I spent a few hours going down the rabbit hole of Canadian far-right websites after the Christchurch mosque massacre last week. The experience was as depressing as it was traumatizing.
From overt racism and Islamophobia to homophobic attacks directed at the PM and threats of violence, there’s more hatred than you can imagine in Canada. It’s literally endless.
And, judging by the commentary of their online supporters, it seems the only aim of these groups is to hurt people they don’t like in the name of racial purity. They are in war mode.
As a consequence, the hatred is spilling more frequently into public view in our streets. A few dozen so-called “patriots” representing the anti-Muslim white nationalist group Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), showed up for rally at Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday, March 23, to warn against “Islamism and hate speech.”
Christian Peña
Mayor John Tory condemned “the ideology and tactics of white supremacists planning to demonstrate and disrupt… in our city,” in a tweet before the event. The mayor also let it be known that he had spoken with Chief Mark Saunders and that “plans are in place to deal with it.”
Except, rather than protecting the city from the spewings of the far-right protestors, police ended up protecting them from counter-protestors who showed up to shout them down. Some members of the mainstream media there to cover the event didn’t help matters by making the counter-protestors out to be the bad guys.
It’s a scene that has been repeated numerous times in Nathan Phillips Square since Trump came to power. The square named for Toronto’s first Jewish mayor is no longer the place where I used to skate as a kid. It has become a battleground for right versus left, but not for competing views.
There’s actually no dialogue to speak of and that’s not only anti-intellectual – it’s extremely dangerous. It’s plain as day what’s happening. The two sides inhabit echo chambers online. And by the time they meet in real life, they are so pent-up with hatred that they just verbally and physically attack one another.
Christian Peña
Being trained in philosophy has taught me how powerful dialogue can be in resolving differences and also undermining prejudice.
But until that happens, the right wing and other forms of extremism we’re now seeing will only get worse.
People are coming from a place of fear. That’s what’s motivating them to turn to online groups for reassurance that what they stand to lose is real – in the case of the far right, “Canadian culture” in the case of the left, respect for diversity.
That further emboldens them to act reflexively. This quickly becomes apparent navigating the sea of hate online.
As political science professor Stephen Eric Bronner suggests in The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists, “The bigot’s sense of self derives from what might be termed a power-protected inwardness. He cannot admit his failures personally, professionally, financially or socially. All problems are displaced on the alien, heretic, immigrant or outsider: the Other. Only in that way is it possibly for the bigot to maintain his own standing and status.”
Extremists experience “strength” in constructing an enemy whom they falsely perceive as a threat. It is a narrative in which they are the fictitious hero, the lone wolf fighting those who dare encroach on their culture, nation, civilization. It’s an unenlightened way to look at the world.
Christian Peña
@nowtoronto
