Life During Culture War Time — A Canadian’s Thoughts on the Anti-Vax Truckers and the War
By Moses Cirulis
By Moses Cirulis
Presented by Modest Metamodernist
On February 15th this year, I saw that the Canadian flag on one of my neighbors’ houses was dipped down quite a bit. When I asked him whether it was working right, he said that he had brought it down half-mast, after Trudeau had declared a state of emergency. He called it martial law, and said other things seemingly in support of the occupation in Ottawa, which I won’t detail here.
But my thought about this was this: if he cares so much about his fellow Canadians, then why didn’t he lower it a week ago?
I already know why. But it reveals something that I didn’t want to admit. One of my own neighbors has fallen for America’s latest export: anti-democratic authoritarianism. God help us all.
…
Incidentally, that day was also my 31st birthday. After seeing this on my way to work, I tried to put it out of my mind. I had already been trying to do so for over a week by temporarily removing Facebook and Twitter from my phone, but, curse my knowledge, news of the American alt-right funded and Canadian far-right supported anti-vax trucker blockade still trickled in.
And the view on this event, from the perspectives of the two memetic tribes involved, could not be more different. The pro-antivax trucker side kept their image squeaky clean: they posted images of happy kids, bouncy castles, lots of Canadian flags, and of course they romanticize the truckers leading the movement. The Canadian left however showed a lot of the realities on the ground-that the whole thing was organized by a far-right political leader [1], that locals and minorities were being harassed and kept awake [2], that white supremacist hate groups were openly allied with this occupation and displaying their flags. [3]
It was like January 6th, 2021-but this time they actually held a whole city hostage.
…
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It took about a full week for the Canadian banks to freeze monies donated to the anti-vax convoys [4], hackers to reveal the sheer number and size of alt-right American source donations [5], for the RCMP and local police empowered by the Emergencies Act to break up the blockades [6], for the Canadian people finally stop giving the PPC and Wexit backed mini convoys the attention they craved.
Other carbon copy convoy attempts popped up like mushrooms around the world, to be mocked to varying degrees [7], before the whole thing finally died down.
Just in time for me to find out that Russian troops were massing at the Ukrainian border.
…
The far-right authoritarianism of the Russian government has been poisoning discourse around the world for a decade now, to my knowledge. Probably a lot longer.
I used to argue with one of the Russian trolls on Deviantart online, around 2012. It was still the Wild West back then. He made his impressions mainly by stirring up fights against progressive leaning and/or LGBTQ people in the forums, backing it up with Warhammer 40K paintings and cartoons as well as miscellaneous paintings and short stories about torture, murder, horrible racism-basically all of the stuff that would get you banned in a heartbeat in any online public square these days. [8]
I didn’t know it, but him and the Russian forum buddies that would inevitably back him up were the first in a wave of Russian trolls that would slowly turn online political groups like 4Chan and Anonymous either to Nazis, or consign them to irrelevance.
And even the trolls were only part of the picture. The personality analytics collected by the likes of Cambridge Atlantica for the sake of the Trump election and Brexit, the growing mass of alt-right public figures, as well as Trump himself, often had financial paper trails that led back to Russian money-usually at least partially disguised for plausible deniability, but always hanging over us, like a light fog.
Finding out that the Canadian PPC and Wexit movements were spearheading the anti-vax trucker movement made me more than a little suspicious. When the list of anonymous donors on the GoFundMe campaign was made available, in a limited fashion, to the public, it revealed that the largest donations mostly came from alt-right Americans.
I do suspect that Russian oligarchs and their employees may have also fed information to the Canadian far-right, and sent rubles to those donors, in a low key fashion. Given how soon afterwards the Russians invaded Ukraine, and how far back their paper trail of subtle collusion with the far-right goes, there’s no way this can be a coincidence. But I have no smoking gun, in this case. The Russian trolls have finally mastered their craft.
…
I can’t be a leftist anymore. Or so I thought.
I used to have the plausible deniability that Green Social Liberalism 2.0 at least emphasized the social and thus worker’s rights. But my lifelong appreciation of freedom-real freedom, that is, not the freedom to starve and torture people, was sacrificed by much the online left upon the altar of breaking the American empire, regardless of consequence. As I found out later though, these “leftists” were mainly state capitalists. The true left has remained standing-if quite small, still.
My first proof of this was that the moderator of a leftist group on Discord demanded that I argue against the idea that Aleksander Dugin-founder of the Nazbol party and court philosopher of Putin, in Slavoj Žižek’s words [10], could be a good leftist, given a few passages cited by a fellow authoritarian leftist.
I did the best I could to synthesize Dugin to my own liberatory philosophy, but got banned and mocked instead, after which I decided to block them.
This was before Putin invading Ukraine, but I should have taken it as an omen of things to come.
A leader of a group I was in, The Original Alt Left, showed a video of a group of Ukrainian Nazis doing, you know, saluting and wishing horrible death upon innocent people. I pointed out that the video was likely doctored, given the Jewish president and especially the extremely low population of actual Nazis in Ukraine. He proceeded to call Ukraine a dictatorship, denied the Holodomor incident, and proceeded to call all Baltic states, including the one that my own grandfather came from, Latvia, Nazi worshippers. He then blocked me.
There have also been a lot of incidents of a Slavoj Žižek meme group openly defending the Russian invasion as the best way to stop the hegemony of liberal capitalism. There is too much on that front to cite here, but the man himself had very different things to say on the matter. [11] I don’t think the leftists arguing in favour of the authoritarian power of the week understand or care what it is they’re voting for anymore. They don’t remember how Pussy Riot and other LGBTQ activists were disappeared [12], they don’t remember the candidate for the Russian presidency being imprisoned [13], they don’t remember all the imprisoned Russian protestors and journalists [14], they don’t care about the many years of manipulation against democratic institutions, to the point that that corporations are now trusted more than both democratically elected governments and news media. [15]
The state capitalist “leftists” don’t care. And I would rather slather shit all over myself and publicly declare myself a Canadian Bernie Sanders equivalent voting shitlib than continue to seriously consider myself as being among their company. They want to party with far-right money and watch the world burn? [16]
Fine.
But let me quietly support my unions and dream of studying philosophy in Norway, and leave me the fuck out of it. The authoritarians have closed the horseshoe, and I have run out of fucks to give. I’ll take my democracy insurance over your glorious revolution, thanks, especially when it’s rolling over the bodies of innocent Ukrainians and Russians protesting for peace. You go ahead and follow Aleksander Dugin’s pied piper tune, and enjoy the blood on your hands.
I’ll quietly imply that Vietnam should join NATO, because an actual socialist democracy being saved from the authoritarian wannabe empires turning communism into a slur with their bullshit seems like a win for worker’s rights around the world, thank you very bloody much. How about we also re-industrialize North America, and show the workers doing good work around the world for pennies the kind of life they can have, and should fight for? Green New Deal, transnational trade unions, growing student exchange programs, maybe using those empty houses for working folks helping people re-establish supply chains? Hell yes.
The democratic dream isn’t tied to a single economic system, you wannabe liberators-in the right hands it regulates and improves any economic system already in play. Post-war Vietnam and the Nordics both proved it, in their own respective ways. Oligarchs love sucking up all the cash and letting the world burn no matter where they are. The only difference is how they justify it, and what their people allow.
Shit. I’m still sounding like a revolutionary aren’t I?
…
The sort of places my invironment [17] goes to now are much simpler, in a way. It’s actually much more peaceful than the words above imply. My research may seriously lead me to a better life, one that comics, thanks to all the fraught politics and the contempt of me by my peers, never offered.
Either my curious reinvention of myself takes me to happier places at this point or I simply slowly crumble. It’s not like I hadn’t been in a haze brought on by antipsychotics, my former artistic self crumbling away, as a result of a nervous breakdown caused by a breakup before the pandemic, anyway. The pandemic slowed the world down. It gave me a chance to develop myself. To support the people I loved, to once again pick up my fine philosophy tomes, and to deepen my longstanding relation to the Metamodern community. When I was poking around the contemporary arts in university prior to getting my animation degree, stumbling upon the term of Metamodernism, I had no idea how much depth it had, nor the opportunity it would grant me. And the poor professor who evaluated my review of an art show knew even less than I did at the time.
I’m forever grateful I found it, though. I’m tired of fighting culture wars. I’d rather grind a better lens. [18]
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.thespec.com/news/federal-election/2019/08/19/bernier-tries-to-walk-line-between-libertarianism-and-identity-politics-at-people-s-party-s-first-national-convention.html The GoFundMe page’s organizer, according to this article.
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/4/ottawa-residents-decry-anti-vaccine-trucker-occupation Aljazeera article showing local opinions about the anti-vaz protests.
[3] https://www.jta.org/2022/01/30/politics/swastikas-displayed-at-canadian-freedom-convoy-protests-against-vaccination-mandates Jewish Telegraphic Agency article on Nazi flags displayed at the protests.
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-banks-ottawa-protests-1.6353968
The banks freezing the money to the antivax protestors bank accounts.
[5] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wpax/freedom-convoy-givesendgo-donors-leaked
Vice article on the list of names the hackers revealed who donated to the antivax convoy. Many of the anonymous donations were American in origin.
A Newzealand blockade was planned but turned out quite small, much like the Finland one.
[8] https://www.deviantart.com/td-vice/journal/African-geniuses-to-launch-Spooknig-1-356239940 The argument below this incredibly racist journal entry gives you some insight, I imagine. I’m Mosobot64 in the comments.
[9] The donor list can no longer be found, but here’s a Vice article on it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wpax/freedom-convoy-givesendgo-donors-leaked
[10] https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/five-ethico-political-fragments/
Where Zizek’s bon mot on Aleksander Dugin comes from.
Zizek on Ukraine.
Reuters’ coverage of the sham trial that the Russian authorities used to jail Pussy riot. Archived by wikipedia.
[13] BBC’s coverage of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s jailed opposition: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16057045
[14] Regarding the jailed journalists: https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2022/09/22/russia-18-journalists-arrested-during-anti-war-protests/
[15] The 2022 Edelman trust barometer: https://www.edelman.com/news-awards/2022-edelman-trust-barometer-reveals-even-greater-expectations-business-lead-government-trust
Though I readily admit, it is more difficult to prove the sources of distrust against democratic institutions, I hope I have at least sufficiently proven that unaccountable businesses are currently more trusted than democracies.
[16] I can’t find the article for this statement but I will attempt to recall it. Prior to his death, a nihilistic artist in New York threw a party using a far-right donor’s money. Though he made a good show of being a leftist, throwing up middle fingers at the very hand who donated to him, in the end it was clear he didn’t deeply care for his convictions as an artist. I’d be offended as a fellow artist myself, but then I’ve never cared much for nihilism.
[17] The invironment is Germane Marvel’s term-here’s his article covering it: https://medium.com/@germanemarvel/meta-ignorance-bc047d01d865
[18] Baruch Spinoza, the great Pantheist and writer of Ethics, worked as a lens grinder for his primary trade. Feel free to look this up for yourself.