I've been confused; Joseph Goebbels cleared things up.
What is neoliberalism anyhow and if it's so "liberal" why do its policies appear to favour only the corporations? How come it seems that the same people who want freedom of speech don't want students to demonstrate against what I think are evil actions by repressive forces of governments or factions in governments? How can some politicians claim to be fighting for the working man (seldom mentioning women) while advocating tax cuts applicable only to the wealthy? Well, it turns out that is simply the way fascism works, and it's supposed to be confusing.
My book of the week is by a recent immigrant in our great millenial "brain gain" from the United States. Jason Stanley is coming to the University of Toronto from Yale University and he is bringing his expertise in philosophy, particularly political philosophy and specifically, as his recent book title tells me, his knowledge of How Fascism Works. Early on, he quotes Joseph Goebbels who said, "This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed." Some of the best jokes are ironic, often confusingly so.
The students at Columbia who demonstrated against Israeli genocidal brutality - financed and armed by American taxes and factories - were exercising their democratic freedom of speech. The administration who caved to pressure and called in the baton-wielding National Guard said they were protecting members of the student body who claimed they "felt unsafe" in such a climate of dissent. The same people recently decided to comply with a Trump administrations demand … Well, here's Troy Clossen on March 21 in the NY Times:
Columbia University agreed on Friday to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in a remarkable concession to the Trump administration, which has refused to consider restoring $400 million in federal funds without major changes.
The agreement, which stunned and dismayed many members of the faculty, could signal a new stage in the administration’s escalating clash with elite colleges and universities. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties, and college administrators have said Columbia’s response to the White House’s demands may set a dangerous precedent.
This week, the University of Pennsylvania was also explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, which said it would cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university had let a transgender woman participate on a women’s swim team.And now we come to a sliding scale of how to assess what is acceptable behaviour in the protest vs counter-protest discussion.
I'm someone who responds to the complaint of hurt feelings by asking to see the blood. Hard-hearted? Yes. And I recognize that my standard is flexible so that I don't apply it to children. But university students aren't children and if they can't toughen up, they don't belong at university. The whole business of "trigger words" and "cancel culture" and "woke-be-wild" is silly and I know that "silly" is a childish pejorative, but in this case I deem it appropriate. If there really is blood or even threats of blood, that is a different matter. Who makes that distinction and what remedies are invoked are questions that must be addressed, hopefully by people respectful of constitutions (national and institutional) and not as reactions to outside forces with an anti-democratic agenda. Like money.
To return to Canada's "brain gain" for a moment. At last count we have three excellent academics coming to live here. Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore also from Yale will begin teaching courses at U of T. Snyder is the best-selling author of The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, 20 Lessons From the 21st Century. We may expect more teachers and scientists to make the move north as the US bureaucrats become less receptive to the alarms educated people raise over ecological and democratic erosion. We may need the strength of their voices if our own elections put elitists in power. And, if I am not as forthright as you would wish about my political preferences, it is because I am a believer in strategic voting over blind party loyalty.
We do need some changes in our electoral system. It's easy to scoff at the problems of our southern neighbour with their electoral college and super PAC financing provisions and seemingly interminable election periods, but we also have issues with our governing structures. Although promised by our recent prime minister, we never abandoned a first-past-the-post system. Other countries appear to function well with different systems of proportional representation. France, Ireland, Germany, Scotland, South Africa, Norway and even Australia have other adaptations of representative democracy.
I know it can get crazy at times when the proliferation of parties gets out of hand. A doctor in Peru described his country's elections with twenty-three parties as "simply crazy" with the shuffling of allegiances necessary for any one faction to have a majority. I don't have the answer and I don't have the credentials to offer one, but I believe we can do better. At the very least we can keep critical education alive in our classrooms until that better system evolves. What we can do now is to learn the lessons of the past. We may say we are:
Canada
True North
Strong
and Free
but earlier struggles against autocracies had this primary salient lesson: we must resist division.
Dictatorships began with dividing citizenry into us and them groups. After that, the erosion of status for the out-group could gain speed and force until burning books could lead to burning people. Here's my brief summary of those divisions, with thanks to Professor Stanley's excellent book.
Individuals as members of a group
Create factions of good people and bad ones. Reference actual crimes and generalize to entire populations to suggest characteristics of one or few are representative of an entire group. Extend the division to imply a victimization of us good people by those bad ones, especially in the areas of crime or expenditures of publc money.
Present-day situation vs idealized mythic past
The "good old days" never were. Our modern state of affairs may have problems, but climate crises, weather extremes, homelessness, chemical misuse, crime statistics and violence are not more prevalent today because of the behaviour of some marginalized groups.
Ivory-tower elites vs "honest" labour force
Universities that prepare professionals for academic/scientific careers or research and development occupations are sources of national support. We need more health care and construction practitioners, and trained individuals for ongoing critical appraisals of our society. Again, the actions of a few or expressions of extremist viewpoints may be offensive and require constraint by application of legal and reasonable corrective measures. Violent suppression must not be an option. The simplistic notion that sweat confers worth is embedded in our evaluation of work but is obviously silly.
Straight vs Queer
People who have what are in the most polite terms called "non-traditional lfestyles" in the LGBTQ+ community (and even "community" suggests a grouping into us vs them) are as competent, productive, and peaceful members of society as anyone else - or individuals may be as criminally offensive as anyone else; but it is at the level of the individual that character assessment must be made. Gays are not out to convert or victimize your children.
Religiously observant vs non-believers
The Christian Right (in the US) and the Moslem Brotherhood (in the Middle East) are wealthy entities and they subscribe to agendas that would sanction violence against perceived opponents, in many cases in pursuit of their constructed ideologies.
Unionized workers vs free agents
Organized labour has won concessions (and the very term suggests post-struggle acceptance by employers) in the areas of child labour prohibitions, work week definitions, maternity leave, vacation allowances and minimum wages. In earlier times, union activists were attacked by military and police with injuries and death inflicted on unarmed protestors. Now companies may close local outlets where workers have requested union affiliation or fire employees seen as "union agitators".
Having money is a virtue or a sin
It all depends on who has it, how they got it and where it is. And over all - how critics or supporters can characterize those factors. I think Linda McQuaig is a perceptive social critic and a national treasure as a journalist. One person posted on FB to ask the rhetorical question, "How can you trust someone living in a Rosedale mansion in Toronto?" He/she probably has the same question about Naomi Klein or Stephen Lewis.
Now, all this is nice clean academic discussion, and you can leave now. We all have busy lives and for many of us there's electioneering to do. If you want to read what happens when the system of national or international controls is abandoned I offer this reprint from Jewish Currents of Apr 4, 2025. I have also, in fairness, read accounts of the Hamas Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the international fact-checking of both that event and the one recorded here. Israel does not stand up well to the most cursory of examinations. The material is not pretty.
Daniel May (publisher, Jewish Currents): On March 17th, Israel resumed its bombing of Gaza, killing in one overnight attack 436 people, among them 183 children. Here is how the Associated Press described the scene at one of Gaza’s few remaining emergency rooms: “One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.” Reading these words, I found myself returning to a grim set of questions, well-worn by the days and weeks and months of the last year and a half: How much to keep reading? How much to look? Does staring into this void force me to face it? Or does the staring just build mental calluses that wrongly soften the blows? Is looking away simply necessary self-protection, or am I building up the muscles of avoidance? And what is the point of these questions anyway; isn’t this all a slide into narcissism, when children’s legs have been blown off?
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the Egyptian American journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad faces the void—and stays there. Over 187 pages, he tracks the emotional and political toll of witnessing Gaza’s devastation. In form, the book is a polemic, an assault on the myths that the West tells itself and the hypocrisy of American liberals who proclaim their commitment to human rights while insisting that the unfolding destruction of Gaza is justifiable. For El Akkad, this is a story of many losses—above all the losses of Palestinians murdered by those who profess their commitment to freedom, but, most personally for him, the loss of a belief in American ideals that, as a child growing up in Egypt and Qatar listening to Nirvana records whose covers had been blackened by censors, provided inspiration from afar. Covering the wrath of America’s war on terror as a journalist showed him “the ugly cracks in this thing called ‘the free world.’” And yet, he continues, he “believed that the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”
The book describes what happens when that belief is abandoned. One outcome is anger, directed primarily at politicians, journalists, and arts institutions that describe the destruction as “tragic,” but are in fact most offended by protestors whose tactics they find distasteful or those who buck liberal dogma by refusing to vote for the president who supplied the bombs. When the Democratic president supports genocide, he writes, “an otherwise very persuasive arguments takes on a different meaning: ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more’ starts to sound a lot like ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.’”
As scathing as that indictment is, I found the book most affecting, and most troubling, when El Akkad turns his gaze inward. “What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal?” he asks. “What is wrong with all these people who can?” And what is to be done when every action seems so limited, at best symbolic? Ultimately, the book lands on a call for refusal: a refusal most practically to support the machinery of war economically, but, more broadly, a refusal to participate in any institution that contributes to or supports the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. He calls this “negative resistance” and suggests that while the state is well equipped to handle protest, it has no answer for the person who says “I will have no part of this.”
It’s not entirely clear what this might mean in practice, at least for most of us. How exactly are we—as taxpayers and students and workers and rent-payers in the heart of the empire—supposed to “have no part of this?” El Akkad finds some solace in recent protests and boycotts, but given the darkness of the book, it isn’t surprising that he is most moved by the extreme sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. This example points to the central dilemma of withdrawal as a form of political resistance: The most meaningful sacrifices seem beyond what most could be expected to offer. For this reason, Thoreau’s famous refusal to pay taxes to a slave nation always felt to me both the only morally defensible position and of limited political power. I can’t say, though, that I have answers for what to do in the face of such unrelenting horror. But in reading El Akkad’s book, I realized just how much, over the last year, I have trained myself to stop asking these questions. I know the reasons why I’ve done so, but it is still a moral and political failure. Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.
There's lots to look at these days from news feeds to election signs. What do you want to pay attention to?