Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information

Atalante and Its Supporters—Part 2: Folk You! And the Far-Right Infiltration of Folk Music

 Comments Off on Atalante and Its Supporters—Part 2: Folk You! And the Far-Right Infiltration of Folk Music
May 292019
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

Recently Montréal Antifasciste published a long exposé on the neo fascist organization Atalante Québec. The article discusses the group’s international ties, as well as identifying key members in Québec City and Montréal.

The section devoted to the Rock Against Communism (RAC) band Légitime Violence made it clear that for recruiting purposes this sort of organizing inevitably strives to make inroads into certain milieus, especially the countercultural music scene, metal music in particular, tattooing, politics, the universities, and the computer gaming world. As such, the work of identifying these people has only begun.

In the coming months, we will be publishing a series of short articles titled “Atalante and Its Supporters.” Our goal is to expose public figures who are members or close sympathizers of Atalante, and who play a role in popularizing and normalizing the organization.

In this second part, we will be focusing on the folk scene and introducing you to the group Folk You!, three of whose members have links to the far right, and to Atalante Québec in particular. These links go a long way to explaining why Légitime Violence have an assured place to play when they want to do a show in Québec City: Studio Sonum.

Sylvain “Vevin” Cloutier, the “Repentant”

Sylvain Cloutier

Sylvain Cloutier, alias “Vevin,”with his tattoos of the Ste-Foy Krew, 1488, et the black sun on proud display.

Sylvain Cloutier 2

The most recent photo on Sylvain “Vevin” Cloutier’s Facebook page shows him sporting a t-shirt of the far-right metal band Graveland. The photo is datedJanuary 25, 2019 and was taken at a concert by his group Neurasthene.

“De suprémaciste blanc à chanteur folk” [From White Supremacist to Folk Singer] is the title of a March 2018 Le Soleil darticle devoted to Sylvain Cloutier, the vocalist in the group FolkYou. This article is part of the musician’s alleged redemption after his many years as part of the most radical wing of the far right in Québec City.

Ste-Foy Krew, the Fédération des Québécois de souche, neo-Nazi bands like Prison Bound, Elyab, and Dernier  Guerrier have all had the “student with a BA in music from the Université Laval” in their ranks. He has also showed up in groups like La Ferraille, where he dressed up like a pirate.

“Être un gros chr… de raciste et être un nazi, c’est stupide. Du racisme et du nazi, tu n’en trouveras jamais dans Folk You.” [Being some big fucking racist or being a Nazi, that’s just stupid]“Vevin” Cloutier insists, adding: “S’il y a des gens qui veulent me faire tomber moi, fine, mais pas le reste de FolkYou. Je ne veux pas que la m…. retombe sur le reste de mon band, car ils n’ont absolument rien à voir là-dedans” [If there are people who want to take me down, fine, but not the rest of Folk You. I don’t want that shit sticking to the rest of my band, because it has absolutely nothing to do with them].

Our research tells us that that statement is total crap. In fact, it didn’t take a lot of work to uncover not one but two other white supremacists who have been associated with Folk You from its very inception

bergy et vevin

Sylvain “Vevin” Cloutier (on the right) with Atalante member Mathieu Bergeron. The photo was taken at a Légitime Violence concert at Studio Sonum. Note that Cloutier is wearing a neo-Nazi Vinland Misanthropic Division t-shirt.

“Steve Rebel”, the co-founder

Founded in 2014, the hard core of Folk You seems to be Sylvain Cloutier, Félix Latraverse, and someone who calls himself “Steve Rebel.” While it’s not always easy to clearly establish the links between the far right and Folk You, that isn’t the case when it comes to Mr. “Rebel.”

Steve Rebel 4

In fact, the banjo player proudly flies his “1488” tattoo on his knuckles. His most recent Facebook profile photo doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt about his neo-Nazi allegiance nor does his Totenkopf patch.

A quick explanation, “1488” is code used by neo-Nazi militants of every stripe since the eighties. The 14 refers to the “Fourteen Words,”a quote from David Lane, a member of the neo-Nazi paramilitary group the Order, and the 88 stands for “Heil Hitler” (H being the eighth letter of the alphabet). As to the Totenkopf, it was the symbol worn by the Nazi SS officers in charge of the concentration camps during Hitler’s reign. That doesn’t leave a lot of questions unanswered.

Oddly, it seems that “Steve Rebel” left the group a few weeks before the publication of the Soleil article, in 2018. Coincidence?

Félix Latraverse, le guitariste

16387370_10158220159355422_6093589141273031101_n

The founding trio of FolkYou, “Steve Rebel,” Sylvain Cloutier, and Félix Latraverse (from left to right).

In December 2018, the Montréal Antifasciste collective published a complete dossier on the neofascist groupuscule Atalante Québec. It was while working on this dossier that more information turned up on the third founding member of Folk You, Félix Latraverse, who, it is worth noting, was found marching with Atalante Québec in September 2016.

As well as playing with Folk You from its inception, Latraverse is also the current guitarist in Atalante’s flagship group Légitime Violence. Among other things, this allowed him to tour Europe with the group in November 2018, making the rounds of some of the neofascist strongholds in the old world.

latraverse_band

Félix Latraverse with Légitime Violence during the European tour.

Latraverse has been very active musically, particularly in the metal scene, which makes him the right man for the job of creating links between Atalante and its politics and the musical counterculture. Using the pseudonym “Fix,” or sometimes “Ti-Wis,” he has played in a number of groups, including Neurasthène (with Sylvain Cloutier, also part of Folk You), Haeres, Aborgnon, Délétère, Blood Plot, Hollentur, Hymen, Dimentia, and Dèche Charge, to name just a few.

On Subculture

 Comments Off on On Subculture
May 272019
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

Print version available here

A defense of anarchist subcultures and a proposal for one we could build

I’ve been thinking a lot about subculture the past two years, and had intended that this month (May, 2019) be a deadline for getting out a piece of writing about it. I didn’t do that, because writing gets harder and harder as years go by, because online projects felt more immediate, more urgent, more like a living conversation, because I just didn’t get to it. But since part of what I had wanted to propose was that we have more intentional conversations as an anarchist milieu/community/movement/culture, and that we return somewhat to writing and printing as a means of doing that, it felt wrong to not put something on paper. I would rather this were a finished document with punchy, certain proposals. I suspect I’d get more response if it was. But it’s not. Consider it more of a published draft.

If this reads like critique, which I’m not sure it does, know that I’m critiquing myself as much if not more than anybody else. If I had transcended these problems even a little bit on a personal level, this zine would be finished. Among other things.

*

I hate when anarchists get into their mid thirties and start talking like anarchism is dead, like we are nothing, like the “good old days” have passed and now we’re doing it all wrong. I wish those people would realize that often it’s them who have changed, that the scene is still vibrant and that action is usually still happening somewhere out there. I’m going to remind myself of this once per paragraph as I write this thing. Silently sometimes, but I’m going to repeat it in the text too because it’s really important. We are not dead. I am not dead. I am not old. The kids are alright. History is happening, things are always changing, but if you think that the whole world was at its best when you were 21 and feeling excited about your newly-minted adult life, you are not the only one, and you’re probably not right.

But something is always wrong, we can always do better, pendulums swing in various directions and we fuck up, often in the same ways over and over again. And in trying to correct those fuckups we end up recreating someone else’s fuckup from a generation or so ago. That’s ok because we’re also trying new things all the time – in the streets, in our relationships, in our long-term projects, in our attitudes towards the world. I really, really believe that. Sometimes we get worse, and sometimes we get better. Like all things.

*

The thing that I particularly feel wrong about right now is a bit hard to articulate. When I try to get it out it seems like it’s all already been said, and like I’m trying to synthesize a bunch of things that maybe other people don’t think of as the same problem. But here goes.

When I was a kid, it felt subversive to be political. I had a button when I was sixteen that said “I have an opinion.” Another one that said “Wake up sheep-le (baa).” Apathy seemed like a huge problem to combat, and somehow it seemed like combating apathy would also combat inactivity, like it would be better if people just thought something about the world, how it works, how it doesn’t, how it should. It seemed to me like people’s identities were being reduced by the dystopic march of late capitalism to a set of logos and aesthetic expressions, a Nike check shaved into a head, a mass-produced yellow smiley face keychain, a classroom full of identical Gap sweaters and corduroy pants.

2019, on the other hand, feels very ‘political’ to me. Self-directed expression of political views is a huge part of how we identify and define ourselves online, and an increasing proportion of our self-expression and identity formation happens in digital spaces. People are constantly staging positions, putting them out into the ‘world’ (or at least to the bubble the tech companies have given them to exist within). They write these ideas down themselves, they aren’t mass-produced, branded or identical. They aren’t apolitical or apathetic. They aren’t mindless or devoid of content.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is that I have aged and changed, that youth culture isn’t my culture anymore, but I don’t think that’s all it is. I also recognize that Facebook/Instagram is a corporation, so part of the No Logo critique still holds true, we’re being ruled by these corporations and we are opting into it at every step of the way, making it the means by which we express and construct our identities. Facebook’s relationship to our brand/identity is much harder to see than our corporate rulers of the past, and while both Nike and Facebook give us corporate rule packaged as individual self-expression, the illusion that Facebook sells is much more sophisticated. The individuality that people express through Facebook is not as simple as getting a Facebook tattoo and acting as if it means something unique or special about our self. Instead we perform and mediate our daily lives, express our our true beliefs and values, through a corporate platform. The content comes from within, it feels in many ways as real as the sharpie poetry I used to scrawl on bathroom walls as a way to rage against the machine.

It’s not that we didn’t know about this possibility and reference it in dark comedy of our own all along. The system will co-opt anything it can, and self-expression is a really easy target. They’ll take our ideas and sell them back to us. They’ll give us a nice bullpen in which to have out our fights like the gladiators for social justice that we always wanted to be.

Many real, committed, serious anarchists have embraced the social media version of politics in a way that they never embraced the circled-a hoodies at the mall in 2001. There are a bunch of important and valid reasons for this. Social media has permeated our daily lives to an extent that the brand wars never could. A lot of us had already rejected particular subcultures like punk that gave some of us an opt-out from the Niketown life as exclusionary, ineffective, or escapist. Many social and revolutionary anarchists have chosen social media because they’ve chosen a social life where they engage with regular, non-anarchist people and share their ideas, and they see that those people now do their politics online.

But I want to at least point out that if it was ever subversive to simply express a radical opinion, it certainly is not subversive in 2019. Everybody is doing it. I understand that a lot of us just want to give anarchism a bigger piece of that online opinion pie. I see how it can look like your news feed is just a 2019 version of some public square in the 1890s, where people with radically different positions are clamoring for supporters to build the world they want to build. Maybe some among us would burn that public square and Facebook too, but for the social anarchists who I see mainly participating in this kind of online activity, there should be a fundamental difference. The tech companies and the life they offer us are one of our rulers. They may be a relatively new kid on the block compared to the state and other corporations, but they are one of the biggest forces of domination and control in our world today. Bantering on Twitter as a way to oppose them is way more akin to running for office as a means to oppose the state, or to selling records on EMI to get an anti-capitalist message to a “wider audience” than to demonstrating in a public square or park that happens to also contain buildings and landscaping that were built by capitalists.

When we participate in political discourse on their platforms, we do so on their terms, because identity, communication and diverse opinions are what they trade in. And in this case having radical, controversial, seemingly new or subversive opinions is exactly what they need from us to increase their base of power. This is not the same as the tired bit about the hypocrisy of driving a car powered by fossil fuels to the protest against fossil fuels. Social media doesn’t just want your dollars or your labour, it wants as much of us as it can possibly get. And it doesn’t rely on traditional commodity chains, buy-in is all it has. If people didn’t want it anymore, it would cease to exist, and people would still be fed and clothed to the extent that they ever are under capitalism. There is only the sum of individuals who show their support for the platform by placing more and more of their self and life inside its scope, and expression is exactly what the platform wants, the source of its power and profit. Facebook is much newer than these other industries, so we can see the outside of it more clearly. It also hurts us and our relationships in particularly intimate ways.

But more importantly, I believe that our largely uncritical and unrestrained participation in these spaces is part of a broader buy-in on our part that is hurting our capacity to struggle, not enriching it. We are better, anarchism is better, if we live anarchist lives and show that another way of being is possible, rather than merely participating in the mainstream while arguing for anarchist principles. Social media might make it more possible for anarchism to join “the conversation” alongside a plethora of other ideologies, but it doesn’t make it more desireable. Living anarchist ways of life and forms of struggle visibly and openly is a better recruitment strategy than fitting in, looking and acting pretty much like everyone else, while simply articulating a more correct analysis of power. This has always been true for us, but it’s even more true right now when almost everyone is online shouting an opinion, often a radical or extreme one. If we just argue for and present anarchism, especially if we do it online, without offering something joinable – some kind of movement, community, scene, milieu, whatever term you prefer – we aren’t any better than the rest of today’s armchair warriors. It also helps if that joinable thing is refreshing in some way, if it feels subversive, different from what everybody else is doing.

*

2019 isn’t just extra political, it’s extra connected in general. Just like social media serves us a quantitative increase in political discourse but no increase in true engagement in social struggle, it serves us a huge increase in knowledge of and discussion with our real-life social networks, but no decrease in alienation. Simply knowing more about your friends, where they are, what they think and what they like doesn’t breed deeper or better relationships any more than more people knowing more about a wide range of political ideas breeds stronger, larger, better social movements. It’s been said elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating – we are so, so alienated, and it seems like the deeper into the sea of online “connection” we dive, the more impoverished our IRL relationships become.

Anarchists have spent a lot of time thinking about how we could be more for each other and treat each other better than an alienated, capitalist world expects. We aren’t perfect, and sometimes the allure of the idea of better relationships makes the sense of betrayal that comes with a failed one extra bitter. But many of us have spent lives trying really hard to learn our own ways to connect with each other, to honour our friends and comrades, to build new and better ways of relating to other humans and to the world around us. When we accept the social media life, we risk abandoning that as well, moving more and more of what could have been intangibly beautiful and fruitful face-to-face relations onto platforms that drain them of much of their content and meaning.

A lot of my friends seem to have somewhat given up on living differently together, and resigned themselves to more “normal” lives. They do this for a variety of reasons – pressures from capitalism, falling in love, feeling burnt by relationships past. But in 2019, people, including anarchists, need to find better ways of connecting to each other more than ever. It might feel hard to get back on the “rethinking relationships” horse, but the conversations we’ve been having for years about how to do better despite a context of capitalist alienation might make us better positioned than many others to take on the huge problem that Facebook and the desperate loneliness it creates have brought on.

*

I want us to grow, and to be attractive to people who might join us. To do that, we need to have something to offer. For me, that something wasn’t just a different way of understanding power and the world, it was another way of life. It was a rejection of business as usual, of the “way things work,” in favour of radical community, prefigurative or even lifestylist politics, and a commitment to something other than and in opposition to the daily grind of work and obedience. In my particular case, it was dumpster diving and living cheap in a world that wanted us to work hard and spend big. It was sitting or heckling during the national anthem while others stood blindly. It was being good to each other and emphasizing friendship and community over romance, the couple form, and a future with 1.2 children in the suburbs. It was calling in sick to go to the protest every single time, because the action was more important, because now we had something bigger to live for. It felt dangerous, it felt different, it felt right. It also created a huge gulf between me and the “normal” world, served to alienate me from my family, communities and neighbours to an extent that I now question, and included many practices that I now think do little to further anarchist struggle, but if I hadn’t had some sense of anarchism as a way of life in opposition to the system I hate, I would definitely not have stuck around.

*

Nothing is more emblematic of the 2019 version of control, alienation and domination than social media, and yet anarchists as a whole in my context do very little to differentiate ourselves from it, offer alternatives to the life it proposes, or fight it as an enemy force. Part of this is because it’s hard, because we’re addicted to it, because we’ve swallowed its poison. But another part, a more lucid part, is because of a widespread rejection of subculture and escapism that I think some of us have taken to mean that we should not try to build a different life together at all. To be clear, that rejection happened for a diverse range of valid and important reasons. I do not want to recreate a situation in which folks feel they can not “become” anarchists unless they are young, able-bodied white men who choose to spend their lives train-hopping from summit to summit and eating dumpstered bread. I know that situation pretty well, and it isn’t great. But when I look at anarchism now in my context, it also feels like something is missing. I think that something, that way of life, maybe we should even call it the “subculture,” is a huge part of what we as anarchists have to offer. It should always be changing, growing, rejecting what it has been before and becoming something new. It should also be plural, there should be various ways to exist within it and it should be possible to participate in anarchist activity without fully immersing oneself in anarchist subculture or fully rejecting other important personal ties such as home, family or community of origin. But we should live as anarchistically as we can while fighting for the world we want. We should differentiate ourselves from the system that we oppose so that we will be an attractive alternative to it.

Anarchist subcultures exist. Many of us participate in them. Critiques of “lifestylism” from years ago, the mass exodus among my friends from veganism, dumpster diving, and bicycle culture seems to have drained much of the content from that subculture, but it hasn’t eliminated the social networks. Many of us still socialize mainly with other anarchists, and when non-anarchists enter our social spaces I suspect they still feel that somthing is off or different, that we share cultural norms, inside jokes and reference points, even sometimes aesthetic similarity that they do not share. It seems like in some circles an attempt to reject “lifestyle” has led to an anarchism where we still live different lives from the norm, but we don’t talk as much about what those lives are or why, and those differences don’t have as much political or ideological content as they once did. I think some of us once believed that lifestyle could literally effect change on a broader scale, that if we rode bicycles and rejected cars it would inspire others to also ride bicycles and reject cars, and then so many people would ride bicycles and reject cars that the fossil fuel industry would simply collapse. I now think that line of thinking is absurd, but that culture with its bicycles did draw me to social struggle for a world without (among other things) fossil fuels. I don’t know if the argument that fossil fuels are bad and we should fight the corporations and governments that promote them on its own would have done the same. I think we can still build anarchist ways of life together, which I would call subculture, and that they don’t have to rely on lifestylism, which I define as the belief that individual choices, often consumer choices, can generalize to an extent that they will themselves be practices that change the world. We should continue to recognize that shifting our way of life without attacking power will do nothing to change the dominant culture or the world, but we shouldn’t try to reject subculture, or be normal. We need a cultural context from which to launch our struggles, and that context should have its own norms and ways of life. Those norms should be based on principle, and they should be things that clearly further our participation in important struggles, not detract from them. For those of us who opt into it, that subculture can provide both a social base in which to exist and thrive as individuals and a set of practices and experience that we can invite others to join.

To be clear, I don’t think subculture is the same as community, and in many ways I think subculture is easier to define and understand. Community is a whole other conversation, one that gets us into big questions about who owes what to whom, who counts as an anarchist, and what the quality of our relationships should be. Those are really important questions, and there are lots of texts out there about those questions. I think we should keep having conversations about who we should support and live alongside and how, but here I’m talking more about our choices to be or not be “weird,” “different” or “other” together, even if that together-ness is messy and ill-defined.

I don’t know exactly what this culture should look like, and I mostly want to start a conversation. A conversation about forms of life as anarchists, and about how we might offer a different way of being to those who we hope will join us in revolutionary struggle. I’m now going to offer some characteristics that my version of this subculture might have, but I’m offering them in the spirit of plurality and in hopes that others will join a debate about which of these should be broader cultural norms, which should be relegated to weird sub-groups, and which should be rejected outright as anarchist practice. So here goes.

1. Collective abstinence or near-abstinence from personal social media, and very limited use of social media platforms for promotion, with the explicit intent of drawing people offline while drawing them towards anarchist practice.

The detached, performative political and social identities that we project on facebook are producing and furthering our own alienation, and reducing us to hollow, simplified, symbolic versions of our collective selves. We have to untether ourselves from this, and the thing that we mostly have not seriously tried as a community is abstinence. This will make us seem less human, less present to regular people. They will find it hard to keep in touch with us and sometimes they will forget we exist. We will have to have each other’s backs in person, we will have to build healthy ways to communicate with each other and with people we haven’t met yet, and we will have to build a social force that can not be ignored, despite that barrier. Many of us already have these things and don’t need social media, but feel we can’t get off of it without withdrawing from social life, including withdrawing from the anarchist conversation. We will have to be brave, and we will have to collectively agree to move our conversations elsewhere. It might feel annoying at first, but the relationships we have on social media are so impoverished that I really believe it will be worth it. The more of us do it, the easier and better it will be. We will have to trust ourselves that we know a life without Instagram is a better life, is worth it, so that when someone asks us if they can add/like/whatever us we can proudly say that we don’t do that shit and offer the myriad other ways that we can be reached and found. Some people will not bother to find us that way, but the social media machine is so big and so scary that surely some will also be drawn in by the allure of joining us in a life that rejects that machine.

Not being on social media will differentiate us from the rest of politics and from normal life. Maybe that sounds like a problem, but I think it could be one of our greatest assets if we let it. We will get less likes and clicks, maybe we will even get less real engagement in a numerical sense, at least for a time. But I think that engagement will be more meaningful and lasting. I don’t propose doing this alone, or adopting a holier-than-thou approach that shames individual people, especially non-anarchists, for using social media platforms. I propose that we use the strong, supportive networks we already have as anarchists to make this possible for us, and to invite others to do it with us when they join us in anarchist struggle and community. In places where those networks don’t exist, we must build them.

We know that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are horrible, for us and for the world, and inviting others to join us in living a life without them will make us a lot more inspiring than any number of politically correct tweets. The rapid and totalizing shift towards lives lived so entirely online is repugnant to a lot of people beyond our social circle, and the prospect of a community or network that relates and communicates in a radically different way from that might draw a lot of people in. That’s not to mention the substantial impacts on our mental health and relationships, and the obvious security concerns that come with continuting to participate in the forums that the social media giants are offering us.

2. A critical relationship with the couple form.

Being an anarchist places a lot of strain on our relationships with home and family, and how we each choose to navigate that with original homes and families is our own. When I made this choice, I felt like there was a lot of love and support, maybe even a new home and family, waiting for me on the other side. I’ve heard a lot of people speak as if they were promised a lot of connection and support in the anarchist milieu, but that promise was not kept for various reasons. I also see that a lot of people end up withdrawing from anarchist life as they age. I think we need to enmesh ourselves in each others lives by truly committing to radical friendship and comradeship so that we can not and do not want to live without each other, and so that our lives will seem to not go on if we withdraw from anarchist struggle. I do not think this would always be incompatible with romantic love, but I do think that coupled romance is the main reason for the breakdown of such relationships in my immediate community. Chosen family is how I plan to keep myself in anarchist struggle and community for the long haul. There are a lot of other ways that this could be accomplished, but I suspect that prioritizing one person and relationship above all others is unlikely to do it. That’s especially true when we consider how volatile romantic relationships tend to be. It also makes us unavailable to provide the kind of deep connection that friends and comrades who haven’t found or don’t want to find their ‘someone’ will certainly need if we want them to stay here with us too. Whenever we talk about circles of affinity, someone brings up the problem of people who don’t have people, who are alone. That will always be an ethical concern if we value free association, but I think it will be less of a widespread problem if we stop uncritically throwing ourselves into one other person at a time and start honouring and nurturing the relationships we have with our friends and comrades.

3. We should support each other economically and practically, building lives in which we are indispensable to each other. However, we should do this face to face, non-hierarchically and through relationships of trust and mutual struggle, not by creating separate classes of “doers” and “funders” as some people are doing on Patreon in the name of mutual aid. We should build our own system in which we can all work less, or ideally not at all. Patreon is the antithesis of this, relying on some people’s “wage work” to fund other people’s “activism.” We should collectively provide the things that we actually need for all of us to keep fighting.

4. A commitment to sharpening both analysis and praxis.

We should create intentional spaces where we debate ideas, change our minds, and find others who want to try out the same practices as we do. I think anarchist gatherings could serve part of this purpose, and in some contexts are close to doing so. We should keep writing, keep talking, keep arguing and start admitting when we have changed course more often. We should try new tactics and analyze new aspects of the world we inhabit. Some of this might still happen on the Internet but it should be about figuring out what to do, not asserting our identities. This means it probably can’t happen on Twitter or Facebook, where every statement is a fashion accessory attached to a personal brand. If we’re going to participate in a subculture, we have to make sure that it’s about something, that it serves to sharpen and build our sense of purpose, not pacify it.

5. Build anarchist rituals and social spaces.

We should have times and places where we get together to assert and revel in our collective existence. These things help us to feel whole and remind us of what we have, like holidays do for some people with their bio families. Some of them also make us findable and visible, and give opportunity for newer people to test out what it might feel like to join our world. In my context I think of May Day, which I spend every year at a demonstration alongside other revolutionaries, thinking of the many people in many different contexts who are doing the same. I also think of New Years Eve, when many of us yell, bang drums and shoot fireworks in front of prisons before having a party with our friends. Neither of these demonstrations serve a particular unified purpose that is accomplished during the action, but they are ours and that always feels important in the moment. I also remember fondly another city and another time where Food Not Bombs servings brought a lot of us together once a week to talk politics, share our positions with others who weren’t already like us, and eat (mediocre) food together. I am done eating undercooked lentils and I don’t believe in “service” per se, but I wonder if I could build something similarly regular, social and open into my daily or weekly anarchist life.

Basically, I think revolutionaries need both intimate friendships and broader cultures and communities. In some contexts, that broader context could be a neighbourhood, a sense of nation or a shared social position. For many anarchists, it’s probably none of those things. Given that, I propose that as we continue to live lives that are shaped by our participation in specifically anarchist struggle for a better, freer world, we build ourselves at least a subculture to do it from, and that we let that subculture look a little weird, but still inviting, to those outside of it. It doesn’t have to look like communities we’ve outgrown or rejected. It doesn’t have to totally alienate us from our neighbours, coworkers and families. But we have to have each others’ backs and build intentional practices together, in ways that mainstream urban North American culture does not encourage, and so we’re going to have to do something different.

email me – subculture at riseup dot net.

What Happened to Prisoner Justice Day?

 Comments Off on What Happened to Prisoner Justice Day?
May 202019
 

From End the Prison Industrial Complex

EPIC recommends this excellent new mini-series produced in Montreal called “What Happened to Prisoner Justice Day?” for anyone wanting to learn more about the history and context of the prison movement across so-called Canada since the 1970s. From the description:

This is a mini series about the history of prisons in canada focusing on differences in the prison system in the 1960s-1980s versus today. The podcast features interviews with former and current prisoners, as well as supporters on the outside. For those new to prison history, Prisoner Justice Day, also called PJD, started in 1975 on the one year anniversary of the death of Edward Nalon, an inside organizer who bled to death in a segregation cell in Millhaven Maximum Penitentiary on August 10th, 1974. Prisoners refused to eat and refused to work to commemorate Eddie’s death. In May 1976, Robert Landers, who had been actively organizing in Archambault Pen before being involuntarily transferred to Millhaven, died in a segregation cell in Millhaven after repeated calls for medical help met no response. In June 1976, prisoners in Millhaven launched a call for support for their one day hunger strike in remembrance of all prisoners who had died inside – to take place on August 10th. Word spread across the country and, in the end, thousands of prisoners participated in the one day hunger strike and supporters on the outside organized events on the outside. A lot has changed since the 70s, not just in prison, but outside of prison. While respecting PJD remains important to many on the inside and outside, the numbers of those participating are nowhere near the numbers involved in the 70s and 80s. This podcast mini-series sets out to explore why that change has occurred.

To listen, search for “What Happened to Prisoner Justice Day” in your podcast app or visit https://prisonhistoryca.libsyn.com/

From Embers: Anarchist Bookfair XX

 Comments Off on From Embers: Anarchist Bookfair XX
May 032019
 

From From Embers

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair is the largest anarchist gathering in North America and 2019 is it’s 20th year.  In this episode, I interviewed two members of this year’s bookfair collective.  Topics include:

– what, if anything, does the bookfair have to do with books?

-is the bookfair for “us,” for “recruitment,” or both?

-how much should event planners try to shape a space like this? what kinds of policies are appropriate and how, if at all, should they be enforced?

-what should we expect at this year’s bookfair?

The bookfair is coming up on May 25th and 26th!

Links:

Website

Facebook Page

Twitter

Décivilize: the Endgame

 Comments Off on Décivilize: the Endgame
Apr 192019
 

From Décivilize

Welcome back!

This marks the reboot of the eco-anarcho blog Antidev! Now under the improved, catchier name DÉCIVILIZE. You may use the old or the new name as you wish! For those who don’t know what the fuck was that blog… what is a blog… or what’s was this blog’s purpose… well it is still accessible at https://antidev.wordpress.com, or have fun reading the wall of text below.

As for this blog, we promise it to be a little different, yet continuing upon the same effort of bringing to light (even if that’s relative) the critiques, thoughts, projects, actions and sensibilities of the anarchistic eco-rebellion, especially the one that rises against the Leviathan of techno-industrial, consumerist social mess, in a diversity of forms and from a multitude of contexts, in both French and English, and perhaps more! This time around we’ll be looking for contributors willing to translate -to and fro- some texts/articles/reports to Chinese, Korean as well as native/indigenous languages, in an effort to “disown” green anarchy as a Euro/settler paradigm, and make it known to more than just “White” Westerners… try to make it better spread globally, outside of the toxic NGO politics.

Burn, baby, BURN!

So this is how this shit all started…

Proepilogue

This past effort, the Antidev blog was launched out of a will to communicate something, but more deeply out of a few underlying hypotheses that eventually were somewhat proven true…

Over these three years I confronted myself to the world «outside», turning myself inside out, shelving that internet «presence», far away from that bunker of self-seclusion, back to the world closer to those few reading and following this blog, and also and especially to the rest who had near-zero chances of having ever read from it. Sometimes making a fool of myself… going through a few hardships and personal drama… «feeling society» at its worst… even doing institutional entryism…

So, what I have found out there (…or in there?)… was of course a vast web of self-deception, or delusion, and a lot people being distracted by wasteful shit on a thousand plateaus of rather bad social theater, other vaudevillian comedy or even more often some depressing waste of time and energy. In other words, society. Set on a quest to understand their incredible carelessness, their unassumed absurdity, their mindless sociality, I had a taste of their politics, only to realize that it was just, capitalist politics… no worse, no better; just not as good as their external pretenses spectacularize. For sure, I am most likely not a better person than they are, if there is any value, save a meaning, to each other’s goodness. Their world, and my world, is driven by the virtual facades and their politics. How can it be escaped?

The world we produce can only be attacked, subverted, and/or destroyed. But, how to sling at the Leviathan? This may be the most important question of our age. Also a very tough one.

A blog can still be used for a few things, including firing pot shots at society in its thousands of reified shapes and forms, and situations. A blog surely does little more than entertaining you for a moment, as you pause in the midst of your daily barrage of alienation. A blog is not a living thing. «I» am not even a living being, even if the one writing this could potentially be alive (but then again, could I consider this as life?). The blogosphere isn’t as important as it used to be, but like other older structures of the internet, it will remain useful especially for those seeking to escape the big data traps of corporate social media, but not significantly more so than a street post, wall or panel to vandalize.

A big issue with the past blog was how it attempted to be «connect with the world» (or was reflecting its author(s) attempt at doing so) by being a kind of social media, or at best an estuary -or a beach head- to the wider social media. This has been solved by the vast invasion of corporate social media of the past few years, that made such efforts irrelevant anyways. So, good evils. Also some positionning… some fronting that emerged from this blog was pretentious, and sometimes misguided, lacking careful background considerations of who/what it was backing, siding with agendas or interests that only followed their own short-sighted views. Taking sides with the wrong political agencies can easily be an outcome in the smoke and mirrors of the internet, so it may be more cautious to post more intelligently, even if this could mean posting less often, or avoid the social media reaction trap in regards to «world events», more local politics, identity politics, and else.

It may be a benefit of the near-defeat of the «blogosphere» by corporate social media, that it is no longer relevant of attempting to be an interlocutor in the virtual agora of the «masses», engaging in prefab debates or the depersonalized «big issues» of State politics, now that this tribune is pretty much enclosed within the walls of big business. If only for sanity’s sake. Did it matter anyway? Aren’t these masses, aggregates, products of big business, and their State, groomed and programmed by it, after all? How to be autonomous while at the same time getting attention, in a preset discourse with a spectacular mass made of likely forged personas and positions?

The world is a slightly different place since April 2011. The newer generation, like every generation, sold themselves to the social machine until the new normal became existent back again, after this brief and inarticulate moment of social rupture in 2012, and «history», once again, negated its own existence, enforced its immuability, as the world of before reasserted itself to the present, and keeps planting its seeds for future global domination.

But then why keep publishing, when everyone’s getting their daily fill of crap through social media? Do people, in their daily social trance, still «deserve» it?

A few do! Since a few are interested on this radical otherness, that may not have been translated, expressed properly, to do it proper justice after this first attempt, during this past five years period. As a few are showing, in words but more importantly in practice, this refusal, this rejection this big «No» directed at the world, the Existent, even if the latter keeps being enforced, being reproduced, no matter what, even by those «friends» around us, or this less identifiable sanctified «people» we’re all supposed to be part of. People want a «life»! How can we blame them for it? It’s not their fault… they just ain’t asking significant enough questions.

Also because, for its creator(s), it is fun and creative! As a kind of art project. But unlike the contemporary productive/lucrative activity we call Art, it can be one that also serves a collective purpose of agitation, subversion, solidarity, counter-info, education, maybe even liberation.

How to turn your life into a bomb, against the world that destroys you anyways

Let’s be clear that it is always a small decided minority that changes «things»; those interested in experimenting, pandering with devices and mechanisms around, to practice the dangerous magic of «changing reality», and yes, my interest is still into this. It may even start with a few explosive individuals.

But a few fundamental questions equally deserve being asked, about the who and the why these changes have to be set in motion, and at what cost – questions I think are unavoidable to any autonomous insurgent. Most often, the struggle is so self-evident that it doesn’t bear such philosophical questioning at the inception; yet equally, things tend to not be exactly what they seem, and some aspects always evade our limited, one-sided perspectives.

Anarchist insurgents are not supposed to be a bunch of mindless jihadists or mass-shooters driven by some over-simplified, all-encompassing cause -or spooks- especially given how society makes it so easy -even prescribed- to be self-sacrificing over bullshit purposes. Well that’s what work is about, anyways, right? If a few decide to stand up for the lives that get destroyed in the natural world, that’s because there is no other choice. Because these lives do not have the means to defend themselves, even comprehend what’s happening to them. This is why we choose to stand for them. These lives are unlike the compromised lives of humans. They are inherently innocents; it is beyond question. Activists serving agendas… politicians acting upon agendas negotiated with bigger groups, organizations; they of course are serving their own, beneath the spectacular antagonists. They are responsible for their own madness, and gain their own capital as they progress, when they do.

Anarchist praxis emerges from and towards the realization of anarchy, not of made-up ideals recycled from others. It is facing the unknown, answering by asking questions.

«Realization» is in both senses of the word; not just as an idea coming to reality, but as a reality coming to mind, to awareness. Awareness that, inherently, anarchy is already there, and omnipresent; that society, translated in the physical world, means nothing short than a continuous onslaught to break it, transform it, in the goal of ordering it, according to its own dominant institutions, make-beliefs, ideals. Of course there could be a «better society», but it’s not there. It is another projected ideal, that eco-socialism. You likely won’t be living into it in your lifetime, if it ever comes to reality. More importantly, like any other projected ideal, it isn’t to be fulfilled in the first place, but to be enforced as abstraction upon the real world.

Used to be cool & trendy back in Medieval times… so why not today!?

There is little left to create, but plenty of relationships to destroy, horizons to liberate.

I understand that the natural world is a world of anarchy, of freedom. An endless multiplicity of life forms, and their ways of dealing with problems, sustaining, enjoying and coping. There’s violence and there’s peace, love/hate, pleasure/pain… an apparent happiness and sometimes misery… mutual aid just like rivalry… sharing and robbing, there is even some level of oppression and alienation, and all the things between these binaries, but none of these are instituted values like property, or the family, as far as we know.

The mistake in all naturalist thinking is not to be taking example from nature, but rather to be, self-servingly, projecting aspects of our own culture upon what we perceive as the natural world (the idea that killing or domination is natural, because «look at them lions»), and use it back to justify human behavior. In a way, it is an «injection attack». Or an entire blackmailing, of both the natural and the human world. But «nature» is not nature. It is a stained mirror.

What matters -in our own view- is the tension of our (repressed) savagery; the one society fights so hard to erase by disciplining and organizing us. But what this savagery IS… that’s more complicated than what stereotypes might tell us. Is this really irrationality, mindless impulses, or unrestrained sexual onslaught, or chaotic violence? The question of «living like savages» as humans is pretty coarse, and delving in archaic imperial chauvinism, that’s next to racism.

Yet there is the more certain, subversive reality of a life that doesn’t need those fabrications to be and even sustain. That we can live upon the land and feed from its resources, individually, without needing, inherently, to purchase land… as this is fabricated «need» was always nothing else than enforced through a web of interlocking relations, that started with colonialism at their foundation, and are still perpetuating it, through nationalism, the clan, private property, and agriculture. Thought forms and cultural shapes that are the forces of this self-fulfilling prophecy of civilization. They are civilization due to their civilizing; this is what civilization inherently is, a process of transforming and imposing imperiously, which results at the bottom line with… more crap, more waste and more delusions.

Fuck maoists, as the rest of the authoritarian Left, like forever…

Domination is no longer embodied on a global scale solely by the Western Christian-Capitalist civilization. The gods have changed faces, their devices are new currencies. Another thing we’ve seen over the past few years is the sudden rise of China as a counterweight to the Western world. If we ever succeed at curbing capitalist development on Turtle Island, how will that relate to the insane techno-industrial, the economic development in China, and its wider technocratic onslaught? The Communist Party, successful where the Soviet bloc has failed, will keep asserting itself as a civilizing force, for as long as Western capitalists seek to dominate the world, and not only within its national boundaries, but as a global hegemony as well, driven by a kind of late-stage socio-capitalism. It is noteworthy to consider that Chinese interests are also intertwined with the extractive industry, its related tech industry, and obviously, as we all know, the mass commodity markets. Canada, like Europe, has served as an economic buffer zone for these markets, and the investments in infrastructure, real-estate, as well as the deeper energy and mining industries.

The proposed goal here would not to be fighting «them Chinese influence in our cuntry» as xenophobes would, but instead to be (re)building linguistic bridges with those, among the Chinese world (and by extension through the wider East-Asian world), who seek to oppose the techno-totalitarian world that expands upon their lives, upon natural life, and/or assert a life that exists outside of it. Opposition to authority, or the will to be free from its spooks, isn’t only a recent invention of the industrial Western world. Even if «anarchism» may not be a globally well-spread paradigm, the underlying sentiment, intent and rationale from which it emerged in the West is what really matters, and we believe these may exist all over the globe.

This is not yet as much another depersonalized attempt at “changing the world”, as it is an effort of bringing to awareness the realities of personal rebellion, up against the oppression and devastation that are redundant all over the planet, from your specific local context to that of someone in Guangzhou, or in the Amazon forest, as well as our more important converging will to refuse it, and assert life up against civilization’s death machine.

The continuous push to civilize is all over the place, and intimately connected to the authoritarian nature of States, and their managing organs. To be sabotaging the first is to be undermining the latter. This used to be, and still is, the fundamental thesis behind this mediation effort.

撤文明!
撤权力!

More coming, soon…

III% Québec Member Caught Proposing Fake Terrorist Attack

 Comments Off on III% Québec Member Caught Proposing Fake Terrorist Attack
Apr 082019
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

It would have been easy to miss a story that barely made the news last year – the story of Stéphane Dufresne (III% Québec, Front patriotique du Québec) and his leaked chat discussion about the need for a “fake terrorist attack,” along with his multiple allusions to having mysterious “concrete plans.” Although the story broke online early in 2018, the only response from the mainstream media was an article in the Montreal Gazette six months later. Montreal Antifasciste was able to establish a direct link between Stéphane Dufresne and a person that that was suspected by the RCMP of attempting to import weapons to Canada for terrorism-related plans. The context of this story is worrying, to say the least, and so we feel Dufresne merits a closer look.

The chat room leak

It all started in March 2018, when it was revealed on Le Troupeau’s Twitter that a discussion between a somewhat strange mix of folks from the far-right had been leaked from a private chat room called “Patriotes du Québec” on the MeWe platform (MeWe being a sort of imitation-Facebook). A user named “Phénix le Patriote” (who later changed his handle to “Stéphane le Patriote”) let drop a bombshell, saying: “We need a fake terrorist attack to wake up the fucking sleepyheads,” to which user “Heinrich Himmler” (!) replied: “Yeah… but be super careful.”  It is always difficult to discern empty talk or posturing from actual possible action, but Phénix’s reply seems to point to real plans for an attack: “Yes obviously!!!!! Don’t worry… Multiple actions are coming up”.

Phénix le Patriote shares his thoughts on terrorism.

In the same chat room, Phénix boasts of his shooting skills and that he is training in KravMaga, an amalgam of different martial arts techniques.

Le Patriote’s shooting range target practice.

Le Patriote trains in KravMaga.

Who was in the chat room?

So who are the people in this private chat? Phénix le Patriote, who changed his handle during the chat to Stéphane Le Patriote, leaves a trail of clues exposed by Le Troupeau’s leak. The most obvious one being that he posts a picture of himself in the group chat, and then later also posts a picture of himself in the same clothes, under his personal Facebook account (Stéphane Dufresne):

Red tuque, green jacket with Patriotes patch, from the private chat.

Red tuque, green jacket with Patriotes patch, from Facebook.

Taking a look at Stéphane Dufresne’s Facebook account, we can see that his profile also features the name “Patriote”, just like his MeWe account:

His profile name is “StéphaneDufresne (Dit Le Patriote)”

And that he takes KravMaga classes in Joliette:

Dufresne is “feeling awesome at Dojo Yosanryu” at a KravMaga course.

Joliette also matches up with the target practice photos from above, which, if we zoom in on the logo, we can see are from the Club de Tir de Lanaudière, located in Joliette, QC:

The logo from his shooting practice matches Club de Tir de Lanaudière’s logo.

The jacket was also key to identifying him from protests that he has attended (see below), since he is never without his Patriotes patch on one arm (and his Québec flag patch on the other), like here at the “Tout le monde se lève contre le PLQ” protest in Montréal last April 23, 2017.

Dufresne, on the right, with the same jacket as in the MeWe chat.

So that settles it for Dufresne, but what about the others in the chat room? The person using the alias “Heimlich Himmler” (named after the high-ranking Nazi official, one of the main architects of the Holocaust), who advises Dufresne to “be super careful,” was also easy to identify, since Dufresne refers to him by name: “Alan kovak”:

Dufresne refers to user Heinrich Himmler as Alan Kovak.

Alan Kovak (real name: Martin Minna) is known for hanging out with Atalante members, as seen here in his Facebook post with Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald and others after a night out putting up anti-leftist posters around Montréal in January 2017:

Martin Minna’s Facebook post.

Or showing off what might be his tattoos…

Les (présumés) tatouages nazis de Martin Minna.

He also used his real face pic in the MeWe chat room:

Himmler’s pic matches Kovak’s Facebook pic, belonging to Martin Minna.

… and also is probably referring to how he fucked up by posting the Atalante crew’s image above, which was used by antifascists to identify him and others as authors of Atalante’s 2018 anti-leftist postering run, when he says “I got caught when I did a little job with Atalante… Next time it’ll be ultra secret”:

Himmler talks about working with Atalante.

Screenshots also show that Lucien Lalonde and Carl Blanchette were participating in the chat room; these two are both members or associates of the Front patriotique du Québec. Lalonde has a penchant for macho talk, for instance in this screenshot from August 2017 where he suggests using an AK-47 as a “solution” to deal with migrants (many of them refugees originally from Haiti) who were crossing the border at the time:

Lucien Lalonde is a known associate of the Front patriotique du Québec.

Lucien Lalonde fantasizing about using an AK-47 on migrants.

 

Carlito (Carl) Blanchette is a known associate of the Front patriotique du Québec.

Portrait of Stéphane Dufresne

Taking a closer look at Stéphane Dufresne, as there is a lot that can be learned from his online activity.

Dufresne’s “About” page on Facebook.

We can see above that although he works for la Société de reconstitution du Bas-Canada, re-enacting the Patriotes Rebellions of 1837-8, he also runs a construction business, “Constructions Stepco”, out of his home address in Saint-Charles-Borromée, on the outskirts of Joliette, QC.:

Constructions Stepco is listed as belonging to Stéphane Dufresne at his home address.

Life is good in Saint-Charles-Borromée, although he doesn’t seem super pleased about the new house that was built alongside his backyard, talking about how he’s “on the verge of setting it on fire”:

Dufresne talking about his neighbour’s newly built house…

His Facebook likes (below) reveal that he is a strong supporter of “hardcore” Québec nationalism, from the Front patriotique du Québec (the group he is most active with) all the way to the white supremacist Fédération des Québécois de souche, as well as not one but four self-styled militia groups: Milice du Québec, Milice Québecoise des Droits et Libertés du Québec, Milice Patriotique Québécoise, and Milice Patriotique du Québec (and this is not including the III% Québec group he is part of). (Click on the image to enlarge). None of which stops him from also being a strong supporter of the Parti Québécois, like most other members of the FPQ.

A couple dozen of Dufresne’s “likes” on Facebook.

Dufresne is not only an active member of the Front patriotique du Québec, he is an administrator (and active contributor) to their Facebook group. One can only wonder if the FPQ’s poorly attended events, and the rapidly ageing profile of the dozen or so people who do show up, are possibly a factor in him repeatedly referring to the need to wake up the population.

Dufresne is an administrator of the Front patriotique du Québec’s Facebook page.

Dufresne has also become very active with III% Québec; he shows up consistently to do security with them at events, wandering around tepid, poorly attended protests in camouflage clothing, taking part in their group photos… at one point he even looks like he’s trying to throw up the III% hand sign in the group photo below:

Dufresne, first on the left, with III% Québec.

Who are the III% The III% is an armed militia group which was started in the USA in 2008. The Canadian III%, although they describe themselves as “patriots… standing up for our rights,” are mostly concerned with two issues: what they see as the “invasion of Islam” into Canada (much like most other far-right groups), and firearms. Most group chapters require members to have a Possession and Acquisition Licence (a gun permit), and the group operates in a hierarchy imitating that of the military. The III% (also referred to as Threepers) most often show up to provide security for far-right Islamophobic speakers or events, such as for Faith Goldy or La Meute. In Québec, many members of the group signaled their involvement in the 2017 (failed) plan to hold a pro-gun rally at the park commemorating the Polytechnique anti-feminist massacre, on the anniversary of the killings of 14 women there (the failed rally’s organizer, Guy Morin, was also a member of the III% Québec Facebook group).

The irony must not be lost on Dufresne that he is now an active member of the III%, a pan-Canadian patriot group, which is patriotic towards… Canada. One can only imagine his grimace (pictured below), standing in front of the Parliament of Canada with his proud Threeper bros and a Canadian flag in front, when his whole raison d’être seems to be a violent uprising to win Québec’s independence from Canada.

Dufresne standing in front of the Parliament of Canada behind a Canadian flag. Awkward.

Dufresne is also a member of La Meute’s secret Facebook group, even though La Meute spokesman Sylvain Brouillette made a point of saying that he’s “not the type of person we’re looking for as a member,” in the aforementioned Montreal Gazette article.

Dufresne is still a member of the secret La Meute Facebook group, as of January 1, 2019.

Protests… and more protests

Dufresne is probably one of the most, if not THE most, prolific individuals at far-right protests in Québec. Although he started out as a bit of a floater, showing up with La Meute (“Contre la motion M-103”, March 4, 2017), alongside the Soldiers of Odin (trying to intimidate people at the “Learn to Resist” weekend at Concordia, March 25, 2017), or with random Islamophobes (outside the Ahlillbait mosque in Montréal, December 15, 2017), in 2018 he seemed to have settled down to doing security with the III% (“Unis pour la protection des frontiers” at the Lacolle border, “Dehors les libéraux” in Montréal, or against the UN migration compact in Ottawa).

Dufresne spotted at ten protests in the past two years.

Dufresne’s online chatter

It becomes apparent, while looking through Dufresne’s online posts, that he is severely disappointed in the state of the Québec independence movement. The following exchange, after the protest against Bill M-103, is a representative example: “I get the impression Québec is finished… They found a way to crush us.” “We’re fucked.” Near the bottom of the chat he says “We need to get out our ‘teaser’ to wake up a shitload of them” (“teaser” possibly means Taser gun).

Dufresne saying “We need a ‘teaser’ to wake up a shitload of them”.

He also displays the xenophobia that is prevalent in far-right circles, as in the following exchange where he declares that “my religion forbids me from being served by someone who doesn’t respect my fundamental values and who wants to impose their own in MY COUNTRY!!!!,” followed by “what I say is, if you’re not happy GET THE FUCK OUT. Seeing what they did in the Middle East… We’re not out of the woods yet with our fucking governments shovelling them in…”

Dufresne saying, “If you don’t like it… GET THE FUCK OUT”.

Dufresne is also clearly dedicated to the idea that there needs to be a militia in Québec. The below conversation contains a couple of his recurring themes: disappointment in the current state of things, plans he has, and the need for a militia. He starts with “Geez, we are really at the point where we have to justify our existence in our own country? Things have gotten bad.” Once again, he says, “We should buy some ‘teaser’ because people are sleepy as fuck.” Later in the discussion, he says, “It’s time for a Québecois brigade (militia).” Later in the thread, Martin Bédard posts a video of the Milice Patriotique Québécoise, a now defunct armed militia that existed until recently, and was headed by far-right militant Serge Provost. Dufresne replies “I already saw that, I tried to contact Serge Provost last fall.”

Dufresne’s conversations about militias.

He also posted that he is “already ready” to the Milice du Québec Facebook group, following up with “structures are already in place. PM me for details”.

Dufresne invites people on a militia page to get in touch because there are “structures in place”.

He repeatedly refers to having plans, as in the following exchange where Alf Turcotte says, “Before the elections we’ll fight even more,” to which Dufresne replies, “I hope so… I have multiple actions ready to go!!!! These next elections will have a huge impact on our existence… And people are still asleep at the wheel! I’m raging”

Dufresne has “multiple actions” ready to go.

Or, as was revealed by Le Troupeau, his exchange with Dave Tregget (ex-leader of Soldiers of Odin Québec and founder of Storm Alliance), where he says, “Dave, we have some projects that are ready to go… Let’s see what gives J”, to which Tregget replies “We need to talk about it Stéphane,” and Dufresne replies “J real soon” (Image 28 projets-cles.jpg)

Another mention of Dufresne having “projects ready to go”.

From the above chats we see Dufresne is someone disillusioned with the decline of the independence movement, who wants to shock people awake, who is hoping to start or join a Québécois militia, and who makes allusions to having multiple “plans.”

Connections to a person arrested under terrorism-related charges

In 2017, the RCMP was alerted by US authorities that a Montrealer named Alexandre Louis Fallara was attempting to bring in arms from the USA. Further investigation uncovered that Fallara was not just a nationalist but also some sort of “National Bolshevik”, or “Nazbol”, who was posting a wide range of comments online stating he was ready to kill others or sacrifice himself for Québec.

What is Nazbol? While historically, National Bolshevism refers to a tendency within the international communist movement, in the context of contemporary antifascism, National Bolshevism (often referred to as “Nazbol”) is a strain of neo-fascism that emerged following the fall of the Soviet Union, shepherded into existence in part by elements within the former Soviet state security services. Nazbols take on the symbols of, and identify with, selective parts of the history of the communist and anti-imperialist movements, often with an emphasis on the Stalin era and Anti-Zionism in their crudest forms. The social and internationalist content of these movements is downplayed or distorted, while the conservative and xenophobic aspects of their history are emphasized and are often reframed within a racist narrative. National Bolshevism is a highly eclectic ideology; today its main expressions include extreme nationalism, opposition to “mass immigration” (especially of Muslims into Europe), anti-Americanism, and being against “western liberalism” or decadence, which translates as being against Jewish and LGBTQ people. While not identical, it overlaps with Aleksandr Dugin’s “Fourth Position” ideology, and both have been encouraged by elements of the Russian State under Vladimir Putin.

As was reported in a La Presse article last year, the RCMP picked up Fallara under Article 810.2 (3) of the Criminal Code, which is used as a way for authorities to impose conditions on someone that they fear will commit a serious offense, even though the person may not have done anything criminal as of yet. His conditions included being prohibited from possessing firearms, explosives, or what they described as “terrorist material”. (While we are completely opposed to what we know of Fallara’s politics, the repressive implications of this state tool and the conditions imposed should be obvious to readers).

Screenshot of the La Presse article reads “Severe conditions placed on Montrealer suspected of terrorism.”

Buried near the end of the article, it was mentioned that Fallara was also banned from speaking to his friend, Stéphane Dufresne. This led us to wonder: was this the same Stéphane Dufresne as the person this article is about?

Fortunately, Fallara’s Facebook and VK.com accounts are still online and uncensored (he was banned from using social media, but his accounts have remained intact since the date of the trial). On his VK.com profile, he uses the alias Vladimir-Velikayavich Zaytsev-Zorrov, where we can see him in the same outfit as in the photo La Presse used to illustrate their article.

A picture of “Zaitsev” with the same getup as in the La Presse article.

His VK.com profile still features a large number of call-to-arms type posts, such as the following, where he states that he “doesn’t care if he goes to prison or gets killed or executed. I will be proud if the Québécois people finally rise up”. He also mysteriously mentions “I have another wish. My second in command will pick up the baton if something happens to me”. Later in the post he also says “If what I’m preparing comes to fruition and I manage something (I’m not going to elaborate here on FB), know that our revolution will start with a huge BOOM.”

One of Fallara’s posts that probably got the RCMP’s attention.

He shortened his name to “Vladimir Zaitsev” on Facebook, which is still online as he left it before he was banned from using the internet. It is filled with his own toxic blend of Québec nationalism, Islamophobia, and homophobia.

A few of the hundreds of hateful photos Fallara posted on Facebook.

And, as it would happen, it turns out that he was indeed friends with our Stéphane Dufresne: We can see Fallara commenting on a private photo Dufresne posted of the front of his house.

Vladimir Zaitsev (Alexandre Fallara) posting a supportive emoji on Dufresne’s private photo.

In fact, they seem to be quite good friends, tagging each other in multiple posts, such as the following, which Dufresne was tagged in, where they refer to each other as “tovarisch,” which translates to comrade, or friend.

Clear friendship between Dufresne and Fallara.

Or another, where Fallara indicates that he is “with Dufresne and 3 other people”, he refers to Dufresne as “one of our most patriotic steadfast comrades.”

Fallara and Dufresne back-and-forth supportive comments.

As might be expected, they also publicly discuss violent uprisings together, like the following interaction where Fallara asks in Russian “When are we going to war,” to which Dufresne replies: “Currently.”

Fallara asks “When are we going to war?”

Dufresne also is tagged in a creepy video of Fallara stabbing the air with a knife, that he says will “come in handy for close combat”. Dufresne “liked” the video.

Fallara showing off his knife, which Dufresne “liked”.

In another post by Fallara, where he is extolling the virtues of armed uprising (and again tagging Dufresne), we can see Dufresne replying not long after with the comment “Citizen’s militia❤”. Fallara “liked” this reply.

Stéphane Dufresne et Alex Fallara semblent tous les deux avoir une affection particulière pour les milices et les soulèvements armés.

Fallara was picked up by the RCMP and charged under terrorism-related offenses, and one of the conditions of the trial was that he can’t be in touch with his friend Stéphane Dufresne. This brings up some obvious questions, like: Why was Stéphane Dufresne named as someone he wasn’t allowed to associate with? Was Dufresne involved in the same type of activities that Fallara was suspected of planning?

Conclusion

When the Le Troupeau chatroom leak surfaced, it revealed that Stéphane Dufresne was talking about the need for a terrorist attack to wake people up, followed by the assertion that he had “multiple actions coming up.” This in itself was worrying, but a closer look at his online activity shows a man displaying many more warning signs: he is someone who repeatedly states that he wants to wake people up, who practices shooting and street-fighting techniques, who is searching for the perfect Québécois militia (but in the meanwhile has joined a Canada-wide one), and who makes multiple ominous allusions to having “plans.” Dufresne’s name coming up in a non-association clause of a terrorism-related trial makes all of the above even more concerning. The fact that his friend, Alexandre Fallara, was attempting to import arms from the USA and was placed under surveillance by the RCMP, further cements Dufresne as someone who must be monitored closely.

We realize that this story is murky: our own politics run directly counter to the State’s “anti-terrorist” and repressive agenda, which is why we feel the need to carry out our own investigations. We do not rely on State sources, but we cannot exclude what we learn from their investigations and manoeuvres. In a context in which “revolutionary” far-right acts of violence are becoming more and more common, we must remain vigilant, while trying to figure out the answers to the difficult question of what is to be done and how we can most efficiently intervene.

In the broader context, this story is another example of the mixing of scenes and crosspollination on the far-right: in Québec we now consistently have the III% militia providing security at rallies of far-right nationalist groups, and in this case we see neo-Nazis (Martin Minna) planning in private with self-styled “Patriotes” (Dufresne and Lalonde). With the independence movement currently in decline, some proponents have turned to more desperate measures to promote their movement – whether by instrumentalizing islamophobia, or for a much smaller “hard core,” by preparing for violence. What is clear is that the far-right is continuing to fragment and re-form in new ways, and needs to be challenged at every turn.

Report-back on the March 16 Solidarity Vigil/Counter-demo

 Comments Off on Report-back on the March 16 Solidarity Vigil/Counter-demo
Apr 082019
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

On March 16, the day after the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, Montréal Antifasciste organized a rally in solidarity with the victims, which was simultaneously an antiracist counter-demonstration, given the presence on the site of notorious Islamophobes, one of whom publicly “thanked” the terrorist responsible for the attack.

Here’s a report back:

The day after the white supremacist and fascist terrorist attack in New Zealand found us in a state of shock. Besides the absolutely despicable nature of the attack—the killer filmed and live streamed the murders of fifty people at two different mosques—two things jumped out at us. First, the terrorist’s manifesto indicated the influence of an “ecofascist” discourse, which calls to mind ideas advanced by Atalante Québec and other neo-fascists. Second, he paid homage to Québec terrorist Alexandre Bissonnette by inscribing Bissonnette’s name on one of his cartridge clips.

We were also shocked by what was being published by the Québec fascist scene, which at best claimed the attack was a false flagaction and at worst celebrated it. Adding insult to injury, we soon found out that a number of Islamophobes were planning one of the weekly demonstrations of the (phoney) “Yellow Vests” outside of the Montréal offices of TVA television on Saturday, March 16.

Wishing both to honour the memory of the people who had been murdered and to prevent racists who were celebrating the event from gathering outside of the TVA building we decided to hold a solidarity rally at their usual meeting point. Time was short, and we didn’t know that approximately ten other solidarity events would follow ours, with hundreds of people in attendance. We had hoped that our gathering would make the Islamophobes think twice about showing up outside of TVA out of a basic and obvious respect for those who were in mourning.

We had underestimated their lack of basic decency…

By 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, about a hundred people from different scenes had responded to the Montréal Antifasciste callout to gather outside the doors of TVA behind a banner reading “Contre le racisme et la haine” [Against Racism and Hatred]. The people present were taking turns leading chants, when, at 11:30 a.m., people sporting yellow vests arrived on the sidewalk across the street from us. We were (disagreeably) shocked to discover that the leading the packwas none other than Pierre Dion, the Islamophobic militant recently banned from social media following a series of threats and a pattern of verbal aggression. Eventually, the “Yellow Vests” numbered a few less than twenty. We know that there were people among them who had no idea they were surrounded by Islamophobes, and we don’t hold them in any way responsible. We do, however, believe that this article should be a wake-up call for them.

Here’s a list of the far-right militants who were present:

Pierre Dion, homophobe, and conspiracy theorist who aspires to be the leader of a motley crew of nationalist whack jobs who make La Meute look like diplomats par excellence.
Michel Meunier, aka Mickey Mike, Mickey Mayer or Mickey Myers, Islamophobe and apologist for terrorism (for example, he has called for another Islamophobic attack at a Québec mosque and expressed his “gratitude” for the terrorist attack in Christchurch).
Michel Ethier, aka “Le Piratriote” [roughly, the Pirate Patriot], a vulgar Islamophobe, a fan of ALL CAPS insults, and a member of the Front patriotique du Québec.
Mario Dallaire, an Islamophobe regularly spotted at Storm Alliance rallies and on the “security”team at far-right demonstrations.
Robin « Le prophète » Simon, member of the Front patriotique du Québec and its securityteam, the GSP, now associated with the III % militia.
Claude Roy, an Islamophobic tinkerer known for his Styrofoam creations of questionable taste (and repeated complaints that nobody wants his shit).
André Boies, Islamophoboic propagandist and conspiracy theorist, owner of the Les Manchettes disinformation website, and the translator into French of the manifesto released by the terrorist responsible for the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Boies says he was there by mere happenstance, but we are highly skeptical.)

Without really having to work at it, we identified seven known Islamophobic and racist militants in a group of at most twenty people, which raises some serious questions about the Québec “Yellow Vests” pseudo-movement!

Obviously, as antifascists and antiracists, we couldn’t either just sit around twiddling our thumbs or limit ourselves to a silent vigil. From 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., the time set for the “Yellow Vests” rally, we drowned out their chants and their diatribes with our own slogans and prevented them from crossing the street twice, in spite of a muscular police presence.

We were astonished to discover what this “Yellow Vest” movement actually is and who it is made up of. Honestly, up to this point, we hadn’t paid all that much attention to them, but we must say, we did learn some interesting things. . .

Four years of experience tells us that the Islamophobic far-right groupuscules in Québec (first and foremost, PEGIDA Québec, as well as La Meute, Storm Alliance, the Front patriotique du Québec,and all their sad little spinoffs) have a consistent need to demonstrate to justify their existence and disguise their lack of significance, a sort of mad plunging ahead that grows increasingly laughable. They are calling their upcoming ritual demonstration, called for May 4, the“Vague bleue” [Blue Wave]. . .Once again, outside of the TVA offices. It’s obviously an obsession! All of the Islamophobic groups—real and virtual—with the exception of La Meute, are apparently calling for people to join this“Vague bleue.”

Another thing we’ve noticed in this four years is that every time we prevent the far right from demonstrating it grows weaker…

Critical Balance Sheet

We are aware that our gathering on Saturday, March 16, had more of the flavour of a counter-demonstration than of a memorial vigil. We would have liked to hold a memorial, but the presence of Islamophobes across the street made that impossible. Thankfully, in the following week, numerous gatherings reflected the true nature of Montréal: a dignified and diverse city.

In spite of everything, we came out of the experience feeling stronger. We mobilized rapidly (in less than twenty-four hours) and in good numbers (more than one hundred people turned out),including some our closest allies, as well as members of many of Montréal’s diverse communities.

Also notable and encouraging was the obvious popular support we received, even though the chosen site—outside of TVA on Maisonneuve—is in a low-traffic and unappealing area: for example, the group of joggers who passed by middle finger erect in Pierre Dion’s direction, the cyclists and taxis that gave us regular shout-outs, the neighbours who brought us gallons of coffee and hot chocolate, those who came to thank us, infuriated by the weeks of Islamophobic and racist comments on their doorsteps, and the occasional passerby who stopped for a few minutes to talk and share their thoughts with us or to shout a few choice words at Pierre Dion and his gang. We are grateful for everyone’s support. Solidarity is also a matter of small gestures.

– Montréal Antifasciste

///

P.S. Things fall apart for the “Yellow Vests”

When we were outside of TVA on March 16, it was impossible not to notice the silly antics of Anderson Dufresne, who spent the day flailing about in all directions on his “hoverboard,” dancing, singing, not infrequently falling down… and providing a useful foil in the face of accusations of racism (Dufresne is black). The phoney “Yellow Vests,” with Pierre Dion at their head, repeated at least fifty times in three hours: “We can’t be racist; we have our black friend with us!” However, in the few weeks since that gathering, things have gotten tense between Anderson Dufresne and that racist piece of shit Michel Meunier, whom we mentioned above. Things have heated up, with Meunier calling multiple times for Dufresne to be purged from the “Yellow Vests.” Meunier finally let loose with a stream of racism of the vilest kind, egged on by a few other “Yellow Vests,” shining the light of day on the internal contradictions that plague this pseudo-movement. Read Xavier Camus’ report for more details.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: AI Development in Montreal

 Comments Off on Ctrl-Alt-Delete: AI Development in Montreal
Apr 052019
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Our lives are increasingly characterized by algorithms that mediate our relationships to each other and to the world around us. By analyzing our behaviors, our preferences, our networks, and many other aspects of our lives, those who exert power over us manage to stay one step ahead. What’s at stake here is our capacity to have secrets, to resist, to agitate, to attack what destroys everything we love and protects everything we hate. It’s a fight against the new panopticon.

Montreal has become a hub for Artificial Intelligence (AI) development. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated to several companies that now offer tons of specialized yuppie jobs in the domain. At the end of 2018, a document of principles surrounding AI development in Montreal was drafted. These principles were written up by some of the biggest players in AI in an effort to address public concerns about the potential of these new technologies. The document, now known as the Montreal Declaration, lists 10 unattainable and ridiculous principles such as: “The development and use of artificial intelligence systems must permit the growth and well-being of all sentient beings”. Such pitiful public relation stunts by the engineers of social control are no longer surprising. AI will soon be integrated into nearly all spheres of society, from finance and the extractive economy to healthcare and policing. From now on, in a multitude of domains, any entity that wishes to be competitive will need to integrate AI into its operations. States will apply these technologies to expand their capacity for social control, surveillance, and military intervention. We think that it can be useful to shed some light on different projects in the city to demonstrate the intentions of some key players. In order to start a conversation and develop ideas for intervention, we decided to map out Montreal’s AI industry and its allies.

The AI milieu in Montreal is extremely interconnected. Dozens of companies work together to simultaneously develop AI systems for a variety of economic, social, and political goals. The Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA), operating out of the University of Montreal (UDM), is one of the leading institutions in terms of research and coordination of projects. According to Valerie Pisano, the president of MILA, “today, there is a buzz around Montreal and artificial intelligence, we are one of the world leaders in terms of creation, production, and inspiration of talents”. MILA’s mission, according to their website, is to federate researchers in the area of Deep Learning and Machine Learning (see FAQ for definitions). They want to share their infrastructure, knowledge and skills with a pool of companies that could benefit from opportunities opened up by their research.

“The machine learning laboratory at the University of Montreal is led by seven professors, Prof. Yoshua Bengio, Prof. Aaron Courville, Prof. Pascal Vincent, Prof. Roland Memisevic, Prof. Christopher Pal, Prof. Laurent Charlin, and Prof. Simon Lacoste-Julien, all of whom are leading world experts in machine learning, especially in the rapidly growing field of deep learning.” MILA also has offices in the O Mile Ex building located in the Parc Extension neighborhood, at 6666 Saint-Urbain Street. O Mile Ex is a part of MILA’s effort to provide a platform for collaboration, share infrastructure, and provide access to their research to a pool of companies. The space hosts numerous companies specialized in research and development for deep-learning, defense, security, and transportation work. Institutions such as Thales, QuantumBlack, the Institute For Data Valorization, and Element AI all have offices at O Mile Ex. Designed by the Lemay architecture firm (known for designing police headquarters, a migrant prison, etc), this tech hub is a hostile force for the residents of Parc-Ex. Not only are these projects likely to negatively affect the lives of the people living there, but they also contribute to gentrifying this largely immigrant neighborhood to accommodate the developers and students working there.

Yoshua Benjio, professor and director at MILA, is one of the pioneers of AI research worldwide, and his expertise has been sought after by various institutions throughout the years. Although Benjio and his team claim to be firmly opposed to the weaponization of AI systems, MILA seems to be working closely with Thales. Thales Canada develops and provides information systems for defense and security, aerospace, and transportation markets in Canada and internationally. It offers command, control, communications and computer-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance products, force protection products, and radar and night vision systems. Thales has opened its own private lab at the O Mile Ex building.

MILA has also accepted 4.5 million dollars over three years from Google, which brings us to our next players in Montreal’s AI industry: Hugo Larochelle, Shibl Mourad, and Aaron Brindle. Hugo is Google’s AI research director in Montreal and works at the Google Brain Lab, Shibl is the tech engineering director at Google’s Montreal offices, and Aaron is responsible for communications at Google Canada. Google is planning to double its capacity to operate in Montreal by 2020, when they will move from their current offices at 1253 McGill College to a space twice the size at 425 Viger Street West.

Google has been providing AI technology for drone strike targeting to the Defense Department of the United States. Google tried to obscure this relationship by routing this collaboration through a northern Virginia tech company called ECS Federal. They use deep learning tools to help drone analysts interpret the vast array of image data from the military’s fleet of drones in countries like Syria and Iraq.

Whether it’s the US Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work talking about working with ECS/Google on algorithmic warfare designed to “accelerate [the Department of Defense’s (DoD)] integration of big data and machine learning” and “turn the enormous volume of data available to DoD into actionable intelligence and insights at speed,” or Google devices normalizing the use of forensics like voiceprint, GPS location, search histories and preferences, and so much more, these kinds of developments and future Google projects should be recognized as what they are: tools of social control meant to reconfigure the way that capital flows and the world is governed. It is unclear which projects are being developed in Montreal specifically, but technological advances made in one field can easily be re-purposed and adapted to many other fields.

This arsenal of domination is being pushed forward by companies and people working here in Montreal. Such developments are being used internationally to police communities, silence dissent, and limit people’s capacity to attack the existing order.

Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is so ubiquitous that it has become part of our language as a verb. But behind its cool, friendly, 21st-century tech image lies a business model based on surveillance capitalism. Examples include:

“Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond [user’s] expectation of privacy.”

“In Toronto Google is part of the ‘smart city’ project. Its sister- company ‘Side Walk Labs’ is specialized on the matter. This cool name stands for a city where equipment can detect, analyze and collect data in real time, being present at every street corner, installed in the ground and attached to the walls . Everyone will be monitored, for the sake of ‘efficiency’ or saving costs.”

“Machines are increasingly making decisions that influence every aspect of our life. People are being turned into mere series of numbers: Who gets access to credit, how much does insurance cost, who has the right to board a plane, who gets killed by a drone. This is only possible through the harvesting of data by companies like Google.”

(from FuckoffGoogle.de, website from the fight against Google in Germany)

All of the usual suspects are also very active in Montreal. For instance, Facebook’s artificial intelligence research program or FAIR directed by Joelle Pineau is actively working on Internet of Things (IoT) projects, and Microsoft owned lab Maluuba specializes in deep learning and is trying to double its size by 2020 to have 80 engineers. Microsoft President Brad Smith “is excited to engage with faculties, students and the broader tech community in Montreal, which is becoming a global hub for AI research and innovation.” Several lesser-known but similarly fucking huge companies are also working in Montreal. CGI is a company headquartered in Montreal with hundreds of offices worldwide. Founded in 1976 by Serge Godin and André Imbeau as an IT consulting firm, they soon began branching out into new markets and acquiring other companies. They have customers in a wide array of industries, with many in financial services, public safety (police forces), and defense. CGI also develops products and services for markets such as telecommunications, health, manufacturing, oil and gas, posts and logistics, retail and consumer services, transportation, and utilities. On their website, CGI says it works on developing deep learning, the Internet of Things, augmented reality, smart cities, and automated data analysis tools.

Another firm, Deloitte, has offices in Montreal, and has clients from San Diego to Buenos Aires to India. They are inspired by disturbing case studies in predictive policing and crowd-sourced repression. Here are a few examples from their website:

“The 2011 riots in London were an incredibly chaotic time. There were more than 20,000 emergency calls to police, a 400 percent increase from a normal day; and almost 2,200 calls to the London Fire Brigade, which is 15 times the normal amount. To help catch those involved, the London Metropolitan Police crowd sourced the identities of 2,880 suspects using a smart-phone application. The police asked citizens to download the Face Watch ID app and help identify the persons through images taken from CCTV footage. If an image was known to them, citizens entered the name or address of the person, which was sent to the police immediately and confidentially. This enabled the police to effectively apprehend suspects and led to charges being filed against 1,000 perpetrators.”

“In a city of over four million, and with a crime rate that rose in all categories in 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department knew that it needed to take action. To help tackle crime, Los Angeles piloted a new tool incorporating some of the top Smart Security thinking: PredPol. The mission of PredPol is simple: place officers at the right time and location to give them the best chance of preventing crime. The tool, which has been piloted in the Los Angeles and Santa Cruz police departments, uses three data points – past type, place, and time of crime – to predict criminal behavior. These data points are fed into a unique algorithm, which incorporates criminal behavior patterns. Law enforcement then receive customized crime predictions, automatically generated for each shift in their jurisdiction. These predictions are highly specific and lay out the places, mapped to 500 by 500 feet squares, and times where crimes are most likely to occur. While still only a pilot, PredPol has already brought down property crimes by 13 percent in one of the divisions.”

“Risk Assessment and Sentencing Tool or RAST is a sophisticated data analytics engine that helps classify offenders as low-, medium-, and high-risk and makes targeted sentencing recommendations based on a host of case-specific factors. The RAST canvasses large data repositories across multiple states and jurisdictions, accounting for both static and dynamic factors. Static factors are unchangeable circumstances related to crimes and offenders, such as offense type, current age, criminal history, and age at first arrest. Dynamic factors, sometimes called criminogenic factors, can be mediated by interventions and include attitude, associates, substance use, and antisocial personality patterns. The RAST is more advanced and more useful to judges, juries, and parole boards in three specific ways. First, since the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice administers it at the federal level, it relies on an exceptionally large, nationwide data set. Second, the data is continually reassessed for its predictive validity: It is reviewed annually to determine how often RAST correctly classifies offenders, accounts for static and dynamic factors, and makes effective sentencing decisions as measured by the rate of recidivism. Finally, RAST differs from traditional risk assessment tools because it takes into account more than answers to questionnaires. Static and dynamic factors are used in combination with specific, real-time data such as an offender’s behavior and location.”

The Canadian Bar Association is also talking about implementing AI in the justice system here. Karim Benyekhlef, the expert on the matter, is responsible for the cyberjustice lab at UDM.

Fujitsu has also been making waves in the city. Montreal is planning to sign a 2-million-dollar contract with the Japanese company to make the city “smarter”. Fujitsu is supposed to develop systems that will help direct traffic in order to improve emergency response time. The company would link all of the city’s traffic cameras into a single network to analyze the flow of traffic in order to increase efficiency and monitor traffic.

So why are all of these institutions choosing Montreal? Partly because of ongoing research and a skilled workforce that was established over a decade ago, but also because of incentives created by the state. In September 2016, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund allocated $84 million to McGill University for their Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives (HBHL) initiative and $93.5 million to Université de Montréal for Optimization of Deep Learning and Knowledge Sharing (IVADO). In March 2017, $40 million was allocated to Montreal from the Government of Canada’s $125M Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, administered by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). In spring 2017, $100 million was allocated by the Quebec government for the creation of a province-wide cluster and institute for Artificial Intelligence. In March 2018, the Quebec government announced a grant of $5 million toward the establishment of an international organization on artificial intelligence and $10 million to NEXT.AI and CDL, initiatives of HEC Montreal, over the next five years. SCALE.AI, now partnered with NEXT.AI, is part of a new consortium that will form an international platform of logistical chains that integrate AI. In December 2018, the government of Canada gave 280 million dollars to this new giant managed by Hélène Desmarais, wife of Paul Desmarais – President of Power Corp. She is also executive president at IVADO.

Moving Forward

This research on the network of AI players in Montreal is by no means complete. The list keeps getting longer and the scope of the industry is not about to stop expanding. Others can take this as a starting point and dig deeper.

Although the scope of these projects seems to be all-encompassing, odds are that a lot of the development and applications of these technologies are still in their infancy and quite vulnerable. However, the possibility that these projects will reach their completion in the near future is very likely. We like to think that through our actions, we can inspire others to attack these developments on which systems of domination and social control will increasingly depend. Through conversations and research, we can find the weaknesses of these architects of complacency, and strike.

– some individuals against authority

April 2019, Montreal // Tio’ti:ake

 

FAQ

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence in the field of computer science that often uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to “learn” with data, without being explicitly programmed. While ML is often described as a sub-discipline of AI, it’s better to think of it as the current state-of-the-art – it’s the field of AI which today is showing the most promise at providing tools that industry and society can use.

What is Deep Learning?

Deep learning is a particular subset of machine learning. While this branch of programming can become very complex, it started with a very simple question: “If we want a computer system to act intelligently, why don’t we model it after the human brain?” That one thought spawned many efforts in past decades to create algorithms that mimicked the way the human brain worked—and that could solve problems the way that humans did. Those efforts have yielded increasingly competent analysis tools that are used in many different fields.

What is the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things (IoT) comes down to the concept of connecting any device with an on/off switch to the Internet (and/ or to each other). This includes everything from cellphones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of. This also applies to components of machines, for example a jet engine of an airplane or the drill of an oil rig. The point is that data moves in a web of interconnected items to make everything ‘smart’.

Example:

You come home at night. Your smart home recognizes you, and automatically adjusts lighting, temperature, ambient sound. Your domestic items chatter among themselves. “What’s up?”, your computer asks your mobile phone, camera, and all your smart mobile devices, which provide it with daily data. Your smart fridge notes that you eat the last yogurt, and orders more immediately on the Internet.[…] A glance to one of your screens reassures you of your old mother who lives alone: the sensors securing her smart home do not report anything unusual about her blood pressure and medication consumption. She does not need help. In short, without you, your life unfolds just as it should. It’s such a convenience.

(IBM & the Society of Constraint)

Queen Victoria Statue in Montreal attacked with green paint in advance of Demonstration Against Racism and Xenophobia

 Comments Off on Queen Victoria Statue in Montreal attacked with green paint in advance of Demonstration Against Racism and Xenophobia
Mar 242019
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Montreal, March 24, 2019 — A landmark bronze statue to Queen Victoria, unveiled in 1900 and located on Sherbrooke Street at McGill University, was vandalized last night, in advance of the upcoming Demonstration Against Racism and Xenophobia.

Queen Victoria statues in Montreal were targeted at least three times last year: this past Christmas Eve by Santa’s Rebel Elves, on Victoria Day by the Henri Paul Anti-Monarchy Brigade, and on St. Patrick’s Day (2018) by the Delhi-Dublin Anti-Colonial Solidarity Brigade itself.

According to Séamus Singh of the Brigade: “This year we decided to wait one week after St. Patrick’s Day, to better time our action with anti-racist organizing in Montreal.” The Brigade emphasizes, however, that they are not involved directly or indirectly with the organization of today’s important anti-racist march.

Lakshmi O’Leary, also a member of the Delhi-Dublin Anti-Colonial Solidarity Brigade, explained: “Actually, we had to spend a considerable amount of time to remove the thick plastic covering which has kept the statue hidden since December, when it was covered in red paint on Christmas Eve.” She added: “We left the hood on Queen Victoria’s face, since, if Irish and Indian anti-colonial rebels in the last century had their way, she would have been properly hanged for her crimes.”

The Brigade asserts that the presence of Queen Victoria statues in Montreal are an insult to the self-determination and resistance struggles of oppressed peoples worldwide, including Indigenous nations in North America (Turtle Island) and Oceania, as well as the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and everywhere the British Empire committed its atrocities.

The statues are also an insult to the legacy of revolt by Irish freedom fighters, and anti-colonial mutineers of British origin. The statues particularly deserve no public space in Quebec, where the Québecois were denigrated and marginalized by British racists acting in the name of the putrid monarchy represented by Queen Victoria.

Queen Victoria’s reign, which continues to be whitewashed in history books and in popular media, represented a massive expansion of the barbaric British Empire. Collectively her reign represents a criminal legacy of genocide, mass murder, torture, massacres, terror, forced famines, concentration camps, theft, cultural denigration, racism, and white supremacy. That legacy should be denounced and attacked.

Last night’s action is motivated and inspired by movements worldwide that have targeted colonial and racist statues for vandalism and removal: Cornwallis in Halifax, John A. Macdonald in Kingston (Ontario) and Victoria (BC), the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa, the resistance to racist Confederate monuments in the USA, and more.

In the words of another Delhi-Dublin Anti-Colonial Solidarity Brigade member, Udham Connolly: “Our action is a simple expression of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist solidarity, and we encourage others to undertake similar actions against racist monuments and symbols that should be in museums, not taking up our shared public spaces”

Séamus Singh concludes: “This time, however, we are not asking for this statue in particular to be taken down; as long as it remains vandalized with green paint, with Queen Victoria’s head in a hood, it can stay up.”

Notes on Our March 15th

 Comments Off on Notes on Our March 15th
Mar 182019
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

I want to remember how it felt to be shook by the beauty of the crowd. Fear and anxiety dissipate as a hundred-strong black bloc takes the street, realizing its collective power that compels police units to maintain a safe distance. It’s happening. We can do this.

Attacking luxury cars, hotels, and banks when the police have been made unable to defend them is an attack on the police, which depends on the perception that it can maintain law and order to be respected by good citizens and feared by the excluded. A call-and-response of shattering glass echoes down Peel Street, as projectiles fly at bank windows in quick succession. Not to worry, several rocks, flares, and at least one decent firework are reserved for the SPVM.

Spontaneity works pretty well sometimes, and it’s cool when people roll a dumpster out of an alley, someone else drops a flare in it to start a small fire, an “ACAB” gets tagged on the front, and others decide to charge with it at some cops up ahead, all in the span of sixty seconds, as though carefully choreographed. Our time together is limited, yet expansive.

Riot cops arrived from behind on Maisonneuve and quickly shot tear gas, which had its usual effect on such a relatively small demo. Two people were arrested, and some people were hurt. This brings us to the requisite tactical suggestions for next time:

Making dispersal dangerous (for the cops): when a demo splits into multiple directions after the police attack, we could try to keep our composure, check in with our friends and new surroundings, and see if we can regroup with the others who turned the same corner. We may be smaller in number, but the cops’ attention is divided, and they are unlikely to be positioned to attack us again right away. We might even come across isolated groups of police that are unprepared for a hostile crowd. The state is using chemical weapons and blunt force to cut short a joyous departure from the devastating routine of a prison society, and it might be injuring our friends: let’s respond to the height of their aggression.

Accelerant: let’s bring some/use it? The aforementioned dumpster would have made a better battering ram if it was more fully on fire.

Review of Black Bloc Manual 13th Edition, Chapter 12: choosing the right tool for the job. Not everything is a substitute for a good hammer. Secondly, covering your face isn’t enough to be anonymous. If your mask or something else about your attire stands out amongst the crowd, it could help the cops track you (via undercovers, livestream, or video footage after the fact), which could put you in greater danger as the demo is ending or afterwards.

The rear of the demo: the dispersal tactics on Friday and in the election night demo last October were identical: riot cops arrive about a block away behind the demo and shoot tear gas. The panic that circulates can allow them to drive vehicles straight into the running crowd, accelerating the dispersal. What could a combative crew of people holding down the rear of the demo accomplish? No specific proposals to make here, but we think this is an area for improvement.

Warm greetings to all the other crews and individuals who came out, and to everyone who was there in spirit. Let’s take care of each other and destroy all authority. We would like to hear how you experienced this March 15th.

Sending love to all the rebels behind bars. Fire to the prisons.

We also remember the sacrifice of Anna Campbell, an anarchist who fought with the YPJ in Rojava, who was killed along with four comrades by the fascist Turkish army one year ago, on March 15, 2018.

See you on May Day, or sooner! Fuck the police.