Antifascist

Given that, today, as has always been the case, May 1 is an opportunity for the workers of all nations to celebrate their historic victories and to put forth demands for further improvements to their working conditions and their health and safety conditions in general; given that protecting the health and safety of health care workers is of primordial importance; and given that the health care system and all of its workers, nurses, doctors, councillors, managers, office workers, and support staff are currently under enormous pressure and deserve our unconditional support; ...

On March 16, 2020, our comrade Matt departed for the spirit world. We have lost one of the most committed anarchists in our part of the world, and the loss is felt intensely due to the tragic circumstances of his death. Many people who did not know Matt well will probably remember him as the guy that bombed the bank back in 2010. At this time, there was a major mobilization of anarchists preparing for the G20 summit in Toronto. Several months prior to the summit, a group calling itself FFF (Fighting For Freedom) released footage of the firebombing of an RBC branch in Ottawa. The footage was dramatic – a black-clad figure runs out of the bank minutes before it explodes in flame. ...

On February 2, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network published an article detailing the links between Steve Labrecque, alias “Steve Rebel,” alias “Chtev,” who we’ve mentioned before , and the local NSBM (National Socialist black metal) label La Barricade, which for a number of years now has been one part of the scummy underbelly of Québec’s musical counterculture. For obvious reasons we’ve been paying attention to the tiny neo-Nazi/NSBM milieu for quite a while, [i] if only because it is close to the RAC (Rock Against Communism) scene, the band Légitime Violence, and the Québec Stompers bonehead gang, the incubator for the neo-fascist groupuscule Atalante . Our previous articles about Atalante and its sympathizers have clearly established the roots of Atalante’s key militants and their entourage in the “white power” and neo-Nazi subculture in the Québec City region, the pitiful denials of the key parties notwithstanding ; they, of course, prefer to present themselves as “revolutionary nationalists” or sanitized fascists of the allegedly more presentable Italian variety. ...

So much could be said about the spectacle recently witnessed at Washington, DC’s federal capitol building, however we will write a quick statement, hoping to further understand the situation as well as to assert a need on behalf of comrades in the States who face both imminent and ongoing grassroots violence and parallel state repression. Essentially, what we saw was not an insurrection or revolt; what the world witnessed was a permitted fascist temper tantrum. ...

On May 4, 2018, the Montreal Gazette published the first of a series of articles exposing the identity of an important international neo-Nazi propagandist residing in Montréal, an individual only known up to that point by the pseudonym “Zeiger. ” The journalists at the daily made public the results of an investigation conducted over many months by Montreal-area antifascists to identify and expose “Zeiger,” who had long been active in the most extreme wing of the alt-right fascist movement, notably as an editor and administrator of the Daily Stormer website, widely considered the most influential international platform for neo-Nazi propaganda of the last decade. ...

Journalists recently reported on arrests in relation to online threats against Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s public health director and the public face of Quebec health policy in the context of the pandemic. These arrests bring to light the involvement of a section of the far right in mobilizations against mandatory masks, social distancing, and other measures put in place to minimize the risk of contagion in public places. [1] In a July 31 blog post , the antiracist blogger Xavier Camus reported a post by QAnon true believer Fabrice Descurninges, which included the home address of Horacio Arruda. Camus also reported – with the aid of numerous screenshots – on a similar post by Sylvain Marcoux, whom he described as a “violent conspiracy theorist.” ...

Atalante is a neo-fascist organization mainly present in Quebec City (s ee the articles of Montréal Antifasciste concerning them ). In Montreal, the group gathers a handful of neo-Nazis. Here we expose two of them. Shawn Beauvais-Macdonald, the now famous Charlottesville Nazi , is a long-standing fellow traveler of Atalante (in the photos below, he poses with Raf Stomper, the head of the organization, and in an Atalante action). He resides in an apartment on the second floor of 2045 Elmhurst Avenue in Montreal-West. ...

A demonstration by healthcare workers ( « Manif des travailleurs de la santé!!!!! » ) has been called for July 18th at the Parc Saint-Laurent in Repentigny. Organized by a collective of patient attendants, « Le journal des PAB », the demonstration has five demands (which are not at all easy to find of the event page…) and is inviting “all healthcare workers in Quebec” to join them. At first glance this struck us as a welcome initiative, but we changed our minds pretty quickly over the past week when we saw that several far-right figures and anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists were inviting themselves or plain out being invited to attend by some of the organizers! ...

Revolutionary greetings from the insurrection sweeping throughout the occupied territories of the so-called United States of America. We are asking comrades across the world for immediate and unrelenting acts of solidarity against the United States. In the past few days, we have accumulated experiences that amount to decades of learning. In doing exactly what we previously thought was impossible, we have exposed this country for what it truly is: nothing more than a fragile paper tiger. Tearing at its massive technological police state, the black people of America have demonstrated that they will from hereon refuse to ever be intimidated by a power structure upheld by white terror and violence. ...

The pandemic that hit the entire planet full force beginning in January 2020 has, at least temporarily, completely altered the political climate, given that the lockdown and the ban on gatherings mean that social movements cannot default to their traditional tactics, e.g., demonstrations to denounce injustice and propose solutions. Far from being some pause or time out, the pandemic constitutes, among other things, an increasingly intense political situation, during which class relations exhibit their inherent violence at its bluntest. Racialized minorities and poor neighbourhoods experience the carnage at its most brutal, domestic violence rises as the lockdown drags on, the police forces take advantage of the state of emergency to harass and abuse the people they usually target with even greater abandon, people from immigrant communities, particularly Asians, are even more stigmatized than usual, the state issues decree after decree to force large sections of the population to work in unsafe conditions for starvation wages in the name of its sacrosanct economy, and on it goes. ...

In 2019, the far right in Québec was a lot quieter than it had been in 2018 and 2017, the year that Montréal Antifasciste was formed. There are a number of reasons for this: the CAQ taking power in October 2018 demobilized a certain number of members in the organized groups, who found themselves with a government that was at least partially sympathetic to their identitarian demands (of course, this is not to in any way suggest that these far-right ideas and currents have magically disappeared); major internal conflicts that had been building for some time finally exploded in the past year, particularly within La Meute but also within various groupuscules, including the Gardiens du Québec (LGDQ) and Groupe Sécurité Patriote (GSP), destabilizing the most important and best structured groups; taking advantage of the weakening of the key groups, a certain number of marginal figures and “problematic leaders” (for example, Pierre Dion of the Quebec “Gilets jaunes” (Yellow Vests), Luc Desjardins and Michel Meunier of LGDQ, as well as other distasteful individuals like Diane Blain) have played a more important role, further discrediting and demobilizing the national-populist far right; the sustained work of antifascists in identifying ad denouncing the more radical elements, meaning, the full-on fascists and neo-Nazis in Québec’s far right, which doubtless took the wind out of the sails of part of the base supporting Atalante and the alt-right groupuscules; the antiracist and antifascist movement also continued its sustained mobilization against the national-populist current, particularly what was its key vehicle throughout 2019, the Vague bleue. The decline in activity on Québec’s far right doesn’t signal a victory for antifascist forces. To the contrary, with a majority populist government in the Assemblée Nationale, a government that moved rapidly in its first year in power to pass the racist Bill 21 on state secularism, as well as gagging debate to adopt a variety of anti-immigrant measures, it is reasonable to postulate that the right-wing forces are simply taking a breather, because they feel they’ve achieved some of their main goals. That said, the relative calm has been an opportunity for us to do the work necessary to deepen and refine our analysis, which has led us to define two broad tendencies on the far right. (For more, see Between National Populism and Neofascism: The State of the Far Right in Québec in 2019 .) ...

What follows are preliminary thoughts; things are changing quickly and in unpredictable ways, and while we don’t claim to have anything particularly original to say, we feel it’s important to communicate some thoughts and connect some dots from an anti-racist, anti-fascist perspective, as the exercise might be useful, and to start thinking now about how we will move forward from this. /// The COVID-19 pandemic has set off waves of repressive and authoritarian reaction, often along nationalist lines. While the virus will claim a heavy toll in lives lost, the social ramifications are likely to be at least as significant. ...