Notes on Ukraine, Portland, and Canada

I’ve been really deeply buried into this manuscript and find I cannot really think about much else. At the same time, it seems there are quite a lot of really big things to think about in the world, things I’d normally write long essays to explore.

Three things in particular beg attention, and I’ll regardless write a little bit about them now.

First of all, there’s the matter of Ukraine, NATO, and Russia. Yesterday Putin officially recognised the two separatist regions as independent nations. This was actually a bit of the de facto position already—Russia has had soldiers in and out of those areas for several years now, and I think no one really thinks they won’t eventually be annexed by Russia. And that could easily happen without any real military conflict, except of course that there’s a lot of pressure on President Biden to make something bigger of all this.

For the last 6 years, remember, the Democrats and their associated media outlets have been pushing a narrative that Putin interfered with the US election and that Trump was Putin’s stooge. Six years of repeating this narrative has done quite a bit to convince liberals that Putin is basically the political version of Satan, manipulating events from behind the curtain and tempting people towards sin. Briefly perusing the social media posts of some the more influential believers in this narrative reveals exactly what you might think the effect of all this was: they’re screaming for war now, and also for treason charges against Republicans who do not support a military move by NATO into Ukraine.

There is a parallel narrative that arose during this time regarding Russian manipulation of American politics, specifically leftist politics. It’s a really exhausting topic, so forgive me for being very brief about it. In this narrative, Putin has been working to create a kind of international fascist movement by supporting various local right-wing groups while also funding leftists who criticize American imperialism and reject social justice identity politics to create a ‘red-brown alliance.’ According to that narrative, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, and other journalists—as well as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden—are the propaganda wing for this, and leftists who listen to them are being duped by Russian manipulation.

You’ll find that many Antifa sorts are true believers of this narrative. That’s why my writing has been labeled recently by several of them as ‘radical traditionalist’ and ‘National Bolshevist,’ two very fringe political movements which Putin has supposedly helped grow through funding networks.

I’ve found it quite fascinating how this all is just the McCarthy playbook used by a different team. Russian propaganda is everywhere, and there are influential people who believe it and disseminate it. What is needed is a blacklisting and a purge to cleanse the American people of evil communist Russian influence.

As I’ve often said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it’s full of repeating forms, and this is absolutely one of those forms that never seems to go away.

Anyway, it’s also worth noting that the anti-separatist movement in Ukraine is supported by actual fascists from within that country who have been also supported by the US. The US has funded far-right movements full of holocaust deniers (and some holocaust cheerleaders) within Ukraine, because their hyper-nationalism makes them very anti-Russian. If Russia is funding fascist movements in the United States (which I don’t think they actually are but I won’t rule that out), then they’d merely just be doing the same thing the US is doing.

And that’s the real issue here. Nations always try to manipulate the internal politics of other nations. The US has always been the best at this, but that’s probably because the British taught them well. Israel’s propaganda organs likewise operate quite efficiently—including within Antifa in the United States—while China’s brilliant propaganda machine seems content to focus on Africa and South America instead.

Nations all do this and all accuse each other of doing it but never for a moment admit they do it, too. This game’s been played since the birth of the nation-state, and it will keep being played. There’s no easy way to avoid being manipulated except to stop consuming mass media, stop reading Twitter, and focus only on the conditions around you. But that’s what we should all be doing anyway.

Speaking of Antifa, there was a shooting in Portland this weekend. Details are slowly coming out, but apparently an anti-police protest got a nearby resident angry, who brought a gun with him. The protestors also had guns. This is a thing now in Portland: there’s always an armed contingent who justifies bringing guns because the counter-protestors might have guns, or because they are themselves counter-protesting protestors with guns. And people get shot, because threatening to use a gun on someone who also has a gun is a great way to make sure someone’s gonna use one.

One person died, four other people (including the nearby resident) were shot and hospitalized. Those who were part of the protest were all urged on social media to delete any videos or photos that they had taken of the event in case the police tried to subpoena them, and there were reports that the protestors had cleaned up gun shells at the scene that belonged to their side.

Generally, you only really try to hide evidence for a reason. Given the people involved (including two who have been repeatedly involved in violent armed confrontations, one of whom had a warrant out for their participation in the mass beating of a suspected right-wing protestor), I’ve got a guess about what maybe happened, and I’m sure you do too. Something that could probably have very easily been de-escalated instead blew up because someone tried to play hero. Basically, Kyle Rittenhouse all over again.

Here’s the larger issue, though. Portland is not some revolutionary front of a larger people’s movement. It’s a predominantly white, middle-class city with predominantly white urban middle-class wanna-be revolutionaries. Both the Antifa sorts and the Proud Boy sorts, however, will never understand this. The right-wing idiots who go there to fight think they’re stopping a communist revolution; the woke idiots who strut around with assault rifles think they’re defending Barcelona from Franco’s advance. Neither is actually the case, of course. It’s just a gladiatorial proxy for ideologies, but at least in the Colosseum such contests were safely contained by walls. More people will probably be hurt and killed, and eventually they won’t be just the active participants in the drama.

And speaking of totalitarianism, I think the most terrifying thing right now for everyone of any political ideology should be what Canada has done. I’ve seen it compared to an early implementation of a social credit system, and that’s not really far off base.

Being able to shut off all financial access for individuals involved in a protest movement is a power no government has yet dared to claim until now. Consider what freezing someone’s bank accounts and shutting off their bank cards because they merely disagreed with the government actually means: no money to buy food, no money to pay rent, no money to hire a lawyer to defend yourself. This is the ultimate capitalist weapon, because in capitalism you can only survive if you have money.

Again, though, remember the point about McCarthyism and history being full of repeated forms. The results of the House UnAmerican Activities Commission were that many actors, musicians, and artists were cut off from employment because they had been deemed enemies of American capitalism. What Trudeau has done is really a repetition of this form, except more thoroughly than Joseph McCarthy ever could have done. McCarthy could only smear someone to a point that no one would hire them; Canada’s emergency powers skips this step and directly harms a person’s ability to survive now, not just in the future.

This is why it’s so terrifying that these powers have now been claimed, especially by a supposedly ‘enlightened’ nation, which gives other nations the moral leeway to now do it too. It’s also really terrifying that there’s been no mass movement against this increase in government power except from what we’d traditionally call the ‘right.’

Anti-fascism once meant also anti-totalitarianism, but as I mentioned there are quite a few Antifa-identified people praising this move, since they see the trucker protest as a fascist movement. Never mind that when the capitalist state no longer has a use for their aforementioned street theater, those actors will also find themselves in the same position as the people they’ve labeled the enemy.

There’s not much to be done, though, or at least without a broad shift in the understanding people have about their relationship to government. That would require a lot of propaganda itself, but access to the means of production of meaning are tightly controlled. Social media companies can throttle anything you say that they do not like at the behest of governments or their own moral framework, and there are increasingly fewer venues on the internet that will even tolerate any kind of dissent. This platform has so far been resilient, despite the pressure from repeated ‘exposés’ published by larger media companies claiming that Substack is aiding and abetting Covid-denial, transphobia, and Russian propaganda.

But as with avoiding manipulation from nation-states, the only way to really fight these new government powers is to fully live in the actual world around you. A government blocking your access to capitalist exchange will hurt a lot less if you’re not reliant on those forms of exchange for your daily life. That includes also having real-world relationships with the people around you who’d risk helping you survive not because they are ideologically-aligned with your position, but rather because they care about you as a human.

That kind of care and those kinds of relationships are also repeating forms. Humans have always done this, no matter what games the rulers try to play with their lives. And rulers eventually die, nation-states collapse and empires crumble, but human care and relationships repeatedly survive all of it.