4,000 promote tolerance and diversity
Thousands gather at City Hall for what turned into a massive celebration of diversity and tolerance
In the end, the organizers of a planned “anti-Islam” rally Saturday in Vancouver only spurred a celebration of diversity, anti-fascism and tolerance of Islam so massive it spilled out onto the streets outside City Hall and shut down a nearby street.
At the peak of the counter-protest, at around 2 p.m., when organizers from the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam Canada and the Cultural Action Party of Canada had been expected to speak out against federal immigration policy, about 4,000 people surrounded City Hall, according to a police estimate.
The anti-Islam rally organizers were nowhere to be found.
WCAI Canada president Joey De Luca, who told media this week that he was flying to Vancouver from his hometown Calgary for the rally, did not return a request for comment before deadline.
It seemed all but a handful of the 4,000 people at city hall had shown up to speak against the anti-Islam rally, which a Facebook event page indicated was expected to draw two dozen people.
Those with dissenting voices who made themselves heard — about a half dozen men who exercised their Charter right to freedom of expression on public property — took turns engaging in debates with counter-protesters while each was surrounded by dozens more who shouted “Let him speak” just as often as “Kick him out.”
Often, these heated debates were drowned out by the sounds of bagpipes, accordions, saxophones and kazoos, which counter-protesters brought for that purpose.
Police guarded the dissenting speakers, watching that they didn’t resort to hate speech or that the debates didn’t turn physical. In some cases, when the discourse became too nasty, police escorted these speakers off city hall property to the jeers of the counter-protesters. The dissenting speakers expressed a range of world views — from advocacy for free speech to hate for Islam and overt displays of Nazism.
Near the statue of Capt. George Vancouver at the north entrance to City Hall, a man holding a copy of the Qur’an drew a crowd when he condemned its contents and engaged in a shouting match with a Métis man. The Qur’an hater was escorted away by police.
There was a President Donald Trump supporter wearing a T-shirt marked with the Infowars logo — the far-right U.S. radio show hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — who engaged more calmly in a debate that lasted about an hour, during which a protester showered him with blue sparkles and others screamed at him.
Nearby, another man carried two signs bearing popular images often used by the so-called “alt-right” to troll the left — “Sad Pepe” and the flag of “Kekistan.” He appeared thrilled by all the attention he was getting.
Southeast of city hall, a notorious local Holocaust denier, Brian Ruhe, raised his right hand in the Nazi salute as police surrounded him. Ruhe smiled and laughed as counter-protesters shouted anti-Nazi slogans and profanity at him. He was escorted away by police. Sgt. Jason Robillard said officers made five arrests Saturday for breach of the peace, while two other people were escorted away from the rally to “prevent a disturbance.” There were no reported assaults or injuries.
Annie Ohana, who with her group Stand Up To Racism Metro Vancouver helped organize the counter-protest, said she felt vindicated after seeing such a turnout for an event that proved mostly peaceful.
Ohana said she faced criticism from those who felt a counter-protest could lead to a violent clash.
Scores of police and other first responders were stationed throughout City Hall property.
Mayor Gregor Robertson addressed the counter-protest, saying he was proud of the people of Vancouver for their show of strength and diversity in response to the planned anti-Islam rally.
It is not the kind of observation that should be made out loud, especially in the pages of a respectable daily newspaper, without first taking care to be clear and plain.
So, to guard against ambiguity, here are three caveats. The state must maintain its monopoly on violence. Vigilantism cannot be tolerated. Free speech is possessed by everyone, even the vile, loathsome and wicked.
With that out of the way, then, there is an abiding, vexing truth that invites consideration in light of the rampage that convulsed Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, with its jamboree of torch-carrying “Jews will not replace us” blockheads in khaki shorts and polo shirts, its hooded Ku Klux Klansmen bellowing at the local synagogue, and its swastika-waving Nazis chanting Heil Trump.
It’s this: The thing about fascists is straightforward. Allow them to run riot and eventually you will find that your timidity has invited a bedlam of bloodshed.
You can incinerate Dresden, smash their 1,000-year Reich to smithereens, execute the surviving leadership after fair trials at Nuremberg, but they will be back. No newspaper column is going to persuade them to put the gun down, nor entreaties to reason or appeals to our common humanity.
There are exceptions. The stupidly deluded can be peeled away occasionally. But the rule is proved time and again, and it applies with equal force to the derivatives and mutations of classic European fascism, to the Baathism of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi variety and Bashar Assad’s Syrian variety, and to the theocratic fascism of the Taliban type, the Arabic al-Qaida variety, and so on.
This is an unpleasant axiom, but it is objectively unimpeachable.
It should not be taken as an impudence or a challenge to the breathtaking Christian charity and moral courage of Mark Heyer, the broken-hearted father of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who died in the bedlam of a terrorist outrage in Charlottesville last weekend.
“People need to stop hating, and they need to forgive each other, you know?” he said. “And I include myself in that, in forgiving the guy that did this, OK? He don’t know no better. You know, I just think of what the Lord said on the Cross. Forgive ‘em. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Heyer is of course correct, as well. Americans need more than anything to stop hating one another.
Still, the rule abides. Allow fascists any room in the conversations of civilized people and eventually it will become necessary to speak to them in the only dialect they properly comprehend — raw, relentless violence.
To notice this is not a concession to the hoodie-wearing “antifa” hobbyists whose mischief in Charlottesville last weekend was sufficient to allow U.S. President Donald Trump to equivocate about bad behaviour on “all sides.”
A subspecies of the “black bloc” provocateurs whose antics came to prominence in the anti-globalization hullabaloos of the 1990s, the nomadic antifa set enjoys a wholly symbiotic relationship with the white nationalist filth that has come to form the hardcore component of Trump’s activist base. Their own Maoist hooliganism invites and excuses fascist street violence, which is in turn cited to justify violent antifa “resistance.”
A kind of arms race is set in train — slingshots, “gopher gas” rodent poison, baseball bats, mace, and ‘round it goes. It’s positively thrilling if you like that sort of thing. Riots and violence are always thrilling.
In the same way, the fashion for intersectional identity politics that came to animate the Democratic Party has been met with a revival of the original white-identity politics of the Reich and the Confederacy. The authoritarian virus that has infected the American campus “left” is feeding on the Trumpist bacillus that has rotted away the guts of the Republican Party. And ’round it goes.
But even setting the rule of law and democratic principle wholly aside, anti-fascist vigilantism is doomed to fail. It is especially reckless, now that the Oval Office is occupied by a morally illiterate billionaire thug and the West Wing is the workspace of such prominent white-nationalist champions and enablers as Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka. There’s also a more disturbing factor to take into account: the American cult of the gun.
The most thorough reconstructions of the Charlottesville mayhem have brought to light a total breakdown of the civil order. Arrayed against the Virginia State Police and the first call-out of the Virginia National Guard in 30 years — 1,000 first responders in total — the Nazis, neo-Nazis, white separatists and Klansmen came armed. A collection of oddball and ostensibly “neutral” private citizens’ militias from as far afield as New York and Pennsylvania engaged in as much “police work” in Charlottesville as the police. Armed with AR-15s and all kitted out in helmets and camo gear, the militiamen were practically indistinguishable from the “real” authorities. This is not going to end well. In Canada, dabbling in politics of the “alt right” sort has all been fun and games, until Charlottesville. The Conservative party’s efforts to quarantine its dummkopf wing are what you might call a work in progress, but it’s going well, and Liberals and New Democrats have been presented with a chance to recall that anti-fascist militancy requires more than amendments to human rights codes intended to normalize gender-pronoun neologisms.
For Canadians raised in a milieu that supposes “the personal is political,” Charlottesville might serve as a reminder that the political is also personal, that the 158 soldiers who died fighting theocratic fascism in Afghanistan gave their lives in the same tradition as the million Canadians who enlisted to fight European fascists during the Second World War, and 45,000 of those soldiers never came home. It’s personal.
My late dad was a fierce Irish republican who crossed the Irish Sea to join the RAF to fight Nazis, and for his trouble he could never go home to Ireland again. My ma’s from County Clare, but she was one of the Bletchley girls, with Alan Turing, on the code-breaking Enigma project. My Uncle Patrick was 19 when he was killed by the Nazis near Hanover, three weeks before V-E Day. It is personal. It’s family.
The best way to avoid the eventual necessity of shooting fascists is to deny their antecedents the political oxygen and the undeserved respectability they require to flourish and grow. Let’s start with that.