Filed under: Anti-fascist, Editorials, Indigenous, Quebec, Solidarity
Statement of solidarity from with the growing Wet’suwet’en struggle against the RCMP and Coastal GasLink.
We are an antifascist group, and as such we often end up focusing on people who the mainstream of society consider marginal losers, at best. Yet we do so knowing, as the poet Aimé Césaire explained, that fascism bears a direct relationship to colonialism. Writing about Europe and the rise of Hitler, Césaire noted that the crimes of Nazism were simply the crimes the European powers had inflicted on colonized peoples, come home to roost. This is true here in Canada, where the far right builds on a history of colonial violence against oppressed nations around the world, but first and foremost against the nations of people who are Indigenous to these lands.
We note the role of far right activists currently trying to organize vigilante groups to attack blockades, as they did in Edmonton last week. We see their rhetoric in social media, where they make open threats of violence. We are reminded of 1990, when former police officers and right-wing media stars established vigilante citizens’ groups which worked alongside the tiny Quebec Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Indigenous people, and most especially Mohawk people, at the time of the uprising. It is in light of the enormous potential for such entitled, “politely Canadian,” racism and violence that we understand our antifascism and our anticolonialism.
For those of us who are settlers living on stolen unceded land, we will endeavour to understand and to live up to our responsibilities, and call on our various comrades and communities to do the same, in standing in solidarity with anticolonial resistance, and learning how to do our part to sabotage the ongoing genocide taking place on these lands.
Full Solidarity with Indigenous Resistance!
Against Fascism, Against Colonialism!