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Title: 150, 375: rebels come alive! Author: Anonymous Date: January 13, 2017 Language: en Topics: Montreal, Canada 150, colonialism, nationalism Source: Retrieved on February 10, 2017 from https://mtlcounter-info.org/en/150-375-rebels-come-alive/
This year, Canada is celebrating its 150th year of colonial existence,
and Montreal its 375th. Throughout the next year, we’re going to be
celebrating the histories of resistance to the colonial project of
Canada, by continuing to bring them into our struggles in the present.
This is a call for anarchists across the territory of so-called Canada,
and everyone fighting against colonial society, to combine our diverse
capacities to fight this ongoing nightmare in all the ways that we can.
The project of Canada has been one of ongoing genocide against
indigenous people through various forms, from the intentional spreading
of small pox to the conditions that create staggering numbers of missing
and murdered indigenous women and men. Canada attempts to impose
dependence on colonial society by destroying the autonomy of indigenous
people to live off of their land base (through the reservation system),
and through cultural genocide to instill generational fracturing and
collective amnesia (institutionalized through the residential school
system up until the 90s).
We want to sabotage the machinery that makes this colonial legacy
function. This machine’s infrastructure and development projects of
exploitation mean devastating the land that all life is nourished by. It
means the policing apparatus of Canada, from the onslaught at Gustafsen
Lake to the widespread sexual violence against indigenous women by the
SQ. It means the projects of social control necessary for Canada to
function; the systematic forced sterilization, the reservation system,
and the mass incarceration of indigenous and black people. This
machinery is also social – the social identification with the city, the
nation and with whiteness.
375: Montreal comes alive! is a tourism campaign where each
neighbourhood of Montreal has been allotted money by the State for their
celebrations. This will be used as an opportunity to further
gentrification and social cleansing, and to normalize the State’s
narrative of a benevolent and inevitable colonization. The program of
events, and promotional videos, primarily feature white francophone
artists and musicians – demonstrating who they’re staking their bets on
in this new project of development and control through nationalist and
hipster artists and Quebec popular culture. Though this campaign is
unabashedly white supremacist in who they are trying to mobilize, we’re
also overly familiar with the script of Canadian multiculturalism – of
representing and integrating different identity categories into the
genocidal project, for a more insidious social control.
At the very least, we can show that there are people who Canada is
attempting to integrate into this white supremacist framework who are in
rebellion against it. Let’s find whatever ways that we can to connect
across the segregated lives that we feel every day. Through such
connections, we can look toward creating a project of rebellion that
people can identify with, outside of the right hand of white
nationalism, and the left hand of liberal multiculturalism.
Here are several ideas for how people can self-organize to respond to
this call:
– Disrupting the festivities of 375 and 150, in every neighborhood of
Montreal and across Canada.
– Fostering relations of solidarity between people who want to fight the
project of Canada. In this, we think it’s crucial to not reproduce
passive ‘ally’ politics, where ‘allies’ don’t carry their own reasons
for fighting. Everyone has a stake in defending the land from colonial
destruction. For anarchists, we have innumerable reasons to fight and be
in reciprocal solidarity with anyone struggling against the borders,
police, resource extraction, and the economic domination that Canada
requires. We think that statements like ‘being an ally to indigenous
people’ is contradictory and meaningless when we recognize that
homogeneous categories of people don’t exist. In fact, there are often
conflicts within indigenous communities around goals and tactics that
shouldn’t be sidestepped. For instance, at Standing Rock the Red Warrior
Camp (which employed confrontational and disruptive tactics against the
pipeline) was asked to leave the camp by the chiefs who condemned any
action outside of non-violent civil disobedience that appeals to white
and media legitimacy.
– Creating counter-information to communicate anti-colonial
perspectives.
– Confronting, disrupting, attacking all manifestations of the colonial
order: the functioning of the capitalist economy, resource extraction
projects and infrastructure, the repressive apparatus of police and
prisons, the dominant narratives of colonialism (in statues, museums,
churches, etc.), and however colonialism is being maintained where you
live.
The existence of Canada and Montreal is inherently a project of control
and ecological devastation – this is what ‘progress’ and ‘development’
looks like. These processes further fracture any semblance of community
that we can even try to nourish, which in turn profoundly impacts our
capacities to rebel. We want to break with the social relations of
production, consumption, citizenship and whiteness. We want to create
the possibility to live different relations, which also means creating
opportunities to be uncontrollable. We want to disrupt the narrative
celebrating a benevolent and friendly Canada. Let’s fuck with them at
every turn. Let’s shut down Montreal, let’s shut down Canada.