SwordoftheVistula
06-29-2010, 03:39 AM
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/left-right/anarcho-tyranny-in-ontario/
Samuel Francis defined “Anarcho-Tyranny,” which he saw regnant in most Western nations at the time of his death in 2005, as a political arrangement in which government does everything it shouldn’t with great vigor and exactitude (Tyranny) and everything it should with sloth and willed negligence (Anarchy).
Washington, DC, has more or less decided to leave well enough alone along the Mexican border, and yet will send military units to prevent mass immigration into Iraq. The European Union has declared its right to regulate the content of chocolate and imprison those accused of “minimizing” the Jewish Holocaust, and yet if ever challenged militarily, it would be unable to exercise the most basic function of sovereignty.
And then there’s Toronto, Ontario: Canada’s financial capital, whose municipal government forbids by law owning Pit Bulls and positively encourages the homosexual lifestyle. This is a place I’ve called home for the past six months, and which this weekend hosted the “G20 Summit” of “world leaders.”
Toronto has mastered the Anarchy part of Francis’s expression. “Hog Town” was once a jewel of the Anglo-Saxon world. When I was a child, I remember hearing the city referred to as “the clean, safe New York” or “New York in the ‘50s” (that is, New York without the minorities.) Today, Toronto represents the most evolved case of state-engineered -- and historically incoherent -- multiculturalism on the planet: only 52 percent of the city is white, and it now boasts large blocs of South Asians, (more assimilated) Chinese, blacks, and Filipinos. No one knows who’ll ultimately win the demographic battle, but I have a good idea who won’t.
Canada has even had a little Tyranny, too (despite its reputation for down-to-earth goofiness.) Pierre Trudeau pioneered the promotion of “visible minorities” in the Great White North; his political following has been compared to “Obamania.” And yet when in 1970 the Front de libération du Québec began kidnapping politicians, Trudeau enacted emergency measures and began sounding like J.D. Hayworth:
Trudeau: Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of ...
Tim Ralfe (CBC): At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?
Trudeau: Well, just watch me.
(The fascinating confrontation can be watched here.)
Canada has been quite welcoming to one and all from the third-world, as its quarter-century demographic transformation can attest. Whenever I re-enter the country, however, I usually begin sweating about the possibility of someone in the government reading my blogs, deeming me a threat to the nation, and ordering the border guards to hold me indefinitely in Diversity Training Gitmo. (I don’t think this is a case of overestimating my own significance; Anarcho-Tyrannies do ridiculous things like this.)
This past G20 weekend certainly had some of the “just watch me!” feel. Ontario reportedly spent upwards of 1 billion on security. And on Friday, the province revealed it had passed emergency legislation in secret that allows police to demand papers and search anyone -- for any reason -- who was within five meters of designated “security areas.”
By the end of weekend, close to 600 protestors had been arrested. Quite a sum, though as revealed in the television interviews of those released, detention life wasn’t too shabby: the camps were equipped with lawyers and counselors. Anarcho-Tyranny in action!
There was also a kind of Anarchy in the air that was more immediate than anything Francis described. I don’t exaggerate when I write that on Saturday, the city had begun to resemble the surreal, post-apocalyptic wastelands of The Omega Man or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -- commercial activity was shut down, store fronts bashed in -- bands of black-clad “anarchists” roamed the streets smashing things with hammers and putting abandoned police cars to the flame -- groups of pranksters, literally dressed like circus clowns, cackled and danced -- protesters marched under a cacophony of flags, signs, and banners -- thousands of normal Torontonians (the ones who were brave or foolish enough to leave their homes) wandering the streets befuddled. (I was one of these.)
Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario, June 26, 2010 (photo: the author)
This scene was encircled by militarized police in riot gear, equipped with Plexiglas visors and Praetorian shields. I got the sense that things wouldn’t look too different if a nuclear device had just gone off somewhere in North America or a total collapse of the economy had just ensued.
We weren’t witnessing a disaster, of course, but the culture of the contemporary state -- which loves to put on billion-dollar “Global Summits” -- and that of the contemporary Left -- which loves to protest them.
The Left is variegated, of course, ranging from the suit-and-tie NGO “professionals,” who go on TV, to the unkempt, unwashed (literally), unemployable, universally ugly hangers-on, who schedule their lives around “the next protest.” Such Left People were able to turn the park just outside my apartment into a kind of Lallapalooza-cum-tent city-cum- fornication and defecation zone.
Most of the damage to private property was inflicted by another subgroup, labeled the “black bloc,” which would precipitously come out of the woodwork at opportune moments and start indulging in ultra-violence. (The phrase "black bloc" was unknown, at least to me, before this weekend, but by Saturday afternoon, it had become a dreaded household term.)
And despite the billion spent on security and the large number of arrests, the bloc didn’t have much trouble destroying Starbucks and bank storefronts, their preferred representations of, so I understand, Global Corporate Fascism.
One might presume that in the Dark Ages (Before Sensitivity Training), a cop who saw a “anarchist” dancing atop a flaming police car would grab the perpetrator by the scruff of the neck and rough him up a bit before the arrest. Again, welcome to Anarcho-Tryanny -- where the police are militarized and wussified.
Smashing up Starbucks is certainly pointless -- and fitting for the “black bloc,” whose “Fuck the System!” revolt amounts to a re-rerouted teenage rebellion against their parents. That said, the tens of thousands in damage they inflicted should be compared to the billion spent on “security” and the fact that most all shops in the financial district and Yonge Street area were closed, costing them untold amounts in lost business. Hosting, say, the Superbowl can be a bonanza (at least for hoteliers, restaurateurs, and t-shirt vendors.) The “G8 Summit” was, however, a pure loss of at least 2 billion for everyone in the region. The mayhem I describe in this essay would never have occurred if Obama, Merkel, Cameron & Co. had just decided to have a Skype teleconferece.
(And the price tag doesn’t include the actual programs enacted by the summit attendees. On Friday, at the more elite “G8” in nearby Huntsville, Canada promised 1.1 billion for “maternal health” in “developing nations.” As a good conservative, Prime Minister Stephen Harper refuses to support birth control in Africa … but he still wants to give the continent vast amounts of cash.)
Some rather hysteric Torontonians interviewed on television kept saying, “I don’t know what happened to my city”; others claimed that Toronto had “changed” utterly due to these events. (Since the coverage of the “peaceful protestors” had been universally positive, one must assume that the reaction was against the black bloc and armored police.)
But in fact, the G20 protests were entirely predictable and hadn’t changed anything. Much like the “avant-garde” art world has been engaging in the same high jinx for the past 40 years, the Baby Boom and Gen X/Y Left has been essentially rehearsing the 1968 protests in Paris and Berkeley ad nauseam for just as long.
One might call this political masturbation, or the Left’s version of Civil War re-enactments, but then leftist protest isn’t simply a subculture but an industry. (In this line, it’s fitting that the G20 protests overlapped with Toronto’s state-funded “Pride Week” (which actually lasts 10 days)).
Conservative critics could easily point out the glaring, amusing, contradictions among the Left groups. There’s the quasi-primitivist rejection of the goods of the marketplace, expressed by suburban kids chatting on cell phones and typing “status updates” -- along with their demand that these wicked capitalist goods be redistributed to the masses. There’s the pretense of “anarchism” by groups that also claim every person on earth has the “right” to housing and a “living wage.” There’s the flirtation with Muslim activists by groups staffed by lesbians, gays, and Jews. There’s the unending multiplication of contradictory new fragments and new “rights.” And so on.
But in pointing out the obvious, one misses the guiding threads that run throughout the Left, and which unite it in ways the Right could only dream of.
One of these is the embrace of the “inverted world”: that is, anything -- truly, anything -- that is anti-white, anti-European, anti-Christian (unless you’re supporting “social justice”), anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-meat-eating, anti-beauty (I’m not kidding), and anti-traditional family (unless you’re helping “working families” of labor unionists). Disputes between lesbians and Muslims will be settled after The Revolution.
(If you don’t accept the racial aspect of the Left, imagine going to the G20 and holding up a sign reading “Stop Boer Genocide Now!” Such a sentiment could be described as “leftist” in that it involves helping a small people oppressed by a hostile majority. But as we all know, sticking up for White Protestants in Toronto is dead on arrival. Indeed, it might get you arrested!)
The other thread that runs through the contempo Left is that all its groups seek to be recognized -- and, most importantly, funded -- by the federal governments they condemn as “fascist.” As I was passing through the foul-smelling, hippie-like gathering that had cropped up in a nearby park, I watched as a nerdy white girl took the mike and started complaining about how “the government doesn’t respect us.” Ontario apparently only gave her project -- for lesbians or labor unions or Palestinians or who knows what -- five grand in funding. (If only AlternativeRight.com were so abused by the authorities!)
The Anarcho-Tyranny state, in turn, adores these groups, as all of their “problems” can be solved by new federal initiatives. Every “radical critique of bourgeois society” is in practice an excuse to expand a bureaucracy. The state will never oppose the Left -- and never stop importing the Left’s favored third-world populations -- until this arrangement ends.
For a long time in Western history, a state would establish sovereignty by appealing to theology and natural order (e.g. “the divine rights of kings”), or, with the birth of liberalism, the need to secure liberty. (Carl Schmitt: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”)
The postwar world not only witnessed the triumph of the said “radical critique of bourgeois society” -- what Kevin MacDonald has identified, in its active, subversive form, as the “culture of critique” and Paul Gottfried, in its passive, decadent form, as the “politics of (white) guilt” -- but its institutionalization in education, big business, and, most of all, government.
The critique is the establishment. The culture it engenders eventuates in scenes like the one we saw in Toronto this weekend.
Samuel Francis defined “Anarcho-Tyranny,” which he saw regnant in most Western nations at the time of his death in 2005, as a political arrangement in which government does everything it shouldn’t with great vigor and exactitude (Tyranny) and everything it should with sloth and willed negligence (Anarchy).
Washington, DC, has more or less decided to leave well enough alone along the Mexican border, and yet will send military units to prevent mass immigration into Iraq. The European Union has declared its right to regulate the content of chocolate and imprison those accused of “minimizing” the Jewish Holocaust, and yet if ever challenged militarily, it would be unable to exercise the most basic function of sovereignty.
And then there’s Toronto, Ontario: Canada’s financial capital, whose municipal government forbids by law owning Pit Bulls and positively encourages the homosexual lifestyle. This is a place I’ve called home for the past six months, and which this weekend hosted the “G20 Summit” of “world leaders.”
Toronto has mastered the Anarchy part of Francis’s expression. “Hog Town” was once a jewel of the Anglo-Saxon world. When I was a child, I remember hearing the city referred to as “the clean, safe New York” or “New York in the ‘50s” (that is, New York without the minorities.) Today, Toronto represents the most evolved case of state-engineered -- and historically incoherent -- multiculturalism on the planet: only 52 percent of the city is white, and it now boasts large blocs of South Asians, (more assimilated) Chinese, blacks, and Filipinos. No one knows who’ll ultimately win the demographic battle, but I have a good idea who won’t.
Canada has even had a little Tyranny, too (despite its reputation for down-to-earth goofiness.) Pierre Trudeau pioneered the promotion of “visible minorities” in the Great White North; his political following has been compared to “Obamania.” And yet when in 1970 the Front de libération du Québec began kidnapping politicians, Trudeau enacted emergency measures and began sounding like J.D. Hayworth:
Trudeau: Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of ...
Tim Ralfe (CBC): At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?
Trudeau: Well, just watch me.
(The fascinating confrontation can be watched here.)
Canada has been quite welcoming to one and all from the third-world, as its quarter-century demographic transformation can attest. Whenever I re-enter the country, however, I usually begin sweating about the possibility of someone in the government reading my blogs, deeming me a threat to the nation, and ordering the border guards to hold me indefinitely in Diversity Training Gitmo. (I don’t think this is a case of overestimating my own significance; Anarcho-Tyrannies do ridiculous things like this.)
This past G20 weekend certainly had some of the “just watch me!” feel. Ontario reportedly spent upwards of 1 billion on security. And on Friday, the province revealed it had passed emergency legislation in secret that allows police to demand papers and search anyone -- for any reason -- who was within five meters of designated “security areas.”
By the end of weekend, close to 600 protestors had been arrested. Quite a sum, though as revealed in the television interviews of those released, detention life wasn’t too shabby: the camps were equipped with lawyers and counselors. Anarcho-Tyranny in action!
There was also a kind of Anarchy in the air that was more immediate than anything Francis described. I don’t exaggerate when I write that on Saturday, the city had begun to resemble the surreal, post-apocalyptic wastelands of The Omega Man or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -- commercial activity was shut down, store fronts bashed in -- bands of black-clad “anarchists” roamed the streets smashing things with hammers and putting abandoned police cars to the flame -- groups of pranksters, literally dressed like circus clowns, cackled and danced -- protesters marched under a cacophony of flags, signs, and banners -- thousands of normal Torontonians (the ones who were brave or foolish enough to leave their homes) wandering the streets befuddled. (I was one of these.)
Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario, June 26, 2010 (photo: the author)
This scene was encircled by militarized police in riot gear, equipped with Plexiglas visors and Praetorian shields. I got the sense that things wouldn’t look too different if a nuclear device had just gone off somewhere in North America or a total collapse of the economy had just ensued.
We weren’t witnessing a disaster, of course, but the culture of the contemporary state -- which loves to put on billion-dollar “Global Summits” -- and that of the contemporary Left -- which loves to protest them.
The Left is variegated, of course, ranging from the suit-and-tie NGO “professionals,” who go on TV, to the unkempt, unwashed (literally), unemployable, universally ugly hangers-on, who schedule their lives around “the next protest.” Such Left People were able to turn the park just outside my apartment into a kind of Lallapalooza-cum-tent city-cum- fornication and defecation zone.
Most of the damage to private property was inflicted by another subgroup, labeled the “black bloc,” which would precipitously come out of the woodwork at opportune moments and start indulging in ultra-violence. (The phrase "black bloc" was unknown, at least to me, before this weekend, but by Saturday afternoon, it had become a dreaded household term.)
And despite the billion spent on security and the large number of arrests, the bloc didn’t have much trouble destroying Starbucks and bank storefronts, their preferred representations of, so I understand, Global Corporate Fascism.
One might presume that in the Dark Ages (Before Sensitivity Training), a cop who saw a “anarchist” dancing atop a flaming police car would grab the perpetrator by the scruff of the neck and rough him up a bit before the arrest. Again, welcome to Anarcho-Tryanny -- where the police are militarized and wussified.
Smashing up Starbucks is certainly pointless -- and fitting for the “black bloc,” whose “Fuck the System!” revolt amounts to a re-rerouted teenage rebellion against their parents. That said, the tens of thousands in damage they inflicted should be compared to the billion spent on “security” and the fact that most all shops in the financial district and Yonge Street area were closed, costing them untold amounts in lost business. Hosting, say, the Superbowl can be a bonanza (at least for hoteliers, restaurateurs, and t-shirt vendors.) The “G8 Summit” was, however, a pure loss of at least 2 billion for everyone in the region. The mayhem I describe in this essay would never have occurred if Obama, Merkel, Cameron & Co. had just decided to have a Skype teleconferece.
(And the price tag doesn’t include the actual programs enacted by the summit attendees. On Friday, at the more elite “G8” in nearby Huntsville, Canada promised 1.1 billion for “maternal health” in “developing nations.” As a good conservative, Prime Minister Stephen Harper refuses to support birth control in Africa … but he still wants to give the continent vast amounts of cash.)
Some rather hysteric Torontonians interviewed on television kept saying, “I don’t know what happened to my city”; others claimed that Toronto had “changed” utterly due to these events. (Since the coverage of the “peaceful protestors” had been universally positive, one must assume that the reaction was against the black bloc and armored police.)
But in fact, the G20 protests were entirely predictable and hadn’t changed anything. Much like the “avant-garde” art world has been engaging in the same high jinx for the past 40 years, the Baby Boom and Gen X/Y Left has been essentially rehearsing the 1968 protests in Paris and Berkeley ad nauseam for just as long.
One might call this political masturbation, or the Left’s version of Civil War re-enactments, but then leftist protest isn’t simply a subculture but an industry. (In this line, it’s fitting that the G20 protests overlapped with Toronto’s state-funded “Pride Week” (which actually lasts 10 days)).
Conservative critics could easily point out the glaring, amusing, contradictions among the Left groups. There’s the quasi-primitivist rejection of the goods of the marketplace, expressed by suburban kids chatting on cell phones and typing “status updates” -- along with their demand that these wicked capitalist goods be redistributed to the masses. There’s the pretense of “anarchism” by groups that also claim every person on earth has the “right” to housing and a “living wage.” There’s the flirtation with Muslim activists by groups staffed by lesbians, gays, and Jews. There’s the unending multiplication of contradictory new fragments and new “rights.” And so on.
But in pointing out the obvious, one misses the guiding threads that run throughout the Left, and which unite it in ways the Right could only dream of.
One of these is the embrace of the “inverted world”: that is, anything -- truly, anything -- that is anti-white, anti-European, anti-Christian (unless you’re supporting “social justice”), anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-meat-eating, anti-beauty (I’m not kidding), and anti-traditional family (unless you’re helping “working families” of labor unionists). Disputes between lesbians and Muslims will be settled after The Revolution.
(If you don’t accept the racial aspect of the Left, imagine going to the G20 and holding up a sign reading “Stop Boer Genocide Now!” Such a sentiment could be described as “leftist” in that it involves helping a small people oppressed by a hostile majority. But as we all know, sticking up for White Protestants in Toronto is dead on arrival. Indeed, it might get you arrested!)
The other thread that runs through the contempo Left is that all its groups seek to be recognized -- and, most importantly, funded -- by the federal governments they condemn as “fascist.” As I was passing through the foul-smelling, hippie-like gathering that had cropped up in a nearby park, I watched as a nerdy white girl took the mike and started complaining about how “the government doesn’t respect us.” Ontario apparently only gave her project -- for lesbians or labor unions or Palestinians or who knows what -- five grand in funding. (If only AlternativeRight.com were so abused by the authorities!)
The Anarcho-Tyranny state, in turn, adores these groups, as all of their “problems” can be solved by new federal initiatives. Every “radical critique of bourgeois society” is in practice an excuse to expand a bureaucracy. The state will never oppose the Left -- and never stop importing the Left’s favored third-world populations -- until this arrangement ends.
For a long time in Western history, a state would establish sovereignty by appealing to theology and natural order (e.g. “the divine rights of kings”), or, with the birth of liberalism, the need to secure liberty. (Carl Schmitt: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”)
The postwar world not only witnessed the triumph of the said “radical critique of bourgeois society” -- what Kevin MacDonald has identified, in its active, subversive form, as the “culture of critique” and Paul Gottfried, in its passive, decadent form, as the “politics of (white) guilt” -- but its institutionalization in education, big business, and, most of all, government.
The critique is the establishment. The culture it engenders eventuates in scenes like the one we saw in Toronto this weekend.