I’ve known from the start that the so-called Proud Boys were fascists; it was clear from their self-description. And terrorists; it was clear from their actions. But now it’s official at the governmental level here in Canada, too.
And that’s why it counts. Because white supremacists have been terrorizing this land for as long as they’ve existed here. And more worrisomely, they’ve been infiltrating law enforcement and the military. There’s been a lot of cross-pollination between neo-fascist and white-supremacist groups, and the cop shop, the army, the air force, and the navy. It has to stop somewhere. By designating them a terrorist organization, our government has served notice that they will be treated as the volatile troublemakers they are. And our government, fortunately, did NOT have to redefine “terrorist” to include them. It determined that they met the existing definition already.
But Harsha Walia’s points about this issue are also well taken. Who, or what, is a terrorist? And how does that term actually serve to perpetuate white supremacy, rather than serving to dismantle it? Why are white supremacy and fascism themselves not illegal? It’s not as if they haven’t led directly to an abundance of terrorist acts throughout our history. Or a plethora of groups, right here in Canada, which have a strong potential to turn terrorist, even if they’re flying below the official radar right now.
Non-white and/or leftist groups have been tarred with the “terrorist” brush, often wrongly, for decades now. And even as a handful of white supremacist groups (including a particularly ominous Russian one) have finally made Canada’s terror watch-list, the majority of today’s newly added terror groups are still non-white and non-Christian. And our government has only officially recognized a handful of them since 2019! That means that even in a country where the majority of people (and terrorists, and the law-enforcers that the terrorists have co-opted) are white as Wonder Bread, racial justice is still far, far away.
And that’s something we should all be wary of.
