribe to this “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and are deeply rooted in contemporary neo-Nazi counterculture, for example, worshiping Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, as well as advancing a negationist interpretation of the Holocaust and World War II. They are, of course, steeped in a violent imaginary imbued with antisemitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia/transphobia and a visceral hatred of inclusive and egalitarian social movements—both liberal and radical—which are generally sweepingly categorized as “communist” (hatred of communism is a consistent reference point and a core value).

There is evidence of an Active Club presence in thirty-three US states and at least twelve countries, probably more by the time you read this. According to Vice News, there are at least eleven local Active Club chapters in Canada, including the FAC, which is based mainly in the Greater Montréal Area.

Despite his legal setbacks, Robert Rundo remains an emblematic figure in the movement, and Southern California still seems to be its epicenter, with a gathering of Active Club chapters expected there in August 2024 (the first such event was held in San Diego in August 2022). Rundo has his finger in a number of pies, including distributing Will2Rise (W2R) clothing, whose colors are often worn by Active Club members as a nod to their mentor.

This Active Club Telegram account links to the Will2Rise and Media2Rise projects, both hosted by Robert Rundo.

Where Does the Frontenac Active Club Come From?

The Frontenac Active Club was formed in early 2023 (the Telegram channel was created on February 16) and is the direct descendent of the local White Lives Matter (WLM) group, which we wrote about in 2022. One of the group’s two leaders mentioned in that article, Laval’s Raphaël Dinucci, would become the mainstay and motive force of the FAC. Dinucci immediately forged links with the movement’s Ontario chapters, while gathering a core group of five or six militants who formed what is now the FAC.

The Frontenac Active Club Telegram channel was created in February 2023. It now has nearly eight hundred subscribers.

We know that the FAC still maintains virtual links with other Canadian Active Clubs, notably with the group that was the subject of the RCMP raids, as well as with southwestern Ontario group Nationalist-13 (13 = AC, for anti-communist).

The Frontenac Active Club is close to the Southern Ontario–based white supremacist group Nationalist-13. Front and center, Raphaël Dinucci.

The hand signal that Frontenac Active Club members like to reproduce, the Kühnen salute, is a neo-Nazi sign of recognition.

The group’s activities are centered in the Greater Montréal Area, with its members scattered across the south shore (Saint-Hubert, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), the north shore (Laval), and as far away as Lanaudière (Rawdon). There also seems to be a handful of members/sympathizers in the Québec City area, but they hardly constitute a section as such, since their activity last year was limited to stickering and a few social outings in the Capital.

Most of the Frontenac Active Club’s activity in the capital city consists of putting up stickers and taking photos. Here, Raphaël Dinucci poses in August 2023.

A quiet outing at Taverne Urbaine 1500 in Québec City in December 2023.

To foster the racist and misogynistic fraternity spirit that underpins the movement, membership in the FAC is limited to white men.

The group’s Twitter/X account was created in April 2024. Raphaël Dinucci also has a personal account.

(This platform, under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk, has [re]become a safe space for neo-Nazi and supremacist individuals and groups, reversing the previous administration’s purge. It’s also a space where misinformation and hate speech have free rein, with virtually no countermeasures, to the degree, in fact, that it seems pointless for us to maintain a presence there.)

What Do They Do?

True to form, FAC members train quite regularly in martial arts—unevenly from member to member—usually in a public park near you, particularly on the outskirts of Montréal (Longueuil, Laval). Their other main activity is to showcase themselves on their Telegram channel, posting group photos documenting their activities. Last April, members of the core group photographed themselves posing after a workout in Mackenzie-King Park, in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, across the street from a synagogue and a Jewish school and a stone’s throw from the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Frontenac Active Club members training in Mackenzie-King Park, in the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district, Montréal, April 22, 2024. From left to right: Mathieu Grenier, Martin Brouillette, Shawn Beauvais Macdonald, and Raphaël Dinucci.

Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, whom we had suspected was in contact with the Active Club, turned out on this occasion, confirming our suspicions. There’s nothing to indicate that Beauvais MacDonald had been a regular member of the group before this year, but it’s clear that neither he nor his cronies have any problem with the baggage he brings with him. Indeed, recently, Beauvais MacDonald appears to have taken on an increasingly central role in the group, representing it in a friendly boxing tournament against the Nationalist-13 Nazis and providing his personal contact information to people who want to get in touch with the FAC.

Shawn Beauvais MacDonald and Raphaël Dinucci wearing t-shirts from Robert Rundo’s Will2Rise project in April 2024.

The appalling ignorance of the group’s members is matched only by their extreme fetishization of a cult of the body that clearly reflects the toxic masculinity traditionally imposed in far-right circles. Overall, the FAC seems like nothing more than a social club for Nazi rejects, with its members organizing weekend nature hikes (Mont Gorille, Laurentides, or Montagne Noire, Lanaudière, for example) or a game of badminton at Laval’s Carrefour Multiport, generally followed by a beer at some nearby bar.

Frontenac Active Club nature outing on May 14, 2024. Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, center, face not obscured.

Martin Brouillette and Mathieu Grenier of the Frontenac Active Club sparring in November 2023.

Posturing and sparring on Mont Royal, July 2024. Center, Shawn Beauvais MacDonald.

Raphaël Dinucci holding his group’s flag during an outing at Mont Gosford, in the Eastern Townships, in June 2023.

Along with its physical activities and ostentatious social media presence, the group also hopes to raise its profile around the city, taking a page out of the WLM playbook and heavily stickering in Greater Montréal and several other localities, including Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, home of FCA member David Barrette.

A Frontenac Active Club sticker in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, where David Barrette lives, in May 2023.

Frontenac Active Club militants are particularly fond of this sort of staging, where they hold up a group sticker somewhere. In this case, Bromont in May 2023.

Another Frontenac Active Club sticker in Montréal’s Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie district in November 2023.

As for public mobilization, Raphaël Dinucci and David Barrette had the curious idea of showing up at a demonstration against drag queen story hour and the queer and trans community, in Sainte-Catherine, on April 2, 2023. It didn’t go well for either of them; Dinucci was beaten and then arrested by police, while Barrette was charged with assault (dropped last spring). In a similar vein, FAC activist Martin Brouillette sent explicit threats to the organizers of the « Nous ne serons pas sages » demonstration last March, under his pseudonym “Martin Leblanc.” He failed to follow up on his threats.

David Barrette, aka “NatSocSiD,” or here “SuperFrenSiD,” boasts of his “exploits” on the Discord platform, in the wake of Frontenac Active Club members’ intervention on the sidelines of a transphobic demonstration in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.

David Barrette, aka “SuperFrenSiD,” recounts his trials and tribulations in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.

David Barrette, aka “NatSocSiD,” recounts his setbacks on the Undernet platform.

Martin Brouillette, aka “Martin Leblanc,” explicitly threatens the organizers of the “Nous ne serons pas sages” event in March 2024.

A June post on the group’s channel shows member Mathieu Grenier in France, hanging out with nationalist militants from the Marseilles region.

Where Does the Frontenac Active Club Fit in the Far-Right Ecosystem in Québec?

Whether under the Active Club banner or its previous moniker White Lives Matter, it’s clear that this small core of neo-Nazi militants hopes to carve out a niche in Québec’s far-right milieu.

The FAC falls, first and foremost, within a North American white nationalist and neo-Nazi tradition, representing the most radical fringe of the alt-right and its historical predecessors. It also draws upon key North American conspiracy theories (“White Genocide” and the Great Replacement), including embracing the moral panic around freedom for sexual and gender minorities. It’s worth noting that WLM/FAC activists were spotted protesting when the Covid health measures were in place, and then from spring 2023 onward were found on the margins of transphobic activities organized by the usual suspects from the local complosphere. The FAC also maintains links with the Canadian Active Club network, including, as noted earlier, the neo-Nazi groupuscule Nationalist-13, and with the Diagolon network, primarily on Telegram in the latter case. During its recent “Canadian tour,” Diagolon stopped in Montréal, where its members fraternized with the boys from the FAC.

The Frontenac Active Club and the group Nationalist-13 recently took part in a friendly neo-Nazi boxing tournament. Note that Shawn Beauvais MacDonald is described in this publication as FAC’s “champion,” with his Telegram account listed as the group’s contact.

Militants from the Frontenac Active Club and Nationalist-13 got together in Ontario during the week of August 5, 2024.

Frontenac Active Club militants had the opportunity to fraternize with members of the Diagolon network in Montréal on August 3, 2024. Shawn Beauvais MacDonald appears to have become a key member of the group, speaking here in the first person.

FAC members also flirt with “arrow-sash” fascism. For example, they have participated at least once in the horrifying “Saint-Jean de la race,” organized by Alexandre Cormier-Denis’s ethnonationalist Nomos-TV propaganda channel. For the past few years, these festivities have taken the form of a Nomos live transmission on June 23, followed by an intimate fascist-fest. Raphaël Dinucci was present at the 2022 edition in Québec City (at Bar Le Duck), hanging out with members of the neo-fascist group Atalante and Sylvain Marcoux’s neo-Nazi Parti nationaliste chrétien (PNC),with whom FAC has been on friendly terms since the WLM days. We have good reason to believe that Dinucci was also present at this year’s edition of the Nomos Saint-Jean event, held for the second year running in Montréal at Lux Média, André Pitre’s “reinformation” project. (Beauvais MacDonald made an appearance last year.)

The key thing is that these neo-Nazi “militants,” who imagine themselves playing a leading role in an imminent race war—as white race crusaders, obviously—are an integral part of the far-right ecosystem in Québec. Although they remain relegated to the margins, they unquestionably play a role, if only as a foil for other far rightists who can take the opportunity to portray themselves as “less worser than.” While they may not be united on every issue, it’s important to understand that all the groups and currents mentioned in this article and in other recent Montréal Antifasciste material (from the Nazis 3.0 of WLM/FAC through the Nouvelle Alliance ethnic nationalists to the transphobic conspiracy theory adherents, the Nomos cryptofascists, and the wacky national socialists of the PNC) occupy a specific space in a single ecosystem, where they tend to reinforce each other.

It’s also important to remember the key role played by certain figures in the mainstream media (need we even name them?) in normalizing the far right—by repeating as often as possible that it simply doesn’t exist.

Who Are the Frontenac Active Club Hard Core?

Group photo of the Frontenac Active Club taken in Martin Brouillette’s Rawdon garage in January 2024. Left to right: Martin Brouillette, Mathieu Grenier (kneeling, “Free Rundo” t-shirt), David Barrette (standing behind Grenier), Steven Khazanov, and Raphaël Dinucci (front, “HTLR” t-shirt).

Raphaël Dinucci

Telegram: @Raph131
@adamm1313
Address: 5346 Pauzé, Laval QC H7K 2M5

Raphaël Dinucci is most likely the founder and primary mover of the FAC. He first appeared on our radar in 2022 as co-administrator of the White Lives Matter Québec Telegram channel, using the pseudonym “Whitey,” alongside Yannick Lachapelle, alias “Nord-Est.” Together, they formed the hard core of that short-lived group.

Raphaël Dinucci’s known Telegram profiles.

Raphaël Dinucci’s current personal Telegram profile.

From the outset, Dinucci has distinguished himself by his intense activism, particularly on the streets of Laval, which he covered with stickers and graffiti.

We understand that this silly little goof turned twenty-three on July 22, 2024.

When the article titled White Lives Matter: Neo-Nazi Project Has a Québec 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 takes a selfie for the Frontenac Active Club’s Telegram channel, quoting Belgian Nazi Léon Degrelle.

Detail of Raphaël Dinucci’s tattoo: a wolf figure superimposed on the Tyr rune.

Dinucci appears in almost every photo of FAC activities and is in charge of public relations for the group, whether getting together with members of the Drummondville-based PNC or attending the various editions of Nomos-TV’s aforementioned annual “Saint-Jean de la race,” a major gathering of the fascist far right in Québec.

As mentioned above, he was present at the rally in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023, with David Barrette and Sylvain Marcoux (PNC), where they unfurled a banner reading “Sales pédos hors du Québec” [Dirty Pedos Out of Québec], which was torn out of their hands after a few seconds.

He lives with his father in Laval.

David Barrette

Telegram: @NatSocSiD
Address: 863 rue Saint-Jacques, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu

David Barrette has been a hyperactive keyboard neo-Nazi for years, primarily under the handle @NatSocSiD (he has several others) on numerous virtual platforms, including Telegram, Discord, and the Undernet chat network’s #Montreal IRC server. He’s also active on YouTube, BitChute, TikTok, and several other platforms. He was a member of the WLM group in 2020 and, along with Dinucci and other sympathizers, naturally transitioned to the FAC at its inception.

Ladies, who’s going to be the lucky one?

His activity and involvement with the FAC are limited by a chronic ankle injury. However, this did not prevent him from accompanying Raphaël Dinucci on an “in real life” adventure in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023, which resulted in his arrest on assault charges (withdrawn last March, for reasons unknown to us). We believe these legal setbacks have dampened his enthusiasm for political activism, but he remains very close to the FAC’s core group.

David Barrette finds himself in a sticky situation in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.

David Barrette lives in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and works in Montréal for the information technology company Globotech Communications, which specializes in Web hosting. The information we have gathered leads us to believe that he uses his privileged position within this company to clandestinely host neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites and services on the company’s servers.

Profil Instagram of David Barrette, alias NatSocSiD.

Barrette’s employer would undoubtedly be interested to know about his employee’s extracurricular activities and may even be interested in scrutinizing the servers under his supervision.

Globotech Communications :

sales@globo.tech/support@globo.tech / abuse@globo.tech / NOC@globo.tech
Telephone : (514) 907-0050 or 1 888-482-6661
(Note that Barrette receives messages requesting support and is likely to filter them; it is, therefore, advisable to write to several addresses to ensure that the message reaches the appropriate people.)

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.

Martin Brouillette in his private gym in his garage at his Rawdon home. À noter, le tatouage d’un faisceau (symbole du fascisme) sur sa nuque et l’arrière de sa tête.

Martin Brouillette in his private gym in his garage at his Rawdon home.

Martin Brouillette boasts that he built the gym in his garage during the pandemic.

This profile enabled us to find his real name, Martin Brouillette—his Facebook account has the same profile photo as the Telegram account of “Martin Leblanc.” On it, he bluntly describes himself as a “fascist” in his bio. (By the way, Facebook’s bots seem less and less able to recognize neo-Nazi or white supremacist posts or even to note profiles that spell out “fascist” in plain text and display hateful content. All of this goes undetected in this AI Brave New World).

Martin Brouillette’s Facebook account.

Photos posted by Brouillette on his Telegram channel tell us that he trained at a private martial arts club in Saint-Charles-Borromée (Joliette), whose managers were evidently unaware of his activism (see the update below). In the same way, we were able to determine that his private gym, where he invites his fascist buddies to roll around on the floor, is located in his garage on chemin Bélair in the municipality of Rawdon.

Martin Brouillette, a member of the neo-Nazi Frontenac Active Club, poses at a private martial arts club in the Joliette area.

Martin Brouillette, a member of the neo-Nazi Frontenac Active Club discreetly displays his colors inside a private martial arts club, unbeknownst to the Sensei and other club members.

Update: Following the publication of this article and the steps taken to contact the managers at Karaté Kanreikai Joliette, we have been assured that they have taken the necessary steps to exclude Martin Brouillette from the dojo for good. This decision is to their credit.

Shawn Beauvais MacDonald

Telegram: @FriendlyFash

Holy fuck! to use a well-worn phrase. This drunken idiot is actually involved in every wrong thing, so much so that at some point the other Nazis will have to realize that he’s toxic, and that everything he touches turns to shit. In any case, he has no notion of operational security, and his trivial Nazi life is an open book, which sooner or later exposes his equally trivial comrades. What could we possibly say about this piece of shit that we haven’t already said a hundred times?

As noted, since 2023, we’ve suspected Beauvais MacDonald of playing some role with the FAC, whether a key one or on the margins, but we had no proof. Last April, however, he began posting photos with the group on his Telegram account, after which the group decided to make him a poster boy on its own Telegram channel. Recently, he has been an increasingly central figure in the group. It’s worth noting that his arrival on the scene coincided with the jiu-jitsu training session outside of a synagogue in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood mentioned above.

Shawn Beauvais Macdonald is now, quite literally, a central figure at the Frontenac Active Club.

Shawn Beauvais Macdonald poses with Frontenac Active Club comrades in Montréal in July 2024.

Incidentally, it seems that Beauvais MacDonald has recently become even more of a loose cannon. We’re told he’s been seen more than once threatening members of the public who recognize him (whom he obviously presumes are the famed “antifa”). What’s more, he seems to have hooked up with young Sandrine Girardot from Châteauguay, who gained public attention last March for painting hateful graffiti in that town, including on the building she lives in. She has also posted a series of completely insane publications and videos on her social media accounts, the latter showing her and Shawn Beauvais MacDonald verbally assaulting passers-by with invectives and racist and homophobic insults in various neighborhoods and in the Montréal metro, as well as shouting their admiration for Adolf Hitler and throwing ridiculous Nazi salutes.

When we publicly reported this neo-Nazi tryst, Beauvais MacDonald responded with explicit threats:

It’s as if we asked a conversational robot to produce a threatening message dripping with toxic masculinity, as one would expect of a forty-year-old steroid-driven neo-Nazi salivating over an obviously mentally fragile twenty-three-year-old woman.

Mathieu Grenier

Mathieu Grenier uses the alias “@matthewattic” on Telegram. We don’t know much about him, apart from the fact that he has red hair and was once involved in Montréal’s (very short-lived and essentially virtual) Proud Boys group. He recently took a trip to Marseille, where he socialized with local fascists.

Steven Khazanov

Khazanov uses the alias “@stvjms” on Telegram. He lives on Montréal’s South Shore and has participated in several FAC activities over the past year.

His profile picture on Telegram shows him training in the outdoor facilities of Parc de la Cité, in Saint-Hubert. He resides at 3133, rue Ovila-Hamel, in Saint-Hubert.

///

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.

L’espoir c’est la lutte: Reflections on the Night Demo of July 19th

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Aug 012024
 

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.

Let’s be honest, this was a fucking summer camp: a postmortem of the failures of UofT’s so-called People’s Circle for Palestine

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Jul 232024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

As the zionist entity’s siege on Gaza enters its ninth month, the now-dead People’s Circle for Palestine at UofT joins the ashes of Northwestern, McMaster, and numerous others as an exemplar of liberal cowardice in the face of a livestreamed genocide. Not only did this encampment fail to deliver on its stated goals of disclosure, divestment, and termination, it betrayed both the people that made it possible as well as the movement at large. Far from opening up new terrains of escalatory struggle, the organizers of this People’s Circle spent the sixty-three days of its existence working tirelessly to make it a remarkable case study in defanging and dismantling the budding militancy of the local movement. It perverted its own promises, violated every principle of liberatory organizing; it wasted multiple weeks sabotaging the efforts of its own comrades while thousands in Gaza continued to be murdered. It turned something that could have been revolutionary for the city’s organizing scene to a summer camp that years on will likely be remembered with nothing but shame. It was a disappointment and a disgrace.

Red flags had existed right from the moment it was launched, but one could be forgiven for having been optimistic back when the encampment was still within its infancy. For many in the city who were disillusioned by months of pointless rallies and hungered for more, there had initially been a few things to be optimistic about. By Toronto’s unfortunately low standards, breaking open the fences of an enclosed privately-owned space to set up camp while multiple banner-wielding crews physically blocked the police from interfering was pretty damn militant. Yet this sole act of breaking and entering, it soon became clear, was where the line was drawn. In the two months following the breaching of King’s College Circle’s fences, UofT saw not one single large-scale escalation for Gaza: no building occupations, no disruptions of Board of Governor meetings, not even convocation ceremonies were meaningfully targeted. In fact, forget escalation: even simple attempts to strengthen the encampment’s defenses were constantly shot down. Autonomous actors were repeatedly prevented even from building barricades and had to defy the organizers in order to reinforce the preexisting fences, and the tactics trainings independent crews had started in the camp were forced to a halt halfway through.

While encampments all across the world were courageously confronting police forces and taking on their universities in ever more creative ways, the organizers of the so-called People’s Circle chose to abandon the very possibility of a principled defense or strategic escalation, not only failing to build a movement that could sustain such a struggle but actively ensuring any elements that were interested in doing so were killed off. Rather than focusing on building up the community’s material capacity to defend itself and keep on escalating, the organizers focused on pandering to corporate media, on ‘deescalating’ confrontations with the pigs, on preventing any autonomous actions that might make them ‘look bad’ or ‘invite’ police repression. They devoted their time not towards principled resistance but towards crafting an image that portrayed them as ‘peaceful’ and ‘nonviolent’ in a futile attempt to initiate ‘good faith dialogue’ with a system that understands no language but violence. Instead of focusing on what they could do to continue targeting the infrastructures sustaining this genocide, they focused entirely on whether what they did remained legal, and whether it looked good on camera. And their flimsy excuses for taking this approach – namely that the risks of continued escalation were ‘too high’ to be worth it and that their priority was ensuring the continued ‘safety’ of all participants – remain precisely that. Flimsy excuses, rooted in an illusory liberal notion of ‘safety’ built on centuries of corpses.

Because there is no safety to be found in abiding by the laws of the state, nor is there safety to be found in pandering to its propagandists. It does not truly matter if an action is legal or not, because the law is fundamentally a weapon of the oppressor. If the armed swine that are supposed to enforce it are inclined to inflict violence, there is no law that will stop them. What can, however, is our own ability to evade capture, or to fight back. To defend ourselves not by appealing to the laws of our enemies but by the strength of our own ability. In the same vein, it does not matter if it looks good on corporate cameras – because for starters, no matter how legal and peaceful our actions are, it fucking won’t. Almost a year of witnessing corporate media’s relentless vilification of Palestine and her allies is more than enough proof that its sole raison d’être is to manufacture consent for genocide. Any positive press possibly gained by painting our actions at ‘legal’ and ‘peaceful’ comes at the cost of legitimizing the perceived necessity for legality and nonviolence – yet no act that poses a genuine threat to the state and its interests can ever remain either. Any ‘safety’ built upon seeking recognition and approval from the apparatus of our enemy is a ‘safety’ built on sand – and any ‘safety’ that disavows the praxis of genuine resistance is a ‘safety’ paid for in blood. Liberal notions of ‘safety’ within the imperial core are contingent upon our refusal to take the risks needed to end the continued slaughter of thousands of Palestinians. They are contingent upon letting people continue to face the ever increasing violence of manufactured poverty, of police and carceral brutality, of eugenicist policies, and of ongoing settler colonialism, right here in our own communities. We do not keep us safe by letting others be thrown under the bulldozers and tanks of colonial violence. No, as our friends at Palestine Action US tell us – and as the cowards within OccupyUofT refuse to understand – we keep us safe by escalating.

Yet OccupyUofT’s destruction of militant efforts within the encampment wasn’t merely a result of their deference to optics and legality, nor was it simply a matter of their own refusal to escalate. Organizers, after all, can be ignored, marshalls punched, and cameras smashed. For these liberal tendencies to make a dent, the rot had to go far deeper. The so-called People’s Circle’s steady dismantling of militancy was rooted ultimately in its deeply exploitative relationship to everyone outside its limited organizing circles, to the community at large, and particularly to so-called ‘outside agitators’. For some background, the People’s Circle was launched immediately after the academic year had ended, right as thousands of students were wrapping up with their exams and leaving the city. It could never have been sustained without the critical support of hundreds of local community members unaffiliated with the group and the university. It relied on ‘outside agitators’ since the beginning – yet said ‘outside agitators’ were unsurprisingly neglected at best, and vilified, isolated, assaulted, and forcibly driven out at worst. Organizers constantly demanded unending amounts of labor, love, and logistical support from the community, consistently exploiting people’s goodwill and commitment to the cause to sustain this summer camp, while reciprocating with neither care nor solidarity nor even basic respect.

Rather than empowering people to take independent initiative and do what needed doing, organizers consistently acted on arrogant, authoritarian tendencies, acting not to distribute power but to consolidate it among themselves and the select few they approved of. They withheld crucial information from others, refused transparency with regard to finances even though every cent of their funds was drawn from community donations, and created an internal culture where nothing could be done without asking for permission from the Right People. They refused to listen to criticism, acted as though they knew everything, and repeatedly patronized multiple people with far more experience in organizing. They demanded people trust them yet refused to reciprocate – not granting others any meaningful ability to participate in collective decisionmaking, while also simultaneously trying to sabotage autonomous organizing and telling people they have no right to make ‘unilateral decisions’. This so-called ‘liberated’ zone was marked foremost, therefore, by the almost immediate imposition of a hierarchy between the organizers and everyone else. Not an exit from the social order imposed upon us by those in power, but the recreation of the same within a microcosm that openly – and falsely – branded itself as revolutionary.

Every hierarchy, of course, requires the violence of its maintenance. It is thus entirely unsurprising that the range of tactics OccupyUofT employed to maintain this power structure, in several cases, was nothing short of abusive. Finding a number of natural allies amongst the liberal factions of large orgs like PYM Toronto and Toronto 4 Palestine, they and their extended network of liberal marshals and ‘deescalators’ subjected people to endless tone-policing, shut them off by invoking a supposed need for ‘maintaining unity’ and ‘centering Gaza’, weaponized identity politics even against Palestinians, and if those tactics didn’t work, harassed folks into either shutting up or leaving. They deliberately exposed people to police and Zionist violence, spread rumors about multiple individuals, publicly named comrades who’d explicitly said they did not want to be identified, and recklessly shared around people’s sensitive personal information without ever asking for their consent. Organizers relentlessly badjacketed and even copjacketed several militants, labelled them as ‘wreckers’ who shouldn’t be worked with, and in atleast one instance forcibly kicked them out of the camp after a sustained days-long witchhunt. They created a space that was not only against militant actions but actively hostile to militant presence, isolating, alienating, and traumatizing dozens of our city’s most experienced and committed organizers into no longer wanting anything to do with the encampment.

Perhaps the most powerful weapon in their arsenal of anti-militant tactics, however, was the way the organizers enabled various forms of oppression against the very people whose circle it was supposed to be. OccupyUofT deliberately excluded unhoused comrades with far more experience in encampment defense by enabling repeated instances of harassment against them, denying their offers of organizing support, and in many instances even very explicitly refusing them entry. They tolerated and enabled tokenization and disrespect against the very indigenous aunties whose land they camped on, compelling several land defenders into leaving, dismantling the sacred fire, and denouncing the encampment. They threw around racist slurs at Black and South Asian people; dehumanized queer and trans people, particularly trans women; and perpetuated an ableist culture that treated people as mere disposable bodies worth little more than their labor. They failed to keep out predatory ‘leftist’ organizations with well-documented histories of enabling sexual abuse, and they failed to adequately address instances of sexual assault and harassment when they did occur inside the encampment. They enforced a ‘campers only’ food policy that denied everyone except those staying overnight access to food – all while throwing heaps of perfectly edible meals into the compost every single week.

In other words, the organizers spent multiple weeks shutting down militant actors in the name of keeping the community ‘safe’, yet actively endangering many of its most oppressed members – while sparing no effort whatsoever, of course, in portraying themselves as welcoming and inclusive and even liberatory to their thirty thousand Instagram followers. Over the course of two months, they reduced the word solidarity to a hollow caricature of itself, a performance that meant nothing more than statements and instagram story-posts. They failed utterly to realize that the saying ‘all our struggles are connected’ isn’t some meaningless feel-good platitude, but a material reality – a reality that cannot be ignored if we are to set anyone free. In effectively reducing their efforts for Palestine to a ‘single-issue’ struggle, in alienating, excluding, and actively harming entire groups of potential comrades, in focusing entirely on posturing and performance instead of doing the actual fucking work, the organizers of the People’s Circle deprived the movement of building up its true collective power. Because the fact of the matter is this: liberation starts at home. To paraphrase a recent piece by Dr Ayesha Khan, one worth reading in its entirety: the genocide in Palestine does not exist in a vacuum. It is intricately connected to a global web of violence that includes the daily carnage taking place right at our doorstep. It is this web we must dismantle – and to do so, we must start by pulling at the threads closest to us.

Yet OccupyUofT did none of that. Instead, it operated from a shallow, arrogant, liberal middle-classist framework of organizing that focused almost entirely on political theatre at the expense of any material community- and movement-building. In doing so, it only masterfully engineered its own defeat: by the time the injunction order inevitably came, the organizers found themselves with nearly nobody willing or able to defend the camp, nor were they able to wield the threat of continued disruptions as leverage in furthering negotiations to arrive at a deal they could settle for without looking bad. They can pat themselves in the back all they want, but they know as well as we do that they did not clear out ‘on their own terms’. They did exactly what the university and the pigs wanted, because they had spent the last two months ensuring the very possibility of a principled defense or an escalatory response were rendered impossible. The so-called People’s Circle died the way it did because it had long ceased to be a protest, let alone anything that resembled a liberatory project. That ‘closing press conference’ – that’s right, a fucking press conference – marked only the end of a sixty-three day long summer camp that had all too gladly traded in the very essence of liberatory praxis for the smoke and mirrors of media attention, power-hungry nonsense, and individualist clout building. Its shameful, pathetic, cowardly end was a perfect illustration of the fact that the so-called People’s Circle had been rendered empty of substance long before it was emptied of tents – that all that remained was spectacle.

Yet the encampment is not the movement. As the zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza enters its ninth month, those of us in Toronto that take to heart the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ must not let OccupyUofT’s neoliberal ineptitude demoralize us into inaction. The damage done is immeasurable: far too many of us find ourselves exhausted, traumatized, and isolated from a disintegrating community unable to do anything but watch our networks get torn apart while Gaza continues to be bombed. Betrayed by the callousness and cowardice of those that were supposed to be our comrades, far too many of us feel more hopeless than ever in this fight against the global war machine. Yet hope or no hope, we know this: there is no future for any of us within this existing order, and nothing to be done except to fight. If short-sighted and self-interested actors have harmed our collective ability to do so, we must find ways to nurture it back. We must build the infrastructure necessary for sustained, meaningful, material disruptions against every institution where the hydra of zionism and imperialism rear their ugly heads, and we must start doing so now. There is no other choice. We have never been exempt from the struggle – our task, too, is Intifada, and Intifada means attack.

Key to this task are of course the principles and praxis of solidarity, mutual aid, and community building, which not only constitute direct action in and of themselves but form the building blocks atop which all other direct action is sustained on. The praxis of solidarity can look like joining a weekly mutual aid distro, or running donation drives for unhoused people, or helping to organize jail and legal supports. It could look like inviting your neighbors over for dinner, or letting friends with abusive families crash on your couch, or sharing gatekept meds with those who need them, or bringing extra N95 masks to the function. It does not matter if’s considered capital-O Organizing. What matters is supporting each other, connecting to and building together with the most marginalized among us, and forging resilient relationships – relationships that can withstand both the unrelenting lure of liberalism and the batons of state repression, relationships that remain rock solid when things go to shit, that can form the bedrock of a movement that, in the face of a livestreamed genocide, can actually shut things down. Setting fire to cop cars or mass-sabotaging arms factories is hardly imaginable when so many of us are far too caught up in the daily agonies of surviving capitalism and barely even know each other, let alone have longstanding networks of support, trust, and care. If we seek to build militancy in so-called Toronto, we must build a culture where militants are cared for and care for each other – a culture where people are cared for and care for each other. Faced against the twin threats of state repression and an activist scene dominated by a hostile liberal rhetoric wedded to farcical nonviolence and privileged safetyism, this is a foundation we simply cannot do without.

Rebuilding our communities and support networks is the only first of many steps: we must also push back against both liberal anti-militancy rhetoric and state intimidation, we must equip ourselves with the skills we need to actually disrupt business as usual, and we must foster the radicalization of new militants. We need agitprop, education, training. We need one-on-one conversations, we need zines, we need teach-ins, we need wheatpaste and stickers and spray paint, we need weekly self-defense practice – as our friends at CUNY put it, we need escalation trainings. We need to claim ground against the pervasive rhetoric of nonviolence and stop feeding the cowardly illusion that freedom can ever be won by merely appealing to the moral sense of the oppressor. We need to build a broader collective understanding of what it truly means to support resistance, of why it is imperative for our movements to develop teeth if we hope to even leave a scratch upon the leviathan body of imperialism. We need to remember that pigs and politicians are just as mortal as us plebeians. We need to turn cross-movement solidarity into an inviolable principle and a daily praxis instead of continuing to treat it as a bonus add-on, as something to be acted on only when convenient. We need to remind ourselves that we too live under a colonial monstrosity built on genocide, that our most paramount task in the fight for Palestinian liberation will always be to fight for the death of the settler state that exists right here on these lands. We need to teach each other how to dearrest comrades, how to use Tails, how to care for our suicidal friends, how to make unsanctioned street art, how to administer naloxone, how to liberate food from corporate megastores, how to survive a night in jail. We need to do so frequently and consistently, we need to find ways to scale up our projects, we need to bring in new people, and we need to make sure they are supported single every step of the way.

Most importantly perhaps, we need to step the fuck up and practice the things that we preach. The past nine months have shown us that liberals will gladly continue to pat themselves on the back for mindlessly repeating the same useless tactics over and over again while Gaza continues to burn. The past nine months have shown us that there is no critical threshold of livestreamed Palestinian suffering that when crossed will naturally result in worldwide revolt – if as many as two hundred thousand Palestinian martyrs are not enough, nothing will be. The movement will never naturally shift from one of hypocrites shouting ‘shut it down’ while yellow-vested pigs with megaphones make sure the empire is never inconvenienced to one of principled militants actually following through on the promise of the chant. If we want militancy, we will have to build it, and we will all have to do so by actually being fucking militant. And it will have to involve all of us, because every single one of us has a vital part to play. We will need people who are down to confront pigs on the front lines and sabotage infrastructures in the dead of night, just as we will need people to secure logistical necessities and track enemy movements, just as we will need people to support injured comrades on the ground, to organize jail supports in the aftermath, to make sure we’re fed and cared for and ready to fight another day. We’ve waited for too long – it’s time we remember what we’re capable of and start organizing the sustained material disruptions we wish to see in the world. Gaza demands that we escalate – it’s time you and I heed her call.

Our efforts will never be perfect. New challenges will undoubtedly continue to emerge both from within and without. We will face increasing state repression, just as we will face liberal reaction, just as we will face internal conflicts and fractures. Yet we cannot let these challenges keep deterring us. We owe it to Gaza to try, and when we fail, we owe it to Gaza to keep trying. We owe it to Hind Rajab, to Refaat Alareer, to Mohammed Bhar, to Hamza Dahdouh, to Shireen Abu-Akleh, to Ghassan Kanafani. We owe it to Breonna Taylor, to Regis Korchinski-Paquet, to Nex Benedict and to Pauly Likens, to Corrie and to Bushnell, to Tortuguita, to Fred Hampton. To the countless others that have lost their lives in the struggle against zionism and settler colonialism – in the last nine months, the last century, the last five hundred years. We owe it to those still alive – to those that every single day continue to resist against the global industrial slaughterhouse we are all being led towards. We owe it to ourselves to fight. By any means necessary.

The secret, as always, is to begin.

Reportback from Vancouver Anti-fascists RE: Diagolon Rage Tour 2024

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Jul 232024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

On Friday July 19th. Anti-fascists around so called Vancouver mobilized to conduct surveillance of  the extreme fascist group “Diagolon” on their third official ticketed stop on their cross country tour dubbed “Rage Tour 2024” by Diagolon. The event followed ticketed events in Ottawa and Calgary, and unticketed meet and greets in Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Regina, Lethbridge, Kelowna, and Nanaimo.

The email sent to ticket holders is as follows:

“Good evening, bigots!

You will be sent to a pre-location nearby the final location that could be up to a 50 minute drive from Vancouver. This is due to severe cases of Trantifa and Diagolon Derangement Syndrome (DDS) within the city of Vancouver and surrounding areas. We hope any inconveniences will be made up for in our effort to protect ticket holders from Circs. The final location will be emailed 6(ish)hrs in advance via email from this account, (please forward any q’s to inforoadrage@proton.me)

4-7pm volunteers and Road Rage Terror Tour team arrive, set up, eat at venue

7-8pm VIP’s early entry, (please be at the pre-location area 10-15mins prior if possible)

8-9pm General Admission entry, (please be at the pre-location area 10-15mins prior if possible)

9-12pm(ish) Show

– Catered food will be available for cash only purchase. Smokie combo with a drink and chips $19, cheeseburger combo with drinks and chips $19. Chips and drinks available seperately as well

– Alcoholic beverages will NOT be served at the event for insurance and safety reasons. If you arrive intoxicated or become a problem in general you will be removed from the venue. Non-alcoholic beverages will be available for purchase – cash/coins are ideal.

– Do not bring weapons of any kind or you will be removed from the venue.

– Backpacks, bags and similar cargo carrying accessories may be subject to search for safety and insurance reasons.

– This is a private event. Phones and recording devices must be disabled and hidden during the venue, left inside your vehicle or at home. The contents of the event including visual, audio recording, streams and photos are proprietary to GRIFT CORP. Unauthorized recording of any kind will result in your removal from the venue and GRIFT CORP will pursue civil litigation against offenders.

– Security teams are in place to keep an eye on vehicles and measures have been put in place to avoid Trantifa issues.

– There will be Dag swag for sale via cash or e-transfe.

– Entering the event serves as an acknowledgment and agreement to the terms above.

We look forward to seeing you!

– Jeremy Mackenzie, Alex Vriend (The Ferryman) Derek (Rants) Harrison and Morgan May(hem)

#DiagolonForever \\\

Tickets
www.thegrift.shop/rage-tour-2024/

Website:
www.ragingdissident.com

Anti-fascist surveillance teams were in place to collect information on ticket holders and attendees. A small portion of that information will be shared here.

Location:

The initial location was at the Grove Church (20784 93 Avenue Langley, BC, V1M 2W5) roughly an hour from Vancouver. At any given time there were roughly 7-15 individuals standing out front greeting guests and acting as a stationary security team. There were also roving surveillance teams in pickup trucks and what are currently believed to be rental cars and other vehicles. The perimeter was wide, and vehicles were equipped with cameras. Security was also seen patrolling on foot around the neighbourhood.

The secondary location was the West Langley Hall, 9402 208 St, Langley, BC run by the Langley Lions Club just down the street. Participants walked to the secondary location, and eventually moved the roughly 70 vehicles to the main venues parking lot.

Attendance:

Approximately 70 individuals, including Jeremy Mackenzie and his wife Morgan May were in attendance.

(From left to right) Morgan May, Jeremy Mackenzie, Derek Harrison, currently unknown chud

Spotting the Fash in your town:

The Diagolon team is driving in a 2009 Jayco Melbourne Class C RV (image below). While some vehicles had unmistakably white-supremacist stickers with unmistakably white-supremacist drivers, many vehicles were unmarked, and their occupants unassuming. Obtaining the first location, and locating community halls in a nearby proximity could assist you in quickly finding the final destination. Look for individuals moving between the locations and look for the RV. Security members had headsets connected to radios and some were trying to remain unseen. Inside the venue there was a lot of chanting, raucous applause and yelling of hateful rhetoric.

Some of what we know about Diagolon:

Diagolon is a violent and bigoted group, who often speak of commiting violent acts against racialized people, queers, and leftists. They are highly nationalistic, self described white supremacists, and avowed accelerationist neo-nazis who claim they would die for their cause. Several of their members, including their founder Jeremy Mackenzie have violent pasts, including weapons and assault charges. The group came to national headlines during the Coutts border blockade in relation to the anti-vaxx protests in February of 2022 in which several Diagolon members were arrested in possession of semi-automatic rifles and armour plated vests adorned in Diagolon patches. They have openly boasted about their recruitment success in the Canadian Armed Forces (several of their followers have been confirmed to have served or currently serve in the military), and have at least one former Toronto Police Sargeant in their ranks. In clips pulled from Jeremy Mackenzies podcast The Raging Dissident he often calls for the murder and expulsion of Indians, Sikhs, Chinese, Somalians, leftists, Jews, political opponents and queers while rambling nonsensically about pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies while in fits of barely controlled rage. Jeremy Mackenzie currently lives in the town of Pictou Nova Scotia, according to his Wikipedia page, a town of just over 3100 people. 

Where do we go from here:

Diagolon and their growing group of followers emerge through state-sanctioned racist, homophobic, and bigoted world views. Many of their compatriots were radicalized during the lockdowns, and often participate in anti-mask, and anti-sogi demonstrations. While we too desire for another world, our desires are incompatible with celebrations of hate and any white ethno-state-making project. Beyond collecting information, a surveillance mission with a group of trusted friends is a great way to build trust, sharpen your skills, escalate your sneak, and be better equipped for the next time fash bubble up in your town. Be sure to protect each other in tangible ways, and be ready for confrontations. Diagolon members often lament about their wishes to beat up or kill anti-fascists. This should scare you, it should also sharpen your resolve and activate you and your community. The state will not save us, whether they label groups like Diagolon & The Proud Boys terrorist organizations or not. We need to increase our communities capacities to take these groups on and protect each other in the streets and in our homes. Self defense means literally fighting back.

Toronto Police Approaching People to be Confidential Informants

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Jul 132024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

In case you missed it, Toronto Police have recently been attempting an old tactic against Palestinian solidarity organizers: soliciting arrestees to become confidential informants.

While this isn’t a new tactic, the blatant and concerted attempt to conjure informants in community organizing spaces is.

Writing this, I know of at least four separate individuals approached by police.

Each approach has been similar: the individual is arrested, charged, and then prior to being released, approached by a detective from Toronto Police’s Hate Crimes & Extremism Unit (HCEU).

Many major municipal police forces in so-called southern Ontario have a HCEU, usually nested within their “Intelligence Division”. These are the units that track and gather intel on protests, organizers, and mobilizers. The municipal units together form a provincial network – the Hate Crime Extremism Investigation Team (HCEIT) – which attend trainings together, document and share intel in various ways, and work closely with provincial and federal intelligence bodies.*

The detective’s approach is very straightforward: they inquire whether the individual knows what a “confidential informant” or “CI” is. The detective suggests that perhaps the individual has concerns about the actions of some of their comrades, and they tell the arrestee that if they have information to share it doesn’t need to happen through their lawyer. In some cases there’s an insinuation that the detective could talk to the crown on their behalf if were to provide information, but without promising anything.

It’s worth noting that we have seen police make informational approaches to individuals in the GTHA area before.

In Hamilton during the height of Landback Lane we saw the OPP approach an individual, suggesting they may be concerned about what people they knew were up to. Likewise, Hamilton Police have previously coerced people in to coming to the police station under the guise that they were being charged. Instead they were solicited for information, then released. As well, during escalating anti-line 9 organizing, at least one individual in the Waterloo region was approached by an intelligence body to inform on people.

In each of these cases – as well as the recent Toronto examples – the individuals being approached were “newer” or peripheral to organizing (at least locally). Police intentionally choose to approach these individuals because they believe:

  • The individual may not have the support of others at that time, and out of duress (real or imagined) may give information
  • The individual has yet to develop core politics of the struggle (i.e. ACAB/Don’t talk to cops)
  • The individual may not have developed attachment to the people or struggle they’re being asked to inform on, and more likely to give up information as a result

While police may most often approach folks new to the scene, this isn’t good reason to exclude those new enthusiastic folks from our spaces or movements – but it is a good reason we need to take the time to get to know folks coming in to our scenes and circles as often as possible. Building genuine relational movements means people are better supported (not just in moments of repression, but especially then), and more likely to move us towards building movements that can grow in both size and risk-taking, while resisting repression.

Remember: Don’t talk to cops!

A Mini Primer on Informants

People might agree to inform because of:

  1. Fear/Isolation
    • This could be fear of their legal predicament, or something police have done to covertly or overtly threaten them, or both. Especially fear in isolation/without support.
  2. Attention, self-importance
    • Making themselves important to someone, even if it’s a fucking pig.
  3. Conflict/Bad Politics
    • They don’t have ACAB politics – they believe police will solve whatever issue they have with whomever or whatever, or they’re pissed at someone (in combo with bad politics)

Which leaves us with: What can WE do, collectively, to dissuade or render CI’s useless?

  1. Have and continue building good security culture and OpSec practises
  2. Create opportunities in movements (especially) for people to question and understand anti-cop politics, even if it’s via an anonymous zine library or reading group. Learn to have hard conversations.
  3. Actively & proactively counter fear of repression by discussing it, creating opportunities for connection and relationship building with others experiencing it or likely to experience it – both in private groups and larger ones.
  4. Build a culture of support, debrief, openness & transparency about repression, police & police approaches
  5. Build skills, spaces, and support for conflict resolution in community. Police are adept in creating or inflaming controversy, and it’s only leaning in to hard conversations that will move us clearly through those moments.

Other Things to Remember:

  1. Police don’t need to arrest someone to approach them to be a CI
  2. We give police intel in many other ways – work on things in your control. Security culture. Operational security. Tech security. Be cognizant of everything you’re doing on frontlines while under surveillance: Are you taking photos on your phone and immediately posting to a key social media account? Are you always talking to the same few people right before a big decision is announced?
  3. Someone disagreeing with you, your ideas, or your politics does not mean they’re a cop, informant, infiltrator, or disruptor. This type of thinking can paralyze us, and is ignorant. Large movements attract a huge number of people with difference backgrounds, experiences, ideas, all at varying moments in their political development. Your differences may mean you need to have some conversations or even reconsider collaborating – but that can usually be done amicably.

And finally, some affirmation: Police making a concerted effort to flip people means they want information – which means they don’t have the information they’re hoping to have. This is good news, and in some ways may even indicate that reasonable security practises are already working. Keep at it!

* Further notes on Hate Crime Extremism Units

The following police department HCEU’s form the provincial Hate Crime Extremism Investigation Team (HCEIT): Guelph, Hamilton, London, Ottawa, Waterloo, Durham, Halton, Oxford, Toronto, York Region, Peel Region, Stratford, Brantford, Niagara.

HCEIT works with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Criminal Investigation Services Ontario (CISO), Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) & Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

It’s worth noting that there have been recent and continuous federal, provincial funding being given to municipal hate crime units to investigate “antisemitism” and anti-muslim incidents. Antisemitism is in quotes because the state and some Jewish bodies sees all pro-Palestinian action as antisemitism, not because there have not been instances of such since October – and prior. Regardless, my point is that we are in a moment of heightened state surveillance & repression around pro-Palestinian organizing with some level of joint national and provincial directives happening. Act like it – but keep f*cking shit up!

More Notes on June 6, 2024

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Jul 032024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

A summary of events

At around 4 PM, student protesters entered the James administration building of McGill University and disrupted the Board of Governors’ (BoG) meeting to oppose its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The BoG is the highest instance of the university and decides in which companies its endowment fund is invested, including Israeli, Zionist and arms companies. Hundreds of protesters formed a support rally around the building, with some creating makeshift barricades with fences and furniture. An hour later, on the administration’s request, a strong police presence arrived on campus, including several dozen riot cops. The latter took control of the walkway east of the building and prevented protesters from protecting the north (back) entrance, thus confining them to the south (front) side of the building.

At around 6:30 PM, cops entered the building through the back entrance. They would soon begin arresting the protesters inside, who had tried to barricade the room they were in as best as they could. Simultaneously, cops brutally assaulted the support rally, using their batons, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse the protesters, who did not go out without a fight.

One particularly funny moment captured here is Deep Saini hiding from his students, cowering behind admin staff ushered out

The level of violence from the police surprised some demonstrators, with cops aiming tear gas or rubber bullet guns at people’s heads and intentionally shooting people with tear gas canisters, in addition to using huge quantities of chemical irritants.

At 7:15 PM, a demo started marching from the UQAM (another university) encampment towards McGill. The march symbolized the end of said encampment and had been announced several days prior; it was therefore not in direct reaction to the James building occupation, though its path might have been rerouted for the occasion. Protesters meandered through the Milton-Parc neighborhood to try to reach the administration building, but their attempts were thwarted by police following them and blocking streets. The demo finally tried to break through the police line on Milton street, just a mere hundred metres east of the James building. Protesters were then met with the violence and pepper spray of bike cops, backed up by riot police. In the disorientation that ensued, the protesters ran away and, one way or another, reached the Lower Field.

The UQAM crowd slowly regrouped there, joining forces with the McGill one. Those who were still good to go started marching again, unabated by the torrential rain. The demo meandered through the streets, with riot cops clearly blocking any road that might lead to the James. Once on Sherbrooke, a Scotiabank window was shattered. The protest continued wandering through Milton-Parc and went east, eventually disbanding on St-Laurent.

Some thoughts

The author of these reflections applauds everyone who partook in the occupation or the demos, and hopes the following thoughts are not taken as negative criticisms, but as things to think about, discuss and debate moving forward.

1. On communication: publicly announcing the BoG meeting on social media would have made the James occupation impossible, as the administration would have called the cops beforehand or moved the meeting online. However, I still think it would have been useful if McGill folks had shared the information with trusted UQAM folks. For one, this could have allowed the latter to advance their demo time and thus join the support rally. This would also have facilitated the exchange of knowledge and material, namely rope to allow the occupiers to escape through the windows and things to block the back entrance. On the last point, I think more intel should have been done to make sure every entrance had been dealt with.

2. On meteorological conditions: the heavy rain created unique conditions with some payoffs. While it might have discouraged more people from attending the demo, it somewhat mitigated the spread of pepper spray and tear gas and provided a good reason to bring umbrellas. Of course, goggles and masks still proved useful that day. The wind also made its presence known: there is footage of riot cops teargassing themselves because of it. Weather conditions and terrain geography (elevation, obstacles) still seem to be relatively unexplored areas of demo planning.

3. On objectives: both the march from UQAM and the subsequent one from Lower Field apparently had the goal of reaching the James. Other than its symbolic significance, this objective makes little sense in my opinion, since the cops had already entered the building before the first march was on its way. Also, the long meandering paths taken did not help reach the destination, as the cops could always see where we were headed. Nevertheless, the persistence and temerity of the protesters is worth acknowledging and commending. Older comrades even said the demo reminded them of combative night demos from 2012.

4. On demo formations: the UQAM demo had a few standoffs with the police, who were adamant on preventing it from getting to the James. As explained in the previous point, I still have difficulty understanding that objective. However, there might come a point in time where similar ones prove crucial in achieving wider goals. I will thus share my two cents on two noteworthy standoffs:

– The first one happened with bike cops preventing further advancing on Prince-Arthur street. After stopping for a brief while, protesters started marching again towards the cops, yelling “Bouge!” (Move!) to give them a taste of their own medicine. Some rocks were also thrown (albeit not very powerfully). Despite the comedic value of the whole scene, the cops did not cede, with some deploying pepper spray and others threatening the crowd with their bikes. The demo thus chose to turn away. In my opinion, the demo did not charge fast enough to instill psychological fear in the cops. It is somewhat understandable though, since the protesters didn’t have much in the way of equipment to neutralize the bicycles.

– The second standoff occurred on Milton street, where police vans were spread throughout the street and reduced mobility for both sides. Once again, the protesters faced bike cops, but this time, they made contact, as their resolve had hardened. The first three rows respectively held the following items: banner – umbrellas – flagpoles. The protesters held the line for a while, but fell into disarray after the cops made liberal use of pepper spray and riot cops arrived on the scene. I think that with more training, discipline and experience, the demo could have stayed grouped while the medics attended to those who had gotten sprayed. This would have prevented the ensuing disorganized and individualistic retreat. I also think that expanding the demo onto the sidewalks and attacking by the flanks (while still leaving an escape route for the cops) would have proven strategic.

Another tactic worth thinking about when cops deny entry to an area is the splitting of the demo into two or more groups,  provided that they remain big enough. Each would take a different road to try and spread the police force thin. This allows the protesters to increase their surface area, i.e. the number of people directly facing the cops instead of waiting in the middle of a crowd. Needless to say, the successful execution of such maneuvers would require prior training and constant communication between the groups.

5. Be like water: our force stems from our ability to be anywhere and everywhere, whether it be at a protest or other actions. According to many comrades, the riot cops’ priority seemed to be to guard the James building. This limited their range of motion, and other types of cops seemed more interested in following the demo than protecting other potential targets, like the Scotiabank. On a broader level, the events illustrate an asymmetry between the people and state forces: the former, like steppe cavalry, have a harder time defending places, but are more agile; the latter, like heavy infantry, are stronger in direct confrontations (unless at a significant numerical disadvantage), but less mobile. While the police has various vehicles at their disposition, they can be slowed down by dragging objects into the street. Now, I am well aware that habit gets a bad rep because it doesn’t really slow down riot cops and can constitute a tripping hazard for ourselves. That being said, in narrower streets, it proved useful in creating some distance from bike cops and vans and giving protesters some time to regroup after a rout.

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