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i am back

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A Quick Hello

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The blog has been neglected for the past month or more - i apologize for this!

As some of you may know, i am working on a couple of books about some interesting German characters; these have become much more ambitious than i originally intended, and in the effort to get the first one out this spring all else has fallen by the wayside.

& now, to put an extra freeze on S.T., i am writing this from the airport, about to board a plane to visit my father's side of the family.

i'll be trying to keep in touch... certainly, once the first of these books is done i hope to get back to things here in the blogsphere.

take care all!
-k


p.s. some kinf folks recently invited me to join this thing "goodreads" - i now have an account which i believe you can all check out, so feel free to do so and if you like you can by my "friend": Kersplebedeb Goodreads

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Racial Profiling in St-Michel: Cops Get Their Wrists Slapped

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From today's Gazette:

$20,000 QUESTION ARE COPS TARGETING TEENS OF COLOUR?
‘ We did not profile because of race,’ police say
IRWIN BLOCK THE GAZETTE
On a steamy August night in 2003, 13-yearold Jonas Cassey, his brother Henri, 16, and four teenage friends were sitting on a low metal fence and chatting.

The three males and three females, all black, felt at ease, as most were in front of the St. Michel walk-up where they lived.

Suddenly, two Montreal police officers asked them to get off the fence because they were obstructing pedestrian movement and risked falling, the youths said.

When they refused, the boys – but not the girls – were each given $85 tickets for “using municipal property for a purpose other than that for which it is designed.”

This was a case of racial profiling, the Quebec Human Rights Commission said yesterday.

The commission recommended the city of Montreal pay $10,000 each in moral and punitive damages to Jonas Cassey, who at 13 was a year too young to be fined.

It suggested the city pay the same amount to his brother Henri and their friend Fritznol François, who was 16.

In fact, the housing unit in working-class St. Michel, home to many people with roots in Haiti, North Africa or Latin America, is considered private property because it belongs to the para-public Municipal Housing Office, not the city of Montreal itself.

In a second case from 2003, 15-year-old Feten Ounissi, who is of Tunisian descent, was walking with friends and her younger brother behind a St. Michel housing project where she lived when several police officers told her to go home.

She then went to the front of the building and sat on the stoop. Again, police told her to go home. When she refused, she was lifted off the ground by two cops, taken to a cruiser, handcuffed and given a $118 ticket, she testified before the rights panel.

Her mother, Arbia Bouganmi, who said she was prevented from talking to her daughter, also was fined.

The commission said there was no valid motive for these police actions. It ruled that Ounissi, now 20, was a victim of racial profiling and should get $13,000 in damages. Her mother ought to receive $4,000, the panel added.

Fo Niemi, executive director of the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations, which supported the complaints, said the ticketing indicates Montreal police are targeting teenagers of colour in that area.

This was strenuously denied yesterday by Chief Inspector Paul Chablo, who said the department does not accept the commission’s decision because “we are convinced this was a justified police intervention.”

“We did not profile anybody because of race,” he said, but added the department welcomed the commission’s suggestions to invest more funds to improve training and track incidents with racial overtones.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy on racial profiling,” he said.

There had been “a large amount of citizen complaints” about crimes in St. Michel at the time, Chablo said.

The tickets were “immediately retracted” when it was discovered one had been issued to a 13-year-old and all the supposed violators were on private property, he said.

The commission can refer the case to the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, which has the status of a court.

Niemi congratulated the Montreal force for its recent training policies to prevent racial profiling.

“We do not want this seen as bashing the Montreal police department.We have to congratulate the leadership for their efforts.”

Jonas Cassey said that was not his first run-in with police that summer; he was also fined for “incivility” because an officer did not like the way he was jivewalking when crossing the street. Jonas did not file a complaint in that case.

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Montreal's 9th Anarchist Bookfair & Festival of Anarchy (MAY 2008)

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: :: Montreal's 9th Anarchist Bookfair
& Festival of Anarchy (MAY 2008) :::

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair will take place on Saturday, May 17, 2008; the Bookfair will be followed by a full day of workshops on May 18. Reserve these dates!

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair is for anarchists, allies, and those who are interested or curious about anarchism. Welcome to all!

::::::::::
MONTREAL'S 9th ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR
Saturday, MAY 17, 10am to 6pm
CEDA, 2515 rue Delisle
(near the Lionel-Groulx metro)
::::::::::

--> The largest anarchist event in North America.
--> Part of the month-long Festival of Anarchy (May 2008).
--> Followed by a full day of Anarchist Presentations and Workshops (May 18, 2008).
--> Bring your kids! Kids activities and free childcare on-site.

[The main space is wheelchair accessible. For more information or to inquire about other accessibility needs, see our accessibility policy -- http://www.anarchistbookfair.ca/en/node/6 -- or contact the collective.]

-----
More info below about:
a) Workshops (deadline for proposals is March 3, 2008)
b) Tabling at the bookfair (deadline April 1)
c) Art Exhibits and Films (deadline April 1)
d) Festival of Anarchy Events (deadline April 1)
e) Anarchist Theatre Festival (deadline February 1)
f) Volunteers, Supporters, Postering and Publicity
g) Contact Information
-----

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and Festival of Anarchy is the largest anarchist event in North America, and an important exchange of anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas. The Bookfair is for anarchists and non-anarchists alike, in French and English (and other languages too), with participants from all of North America and beyond. Founded in May 2000, the Bookfair is now entering its ninth year. Anarchist Bookfair events include book and information tables, workshops, readings, films, presentations, walking tours and much more.

Once again, the Anarchist Bookfair will be followed - on Sunday, May 18 - by a full day dedicated to anarchist-themed workshops and presentations. As in the past, the "Festival of Anarchy" will take place in May, with diverse events organized by anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups.

Check out the PHOTOS from the 2006 edition of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and Day of Workshops, to give you an idea of what the Bookfair weekend is all about: http://photos.cmaq.net/v/7thbookfair


::::: a) Workshop Proposals :::::

Proposals for the Day of Workshops (Sunday) should address an anarchist-themed topic in some depth, and should be intended for people who are already familiar with anarchism, or might identify as anarchists. The collective will accept between 10 to 15 workshops.

Workshop proposals for the Bookfair day (Saturday) should be introductory workshops to anarchism, or an aspect of anarchism, and should be aimed at people who are curious about, or new to, anarchist ideas. These workshops should be accessible to non-anarchists. The collective will accept up to 6 introductory workshops.

More detailed information about workshop proposals, including guidelines and previous workshops, is linked at: http://www.anarchistbookfair.ca/en/node/9

--> The deadline for workshop proposals is MARCH 3, 2008


::::: b) Tabling at the Bookfair :::::

The heart of the Bookfair is the main auditorium on May 17, 2008 (10am-6pm) which will include booksellers, distributors, independent presses and political groups from all over Montreal, Quebec and North America, and abroad. Please make sure to read our principles www.anarchistbookfair.ca/en/node/4.

Contact us at info@anarchistbookfair.ca to request table space. If you haven't tabled at the Bookfair before, please include a short description of your group and the material you intend to distribute at the Bookfair.

--> The deadline to request a table is APRIL 1, 2008.


::::: c) Art Exhibits and Films :::::

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair will again be displaying artwork relating to anarchism and anti-authoritarian, autonomous or anarchist-supported struggles. Please consider proposing an exhibit of photos, posters, original art, repros - anything within the parameters of the Bookfair that can be mounted on a wall or placed in a corner!

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair will also have a film room running all day, showing films related to anarchism or anarchist-supported struggles, that fall within the principles of the Anarchist Bookfair.

--> The deadline for art exhibit and film proposals is APRIL 1, 2008.


::::: d) Festival of Anarchy Events :::::

In addition to the Bookfair and Day of Workshops, the entire month of May is part of a Festival of Anarchy, with diverse anarchist-themed events occurring at different venues in Montreal. The Bookfair collective compiles a Festival of Anarchy calendar, but we count on you to organize the actual Festival of Anarchy events. Get in touch to reserve a date for your event in May (calendar dates are "first come first served").

--> The deadline to submit Festival of Anarchy events, to be included in our public calendar, is APRIL 1, 2008.


::::: e) Anarchist Theatre Festival, May 12-14 :::::

[The Montreal Anarchist Theatre Festival is organized by an autonomous collective.]

Montreal's third annual ''Anarchist Theatre Festival'' is seeking submissions of anarchist theatre pieces to be staged May 12 & 14.

Already confirmed are the Bread & Puppet Theatre, from Vermont, famous for their giant puppets, as well as Monique Surel, author of Au temps de l'anarchie, un théâtre du combat, a three-volume reference on anarchist theater. Also, French actor Nicole Mourer will present a one-man show (a seul sur scène) about the French anarchist poet, Armand Robin.

We are looking for other theatre pieces about anarchists, anarchist ideas and history, or any subject related to anarchism including anti-state, against capitalism, racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. We will consider plays or monologues that are original work, ones that have already been performed, or that have been written by anarchists (historical or contemporary). The pieces can be either full productions or staged readings in French or English.

All work performed is without remuneration. The Festival will provide publicity, an appropriate indoor venue, plus a guaranteed interested audience. All proceeds from ticket sales are used to cover event expenses and for staging future Festivals.

If interested, please send either an outline of your proposal, or a sample pages from your work and explain why your proposal would fit in the Festival.

Deadline: No later than February 1, 2008.

Submit your proposals to:
anarchistefestival@yahoo.ca
or, mail to:
@ Theatre Festival
c/o S. Laplage
6797 rue de Normanville
Montréal H2S 2C2


::::: f) Volunteers, Supporters, Postering and Publicity :::::

--> If you would like to receive Bookfair publicity -- flyers or posters -- by regular mail or electronic mail, to distribute in your community get in touch. Also, please specify whether you want publicity materials in English, French or both.

--> If you are from the Montreal area, and would like to help with local postering and flyering efforts, please pass on your email and/or phone number and specify what areas you can poster.

--> If you would like to support the Bookfair collective in general, with organizing tasks between now and the Bookfair, get in touch!


::::: g) Contact Information :::::

If you have other ideas for the Bookfair or Festival of Anarchy, don't hesitate to get in touch with a proposal! Contact us to receive regular updates and announcements by e-mail.

post: Montreal Anarchist Bookfair
c/o QPIRG Concordia
1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest
Montréal, Québec, H3G 1M8
CANADUH

e-mail: info@anarchistbookfair.ca
phone: 514-435-2385
web: www.anarchistbookfair.ca

Nous parlons français.
Se habla espagnol.

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No Olympics on Stolen Land! Great Lakes & East Coast Speaking Tour

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No Olympics on Stolen Land! Great Lakes & East Coast Speaking Tour
With Kanahus Pellkey from the Native Youth Movement and Dustin Johnson

With the 2010 Winter Olympics scheduled to occur on unceded Coast Salish, St’at’imc and Squamish territory in two years, the spectacle surrounding them continues to wreak havoc on Indigenous people, poor people, and the Earth. In the spirit of resistance to colonialism, with the 2010 Olympics as a main target, Kanahus Pellkey of the Native Youth Movement and Native youth Dustin Johnson are touring throughout the Great Lakes and East Coast in January and February 2008.

“By them choosing to have the Olympics here, it’s opening up our land, our sacred sites, our medicine grounds,” says Kanahus Pellkey. “We want investors to know our land is not for sale.” Pre-Olympic fever occupies the province of BC, and the economic excitement has massively accelerated gentrification and the building of highways, resorts, and condos. The construction of infrastructure for the 2010 Olympics itself is adding to extensive destruction of traditional homelands of the local Indigenous peoples.

In October 2007, more than 1500 Indigenous people representing communities across this hemisphere held the Gathering of the Indigenous Peoples of America, on Yaqui territory in Vicam, Sonora, Mexico. They stated in their final declaration, “We reject the 2010 Winter Olympics on sacred and stolen territory of Turtle Island–Vancouver, Canada.” This speaking tour is strengthened by this momentum, and by the knowledge that hundreds, if not thousands of Indigenous people now plan to attend the Olympic Games, not in celebration, but in resistance to the danger the Olympics poses to Indigenous lands, identity, culture, health, livelihoods, and to future generations.

The Native Youth Movement is a Movement of Native youth that works to revive traditional knowledge and inspire Native youth to defend their Peoples and Territories.

Kanahus Pellkey is a Secwepemc and Ktnuxa Warrior and a spokesperson for the Secwepemc chapter of the NYM. She has been jailed before for fighting against the illegal occupation and theft of Secwepemc Lands for the Sun Peaks ski-resort, and is active in opposing the 2010 Olympics.

Dustin Johnson is a member of the Ts’mkiyen nation and is active in organizing anti-colonial resistance to the 2010 Olympics.

The Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement-Guelph did much of the core organizing of the tour. IPSM-Guelph works in solidarity with Indigenous struggles for self-determination and control of their traditional territories.

To get involved, help out, or ask questions, contact healingtheearth@resist.ca.


Tour Dates (a few are still in the works):

Windsor * Saturday January 19
Guelph * Sunday January 20
Six Nations * Monday January 21
Toronto * Tuesday January 22
Hamilton * Wednesday January 23
Six Nations * Thursday January 24
Peterborough * Friday January 25
Tyendinaga * Saturday January 26
Sharbot Lake * Sunday January 27
Kingston * Monday January 28
Kahnasatake * Tuesday January 29
Kahnawake * Wednesday January 30
Montreal * Thursday January 31
Ottawa * Friday February 1
Akwesasne * Tuesday February 2
Penobscot * Sunday February 3
Portland * Monday February 4
Boston * Tuesday February 5
Binghamton * Wednesday February 6
Ithaca * Thursday February 7


More information:

The Olympic organizers operate with a budget of almost $2 billion, and other costs to government surpass $6 billion. Despite all the Olympic-related mega development, Vancouver is now home to North America’s fastest growing homelessness crisis. Indigenous people account for 30% of this homeless population, despite making up only 2% of the total population in the province.

Dozens of low-income hotels and apartment buildings are being converted to unaffordable condominiums. As thousands of people are forced from their homes, they are then criminalized for being homeless. Private security firms are hired by the city to further police the streets, long-running squats are shut down, and social services are more stressed and threatened than ever. The solution of the municipal and provincial governments and the police is to ignore the root cause, and instead pay people to leave Vancouver and repress those who stay.

The darker side of the 2010 Olympics is further apparent by examining how their sponsors and supporters are some of the most destructive companies on Turtle Island. These include:

• Petro-Canada, one of Canada’s largest producers of oil and gas,
• TransCanada, one of the continent’s largest transporters of oil and gas,
• Canadian Pacific Railway, long an integral tool of colonization,
• Hudson’s Bay Company, another company responsible for the colonization and theft of Indigenous land,
• General Electric, one of the world’s top three producers of military aircraft engines and major producer of nuclear power plants,
• General Motors, long a top contractor for the Canadian military and now the world’s largest automobile manufacturer,
• Dow Chemical, the world’s second largest chemical manufacturer and cause of the Bhopal, India disaster,
• Bell Canada, who’s CEO is one of the top corporate architects of the Security and Prosperity Partnership.

There is of course so much more that could be said. For further reading, see:
www.no2010.com
www.2010watch.com
www.harrietspirit.blogspot.com

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[Le Drapeau Rouge] At Last the PQ Shows Its True Colours!

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The below article in Le Drapeau Rouge; i felt it was well worth translating and sharing with you all.

At least in its newspaper, the Revolutionary Communist Party (the canadian one, not the Avakian outfit in the u.s.) is providing welcome leadership in opposing the rise of racism in Quebec, without ambiguity or compromise. While on the ground in Montreal most of the anti-racist organizing against the "reasonable accommodation" bullshit has come from groups like No One Is Illegal, the RCP benefits from greater organic ties to the Québécois revolutionary tradition, witness the forthright analysis of Pauline Marois' agenda in the Parti Québécois which follows:

Pauline Marois Demands a Makeover

At Last the PQ Shows Its True Colours!

With her proposed Québécois Identity Bill, the new Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois has shown that there is no limit to how low she will stoop to get back in power – even hunting for support on the ADQ’s terrain and leaping into racist and xenophobic manure. After several days of debate in which she did her best to defend her infamous Bill, the Lady of Île Bizard[1] once again tried to justify herself during the November 4 PQ commemoration of the 20^th anniversary of the death of its former leader René Lévesque.

Sharing the stage with a follower of the Church of Scientology (the popular singer France D’Amour), Pauline Marois first denounced her Liberal and ADQist adversaries “who are using a populist and demagogic approach but have no concrete proposals” as to how to affirm Québécois identity. “Well I do!” she added proudly. It is true that on top of joining the others in adopting a populist and demagogic approach, the new deputy from Charlevoix had done them one better, shamelessly proposing that certain civil rights be withdrawn from immigrants who, having already obtained Canadian citizenship, fail to show an “appropriate knowledge” of the French language.

It is obvious that this initiative from the PQ’s leader is simply politics, as she is sure to have known that her Bill had no chance of being adopted, and even if it was passed it would have likely been struck down by the courts. Ever since the last elections, the Parti Quebecois has been worried that the conservative section of its traditional supporters might leave it permanently for the ADQ. So, under the influence of political strategist Jean-Francois Lisée (the king of all gimmicks, who has himself just written a pamphlet in defense of cultural nationalism[2]), Pauline Marois decided to outflank Mario Dumont on his right and do her part in feeding the climate of fear and xenophobia which has polluted public debate in Quebec for over a year now, all in the hopes of leading her troops back into the fold.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if her Bill becomes a dead letter: public opinion will remember that Marois wants to put “the others” in their place (the others being all those who are not like us) and oblige them to conform to the dominant bourgeois ideology in Quebec. The PQ is betting that this rhetoric will pay off in terms of votes. And what does it matter if the verbal attacks, mainly against the Arab and Muslim communities, end up also leading to physical attacks: this would just be “collateral damage” in this PQist march back to power.

When she delivered her first speech to the National Assembly on October 16, Pauline Marois devoted most of it to defending cultural nationalism and stigmatizing the “foreigners,” going so far as to beseech Québécois, “don’t give up your place to others.” She joined the chorus insisting that everyone must submit to the famous “common values” imposed by the Québécois ruling class, which boil down to speaking French, complete secularism and that famous “equality between men and women,” which apparently constitutes one of the most important elements of Quebec society. Need we remind Pauline Marois that Quebec was the last Canadian province to grant women the right to vote in 1940? That it was only in 1980 (quite a bit less than a century ago!) that women in Quebec won the right to sign a mortgage? That not so long ago the dominant model was still the woman in the home, submissive to her husband, whose main role was to bear children and perpetuate the “French Canadian race” (remember Lionel Groulx?).

The PQ leader – and all those others who are condemning, in the name of gender equality, the fact that Muslim women “dare” to wear the Islamic headscarf – would do better to worry about the fact that the song of the year which was crowned at the last ADISQ[3] gala (a demagogic hymn entitled Dégéneration, from the reactionary group Mes Aïeux[4]) sings the praises of “the good old times when our grand mothers had fourteen children,” and when, of course, we did not have that awful right to an abortion… we think that things like that are much more worrisome than the purely hypothetical possibility that one day a woman wearing a niqab might ask to vote without showing her face.

The silence emanating from the “PQ left” regarding this racism and xenophobia is deplorable, but not at all surprising. The leaders of SPQ libre[5], Marc Laviolette and Pierre Dubuc (or as we have called them, the Laurel and Hardy of left nationalism), narrowly avoided the new leader’s cutting block, as Marois apparently wanted to dismantle their “political club.” Marois finally agreed to leave them their toy, but not before she grilled them and seems to have received the promise that they would stay in their place and not criticize her in any way. In any case, these two representatives of the alleged “left” of the PQ are 100% in agreement with the turn towards identity being carried out by Marois, as they were already attacking the “civic nationalism” promoted by her predecessor, Andre Boisclair.

The only criticism from within the ranks of the PQ has come from the Groupe d’action politique des Québecois et Québecoises issus de l’immigration, which is the body responsible for questions of immigration within the party. In an open letter published on October 18 in the newspaper le Devoir, the group’s spokesperson Kerlande Mibel protested against the emergence of a “populist cultural nationalism” within the PQ, “which demands that everyone share the same values and way of life.” “If tomorrow everyone must share the same values as white francophone Catholics, that isn’t progress,” notes Mibel, adding that every Quebecker should have “the same rights and responsibilities” – a position which is clearly not in step with the rest of the PQ!

One is forced to admit that Pauline Marois is at least consistent: her right turn on questions of identity is perfectly in step with her social and economic positions. Remember that when she was crowned in June, Pauline Number One came with certain conditions, “take it or leave it”: amongst these was the “rejuvenation” of the PQ’s social-democratic rhetoric, in the style of Tony Blair’s British Labour Party.

Under her leadership the PQ will adopt the line of the “lucides”[6] (which is not at all surprising when you note that the “lucides” included many well known PQists). From now on the emphasis will be on “creating wealth before we redistribute it.” Amongst other things, Pauline Marois has come out in favour of the university tuition hikes proposed by the Charest government. Loyal members of the Lady’s Praetorian Guard that they are, over the past few weeks the young PQists within the student movement carefully maneuvered to sabotage the campaign for a general student strike which had been initiated by the Association pour une solidarite syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), and which as we know ended in failure.

The fact that the PQ is a reactionary bourgeois party is nothing new to Quebec workers, who have been subjected to its policies for 17 of the past 30 years. That the party is finally getting rid of its “progressive” window-dressing may have some noteworthy consequences. The PQ seems to be trying to compete with the ADQ to claim the political space traditionally held by the bleus[7] (i.e. the conservative right) in Quebec. As to the army of “followers” and civil servants which the party has generated within the civil society organizations, the question is how far are they willing to go down this path? There is a question which it is still too early to answer.

As workers, perhaps we should take advantage of this “political recomposition” within the Quebecois bourgeoisie to get rid of this scum once and for all; without a doubt, that would be the best result we could hope for.

Serge Gélinas, Le Drapeau Rouge Nov.-Déc 2007 translated by Kersplebedeb

all footnotes by the translator

---

[1] Marois, who was elected to represent the riding of Charlevoix, actually resides in a three million dollar mansion on a 41 acre estate in the suburb of Île Bizard.

[2] i have translated the term “nationalisme identitaire” (literally, “nationalism having to do with identity”) as “cultural nationalism.” Whereas the terms may not be a perfect fit, it strikes me as a more accurate translation than “ethnic nationalism.”

[3] Association québécoise de l'industrie du disque, du spectacle et de la vidéo : the Quebec Association of the Recording, Festival and Video Industry.

[4] My Ancestors.

[5] A social democratic ginger group within the PQ.

[6] In 2005 the debate about which way forward for Quebec became characterized by two public manifestos, “For a Lucid Quebec” representing the economic right-wing and “For a Quebec in Solidarity” representing the social democratic position.

[7] Traditional party colours in Quebec have the liberals being the reds (!) and the conservatives being the blues.

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Red Brigades in the 21st century

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A comrade sent me the following article about the capture of some people trying to re-establish the Red Brigades in Italy. It's from the Wall Street Journal, and so bound to be neither sympathetic nor necessarily even accurate, but nevertheless worth a quick read.

For more on the historic Red Brigades, be sure to check out the first chapters of the book Strike One to Educate One Hundred, scanned and uploaded on the Kersplebedeb site.

Googling, i found a few more things about these busts. Vincenzo Sisi writes a short defense of the fact that he was active in the trade union movement at the same time as he was trying to prepare for armed struggle, entitled Who are the rotten apples?; i particularly liked this paragraph:

How dare you say I’m an infiltrator amongst the workers and in the union. Epifani (a union leader) said we were rotten apples. He never worked three shifts, he was put there by the party system, which sold out the working class. I come from a working class family that paid for their union card and helped fill his plate with our blood. Who is the infiltrator in the working class? Who, me or him, is the rotten apple? At the congresses I said what I thought. My union are the workers! In conversations amongst the committees I always represented what was important for us delegates, the ability to build autonomy spaces at our places of work to stimulate the protagonism of the workers. But however well you do it you stay within the boundaries of the economy struggles in the factories. While the superiority of the union leadership, after years of retreats and defeats, becomes an instrument to control the class.

There are two other short texts by Sisi in english on the Secours Rouge Internationale website here as well as a text in french by Sisi and three other militants.

also in french there is an article from le monde up on the PCMLM website...

if i see anything else i will let you know, in the meantime here is the Wall Street Journal article - thanks to my correspondent for sending it to me:

In Europe, Some Still Cling To Dreams of Revolution; Group Nabbed in Italy Appears to Hark Back To Lethal Red Brigades

Gabriel Kahn and Kristine M. Crane. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Dec 13, 2007. pg. A.1

GASSINO TORINESE, Italy -- One night in February, 40 police officers in ski masks burst into a house in this small town near Turin and arrested Vincenzo Sisi. The charge: running an armed terrorist group.

Giancarla Lorenzin, his wife of 26 years, thought it was a mistake. Her husband, a press operator at a factory, had no criminal record and professed nonviolence. They spent weekends hiking, bicycling and gardening. "I'll see you in a few days," she told him as he was hustled out by police. He caressed her cheek and shook his head no.

Mr. Sisi knew things she didn't. For years, he had lived a double life, appearing as a model citizen while secretly running a radical group that plotted bank heists, bombings and assassinations, police say. They describe Mr. Sisi and more than a dozen others arrested that day as the new face of the Red Brigades, a violent left-wing group that haunted Italy during a bloody era of the 1970s called the "Years of Lead."

Some of those arrested had been underground for years. Mr. Sisi, for one, is 54 years old. Others weren't yet alive in the 1970s; they include 20-something factory hands, a call-center operator, a pony- tailed mailman and a student named Amarilli Caprio.

Ms. Caprio, 26 when arrested, seemed above suspicion. She came from a middle-class family in Padua, had good grades in high school, wrote poetry and was studying languages at a Milan university.

Police uncovered clues they say make clear members of the group were armed and preparing to act. Dogs sniffed out a Kalashnikov assault rifle buried under the garlic bulbs in Mr. Sisi's garden. They found a cache of automatic weapons buried near an abandoned farmhouse, sophisticated surveillance equipment in a Milan basement, ingredients for explosives and fake police uniforms. Among the group's targets, police say, were the Milan headquarters of oil company Eni SpA and a professor of labor law.

Hearings to decide whether the matter goes to trial began this week. Attorneys for both Mr. Sisi and Ms. Caprio said their clients planned to fight the charges but declined to discuss the case. From jail, Mr. Sisi has written letters calling himself part of the "politico- military wing . . . preparing for the struggle to finally end the barbarism of exploitation." Ms. Caprio, before a transfer to house arrest, signed prison letters "as always, with a clenched fist."

Beneath the archaic rhetoric and sweeping ambitions is a remarkable story of a political movement's survival. Long after Soviet communism collapsed, traces of a left-wing dream of revolution live on in corners of Europe, sometimes in virulent strains.

Adherents say they're motivated by profound disappointment with how political struggles from a generation ago have played out. Instead of a more equitable society, they see one more out of kilter. Partly through years of strikes, European workers have won greater job and welfare protections. But debt-laden governments can no longer pay for it all, and a system of haves and have-nots has emerged. Young people chafe at a rigid job market with few opportunities.

Communist parties espousing workers' rights still garner support. Italy has two, each with ministers in the government; France has five far-left groups. The parties retain the trappings of a militant era, like the hammer-and-sickle symbol, but most have lost their edge as they join governments and forge compromises.

One result is that some who still cherish the dream of revolution have been forced to the margins of society or gone underground. Although the mass worker movements that fed the political violence of the 1970s have long vanished, left-wing political terrorism retains a romantic appeal. Italian movies such as "The Best of Youth" and "Buongiorno, Notte" -- co-written by a former Red Brigades member -- paint a seductive picture of idealism and violence that resonates with some.

Investigators were struck by the sympathy the arrests kicked up. Graffiti in support of the Red Brigades and those arrested appeared on factory walls around Padua, and there were two protest marches. A Molotov cocktail was left, unexploded, at the home of a police investigator. That has left investigators with nagging worries. "We have dismantled this wing, but we don't know if there are others," says Bruno Megale, head of Milan's investigative police unit. "I think the siren call of revolution is buried deep inside this society."

In the 1970s and '80s, a bloody ideological struggle in Italy pitted workers against bosses and left against right. Communists garnered up to 34% of the vote in elections. Strikes were frequent and often violent. Some elements, impatient with the pace of change, began seeing the unions and even the Communist Party as obstacles to a profound transformation.

A group with roots in the sociology department of the University of Trento in northern Italy evolved into the Red Brigades. Highly secretive, they counted 5,000 members, many with training in explosives, firearms and forging documents. Their attacks were brazen, including bank heists and prison breaks, and hit factory owners, politicians, journalists, police and military officers.

Attacks organized by the Red Brigades and other extremist groups killed more than 1,000 and wounded thousands. In 1978, the brigatisti kidnapped former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in broad daylight, killing his bodyguards. After 55 days, they shot him and left his body in a car trunk in central Rome. The brutishness of the assault isolated the Red Brigades from many of the workers they claimed to represent, but it didn't stop them. Attacks continued, including the 1981 kidnapping of a U.S. general, James Dozier, who was later rescued.

Authorities who'd infiltrated the movement finally broke the back of it around 1984.

History seemed to do the rest: The Soviet Union collapsed, China embraced capitalism. Yet on a spring day in 1999, a man stepped from a parked van near the University of Rome and shot to death Massimo D'Antona, a professor and government labor adviser. In a dense manifesto, a group calling itself the Red Brigades took responsibility. In 2002, Marco Biagi, an economic adviser to the government, was slain with the same gun.

Not long after, Mr. Sisi, unknown to his wife, began recruiting militants to plot more attacks, according to his arrest warrant and other police reports.

Mr. Sisi had quit school at 15 for a factory job. He joined a union to fight for better pay and safer conditions. By the time he met Ms. Lorenzin in a disco in 1975, he was deeply involved in the ideological battles of the time.

Three decades later, he was still at the bottom economic rung, making around $1,900 a month after tax, according to his former employer, for operating a press at an auto-parts supplier. He was still fighting the same battles, railing against his employer over working conditions and safety standards.

At home, he and his wife focused on eating healthily, cooking the vegetables from Mr. Sisi's garden. "He doesn't have vices. He doesn't smoke, drink coffee," says Ms. Lorenzin, sitting in her living room under a crocheted "No Smoking" sign. Yet in between pursuits such as his garden and bicycling or hiking, Mr. Sisi was cultivating a violent plan, police say.

One thing he did, they say, was procure false documents and plan a clandestine border crossing for an associate from decades earlier. The comrade, Alfredo Davanzo, had been on the lam in France for 15 years after drawing a seven-year Italian prison sentence for subversive activity and arms possession. Investigators say Messrs. Sisi and Davanzo, with a third longtime radical, Claudio Latino, formed the core of the group.

In 2004, they began anonymously publishing a journal called Aurora, which pushed a Maoist-type strategy of "long-term class warfare." The plan was to recruit followers in places where social tensions ran high, such as certain factories, universities and immigrant neighborhoods. The chance discovery of sophisticated surveillance equipment and bomb-making manuals in a Milan apartment building's basement storage area put police on their trail. But they took elaborate diversionary measures when they got together.

While walking to a meeting, Mr. Sisi would duck behind a wall and emerge a moment later with a different-colored shirt, up to three or four times in a single outing, according to a police surveillance report.

Mr. Sisi's arrest warrant says he would arrive in Milan from Turin by train and switch to the subway. He would take a zigzag route, jumping out of a subway car just before the doors closed and then taking another subway in the opposite direction.
Mr. Latino would arrive by bicycle. To elude a possible police tail, he would ride the wrong way down Milan streets and run red lights. He looked over his shoulder so frequently, say police, that more than once he crashed his bike into parked cars.

Arriving at their destination, usually a Milan street corner, the three didn't greet one another but loitered on opposite corners. One would begin to walk and the others would follow at a distance. They might walk for miles before stepping into a cafe; or Chinese restaurant, never the same one twice. Ms. Lorenzin says she wondered about Mr. Sisi's absences: "He would leave for whole days and not tell me where he was going, and not answer me when I asked him." She assumed his trips had to do with union activism.

In the summer of 2006, the couple rented a cottage in the Alps. When Mr. Sisi and his wife returned after a walk, he would check to be sure nothing had been moved, according to the police surveillance report. He insisted testily that his wife never say "Milan" or "leaving" on her cellphone. When she told him he was being too cautious, he snapped, "You just don't think about anything."

Police were indeed watching. Through surveillance that sometimes included 30 agents across a single Milan neighborhood, they began to piece together the outlines of the group's plans, such as amassing explosives.

On Aug. 31 of last year, at a meeting in a bar across from Milan's Teatro Piccolo -- recorded by the police -- Mr. Latino said he had moved two people from Padua to Milan, where they had enrolled in the university to canvass students and "see if there are others who might be interested." One of the two was Amarilli Caprio.

The daughter of a middle-class engineering consultant and a high- school literature teacher, who had named her after a demigod in a Virgil poem, Ms. Caprio attended the University of Padua. She also worked in a customer-service call center and became active in the local union. A co-worker recalls her as "combative but hard-working."

Ms. Caprio was eager to earn financial independence, but the call- center job offered meager pay and few prospects. Like many other students in Italy, she languished in the university, with no degree six years after high school. In 2006, Ms. Caprio told her parents she was leaving Padua to enroll at the University of Milan. She said she wanted to learn languages that would allow her to teach Italian to foreigners, and there were more immigrants in Milan, recalls her father, Roberto Caprio. "She was independent," he says, and he saw nothing odd about her move.

In Milan, Ms. Caprio and her boyfriend held meetings with other students and advanced a radical agenda, police say. The warrant doesn't say whether they recruited anyone. After Ms. Caprio's arrest, police say, they found her notebooks to contain lists of possible targets, the same ones discussed by others.

Her arrest came at 5 a.m. one day last February, in the Milan apartment she shared with her boyfriend. When her father in Padua got home that evening, his wife told him something terrible had happened and turned on the TV news. "I thought: 'My daughter?' I felt the whole world coming down on me for something that couldn't be true," Mr. Caprio says.

It was five days before he and his wife could visit Amarilli in jail. When they did, "she looked at her mother and said, 'I did it for love,'" Mr. Caprio recalls. The love, he says, was for the working class.

In solitary confinement at first, Ms. Caprio spent her days writing poems, as well as letters home and to a radical Web site. In one poem, she saw herself as part of a long struggle of the working class. "We have callused hands," it began, forged by "centuries and centuries of exploitation."

Ms. Caprio turned 27 in jail on June 19 -- a date, her father notes, that is recognized as the international day of political prisoners. In September, a judge let her finish her pretrial custody under house arrest at the home of an uncle near the town of Urbino, hundreds of miles from her home in Padua.

"When I can't sleep at night, I try to make sense of what's happened," Ms. Caprio's father says. "She was accused of proselytizing. We all do some form of proselytizing. Look at priests." He adds, "Why couldn't she have just taken to golf or something?"

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Justice for Quilem Registre! Protest This Police Murder-By-Taser!

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MARCH AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY
::::::::::
WHEN: Saturday, December 15, 2007
TIME: 11AM
LOCATION: ST-MICHEL / D'HÉRELLE
::::::::::


This past October 18, 2007, Quilem Registre died as a result of injuries suffered after a brutal arrest by police. Subjected to at least 6 Taser Gun shots, as well as the excessive brutality used by the police, Quilem died several days after his arrest.

[translated from the original French]

[Press Release (in French) linked HERE. ]


MARCH AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY
::::::::::
WHEN: Saturday, December 15, 2007
TIME: 11AM
LOCATION: ST-MICHEL / D'HÉRELLE
::::::::::


This past October 18, 2007, Quilem Registre died as a result of injuries suffered after a brutal arrest by police. Subjected to at least 6 Taser Gun shots, as well as the excessive brutality used by the police, Quilem died several days after his arrest.

Should we continue to submit to this kind of abuse by the police? What can we do against this? Come march with us this Saturday, December 15, 2007 from 11am. The goal is to denounce these abuses and others that are kept silent.

The meeting point of the demo will be at the corner of St-Michel and d’Hérelle, and we will march to 23e Avenue and Jean-Rivard (where Quilem was arrested). We will be heard! Let’s struggle together in peace against police abuses in the name of all victims! Enough!

[Organized by the Registre family with the support of the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP).]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Collectif Opposé à la Brutalité Policière
Collective Opposed to Police Brutality
(514) 859-9065
cobp@hotmail.com
http://www.cobp.ath.cx/
Montréal, Québec, Canada

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Aqsa Parvez, Rest In Peace

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Sixteen year old Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father, who strangled her to death, we are told, because she did not want to wear hijab.

She had already tried moving out of her Mississauga home, ongoing conflicts about how to dress and behave becoming too much to bear. She went home to get some things and ended up on the front page of the Toronto Sun.

Oppressed people, and most especially women, suffer for being metaphors to their oppressors. How they talk, walk, fuck and dress "represent"/"symbolize"/mean so much to their menfolk, and so controlling/punishing/murdering them becomes a compensation prize for not being able to control much else. Because once he has lost control of his daughter/wife/sister he has symbolically lost control of all that matters.

In life, how Aqsa Parvez dressed and acted meant a lot to her father. She died because of this.

As we focus on the next link in the Great Circle Jerk of Oppression, that patriarchal chain of being, it is only normal that Parvez' death is going to mean so much to so many writers, spokespeople, bloggers - until of course her five minutes are up and we all move on.

Needless to say, white volk are already keen on de-gendering her death. She wasn't killed at the hands of male violence, or as a result of teenagers having so few options when they decide the need to leave home. She was killed by Islam, by Immigrant Culture, by Multiculturalism and a lack of Western Values.

Blog the google on Aqsa Parvez and you'll see what i mean.

At the same time , you can be sure that others will be intent on de-Islamicizing her death, of insisting that her murder is just like the murder of any other woman, except that in her case she is to be denied any specificity at all (always the curse of those who die inconveniently). People will talk about how teenagers in all cultures and religions are having trouble with their parents, as the racist use of her death makes us recoil, hoping to find refuge in an explanation which whitens the whole affair.

In point of fact, in death the sixteen year old Parvez joins two sororities. She is one of the hundreds of Ontario women and children who have been murdered by the Head of the Family, by the One Who Wears The Pants. She is also one of the hundreds of thousands of women who have been killed for wanting to negotiate their own relationship (or lack thereof) to Islam and the various interpretations of its rules.

Rest in peace.

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Trade Unions Line Up for a "Neutral" Racist Quebec

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Well, you know what i think: this is a white stain on the Quebec trade union movement, certainly not the first and certainly not the last.

In the present context it is clear that arguing for a "ban on religious symbols" is at best riding the wave of racism for one's own purposes, and we know that in politics, to ride a wave is to contribute to it. (At worst, well, at worst such a position is just a chickenshit way to promote one's own racism.)

Never mind the fact that "neutral State" is an oxymoron. It is always someone's State, meant to serve someone's interests. This is not about keeping the State "neutral," it's about establishing (once again) whose State it is, whose interests it will serve. For people on both sides, the hijab is becoming a powerful symbol, and women's bodies are once again metaphors , stand-ins for social conflicts. And in Quebec, when we talk about men forcing women how to dress, we are talking about men forcing women to reveal their faces as an ersatz pledge of allegiance to "our" nation.

Of course, a certain abstract class analysis pretends that the State only belongs to a few thousand of the wealthiest citizens, that everyone else is equally oppressed. Those who like this fairy tale then see no issue with trade unions asking the State to enforce "neutrality", because as far as they are concerned their interests, their culture, their heritage is indeed neutral. If the State's decision is not clearly biased in favour of Westmount (or perhaps Ste-Foy) well then it's not really biased, is it? Or at least, not in a bad way...

That there is hypocrisy and open racism amongst those who wish for the State to be simply anti-Muslim, or post-Catholic, like the ADQ argues, should not obscure the fact that there is also racism, and there is also hypocrisy, in the "progressive" option of riding the racist wave to suddenly pass a "Charter of Secularism," one which we all know would never come into existence without the current Islamophobic brouhaha and which in practice will be enforced primarily against Muslim women who wish to work in the public sector.

(As a corollary to all this, let it be noted that the public sector remains one of the most highly unionized work sectors, that the public sector already discriminates overwhelmingly against people of color and immigrants, and that exclusion from unionized sectors has been identified as a key factor pushing immigrant communities into the poorest layers of the Quebec proletariat, separate from and oppressed by the greater national class structure.)

To be clear: a State does not become a theocracy, or "religious," because a schoolteacher or a secretary or a bureaucrat or a politician does or does not wear a hijab, yarmulke or crucifix. That is not what constitutes a religious state, any more than a revolutionary State is one where some public sector employee wears a Che Guevara t-shirt. (joke: i guess an anarchist State would be one where a civil servant goes to work naked?)

Here's the article from today's newspaper. Now excuse me while i go and puke.

Unions against religious symbols
WANT THEM BANNED IN CIVIL SERVICE This would ‘ ensure the secular character of the state,’ SFPQ vice- president says

JEFF HEINRICH THE GAZETTE

No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec’s two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants union told the BouchardTaylor commission yesterday.

“We think that teachers shouldn’t wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not,” said René Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour.

“The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service ... in order to ensure the secular character of the state,” said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new “charter of secularism” – akin to the Charter of the French Language – that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau, president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux.

Such a charter is needed “to avoid anarchy, to avoid treating ( reasonable- accommodation) cases one by one,” Carbonneau said yesterday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation’s 300,000 members at the commission’s hearing at the Palais des congrès.

Same point of view at the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Québec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

Quebec needs a “fundamental law” akin to the Charter of Rights that sets out clearly that public institutions, laws and the state are all neutral when it comes to religion, said Centrale president Réjean Parent. The new law would also “define (people’s) rights and duties ... in other words, the rules of living together.”

Under a secular charter, employers would understand that they don’t have to agree to accommodate religious employees if, for example, they ask to be segregated from people of the opposite sex, Carbonneau said.

Similarly, religious students in public schools would understand they can dress as they like, but not if it means wearing restrictive clothing like burqas, niqabs and chadors, which make communication difficult, she told commissioners Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor.

And in the courts, “there are cases that are clear – I wouldn’t want to see a judge in a veil,” she said. Judges need to appear “neutral” so as to inspire confidence in their judgment, she added.

The unions’ anti-religious attitude – especially the CSN’s idea to ban hijabs on teachers – got a cold reception from groups as disparate as a Muslim women’s aid organization and the nationalist Société St. Jean Baptiste of Montreal.

“What that would do is close the door to Muslim women who want to teach,” said Samaa Elibyari, a Montreal community radio host who spoke for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. “It goes against religious freedoms that are guaranteed in the (Quebec) Charter of Rights.”

Elibyari said Muslim women routinely face discrimination in the workplace. They don’t need unions on their back, too.

“When a young teacher calls a school to see if she can do an internship, and is asked on the phone straight out: ‘Do you wear the veil?’; when a cashier at a supermarket is fired and her boss tells her: ‘The customers don’t want to see that,’ referring to the veil; when a secretary gets passed over for promotion even if she succeeds in all her French exams, and is told: ‘Take off that tablecloth’ – is that not discrimination?” Elibyari asked.

The commission is holding its final week of hearings this week in Montreal, bringing to an end a cross-Quebec tour that began in early September.

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Immigrant Workers Centre Statement On Racist Reasonable Accommodation Bullshit

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Here is an excellent statement on the racist "reasonable accommodation" hearings in Quebec, from Montreal's Immigrant Workers Centre:

Whose Reasonable Accommodation ?

The debate raised in Quebec on ‘reasonable accommodation’ is built on a number of false assumptions about the relationship between majority groups (‘we’) and minorities (‘they’) and what ‘we’ believe the correct behaviours of ‘they’ should be. It is the wrong debate. Reasonable accommodation should begin with the rights of workers. Accommodating reasonably implies the protection of basic rights, decent wages, rapid recognition of credentials, and terminating ‘guest worker’ programs that deny rights. We have to remember that historically Canada/Quebec has been created and developed through the colonization of First Peoples on the one hand and the exploitation of migrant labour on the other, in order to build the ‘nation’. These processes continue unabated.

The public debate on ‘reasonable accommodation’ remains how ‘they’ should modify their customs to accommodate ‘us’. It assumes, dangerously, that there are common values, as though such things actually exist. We are writing this because we do not believe in this false consensus, this tendency to homogenize all things except food, custom and costume. ‘Cultural accommodation’ blinds the public to the realities of migration, and how the middle and owning classes of Quebec society benefit from the exploitation of the ‘they’. The connections between immigration and labour are absent from the debate and we believe that it should be at its centre.

Let’s briefly review some of the trends in immigration and labour over the past 30 years and ask ourselves is this ‘reasonable accommodation’? Most immigrants arriving during this period are from countries in the South (Asia, Africa, Latin America) and therefore they are not white. The economic forces that push them out of their countries are the same ones that shape their conditions here. They are ‘the other’. They have arrived with high levels of education and skills. Yet over that time, most have not had their skills and training recognized and therefore, they have been forced to take jobs that many “Canadians/Quebecers” reject. They do the work that remains hidden: the caring for children and the elderly, the services and cleaning that allows the ‘we’ to function. In these jobs, there is little protection. Minimal labour standards exist on paper, but are not posted in workplaces or in private homes for caregivers and domestic workers. There are few inspectors and where these standards are abused, it is incumbent upon the workers her/himself to challenge her/his boss. They are often isolated and with few other employees. For people who are struggling to raise children and send remittance payments to family members in their countries of origin, this is a great risk. It takes enormous courage to stand up for their labour rights when the chances of their winning anything and keeping their job is remote. You might say that this is a situation of ‘reasonably accommodating’ the class interests of employers by providing a pool of skilled, cheap labour (trained and educated elsewhere) who are prepared to work in almost any conditions as the price of migration to a better place. In addition, there is little evidence to support the myth that ‘things get better for immigrants with time’.

Many Canadians and Quebecers are unaware that we have programs for ‘guest workers’, who are brought in for limited periods and sent back to their home countries when the work is done. This is the case of agricultural workers. Domestics, through the Live-in Caregiver Program, are brought in and if they comply as live-ins can apply as permanent residents. The federal government likes these programs and intends to increase their use because they allow labour to be brought in without any real ‘accommodation’ as strict rules regulate the conditions of exploitation. Workers in these programs have little recourse to protection from the laws and policies for ‘us’ and remain the ‘they’ of the labour market. Even worse off are the many workers without formal status- who remain hidden as cleaners, cooks, dish-washers and domestics, facing arbitrary and well-below the minimum wage and labour standards, not eligible to making any claims but available nonetheless to be exploited.

As the policies of the provincial and federal governments have been to open up markets and reduce ‘expensive’ state programs, immigrant labour has been one of the ways of filling the gaps left by the inadequacies of neo-liberal policies. We don’t need as many decent nursing homes if immigrant women, often trained as nurses, can provide cheap care at sub-standard private ones or in peoples’ homes. We don’t need as much public childcare if we can import nannies. We do not need to increase wages and improve working conditions if the international labour pool will continue to bring workers here who are pushed into sub-standard jobs. Accommodation implies justice for immigrant workers as a precondition for any other discussion.

Immigrant Workers Centre-Board and Staff
Tess Tesalona
Jill Hanley
Eric Shragge
Malcolm Guy
Sid de Guzman
Andre Rivard
Degane Sougal
Julia Jankousky
Valerie Lavigne
Karim Ben-Jemaa
Mostafa Henaway-Staff
Bita Eslami-coordinator

Immigrant Workers Centre Research Group
Eric Shragge
Jill Hanley
Steve Jordon
Aziz Choudry
Martha Stiegman




-------------------------

Onward With the Struggle!
Centre des Travailleurs et Travailleuses Immigrants
Immigrant Workers Center
6420 ave. Victoria Suite 9
Montreal, Quebec
H3W-2S7
Phone: (514)342-2111 Fax: (514)342-2786

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into our second week without internet, thanks to some kind of fuck up on the part of our ISP... in any case, for once i have an excuse not to be posting!

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Anti-Racists Attacked by Police Outside "Reasonable Accomodation" Hearings in Montreal

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On Tuesday night i was one of a hundred people who gathered on the ground floor at the Palais des Congres conference center to protest against the racist reasonable accommodation hearings being held there (on the third floor) that night.

(i would have posted about this earlier, but have been without internet for a number of days - i'm not actually posting from a public terminal right now)

The protest was organized by No One Is Illegal Montreal, and attracted people from a number of organizations and communities, including Solidarity Across Borders, the IWC, NEFAC, the PCR, and i'm sure many many others whose affiliations i did not get.

There were speeches, some more inspiring than others, some great poetry... and then we went up the escalators to the hearings, leaving some befuddled security guards behind (it's difficult for a half a dozen secuirty to stop a hundred people who want to go somewhere...)

We were up there for hours, more speeches, music, chanting, etc. At about 9pm, after our numbers had thinned, a group of people tried to actually enter the room where the hearings were happening. They were physically blocked by the security guards, and this time they failed to get through. (It's trickier to open a door towards you with security in front of it than it is to just walk up some stairs.)

At which point the cops, who had been lounging around, came to reinforce the conference center security. It was obvious that nobody was getting in to these supposedly "public" hearings, and so we left, at this point numbering perhaps fifty, walking down all those stairs to the ground floor with some now hyped up very young cops shoving people from behind, including people on the stairs who were trying to leave as quickly as was safely possible.

In my opinion, the reason the cops were being aggressive is because they felt stupid for having been caught sitting on their asses not noticing when folks tried to get in to the hearings. They were embarassed that the conference center security staff was left to "guard the gates" on their own, and they didn't like being called pigs by the demonstrators as they were leaving.

What happened next was a perfect symbol of the hearings, of "accomodation" in an unreasonably racist Quebec, and of plain old Montreal policing.

As everyone was milling around on the ground floor, surrounded by cops, it was announced that we all had to leave. It was obvious at this point that there was no point in resisting: there were many people there who could not afford to get arretsed, there were little children, and we were outnumbered.

So immediately, people started filing out of the building. The only reason for some delay was some people had to pick up their things, including a sound system. Nobody was staying behind or resisting, but the cops had already identified a few people they wanted to get, and they moved in to do so, grabbing folks, throwing them to the floor, all the while others charged at the remaining stragglers, shoving them with their batons.

This all happened less than one minute after it was announced that everyone had to leave. There was obviously no intention of allowing the demo to end peacefully.

Four people were arrested. Two inside the building, and two others outside as they waited there, loooking in through the windows at the police and their arrested comrades. Police pulled out their tasers and "shot" them in the air, and were obviously enjoying the fun.

This is reasonable accommodation. This is what it's all about. Hearings thoughout Quebec where the state legitimized the most crazy racist and anti-semitic conspiracy theories, thanking bigots as they make their submissions, making it clear that if nothing else, there is not thought of not accomodating racism.

When the hearings come to Montreal, it is no surprise that they get protested. It is no surprise that activists come out to denounce them.

Now, as i already mentioned i have no internet access. On top of that, i had ot go out of town, so i was not at the follow up demonstration scheduled for last night. i hope there were lots of people there, because it strikes me that the police made an error in attacking people. By marring the second Montreal hearings with arrests and gratuitous violence, there is an opportunity to rip a hole in the democratic mystification surrounding these hearings. Hopefully, this opportunity will be/has been capitalized on.

While today some people have difficulty denouncing the hearings, the idea of "no platform for racists" being less easy when the mass media and democratic politicians are the ones supporting this crap, in the future it will be of obvious importance how one responded to the fragmentation of (social-democratic, "sovereignist" sections of) the Quebec left and the consolidation of a racist political pole in 2007.

What follows is the rpeport from the No One Is Illegal blog:

At least 75 protesters gathered in the lobby of the Montreal Congress Center, before proceeding past security guards upstairs, near the hearing room. The protest was well heard inside by participants. After more than 90 minutes of protesting outside the hearing, at least 20 police officers entered to remove demonstrators. During the police attack, uniformed officers pushed and punched protesters, and used batons; several police had also drawn their taser guns. The protesters included small children, as well as elders, who were pushed.

-- Police attack and arrest anti-racist migrant justice protesters at Bouchard-Taylor Commission

-- Protest and speak-out against the commission to continue on Thursday

MEDIA REQUESTS: Contact Leila Pourtavaf at 514-994-4595

MONTREAL,
Wednesday, November 27, 2007 -- Last night, No One Is Illegal-Montreal and
allies began pickets and speak-outs against the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on
"reasonable accommodation".

A statement on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, and the racist "reasonable
accommodation" debate, is available here.

At least 75 protesters gathered in the lobby of the Montreal Congress Center, before proceeding past security guards upstairs, near the hearing room. The protest was well heard inside by the some 190 participants.

After more than 90 minutes of protesting outside the hearing, at least 20 police officers entered to remove demonstrators. The protesters proceeded back to the main lobby of the Congress Center, where security had earlier said the protest could continue unimpeded. But, after an eviction order, protesters began to leave. Without provocation, police targeted individuals for arrest.

During the police attack, uniformed officers pushed and punched protesters, and used batons; several police had also drawn their taser guns. The protesters included small children, as well as elders, who were pushed.

Ironically, one officer, who didn't have ID, identified himself as "Stante". When asked if he was Giovanni Stante, the officer said "yes". Giovanni Stante was implicated in the murder of Jean-Pierre Lizotte in 1999. More background info available here: http://www.ainfos.ca/02/aug/ainfos00058.html

During the speak-out outside the Commission, demonstrators addressed issues like poverty, police brutality, racism, immigration status and more, thru speeches, music and spoken word.

Photos and updates from the Commission pickets will be posted at http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com

No One Is Illegal and allies refuse to be intimidated by police attacks, and will return to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission this Thursday for another picket and speak-out outside the commission. The protest will begin at 6:30pm at the Montreal Congress Center at the corner of Viger and de Bleury (near metro Place d'armes).

For more info:
No One Is Illegal-Montreal
514-848-7583 – noii-montreal@resist.ca
http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com

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La Guerre Larvée

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Can anybody help me translate this term?

i've looked it up in Le Petit Robert, but can't seem to find it...

translations translations...

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NOII Actions Against "Reaonable Accommodation" Hearings, Nov. 27 & 29

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::::::::::::::::::::
NO TO RACISM, XENOPHOBIA AND SEXISM!
Denounce the racist Bouchard-Taylor Commission
Solidarity across borders, not "reasonable accommodation"
:::::::::::::::::::::

-- PICKETS AND SPEAK-OUTS --
TUESDAY, November 27, 6pm
&
THURSDAY, November 29, 6pm
- in front of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission at the Palais de Congrès, corner of Viger and de Bleury
- by metro: exit at metro Place d'armes; stay inside and enter the Palais des Congrès directly).


No One Is Illegal-Montreal and allies are organizing pickets and speak-outs outside the Bouchard-Taylor Commission's public forums in Montreal next November 27 and 29. We encourage you to join us in large numbers.

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission has been a forum for racists and bigots for the past several weeks. The Commission itself is based on a fundamentally racist premise, which is to stand judgment of immigrant communities. This Commission, sanctioned by the state, is a process of submission, whereby minority populations are forced to justify their very existence in Quebec.

Join us for a speak-out and picket outside the Commission, as we share our struggles of resistance to poverty, precarity, racial profiling, police brutality, war, capitalism and gender oppression. Instead of "reasonable accommodation" we will share our perspectives of organizing against borders, for free movement and status for all.

INFO: 514-848-7583 – noii-montreal@resist.ca
http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com

-> If you plan on attending the pickets and speak-out, get in touch for more info.

-> Endorse the No One Is Illegal statement on reasonable accommodation which is linked here

et en français:

::::::::::::::::::::
NON AU RACISME, À LA XÉNOPHOBIE ET AU SEXISME!

- Dénoncez le racisme et la Commission Bouchard-Taylor!
- Oui à la "solidarité sans frontières", non au débat sur les "accommodements raisonnables".
::::::::::::::::::::

-- LIGNES DE PIQUETAGE ET TRIBUNES PUBLIQUES --
MARDI le 27 novembre à 18h
&
JEUDI le 29 novembre à 18h

- devant la Commission Bouchard-Taylor au Palais des Congrès de Montréal, coin Viger et Bleury
- pour vous y rendre: métro Place-d'Armes, restez dans la station de métro et prenez la sortie qui donne directement sur le Palais des Congrès)


Le collectif Personne n'est illégal-Montréal et des allié-es organisent des lignes de piquetage et des tribunes publiques devant les audiences publiques de la Commission Bouchard-Taylor à Montréal les 27 et 29 novembre prochain.

Depuis plusieurs semaines, la Commission Bouchard-Taylor sert de forum public pour racistes. La Commission elle-même est basée sur une prémisse fondamentalement raciste, celle de faire le procès des communautés immigrantes. Cette Commission, sanctionnée par l'État, est un processus de soumission, par lequel les populations minoritaires se voient obligées de justifier leur existence même au Québec.

Joignez-vous aux tribunes publiques et aux lignes de piquetage qui auront lieu à l'extérieur de la Commission. Ensemble, nous partagerons nos histoires de lutte et de résistance face à la pauvreté, la précarité, le profilage racial, la brutalité policière, la guerre, le capitalisme et l'oppression. Plutôt que de discuter d'"accommodements raisonnables", nous parlerons de mobilisation contre les frontières, pour la liberté de mouvement et pour des papiers pour toutes et tous.

-> Pour plus d'information: 514-848-7583 – noii-montreal@resist.ca
http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com

-> Vous pouvez également appuyer la déclaration de Personne n'est illégal
sur les accommodements raisonnables

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Henry Aubin on the Police Murder of Robert Dziekanski

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cellphone-video of an RCMP murder:
Robert Dziekanski was killed on October 14 in
Vancouver International Airport

Pulling the plug on Taser deaths
INCLUDING A CAMERA on the electric-shock weapon would help clear up questions on its use

HENRY AUBIN

Everyone is appalled by the tragic death of a man in Vancouver after police shot him with a Taser. But you don’t have to go far to find other cases of questionable use of this electric-shock weapon.

So far this fall, two men have died in Quebec after police tasered them. Unlike the death of Robert Dziekanski in Vancouver International Airport, no videos exist of the incidents, and they have received too little attention in the Montreal media.

On Oct. 14, the same day that Dziekanski died, Montreal police stopped Quilem Registre, 38, because of his erratic driving in the St. Michel area. Police say they shot him with a Taser because he was aggressive. Cocaine has been linked to numerous deaths of tasered people, and tests show that cocaine was in Registre’s blood when he was admitted to hospital after the incident. Relatives say he was in a coma for three days and suffered heart problems before he died.

The other case is still more troubling because a witness says the victim was peaceful. Claudio Castagnetta, a 32-yearold translator, was arrested for loitering barefoot and acting strangely inside a small grocery store in Quebec City. Unlike Registre, he had no criminal record.

The store owner who called police because of Castagnetta’s annoying presence told the Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil that when he asked the man what he was doing, “To my great surprise, he was not at all arrogant and was very diplomatic.” The store owner said that when the cops arrived, Castagnetta told them he had the right to be where he was. When police took him to their cruiser and tried to put handcuffs on him, he resisted – not with violence but by making his body rigid.

Two witnesses say police fired a Taser at him not once but at least three times – although they were unable to say how many times the weapon’s two darts hit him. It took six cops to bring him under control while lying on his stomach. Afterward, he was well enough to tell a lawyer that he suffered from bipolar disorder, but he died two days later in his cell.

Let me say right off that there’s not a mote of evidence that the Taser directly caused the deaths of Dziekanski, Castagnetta or Registre. Eight police forces in this province use Tasers (including the Sûreté du Québec and the Laval and Longueuil police), and a spokesperson for Quebec’s public security ministry, which oversees police, stresses that no deaths are directly attributable to the weapon since its introduction here in 2001.

The key word in all this, of course, is “directly.” The fact is that people hit with Tasers have a way of dying shortly thereafter. Amnesty International counts 18 such deaths in Canada and more than 240 in the U.S.

The only time police ought to be able to use Tasers is to defend either themselves or other citizens from life-threatening attack or injury – precisely the same criteria that governs (or is supposed to govern) police use of firearms.

We can’t tell if the Registre case meets that criteria because Montreal police have divulged so little about it. But the Castagnetta and Dziekanski cases flagrantly fail the test. First, neither victim had threatened police or endangered the public in any way. Second, police fired the Taser at them more than once, then pounced on them en masse (possibly inflicting serious injury on Dziekanski when an officer knelt on his neck).

Both times, then, police used the weapon gratuitously as an easy way to master people. Pardon me if I sound like the National Rifle Association, but Tasers don’t kill people, irresponsible police do.

A way exists to deter police from such casual use of this dangerous device. Taser International now makes a camera that clips on to a Taser and records what’s happening in video and audio. The company’s website notes that this “offers increased accountability – not just for officers, but for the people they arrest. Until now, it’s been the officer’s word against the suspect’s word.” If the suspect survives, that is.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has made the camera a precondition for introducing the Taser to his country. This little gizmo might be worth the Charest government’s consideration.

The above is from today's Montreal Gazette - i apologize for not having time to write about this myself, as some of you have noticed i'm posting a lot less these days. Too much work, and it's not showing any signs of abating...

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Settler Colonies

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French Jesuit Mission of St. Sauveur in Acadia:
corrupting the Wabanaki Nation with christianity

someone emailed me asking what the definition of a "settler-colony" was...

i gave a lame ass answer, but then figured i should post it here so that people can either agree with it or explain to me the places i'm wrong...

this is a paraphrase of what i answered, based on my sketchy memory of high school history class...

i went to high school in Quebec, and from memory we were taught that France was defeated in North America because its mode of colonization was insufficiently settler-oriented. By this what was meant was that instead of building new European-style societies in areas claimed by the French crown, the colonial policy relied heavily on planting flags around the continent and and saying "this belongs to us now."

The strategy was to corrupt the Indigenous nations, to have them reorient their economies to serve as the labour behind the fur trade. The idea was also that these Indigenous nations would provide military support in the recurrent conflicts with the British crown. The idea was not to create a white North America, not even a French-speaking North America - both those goals came much later, and were never taken up by anyone's ruling class, lip service aside - the real aim was to create a Roman Catholic North America serving the economic interests of the increasingly dysfunctional French monarchy.

A few white settlements on the banks of the St-Lawrence were supposed to be the base for mass conversion of francization of indigenous folks across North America. Cultural genocide yes, physical extermination only in exceptional circumstances.

The French were using methods that today we associate with neo-colonialism (fucking with your economy and culture to make you dependent) instead of what we often think of as classic colonialism. Which just goes to show the degree to which what we consider "classic" is really modeled on the British strategy which ended up fathering the United States... perhaps another example of tunnel vision on the u.s. experience?

The French model worked fine for them for centuries in places like the Maghreb, but couldn't compete side by side with an aggressive anglo-capitalism based on settler colonies. which is why although a Quebecois nation exists in a corner of the continent, most of those places claimed by the French crown have been easily anglicized. Just think of all the American cities with French names...

Again according to my high skool history teacher, the reason the English won out was they utilized a different mode of colonization. The details - really only glossed over in skool - being that this model was based on displacing Indigenous peoples or physically exterminating them and setting up settlements of Europeans who might use Indigenous slave labour (or imported Africans) but whose communities were meant to replace, not incorporate, the previous inhabitants' society.

So a colony would be any outpost of a foreign power (in the case of North America, these powers being England, France or Spain) which is meant to be permanent, whereas a settler colony would be a subset of colonies which are based on importing new populations to set up a new society replacing completely that which existed before, either through exterminating the previous inhabitants or else shoehorning them into the new society, generally as a proletarian layer whose labour is used to support the settler population.

Comments?

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Pauline Marois, the PQ's "Quebec Identity Bill" and Divided Strategies on the Radical Left

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Pauline Marois: white woman on a mission

On October 18 Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois proposed a new piece of legislation, Bill 195, the "Quebec Identity Act."

This piece of legislation would create two classes of citizen within Quebec. You would have Canadian citizens, and then within this group you would have a second set, those who would pass a French exam and pledge allegiance to the Quebec nation.

Only those in this separate group would have the right to run in provincial, municipal and school board elections, or address petitions to the national assembly. Obviously, once this second tier of citizenship was established it could be tied to any number of other rights or privileges.

A bit of background perhaps...

For those from elsewhere: Pauline Marois is the head of the Parti Quebecois, which has revolved through the provincial government in Quebec (taking turns with the Liberals) for over thirty years now. When i was growing up people still talked about the PQ as if it were a progressive party, and many leftists a generation older than me still feel that way. And at one point in time there was some truth to this, as the PQ combined social democracy with an officially unracist nationalism.

(Of course, there were those who were clear on the actually racist underpinnings of the nationalist project, and the bankruptcy of social democracy, even back in the seventies.)

The PQ jettisoned social democracy early on, but continued to pay it lip service whenever this helped to rally the troops. It similarly rejected those separatist strategies which would upset the North American capitalist applecart - the PQ when first elected disappointed many people by not declaring independence, rather it would hold referenda asking for a specific mandate to "enter into negotiations" on the subject, or else later to establish a "sovereign" state which would retain all of the colonialist and capitalist hallmarks of the present "un-sovereign" one.

This watering down of both the left-wing and separatist elements in the party led to further confusion between these two different aspects of its program, and to the development of a "left" within the party which saw its "leftism" as having as much to do with being more nationalistic as with being more committed to social democracy or "socialism".

All of which is in a sense irrelevant, or at least of purely historical interest at this point.

The year two thousand and seven can be seen as a turning point, a watershed of sorts in Quebec politics, as certain (decades old) changes in the class structure and the demographic balance finally found their corresponding political expression.

The PQ, which has at all times since the early seventies been either the government or the official opposition, was relegated to being a third rate rump party in the spring elections. Under the blandly center-right leadership of Andre Boisclair, the endless watering down of its nationalist content and the final erasure of its left-wing pretensions brought about the predictable results, as the party was eclipsed by the more openly and honestly right-wing and xenophobic ADQ.

Following the March elections, which were preceded by a wave of media-instigated racism around the "reasonable accommodation" soap opera, the PQ was confronted with a necessity to act, and act boldly, or risk permanent eclipse.

Boisclair resigned, and longtime party-insider Pauline Marois - who had already failed in two previous attempts to run for party leader - won the leadership by acclamation.

The task immediately confronting Marois's PQ has been to win back voters who had drifted to the ADQ, and the way in which this is to be achieved is to further imitate the latter. So it is that "sovereignty" has been put on the back burner, replaced with the same amorphous, and essentially racist, concept of nationalism as that put forward by Dumont's ADQ.

What we have seen since has been a calculated and deliberately public embrace of xenophobia, a public relations strategy of which Bill 195 is simply the latest and most obvious example.

Marois racist "Quebec Identity Bill" has been denounced privately and publicly by all manner of establishment voiceboxes. Including many longtime PQ supporters. It has been declared illegal, unconstitutional, unacceptable and a betrayal of all kinds of things good people hold dear.

In conversation, many point to the surrounding context of the racist reasonable accommodation hearings, and say that given this context, now is certainly not the time for any such piece of divisive legislation.

Which is a really curious criticism, if you think about it.

Marois obviously put forward this piece of racist legislation because of the surrounding "reasonable accommodation" shit. She is well aware of what she is doing: riding the wave. The fact that "to ride a wave" in politics is also to contribute to it, is no skin off her back.

The criticism that "this is not the time" begs a certain question, namely when would the right time be to legally establish two classes of citizenship?

This confusion says something about the mixed up ideas and unfinished thoughts which make up the left of the nationalist project, or also those leftists whose understanding of nationalism bleeds into sympathy.

The particular kind of racism which has popped up all over Quebec this past year bears perverted witness to changes in the class structure of Quebec and changing meaning of nationalism here over the past forty years. What has been going on is an example of what we discussed last August, the way in which "Quebecois nationhood" plays a role in people's consciousness similar to "whiteness" in the united states, and as such racism is the likely response to social crises and tensions:

But where this increasing similarity is relevant is that white Québecois – and most especially nationalists – are liable to resist this globalized capitalism in ways that have more in common with white US workers than with the radical labour movement of the 70s. (Never mind the Patriotes!) Pat Buchanan-style, not Malcolm X-style, if you know what i mean: with an increased openness to racist demagogy and national chauvinism. Even (or perhaps especially) amongst people who admire Che, loathe Bush, and consider themselves to be social-democrats or even “socialists.”

Today the mandate to put immigrants in their place, to "let them know who's boss", runs like a knife through every political grouping, of both left and right. Quietly, often unreported in the media, and loudly, with banner headlines, individuals and groups are positioning and repositioniing themselves around this question, conveniently labeled "reasonable accommodation."

Marois has risked alienating many of the PQ's longtime supporters, but it's a risk she is wise to take. The PQ can't survive indefinitely on nostalgia for the Quebec nationalism of thirty years ago. It can't attract voters based on what their class interests used to be.

Chances are most who are scandalized by Marois' bill will continue to support the PQ anyway. And among those broad swathes of society who have come to identify more and more with a certain style of racism, the PQ can only gain.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of her proposal, a Leger marketing poll clearly showed how she had played her cards right: 35% felt she was the leader who best defended the "Quebecois identity" (as opposed to 30% for Dumont and 18% for Charest) and 52% of francophones supported Bill 195 (38% opposed).

On the left, two different anti-racist positions seem to exist in regards to the ongoing "reasonable accommodation" racism. For want of better terms, let's call them the "anti-racism through secularism" and the "pluralist anti-racism" positions.

The "anti-racism through secularism" position has been adopted by certain people in NEFAC, and in l'aut journal, and in the historically "progressive" sections of the nationalist movement.

Noting that the "reasonable accommodation" brouhaha centers on religious practices of certain racialized groups, these people argue that the best way to defuse the rise in racism is to expose it for what it is. They propose doing this by insisting on greater secularism in all spheres of life and for all religions. These people agree that Islam, Judaism and Hinduism should not be catered to, but wish to deracialize the issue by also insisting that Christianity be pushed out of the public sphere. Muslim women not allowed to wear hijab, Jews not allowed to wear kippa, Sikhs not allowed to wear a turban, Christians not allowed to wear a crucifix, etc.

This position, spelled out for instance in some of the comments left on my blog here,
is an organic expression of the historical secularism of the Quebecois left, a direct consequence of the role the church had in propping up corrupt and oppressive governments for 150 years in this province. It also caries with it the imprimatur of the Quebecois feminist movement, which is very much the sister of the left nationalist movement that emerged here in the 1960s.

The second anti-racist position, that of "pluralist anti-racism", has been elaborated by the (maoist) Revolutionary Communist Party and various anti-authoritarian groups based in Montreal like Solidarity Across Borders and No One Is Illegal, who just today spelled out their position condemning (amongst other things), the fact that "so-called progressives and feminists have used the [Bouchard-Taylor] Commission platform to promote their own sophisticated brand of racism."

The pluralist position challenges without compromise the idea that the State or para-state institutions like trade unions or school boards should have any power to regulate or control how immigrants (or anyone else) expresses their culture or religious feelings. The pluralist position does not actually state that concerns about religious fundamentalism and sexism are red herrings, but at the same time it does not address these.

Despite the serious differences between these two positions, it is striking how little debate or criticism there has been between them. This is an example of the fragmentation of the radical left, and even of the anarchist section thereof, where the "pluralist" camp is very much based in Montreal, and seems to have weak ties to the francophone working class.

The "anti-racism through secularism" position strikes me as wrongheaded through and through. It seems to be a case of instrumentalizing racism rather than opposing it outright. i write that knowing some people who hold this position, and knowing them to be sincere comrades and anti-racists. But this is a point on which we disagree.

Mario Dumont and the ADQ rode the wave while making it, and did so to great success this spring, catapulting the "fringe" party into the center of Quebec politics. Pauline Marois has shown that she understands how this game is played, she has upped the ante, and unlike those mired in the past she's giving the ADQ a run for their money - and she may just come out ahead.

These people are neither stupid not confused. Opposing them is our task. We need to move in that direction.

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