Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, a popular movement demanding an immediate end to vaccine mandates and other restrictions on daily life has shaken the Canadian state to its core. Its calls have deeply resonated with members of settler-colonial society in which public health measures and other forms of collective solidarity are seen by some as an affront to individual freedom and an undue hindrance on capitalist enterprise. While the movement is now facing the brunt of a massive wave of state repression, from which it is unlikely to recover, the contradictions it has exposed are only set to get worse.
Thinking Through the Threats and Opportunities as a Far-Right Initiative Gains Momentum
Opponents of vaccine mandates have established protest encampments in Ottawa and elsewhere around Canada, blockading several routes crossing the United States border. Far-right organizers and former police officers have prominent positions in this movement, and police have taken a relatively hands-off approach thus far; it appears likely that the model currently being tested in Canada will appear elsewhere around the world shortly. In the following extensive report, our correspondent in Montréal explores the sequence of events that led up to these developments, reviews the agendas of the various forces vying for control, and reflects on what we can do in a situation in which the far right has gained the initiative.
To preface this report, it is necessary to deal briefly with the question of whether the anti-mandate protests in Ottawa represent a movement for “freedom,” as the participants insist.
On October 25, 2021, officers of the New York City Police Department participated in shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge—where they famously kettled and arrested Occupy protesters almost precisely ten years earlier—to protest against a vaccine mandate for municipal employees. While we passionately believe that people must be free make their own medical decisions and determine their own risk tolerance, the police were effectively demanding the right to expose those they arrest to even greater medical risk. This is a particularly clear-cut case showing that the movement against vaccine mandates is not necessarily a movement against state control or in favor of medical autonomy.
An authentic movement for freedom and medical autonomy would oppose all the forces that compel workers to expose themselves to COVID-19 against their wishes—in other words, it would be explicitly anti-capitalist. Likewise, such a movement would support striking students intent on determining for themselves which risks they wish to take.
When anti-mandate protesters maintain that borders should be tightly controlled by passport checks, yet decry vaccine passports as “fascism”—when they complain about police checking for vaccine cards, but support police in arresting and imprisoning people by the million—when they object to the government placing limits on economic activity, but not to the vast economic disparities that force workers to face potentially lethal risks simply in order to pay rent—they are not taking a stand in favor of freedom so much as they are willfully changing the subject from the encroachments of state power as a whole to a few details of state policy. This is part of the process through which a spurious right-wing opposition functions to redirect rebellious impulses into ersatz movements that ultimately strengthen state institutions.
It is possible that a consistent movement opposing state control in favor of medical autonomy could serve as a space in which those who oppose vaccine passports could go through a process of political development. But for this to be possible, these movements would have to foster a systemic analysis of power, whereas in fact, they are dominated by right-wing elements intent on limiting their political horizons. Therefore, at the minimum, it is necessary to oppose and outflank the right-wing elements in these movements—which is the subject of the following text.
The paranoid fears concerning vaccination and the conspiracy theories regarding COVID-19 concern entirely the issue of the loss of autonomy. They allegorically (and distortedly) project real economic and social experience onto the body. In this manner, they both express and repress the experience, just as dreams, and more generally, the language of the unconscious, do: it’s not, allegedly, that the small store owner or the small businessman has been crushed by large states’ economies of scale, but rather that there is a plan to control his/her brain, or his/her body, his or her reproductive capacities.
Because the anti-vaccine unconscious is, like every form of mass irrationalism, the exact opposite of what it believes it is—because, in other words, it is a deeply conformist way of thinking—it is also a particularly fertile ground for the development of forms of racism, among which the anti-semitic and the Sinophobic elements are predominant.
Comments Off on A Retrospective of the Counter-demonstration of 12 February 2022, Opposed to the Demonstration in Support of the “Freedom Convoys”
Feb142022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
We were more than 150 on Saturday morning gathered to oppose the far right, which is currently riding the wave of anger at health measures to advance its political agenda. Among the demonstrators we were confronted with, if the most widely waved flags were those of Canada, others were raising high flags of the Front canadien-français, a far-right ultra-nationalist collective with a Catholic heritage [note:we are told that the flag in question, the Carillon-Sacré-Coeur, is not the flag of the Front canadien-français. The flag dates from the early 20th century in Ultramontanist circles. The FCF was a small group created and dissolved in recent years that appropriated this flag, like various right-wing nationalists. –MTL CI]. The extreme right-wing populist of the People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, was also present.
The energy of the counter-demonstrators was very good, despite the sadness of the event. We chanted loudly for hours “A-Anti-Antifascists” and “Neither Trudeau nor covidiot, the solution is not fascist”. Our biggest victory was to deprive the demonstration of all its flag-wearing trucks and cars by blocking the exit to the parking lot. Even in a small, well-motivated group we are really capable of curtailing the movements led by the extreme right.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Despite the situation across Canada, millions in funding from obscure sources, and the spirit of the freedom convoy movement inspired by last year’s assault on Capitol Hill, the SPVM deployed at least as many fascists in police clothing as there were counter-demonstrators to surround us and block any attempt to move. In riot gear, many of them proudly wore “thin blue line” patches. Mixed with rage and sadness, we waited for a long time surrounded by riot cops once the demonstration had left their place of departure. It was pitiful to see so many riot cops putting us in cages without paying attention to the fachos gathering in our neighborhoods.
The situation is extremely worrying. As anti-fascists, we cannot allow the seed that is being sown to germinate. We must organize and multiply counter-demonstrations, let’s be on the lookout for what is being prepared in our neighborhoods. As an extremely well-funded fascist mobilization takes shape and is protected by cops with symbols that have a more than alarming background, putting forward antifascist perspectives in our struggles seems more than imperative.
On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with two anarchists involved in the Punch Up Collective, a group which is currently mobilizing in Ottawa, the capitol city of so-called Canada, in the midst of an ongoing far-Right protest occupation made up of several hundred vehicles in the downtown area.
During our discussion we talk about the far-Right leadership of the protests, their history of organizing similar convoys and their involvement in a variety of racist and reactionary groups, and how the public, the police, and the State are all responding to the demonstrations, as law enforcement has been giving the convoy free reign of the streets and residents report hundreds of incidents of harassment, targeted violence, and racist intimidation. Meanwhile, anger is growing not only at the convoy, but at police and the failure of the State to respond, as people begin to self-organize and take action. We also look at how the Conservative Party is coming out in support of the convoy; hoping to use it as a wedge to gain more power and influence.
We also broadly cover how the Left has been caught off guard by these demonstrations: from how the current pandemic has negatively impacted organizing and support networks, to how the electoral Left has been slow to respond and terrified of the growing anger on the streets against the convoy. Finally, our guests map out current mutual aid programs and various forms of resistance and talk about the need to take the streets back from the far-Right and hold them. With more convoy protests being pushed for in the US and a counter-demonstration being called for in Ottawa this Saturday, it’s up to us to understand what is happening on the ground and prepare accordingly.
We took the train downtown to avoid getting caught in the traffic jam of the protest itself. I’ve spent the ride alternating between preparing myself for what we’re about to see by mentally going over all of the things I should expect to see and hear in the next few hours at the convoy protest and distracting myself by contemplating whether or not I like Ottawa’s new transit system. I haven’t been to downtown Ottawa since before the pandemic. I know what stop we’re going to but it is unmistakeable anyway, a wave of people dressed in Canadian flag capes, maskless and bearing protest signs prepares to dismount just as we do. I remember using a similar tactic to find the right subway stop to get to Zucotti Park in 2011. There are so many surface-level similarities between here and there that I can’t help but feel a pang of the jealousy and perhaps even empathy with the protestors that I’ve been experiencing all week, watching their moment unfold and remembering moments where I have felt joy, camaraderie and anticipation of the kind that I imagine they are feeling this week.
The first thing I notice when we step out of the train is a tall white man wearing a Make America Great Again hat, waving the “Fuck Trudeau” flag that has been an important emblem of the right for the past few years. Obviously I hate his Trump hat but I am also reminded of how much I hate that the far right has taken a slogan as pure and good as “Fuck Trudeau” away from me, such that I can’t insult the man who is perhaps my least-favourite Prime Minister in Canadian history without first stating that I don’t support the far right. The second remarkable thing is two young families crossing paths as one walks toward the train and another away from it, the children jumping up and down as they walk and chanting “FREEDOM” so loud their voices are cracking. I can tell they’ve been doing this all day and the MAGA dude joins in with a boisterous “FREEDOM! FREEDOM!” and waves enthusiastically to the children.
I’ve been following this protest online all week and while I know online is where a lot of the protestors’ banter happens I also knew it would feel different to be among them in downtown Ottawa. I wanted to see it for myself and get a sense of the “vibe,” as well as guage how obvious the presence of the far-right movement that I know spearheaded these demonstrations is. I’m here as an observer, not trying to fully blend in or infiltrate them in any way but also not provoking them. Obviously I can’t get much from being there for one day, and I don’t pretend or hope to be an expert on the freedom convoys, but I did hope that seeing it in person would help me formulate an opinion about it in a way that social media alone can’t do.
There are a lot of flags and signs here representing various wingnut, nationalist, and right-wing causes, but the two most widely-shared symbols of this movement are clearly the Canadian flag and the absence of a face mask. The red and white is everywhere and many of the protestors have taken to draping themselves in it, parading around with a flowing maple-leaf cape. I don’t really get it when the Canadian state is ostensibly the thing they’re fighting but then again I never really “get” Canadian nationalism and this is nothing new – the same plethora of Canadian flags was the most common symbol at two important predecessors of this movement, the populist, Islamophobic “patriot movement” that emerged in opposition to Bill M-103 and the oil-and-gas-funded “Yellow Vests Canada movement.
The lack of face mask is a striking symbol that they all share and many of them have taken it beyond the protest, defiantly refusing to put their masks back on when they get onto public transit or enter the few businesses that remain open downtown. I’m not wearing one either and that’s all it seems to take to blend into this crowd. On the train I imagine they find each other this way, sharing conspiratorial glances with others of their newfound community who have also woken up from the conformist, pro-restrictions stupor they imagine the rest of us to be in. In the streets I’ve heard of numerous passersby and counterprotestors being yelled at for wearing theirs, and I’m not at all surprised.
I know there is racism underlying this, because I know their organizers are rooted in the more overtly racist movements that paved the way for this one, but I don’t think a naive passerby would necessarily notice it unless they happened to be in the right place at the right time. I have heard of people of colour being harassed by members of the convoy protest but that is definitely not most of their main activity most of the time and I don’t see a single sign about immigration, race or colonialism the whole time I’m there. I did notice two overtly anti-semitic signs, mostly of the text-heavy “list of conspiracies” variety that I’ve also seen on conspiracy theorists at broad-based left-wing protests in the past. There are a number of right-wing symbols dotted among the crowd, including a surprising number of “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, but no evidence of known Canadian far-right or neo-Nazi organizations out with their colours and symbols on display. Later on Twitter I notice somebody posted a picture of 6 members of the far-right patriot “Canada First” organization out in balaclavas in the streets that same day, but I didn’t happen to encounter them in person. I had expected to see more evidence of the overt fascists of Quebec and Canada recruiting but I couldn’t find it on Saturday. Maybe they’re hiding or maybe the crowd was just too big for me to find them. There are a lot of white people here but it’s definitely not a homogenous crowd, maybe not even a lot whiter than many of the environmental or other left-wing demonstrations I’ve been to in the past.
It was huge on Saturday. Police on Friday reported “about 350” protestors downtown on Friday and said nothing about numbers on Saturday but there were definitely thousands. The success of the trucks themselves as a space-claiming tactic for this group can not be understated. Every street in and out of the area around parliament is blocked by large vehicles, adorned with signs and flags and with protestors inside the cabs, honking the horns and smiling and waving at their crowd, many of whom are carrying “Thank You Truckers” signs and reserving their biggest shows of enthusiasm for encounters with the actual trucks. Even on days where their numbers are lower it is difficult to imagine what police or counter-protestor tactic would successfully undermine their control on the blocks surrounding parliament hill. There are a lot of them on and in front of the hill, where a sort of “main stage” has been set up on the back of a truck for speakers and announcements, but they have the whole neighbourhood. Several blocks away a park acts as a logistics hub, people are set up there with free food, firewood and other supplies. All of the streets in between and in fact much of downtown are actively part of the protest zone, filled with people yelling and chanting and the ubiquitous sound of truck horns that has drawn so much of the attention of local counter-protestors.
I passed by the main stage several time and every speaker I heard was an anti-vaccine advocate of some sort. It’s actually quite boring – blah blah ivermectin blah blah conspiracy blah blah toxic chemicals in your arm. I can’t tell if many of them are even listening to the speakers and in the streets away from the stage the only chant I hear is “Freedom!” so it’s very hard to tell if people there are all or mostly anti-vaxxers, but I would imagine a lot are. Down the road another loudspeaker blasts classic rock and an equally large group have created a dance party, waving their conspiracy-touting signs and Canadian flags and chanting “freedom” as they dance ecstatically together in the -25 degree weather. I’ve never seen our side get so successfully pumped up in such large numbers in such shitty weather.
I imagine that every conspiracy theorist I’ve ever encountered in the region is here, plus many more. I am used to seeing such people alone in a crowd but it is a bit disturbing to notice just how many of them there actually are now that they’re all in one place. There are signs and pamphlets everywhere about every wingnut conspiracy I’ve ever heard and even some that I haven’t – microchips in vaccines, THE JEWS, lizards, you name it. One sign tells me that a triad of weasels are working together to control the population with the vaccine chip: the Trudeau government, the mainstream media, and the Public Service Alliance of Canada. I hope somewhere out there a PSAC member is proud to be elevated to such a high status. I had intended to talk to more people but literally every conversation I overheard was about a known conspiracy – 3 guys behind me talking about 5G and China, a woman explaining The Great Reset to her school-aged children, a Francophone father telling his kids that masks are bad for their lungs. At the end of the day on the bus home I psych myself up to ask two protestors behind me to explain their movement to me, only to give up when I hear them whispering to each other about how much more needs to be exposed about chemtrails. I am struck by an obvious point that I hadn’t really contemplated before, that a lot of very normal-looking people with families, jobs and nice smiles are in fact followers of some of the conspiracies I think of as the most irrational and impossible to believe. I assume this has increased a lot since the pandemic but I can’t prove it.
I suspect a lot of the growth of this movement is happening among people who did not show up and would not have shown up for right-wing movements of the past but are simply genuinely tired of Covid restrictions. At one point I saw a group of children with cute signs bearing the outline of a truck filled with lists of the things they’ve missed since 2020 – soccer, seeing my friends, smiling at my grandmother, choir practice. My heart sinks as I imagine what worldviews these kids are encountering at what may well be many of their first protest. I empathize so hard with their desire to engage in normal, playful, collective activity after two years of pretending to be satisfied with zoom calls, masked conversations and freezing-cold outdoor meetups. I hate that so much of the left acts as if these concerns are not even a thing, telling people that if they care at all about vulnerable, elderly and disabled people they must simply suck it up and get on with it. One sign reads “This is existence, I want to live.” Me too, man, 100%. If only it were true what the theorists of this movement say, that actually Covid is only a cold, the government has inflated the death toll and all we need to do to find an end to the pandemic is take the red pill, pull of our masks and dance in the streets again. If I squint really hard I can almost see what they’re seeing, they’ve been locked inside for so long and the truckers are the first with the courage to actually speak up and say enough is enough, we need to go out there. If it weren’t for the right-wing racists directing the movement, not to mention the millions of actual deaths due to Covid-19 that no amount of good vibes and lies will prevent, it would make a lot of sense.
In the afternoon we check out a counter-demonstration organized primarily, it seems, by residents of downtown Ottawa who are sick of noise, traffic, and acts of hateful speech, harassment and bullying on the part of some of the protestors. Countering the trucker protest before it becomes a full-blown neo-fascist revolutionary movement is so, so important but I honestly felt zero affinity with this counter-protest in particular. Most of the signs were either calling for more police, complaining about inconveniences like sound and traffic, or making fun of the demonstrators for being unvaccinated and/or stupid. “Honk if you failed civics,” “Self-driving trucks can’t spread covid,” “Ottawa police act now,” “Make Ottawa boring again.” A lady with a wordy sign about how vaccine mandates save lives mistakes me for a member of convoy protest and chastises me for apparently being illiterate, “Did it take you a few minutes to read that one, honey?” I have a graduate degree and no business being this personally offended but I feel a surge of rage at downtown liberal elites who think the problem is that these people just didn’t go to school long enough. We leave before it’s over, just as some of the protestors are engaged in a verbal standoff – antis chanting “Go home dipshits” while convoy protestors chant back “We still love you! Love! Love!” and the police form a stronger line between the two crowds.
I think the trucker convoy is a protest. I disagree with those who say it is a siege, an insurrection or any other overblown term, and think those ideas are coming mainly from Ottawans outraged that someone could be this loud and this annoying for this long. I would absolutely organize and participate in a demonstration exactly this loud and annoying if it were for a different cause organized by different people, so I don’t really see any merit in those concerns and definitely don’t think that being very noisy or very annoying somehow makes this more than a protest. There have always been liberals calling us terrorists too when we take up space, or claiming that our airhorns are weapons and they’re under attack by our refusal to leave. It is an “occupation,” in the sense that the Occupy Movement was an occupation, ie it seeks to take up space as a protest tactic and seeks to create a container for like-minded people to come together, encampment style. Like many protest movements there are revolutionary elements within it that would like to see it escalate into something much more. That could happen – it is a really big and successful protest and a lot of the people there seem very inspired and committed. But it hasn’t happened yet. It should be stopped before it does that, ideally by grassroots resistance and not by police repression.
I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about this and could probably write several long essays about it if I had the time and faith in my own understanding and authority to do so. For today I’m going to be content with sharing my experience and some broad themes of questioning that I’d like to follow up on, in no particular order:
(1) Freedom is a very real and very important goal, and Covid restrictions genuinely constrain people, often in ways that are genuinely unethical. I do not support vaccine mandates, even though I do support encouraging people to get vaccinated in other, less coercive ways. Unlike the right, we know that real freedom will only be attained collectively, that it isn’t about simple individual choice. Refusing to wear a mask when a friend or neighbour asks you to do so for their own health is a busted understanding of freedom. But I do think the world has become even less free since the pandemic, that governments have gained new kinds of powers and new forms of surveillance. In Canada I think they’re also enjoying a new level of deafeatism, pacification and obedience displayed by a large segment of the population who can’t imagine a solution to the problem of Covid-19 that is any more complex than simply doing whatever the government says to do and shaming anyone who doesn’t.
(2) People are always going to believe things that are false. Conspiracy theories are annoying as hell but they provide easy answers and are super compelling. Nobody is going to feel compelled by being called an idiot. We need better ways to counter misinformation than petty bullying and overstated blame.
(3) I have no doubt that if this protest became a revolutionary movement it would absolutely be a fascist one. The elements of it that want to depose the Prime Minister would install someone much, much worse. There is no hope for common cause with this thing but we need to find creative, probably new ways to counter it. It does not make sense to treat these protesters as potential comrades (at least as a group), but it will not work to treat them as we have treated known, overt neo-Nazis either. What are some ways we can counter this movement that go beyond (but might still include) shaming its potential recruits and threatening their events with physical violence?
(4) What is up with the police here, actually? On the one hand it’s true they have not tried much to remove the protestors (although it looks like this might change in the next few days), and the success and good vibes of the protest is in part the result of a near-total lack of repression, partly due to the whiteness and politics of the protestors. On the other, the Ottawa Police are probably not lying when they say they don’t have the training or resources to move this thing. It’s not because there are too many protestors, it’s because of their tactics, particularly the trucks. How is it possible that there is no plan to prevent the police from losing control of PARLIAMENT HILL this easily? What are the things we can learn from this and what new understandings of the Canadian state should this give us?
(5) What do we want to do about Covid now that is clear that vaccines are a tool and not an end? How will we cautiously resume riskier activities while still showing care, empathy and protection to those vulnerable to the virus? Anti-vaxxers are wrong about vaccines for sure but they are not the whole (or even the main) problem and we can not escape the fact that the virus is likely here to stay. If the virus never ends we will have to dance in the streets together one day again anyway. It does not make sense to tell everyone to simply endure a shittier life indefinitely. The freedom that many of the convoy people are talking about is a boring version of freedom because many of them do not care at all about people dying of Covid, but those of us who do care will still have to find ways to live.
[Special collaboration between Montréal Antifasciste et Québec Antifasciste]
Since 2018, Montréal Antifasciste has been documenting the activities of the neo-fascist group Atalante, a group that for the most part operates in Québec City. Since its Facebook page has been closed in August of 2021, it has lost much of its visibility and now seems to be in decline, regrouped around its core militants. Nonetheless, its members and sympathizers remain present and active in our communities, and the possibility that they could recruit new people pushes us to call for vigilance and to continue to keep the pressure on them. That is why we still think it is necessary to continue to expose Atalante members, particularly those who we know have been involved in acts of violence.
This article will focus on Yannick “Sailor” Vézina, one of the founding members of Atalante Québec who is still active to this day and whose involvement has not previously been examined in any depth.
Yannick Vézina took part in Atalante’s latest action n Québec City, during the weekend of 25-26 September, 2021. Photo extracted form Atalante Québec’s Telegram channel.
Yannick Vézina and the Québec Stomper Crew
Yannick Vézina has been part of the scene around the Québec Stomper Crew (the street gang that gave rise to Atalante Québec) for quite a while. Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau, a schoolmate from the Institut Maritime de Rimouski in the early 2010s introduced him to the Stompers entourage. Montréal Antifasciste has already exposed Antoine as the ideological leader of Atalante and the author of Saisir la Foudre [Ride the Lightening], the group’s manifesto. We know that after he met Mailhot-Bruneau, Vézina rapidly radicalized and joined in numerous escapades to win a place in the crew. Specifically, we know that he became a member in good standing following an attack on an anti-fascist militant.
Yannick Vézina (right) with Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau, leader of Atalante Québec.
Légitime Violence and the entourage of US-based band Offensive Weapon.
Vézina seems to have a pronounced penchant for violence, in any case. A few years ago, he saw a young man tearing down Atalante posters in broad daylight and chased him down, baseball bat in hand. He also openly uses hashtags like #quebecfascistcrew on his personal Instagram account. All of which gives you a good idea of what this guy is about…
Vézina and Atalante
As well as being a part of the Québec Stomper Crew, Yannick Vézina is also a key active member of Atalante. Among other things, he joined the “pilgrimage” to Italy and has been present at Atalante actions from the get-go, including having participated in the invasion of the Vice Québec office in 2018 to intimidate it’s employees.
It’s easy to recognize the wristwatch and the tattoo on the forearm.
He can also be seen in numerous photos of the sandwich distribution exercises and the banner collages. Furthermore, the revelations of the mole Quentin Pallavicini suggest that Vézina is Atalante’s treasurer.
Yannick Vézina (front row, right) with Atalante Québec’s core members.
Atalante Québec’s members, in January 2019, on the rooftop of CasaPound’s HQ, in Rome.
With other members of Atalante Québec, in Rome, January 2019. We recognize Sébastien Magnificat, CasaPound’s international affairs minister.
Yannick Vézina speaks to Atalante Québec’s militants, on May 1st, 2016.
Left, Yannick Vézina proudly holds Atalante Québec’s flag, during a torch-lit march organized soon after the organization’s creation, in 2016.
Yannick Vézina has been part of countless actions since the creation of Atalante, including this flyering blitz in Québec, in 2019.
Yannick « Sailor » Vézina
Yannick Vézina chose the nickname “Sailor” and seems very attached to his marine profession. Oddly enough, the Atalante logo seems to draw upon an illustration from an Institut Maritime du Québec study manual that to some degree resembles the fascist “flash and circle” symbol adopted a decade earlier by the Blocco Studentesco, the student wing of CasaPound, the Italian neo-fascist organization that was the inspiration behind the formation of Atalante.
Atalante Québec’s logo…
…was clearly plagiarized from this training manual used at the Institut Maritime du Québec.
The “flash and circle” motif, used by several fascist organizations, is the logo of the Blocco Studentesco, the youth wing of Italian neo-fascist organization CasaPound.
Yannick Vézina is currently employed by the shipping company Desgagnés and sails regularly on the Zélada, a ship that resupplies communities in Northern Québec and Northern Canada.
Yannick Vézina is employed aboard the Zélada, which is part of Groupe Desgagné’s float.
It will be interesting to see how this company reacts to the fact that it is employing a charter member of a neo-fascist organization, a member who has been involved in a number of violent attacks motivated by a detestable ideology, particularly as we have good reason to believe that he carries Atalante stickers to put up during his stopovers in Rimouski.
We encourage you to contact the company and ask them about this:
For some time now, it appears that things have been going pretty well in Vézina’s personal life. He recently bought a house in Charlesbourg/Lac-Beauport, a Québec city suburb, with his partner, whom he recently proposed to. It seems like a good time to remind him that violent acts and the hateful ideas he adheres to have their consequences.
We must highlight the extra note of romanticism that the bowl of kibbles confers to the scene.
Conclusion
Given that the Atalante neo-fascists have lost both their Facebook page and their website, it might seem reasonable to consider them no longer a serious threat. We think that would be a mistake, and that we should redouble the pressure on these militant fascists so that they finally wrap their head around the fact that their detestable ideas are not welcome in Québec.
Whether on land or on sea, we will continue to track these neo-fascists everywhere they go for as long as necessary.
If you have information you’d like to share with us about Yannick Vézina or Atalante and its sympathizers, don’t hesitate to write to us at alerta-mtl@riseup.net or qcantifasciste@riseup.net.
The state has blood on its hands. Anarchists know this. Police killings are normalised – it takes riots to be noticed. Mass death beyond fortress Europe is all too usual, even as it intensifies. But it is unusual for the West to dispose of its own citizenry on such a large scale, and to do so with such a steady manner. In the UK, the pandemics’ mass of dead bodies is the greatest since the second world war.[1] And yet, at this very moment, we hear comrades slip into apologetics. They excuse the state and its economy of death. They wash the blood from its hands and blame “nature” in its place. Yes, we attack the curfews, the policing, the evolving surveillance and disciplinary techniques. We wouldn’t expect anything less. But some anarchists enter new topics; in the same breath, they shout for the freedom of business, of pubs and retail, the return to schools, the reopening of Churches. Their rallying cry: “Anti-lockdown”! The existential threat faced by the disabled and the elderly is simply an inconvenient footnote to liberal rights.
In our critique, “Anarchy, Lockdown and Crypto-Eugenics”, we didn’t begin with abstract notions of “consent”, but from this reality of an existential threat. From there we located targets for attack and provided some speculative points of unity. We welcome the space given to our piece and the wider discussion. We agree with our recent critic that such discussions often “devolve into name-calling”; indeed, we found it amusing to be compared with Italian futurists, Soviet and Trumpian propaganda and (unexpectedly!) the Spanish Inquisition. (On top of all this they described us as British!) We won’t bother refuting these labels in this piece, but will focus on their other claims; (1) that our critique, particularly our use of crypto-eugenics, was in “bad faith”, (2) that we refuse to critique the pharmaceutical industry and (3) that we are “pro-lockdown”.
A very short genealogy of “crypto-eugenics”
In our original piece we located eugenics (and its father, Malthusianism) as a logic of capitalism and the state. The notions of degenerate bodies in need of improvement, efficiency and elimination, and of surplus, disposable bodies, burdensome and unnatural, have a long and deadly history – one which is intimately tied with the modern state and colonialism in particular. As our critic notes, eugenics is the most statist of the concepts – but this does not necessarily make it obvious. The term “crypto-eugenics” was first used in a 1957 memorandum of Dr. C. P. Blacker, Honorary Secretary of the (British) Eugenics Society, to describe a policy of “pursuing eugenic ends by less obvious means” – the obvious being unfashionable in light of Nazism’s recent horrors. (Policy (b) was “to campaign for the control of immigration, and for a reduction in the total population of Great Britain”).[2] Confusingly, the term has more recently been appropriated by anti-Semitic conspiracists (claiming a worldwide Jewish plot of secret eugenics) and the Christian evangelical right (who see a grand eugenic plan in reproductive rights and gay parenthood). Decolonial and disabled critics on the other hand have long pointed to the continuity between classical eugenics and post-war state policies, particularly with regards healthcare, welfare and immigration. We used the term in our piece in a double sense: to refer to an ideology, either covert (as in Blacker’s proposal) or unconscious and “accidental”, and to a eugenics which is increasingly technological, encrypted in a proprietary care algorithm.[3] We then used it in a third sense, proposing that “capitalism itself could accurately be described as an algorithm of crypto-eugenics”.
Our discussion of crypto-eugenics certainly proved to be provocative, but we assure our critics that it was done in good faith. We do not believe our friends are secretly engaged in an eugenic plot, but we do argue that eugenics is a creeping logic, a logic which has crept to certain corners of anarchist thought. Our words were chosen with careful forethought. Claiming that Covid isn’t a risk, because it is only deadly for specific minorities, is crypto-eugenics. Claiming these deaths are simply “natural”, that death from Covid is nature’s plan for certain bodies, is crypto-eugenics. Masking the risk for specific minorities with statistical averages (the “normal” body) is crypto-eugenics. Perhaps tellingly, our friend did not engage with this part of our critique. Instead, they simply quote further statistical averages (from an article which in fact emphasises our very point – that Covid-19’s lethality is highly differentiated across population groups).[4] They limit any notion of “eugenics” to reproduction in its narrowest sense (procreation) and claim that we are not only in bad faith, but off-topic! We would point out that it’s difficult to procreate once dead, and that eugenics concerns not only procreation, but the altered reproduction of populations as a whole and the non-reproduction of specific minorities. They protest that we make an accusation which is impossible to refute: that our accusation of crypto-eugenics is an unfalsifiable claim in the style of “the Spanish Inquisition”. We counter that our claim is clear. Rather than engage with it or refute it they have chosen simply to repeat their friend’s initial argument.
Beyond “big pharma”: biopower
According to our critic, our analysis of eugenics is simply a distraction, a smokescreen to avoid critiquing the pharmaceutical industry. We would argue that it is only through an analysis of eugenics that we can properly critique the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than limit ourselves to “big pharma”, we argued in our last piece that the entire field of public health is based on eugenic logics. The problem isn’t just drugs – but healthcare in general, as a process of ranking, disciplining, saving and disposing of bodies. Our friends’ problem is really that our critiques are not quite the same.
Medicine under capitalism is of course based on exploitation and domination, rather than free desire. The animal liberation movement has done much to critique and attack the specific violence of the technical-production of medicines. And we agree with our friends, that capitalism in turn complicates questions of dependence in relation to medicines as commodities. In the context of Covid-19 this is clear – in the name of the economy it spreads everywhere, and now (unless we are to celebrate mass death) we are dependent on vaccines. Vaccines are powerful – not because Bill Gates will control your mind, but because they can prevent death in a world of death. The urgent question now is not their composition, but their availability: their artificial scarcity. Vaccine capitalists have reaped super-profits through monopolisation, patents (including process patents) and subsidies, on an incredible scale even for pharma corporations. These patents are written in the blood of postcolonial populations. Just as death was displaced on to racialised and migrant bodies within the UK, intensified death-worlds are being created in the “Global South”. We saw world leaders discussing these intensities in the G7 spectacle – how many vaccines to distribute, whether “too much” contagion and death might or might not undermine global racial capitalism. Many anarchists pay lip-service to Foucault’s notion of biopower, but few remember that this is the power to “make live and let die”. The biopolitical state is indeed “letting the bodies pile high”.[5] Our critic’s original piece described anarchism as a set of liberal rights, as a subject’s freedom from “external” coercion. As a result it fails to understand the full power of the modern state, and ends up apologising for its violence.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Now partially vaccinated, the UK government is once again actively pursuing contagion as state policy, with “only” 60 average daily deaths at the time of writing. The eugenic violence remains, particularly for the 500,000 immuno-compromised, a group for whom Covid-19 is a far higher risk and for whom vaccines are suspected to be ineffective.[6] This group faces peak rates of infection in the wider community, forced to try and survive in the midst of England’s maskless “Freedom Day” celebrations. They face a situation worse than even the Barrington Declaration’s proposals, which at least suggested some support for those forced to isolate to survive. Many hundreds of thousands more will suffer from long Covid, many it would seem from long term organ damage. Meanwhile, the UK, already a mass exporter of the Delta variant, is feared to be a “variant factory”, producing the existing virus and new variants on a mass scale to infect the unvaccinated world.[7]
Anti-Lockdown or Anti-State
For recognising the state’s violence for what it is, we are accused of being “pro-lockdown” and, consequently, statist non-anarchists. In our original piece we discussed how “lockdown” in fact refers to a nebulous set of measures – from curfews and policing to closing retail premises and schools. We argue that anarchists should locate our targets, and not allow ourselves to be reduced to one side in the latest culture war. Let’s take schools for example. Anarchists, since Godwin, have critiqued education. We recognise that schools lie on the same continuum as factories and prisons. Hierarchical institutions, which in turn judge and rank pupils, made to produce docile, disciplined bodies, future productive workers, housewives, bureaucrats and prison guards. Why would anarchists support a return to these schools? Of course, a virtual-classroom computer stuck in the walls of the nuclear family household is just a different problem. An anarchist approach must reject both these worlds. In the strikes against unsafe schools, the pupils who faked infection tests to get a day off (or the students burning the union jack at Pimlico) – it’s here we begin to see the possibilities of anarchy.
The “anti-lockdown” narrative offers us nothing. In the UK the organised anti-lockdown demos have clearly shown their colours. Anti-Semite David Icke has regularly topped the bill of speakers amongst other similar reactionaries. They decry the “Covid conspiracy”, masks and vaccines and celebrate the deaths of the disabled. This is not some diffuse gilets jaunes movement of oppositional tendencies and diverse, separated riots. Unless you hate masks and vaccines and are happy to walk under union jacks with known fascist groupings, you cannot join in good faith.
But these are weird times. Simply for affirming violence to achieve disabled liberation, our critic associates us with Italian Futurists and proto-fascists. (They might remember that anti-fascist anarchists, such as Renzo Novatore, were also part of the Futurist movement.) Our critic is half-right however: we should all heed the cautionary tale of those “anarchists” involved with early Italian fascism. The far-right have had a field day, and with little anti-fascist opposition to the London conspiracy demos the anarchist scene has opened itself to entryism. We have heard concerns of crypto-fascists gaining affinities with anarchists and squatters in London, and others sharing videos with and allowing a far-right youtuber to accompany and film the black block at kill the bill demonstrations.[8][9] Without a critique of eugenic state violence, creeping fascism remains a threat to the anarchist scene.
Away from the anti-lockdown demonstrations we can see real antagonisms against the state. Renewed protests against police murders in South Wales, the kill the bill riot at Bristol police station and even a resurgence in political squats (despite tremendous repression). But with regards the mass of Covid death, anarchists in the UK have been outmaneuvered. There have been mutual aid groups and some syndicalist attempts, but little critique and even less attack. The black flag was at one time a flag of mourning: we call on comrades to remember, and to avenge the dead.
Notes
[1] Total UK civilian deaths in the second world war numbered around 67,000. As of 23rd of July, total deaths within 28 days of a positive test number over 129,000; total deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate over 153,000. This makes it the highest death toll from a disaster or war since the total casualties of the second world war. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths The third measure used, excess deaths, numbered over 90,000 for the UK in 2020, again the highest on record since the second world war. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/12/2020-was-deadliest-year-in-a-century-in-england-and-wales-says-ons
[2] Blacker’s Memorandum claimed that “crypto-eugenics … was apparently proving successful with the US Eugenics Society”. In 1960 it was “generally” agreed that “the Society’s activities in crypto-eugenics should be pursued vigorously”. See “The Activities of the Eugenic Society” (1967) in it’s own Eugenics Review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906074/pdf/eugenrev00003-0012.pdf . Documents relating to the 1960 Extraordinary General Meeting, which reference Blacker’s 1957 Memorandum, can be found here: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gew94w8y/items?canvas=1 . The original “rolled-off” Memorandum is detailed as being digitised here, but appears to be missing: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/umfds5vk The point for us as anarchists isn’t to overstate the influence of the Eugenics Society (later renamed The Galton Institute), but to expropriate their terminology.
[4] As the article cited by our critic states: “COVID-19 death risk shows tremendous risk stratification with over 1000-fold variability between children and elderly nursing home residents … Divergence may be larger in some low-income countries, for example, India … Within several countries, disadvantaged minorities have a greater toll … UK has almost 5-fold higher COVID-19 death rate in blacks and Bangladeshi/Pakistani than in whites … Regardless, COVID-19 is a disease of inequality and it also creates even more inequality … Substantial increases in death risk (1.5- to 5-fold) are conferred by organ transplantation, severe obesity, uncontrolled diabetes, severe chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, liver failure, kidney failure, haematological malignancy and recent cancer.” Notably, the article’s speculation that “the proportion of people who need to be infected to reach herd immunity [i.e. without vaccination] may be much lower than originally estimated”, with specific reference to estimated seroprevelance in India (!), has since proven catastrophically incorrect. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13423 The other journal article cited by our critic regarding the effectiveness of lockdowns has been marked controversial by its own publisher.
[7] “Government advisers expect about 1,000 to 2,000 daily hospital admissions over the summer as restrictions are lifted, and 100-200 deaths a day under what was described a “central scenario”… Minutes published by the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) also highlighted the threat of a new vaccine-resistant variant emerging in the UK, which they warned would pose a risk to the whole world.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/12/boris-johnson-urges-covid-caution-amid-warnings-of-1000-hospitalisations-a-day
[8] ResistanceGB is a classic case of calculated fascist entryism. British symbolism is frequent but ideology generally covert. In this video however they can be seen carefully encouraging viewers to get on the “alternative” social network Gab (a neo-Nazi, alt-right and Q Anon fork) and 4chan following Trump’s ban from twitter and Parler’s demise, and complaining about “communists”: https://youtube.com/watch?v=A27zmatEEGY In another live-stream they complain that the filmed “communist” demonstration (one of many following Sarah Everard’s murder by police) is left alone by police. Within moments of the live-stream starting, known fascists can be seen commenting in the chat: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WTSHoUoIbi8 In addition to a Gab account they also maintain a Bitchute channel (far-right youtube alternative).
[9] As others have pointed out, our critic also cites the “anarchist voices” of “Winter Oak, and the Acorn” (in reality one website) as having informed the original piece – a UK blog which has turned to full blown “Great Reset” and anti-mask conspiracies. Winter Oak was already fond of conspiracies, having previously deduced that those who confronted the TERFs at the London Bookfair must be undercover police (!). They have also taken a whole host of other bizarre and damaging positions as detailed here: https://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/in-defence-of-anarchism-and-antifascism-a-reply-to-the-winter-oak/
Since its foundation, Montréal Antifasciste has received all sorts of messages from antifascists hoping to support our work and/or posing questions and sharing the fruit of their research and observations. It is much rarer for far-right extremists to communicate with us, except in the form of childish insults.
On June 18, 2018, someone using the name “Lola Parisi” sent us an e-mail from the address moosque1@hotmail.fr. In September 2018, the same person also contacted us several times by Messenger using the pseudonym “Marie Dubois”.
The message making contact was titled “Atalante spotted” and read as follows:
The person behind “Lola Parisi/Marie Dubois” claimed to have been referred to us by “comrades in struggle,” but gradually it became clear that this person was a man who didn’t particularly embrace progressive thinking and was generally misogynist, but who claimed to be a comrade in arms of Clément Méric. Between June 2018 and July 2019, “Lola” sent us at least forty-five e-mails and numerous messages by Messenger.
The contents of the e-mails, often very short, but occasionally detailed and accompanied by a photo, can be summed up thusly: a speck of original and authentic information that had to come from someone with privileged access to the hardcore of Atalante submerged in an ocean of disinformation. Let’s dissect the content.
The information :
Some very precise information that we were able to verify permitted us to identify people we knew nothing about: Baptiste Gillistro, Louis Fernandez’s accomplice during the attack at LvlOp, and Giulio Zardo, a former Olympic champion who trains the Atalante crew in Montréal at his private gym. The e-mails also gave us advance warning of trips planned by members of the group and information about the French National Socialist Black Metal band (Baise ma hache), which played in a Québec City bar in June 2019. Given this, it seemed likely that “Lola” was a core member of the group, and the explanation that “she” had infiltrated a private Atalante discussion did not appear credible.
An important focus of the e-mails we received seemed to be to encourage us to publicly out certain women, with a particularly unhealthy fixation on Vivianne Saint-Amant, all the while insisting that they were not important Atalante members but were fangirls, followers, the “girlfriends of…,” or “easy” women who were “good for nothing.” That was another reason that we took “Lola’s” information with more than a grain of salt.
The disinformation :
A major thrust of the e-mails, on the other hand, was to lead us astray as to the real identity of Lucie Mergnac: her real name would be Chloé Fleuri or Fleury; in fact her real name was Merignac, not Mergnac; then she was Belgian, not French, and finally she wasn’t really involved with Atalante.
Toward the end of our exchange, the demand that we remove Lucie’s name from our articles and publications grew increasingly insistent.
Far and away, most of the messages seemed to follow the life, adventures, and movements of Quentin Pallavicini, while trying to make us believe that his name was actually Jean Brunaldo, all the while describing Quentin having a fabled dream life: a young ultraviolent fascist who is a seasoned brawler close to the elite of European and Québécois fascism, who made a fortune speculating on cryptocurrency, who is independently wealthy and owns stores, houses, and luxury automobiles, who splits his time as he wishes between Québec, France, and Italy, who, with his hotshot lawyer, has won numerous court cases around acts of aggression… all of which we know beyond the shadow of a doubt to be pure fabrication.
In reality, we know that Quentin is far from rich, that he rents an apartment in the Saint-Canut neighbourhood of Mirabel (after moving out of the flat he shared with his partner in Laval), that he has modest blue-collar jobs and that he rents cars to fake a high-style life. We also know, courtesy of our French and Italian antifascist comrades, that Pallavicini is not the “big-shot” he claims to be, even if he hangs out in the Serge Ayoub and Troisième Voie scene.
A careful rereading of our e-mail exchanges raised doubts for us. The multiple inconsistencies, the fixation on the Quentin/Lucie couple, the repeated attempts to protect Lucie, the odd piece of genuinely useful information embedded in a poorly written hagiography that bragged about Jean/Quentin’s dream life, etc., allow us to now confirm that “Lola Parisi” is, in fact, Quentin Pallavicini, a member of Atalante Montréal (at least until the autumn of 2019) who, to protect himself and his partner, betrayed his organization and sold out his little comrades to antifascists—including asking for money in exchange for information! And perhaps—why not?—to increase his questionable credibility with the Atalante boneheads.
Warning: the following article contains extreme racist and transphobic content.
Almost exactly one year ago, Montreal Antifasciste released an article on the Front canadien-francais, a reactionary nationalist group. In that article, we included a quicklist of about 10 meme pages from the FCF’s entourage that gravitated around hardcore reactionary themes – anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and LGBTQ2+, with accents of white nationalism and a strong ultra-Catholic leaning. With names like “Mèmes evangéliste Duplessiste” and ”Mèmes clérico-nationalistes du Canada français”, such pages provide a convenient way for far-right sympathizers to spread a wide range of reactionary and often racist notions like that of the notorious “great replacement” conspiracy theory (and a whole host of other dehumanizing ideas) to their followers and beyond.
Started in January 2020, the Quebec.wingism page on Instagram (originally called Rightwingism.quebec) is similar in politics and aesthetics to many of the meme pages mentioned above. Although memes are, by definition, meant to be spread, there is also a tendency for whole meme pages to multiply and be copied in style and politics as well. This is particularly the case for Quebec.wingism, which is modeled after other “wingism” pages – twoarticles have already been written about the beginnings of the wingism pages, reporting that the first Wingism page was started in Canada by a University of Calgary student.
The format is the following: in general there are multiple administrators identified by the first letter of their name, and although the pages purport to provide a platform for a variety of ideas, the range is generally firmly in the far-right spectrum: from eco-nationalism to fascism, often with some neo-nazi imagery thrown in for good measure. Many of the pages seem to coalesce around an obsession with the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, fascism, and a hatred of people of colour, LGBTQ2+ people (most especially trans and gender nonconforming people), and feminists, amongst others. It seems the format was easily scalable, as people from different countries all over the world slightly tweaked the politics and format (memes with fashwave filters and alt-right iconography) to their specific white nationalist context. As such, these pages contribute to the dissemination and development of an international far-right online cultural milieu.
The Quebec.wingism Instagram page and a map drawn by Quebec.wingism of all the rightwingism pages in North America (March 2020)
Although Instagram has occasionally purged certain rightwingism pages, many accounts simply rename themselves ever-so-slightly and reopen (it is not uncommon to see “v2” or “v3” next to a name, signifying the second or third rebirth of the page since being banned).
Quebec.wingism is a meme page cast in that mould – fashwave filters on historical reactionary figures and fascists, Islamophobia, white nationalism, overt racism, anti-feminism and hatred of transgender people, mixed with bog-standard Quebec nationalism. Wingism pages specialize in taking tired and repugnant reactionary ideas and spicing them up with “cool” filters or “funny” cartoon characters, all with the plausible deniability of a good dose of confusionism and “irony”. If it sounds like this is building on the cultural accomplishments of the alt-right movement from the USA, we most definitely agree. Wingism pages use the same tired Pepe memes and “based” Photoshop effects that reek of 2015-2019-style online American racism.
Comments Off on Why We Destroy “Boycott China” Stickers
Jun042021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
“Boycott China” stickers are going up in the zone between Atwater and Peel — and perhaps elsewhere in Montréal! We do not know who is doing it, but we sometimes see these stickers accompaned by other stickers that say FUCK TRUDEAU or that call for the liberation of Hong Kong.
We are among those who remove and cover up these stickers.
We do not know for certain the intentions of the people who put up these stickers. However, we have the following analysis:
Some in our society seek a total war between “the West” (defined in various ways) and China. They are not driven by a love for freedom; what they want is an orgy of violence across the world.
There is already a wave of violence directed towards our Asian neighbours across North America and in other countries.
It is legitimate to denounce the Chinese state — the ultimate example of “red fascism” in the modern era! — but it is even more urgent to denounce the empire at home. The Communist Party of Xi is dangerous, but it is not as dangerous as local police, local fascists, local ecocide, local greed. The evil empire overseas is a distraction from the urgent need for social revolution here and now!
We encourage all Montréalers to destroy and cover up these stickers!
We encourage the purveyors of these messages to smarten up a little bit!
