Canada's heart will go on...and on: Justin Trudeau's national vision

When Justin Trudeau, back in October of last year, began his campaign to lead the once great, once natural governing party of Canada, the Liberal Party, he did so with a vision statement that is worth returning to, now that he is the party's leader, if we wish to really understand what he represents in our politics.

Easy to deride in parts, it began with some genuine groaners such as:

So I’m here to ask for your help, because this road will be one long, Canadian highway. We will have ups and downs. Breathtaking vistas and a few boring stretches. And with winter coming, icy patches.
But we will match the size of this challenge with hard, honest work.
Because hard work is what’s required. Always has been.

It also had the broad strokes of rhetoric, which many see as his hallmark, that say much less than they at first seem to as with:

The Liberal Party was their [Canadians] vehicle of choice. It was the platform for their aspirations, not their source.

When we were at our best, we were in touch, open to our fellow citizens and confident enough in them to take their ideas and work with them to build a successful country.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from our party’s past it is not where we landed but how we got there. We were deeply connected to Canadians. We made their values our values, their dreams our dreams, their fights our fights.

Who Trudeau means when he says "Canadians" is made abundantly, indeed almost absurdly clear throughout the speech with its constant repetitive reference to the middle class; a class that is set up as the beating heart of Canada and as its "hard working", no nonsense, moral compass.

Thus:

We need to get it right. We need to open our minds to new solutions, to listen to Canadians, to trust them...
...Solutions can come from the left or the right, all that matters is that they work. That they help us live - and thrive - true to our values.
Because middle class growth is much more than an economic imperative.

As if this was not enough, Trudeau goes on to assure us that "It is the middle class, not the political class, that unites this country. It is the middle class that makes this country great."

The middle class, that amorphous, apparently vast group is not simply the backbone of Canada; in Trudeau's vision it is Canada. Its class needs, ideals and prosperity are what should be the primary needs and ideals that will ensure Canada's prosperity and they should be the frames of reference of its governance.

Trudeau wants not only to fight for the middle class, he wishes to embody it politically. And embodying a class so disparate that it lacks any kind of cohesion ideologically or even in terms of mutual interest, other than an overwhelming consumerist impulse to equate personal material milestones like owning a house or two cars with the "public interest", is an impossibility if one is unduly specific as to policy.

This has, understandably, led Trudeau to be seemingly vague on this front and has led his opponents to label him as a "lightweight" or to contrast him unfavourably with his father. Both the NDP and the Conservatives, as well as many political pundits in the media, have written him off saying that once the public has seen him bested in both ideas and in policy debates by Mulcair and Harper, and they feel it is inevitable that this will happen, Trudeau will come crashing back down to Earth as the "fashion dandy", empty-headed pretty boy who is only where he is due to the fortune of birth.

He will fail as all he ultimately has are platitudes.

Yet, one has to ask, what if that is, in fact, the strategy? What if Trudeau's politics are intentionally devoid of ideas and of substance?

Policy wonks, political junkies and party partisans like to think that, at least to some degree, citizens pay attention to and care about the details of the daily goings-on on Parliament Hill and in committee rooms as they themselves do. They are also certain that citizens will eventually fixate, in making their voting choices, on the increasingly minor differences that exist between the parties in terms of program ahead of factors like image, personality or the ability to inspire.

But politics in Canada has been dumbed down for a generation now already and both the Tories and the NDP are keen to appear "moderate" to those wings of the electorate that they feel might vote for them. These are different wings, and thus their appeal to "moderation" is different.  In the case of the NDP it is renouncing publicly its already largely meaningless connection to its distant socialist past and desperately trying to prove to everyone that they are "ready to govern". In the case of Harper it is to convince the public, in spite of all the evidence, that the unbridled lunatic social conservatives in the party are not anxiously trying to pry open the closet door and create the Republic of Gilead.

Into this race to jettison outward differentiation comes a likable and attractive figure who promises to people that he will reflect back to them in his leadership the best things they feel about themselves and wax poetic to them about the great things that can be achieved through positive thinking and believing in yourself, the middle-class and the country.

Trudeau is only seemingly devoid of substance, despite what his opponents say. It is this apparent emptiness that is his ideology. He is aiming at inspirational banality that looks to appeal to those tired of the harsh reality of Harper and tired of what they have been led to believe is the  "harsh tone" of a politics where often relatively little seems to change when the government changes

Thus, going back to his speech above, he states:

To millions and millions of Canadians, their government has become irrelevant, remote from their daily lives, let alone their hopes and dreams. To them, Ottawa is just a place where people play politics as if it were a game open to a small group, and that appeals to an even smaller one.

He is not really wrong. Government has become increasingly irrelevant under neo-liberalism. Maybe "hopes and dreams" are the new "bread and circuses" of democratic discourse. Trudeau is especially talented at conveying these in a suitably Obamaesque fashion.

During his campaign for leadership, he disavowed any fixation on the deadweight of policy, which is always a proverbial "buzzkill", with  a call to others to do the thinking for him:

This campaign is about conversations, not one-way monologues...We believe that good ideas can come from any corner, and that Canadians deserve the opportunity to share their concerns and offer up their ideas.

In his acceptance speech after his coronation he lashed out at the supposed politics of division, while invoking the memory of a Liberal Prime Minister dead so long that only fifteen history nerds somewhere could take exception:

We are fed up with leaders who pit Canadians against Canadians. West against East, rich against poor, Quebec against the rest of the country, urban against rural...

Canadians are looking to us, my friends. They are giving us a chance, hopeful that the party of Wilfrid Laurier can rediscover its sunny ways.

And, of course, his first foray in parliament as leader led off with a lament for the poor middle class. "The fact is when middle-class Canadians go to a store to buy a tricycle, school supplies ... or a little red wagon for their kids they will pay more because of a tax in this government's budget."

His is a politics that is aimed squarely at the all-encompassing middle class. This inevitably has a vacuous, "what about the children" quality to it, as what else can it have? If your aim is to pander, then one has to distill what is felt to be what your target audience wants to hear  and release uplifting statements that are slightly less complex and slightly dumber than that. Trudeau is highly adept at this.

Trudeau has made a calculation that the winning strategy for him and the Liberal Party is eloquent vapidity.

In the end this makes him the Celine Dion of Canadian politics. His rhetoric, like her music, is soaring, emotional, seemingly inspirational, sometimes almost moving, and basically meaningless and hollow in any lasting sense.

Celine Dion, not unlike Trudeau, is held in complete contempt by her many critics. She is also the best selling female musical artist of all time. Whether Trudeau can do the equivalent in the political arena with pleasant superficiality remains to be seen. But given the obsessively image driven, sound-bite based political culture the parties have created, there is little reason to think it is not at least possible.

Requiem for a preamble: A lament for a socialist ideal

The New Democratic Party believes that the social, economic and political progress of Canada can be assured only by the application of democratic socialist principles to government and the administration of public affairs.
The principles of democratic socialism can be defined briefly as:
That the production and distribution of goods and services shall be directed to meeting the social and individual needs of people within a sustainable environment and economy and not to the making of profit;
To modify and control the operations of the monopolistic productive and distributive organizations through economic and social planning. Towards these ends and where necessary the extension of the principle of social ownership;
The New Democratic Party holds firm to the belief that the dignity and freedom of the individual is a basic right that must be maintained and extended; and
The New Democratic Party is proud to be associated with the democratic socialist parties of the world and to share the struggle for peace, international co-operation and the abolition of poverty.

It was a real vision, wasn't it? This preamble, soon to be gone, was a call to action. A direct contrast to our appallingly unjust society, made by those who really meant to be in opposition to a system, to capitalism, as opposed to being in "opposition" to a government, while enjoying all the perks, financial and otherwise, that a job as an MP brings.

This was a statement that made it clear that this party, the New Democratic Party, whatever tactical steps it might take, whatever short-term compromises it might make, was an opponent of the basic idea of capitalism. That it sought to remake society to eliminate the injustices that this system, by its very nature, inflicted on millions of Canadian citizens, and that it sought, once-and-for-all, to end the barbaric and entirely socially created "institution" of poverty.

It was a vision that understood that the context of any given short-term media spin cycle was not the context that the party fought in. That power was not an end, but a means to an end. And that that end was the reworking of how society functions.

But in a process that began many years ago, and that was consolidated under the leadership of Jack Layton and now validated under the leadership of Thomas Mulcair, the NDP has become little more than an ideological clone of what it once most despised (and continues to out of habit), the Liberal Party of Canada. A party driven by a desire to govern. A party that is "progressive," and that is, indeed, quite different from the Conservative Party, but that accepts that things fundamentally are as they are, and that they will basically remain so.

Thus we hear from the Huffington Post, in an article talking to the NDP's National Director Nathan Rotman:

Several top New Democrats told HuffPost that this weekend's convention will reveal whether the party’s membership is ready to accept the challenge of governing.
In 2008, when Layton told reporters he was campaigning to become prime minister, few took him seriously. Now, the party believes it has a real chance of forming government in 2015 — if it can convince Canadians the party is ready for the responsibility.
The first task, Rotman suggested, is highlighting to the party’s membership the importance of winning.
“We need to bring our people along and say, here are some of the great things we can do (if we have power),” he said.
For a long time, many New Democrats were content with being the “conscience of Parliament,” he said.
“We are still the voice of principle — I don’t want to make it sound like those principles alter — but you need to think about how you govern for all Canadians. You need to think about what happens when disaster strikes, when the economy goes south, when the economy goes north and how we can build a strong sustainable economy, and how we can support small businesses, and what a Canadian New Democrat government will look like,” Rotman said.

The language here is fascinating. Talking of bringing "our people along" and whether or not the membership will "accept" the challenge of governing, juxtaposing this, as they are, with the notion of standing on principle. Implying that leftists should no longer be content to be the "conscience" of parliament, as if this was a bad thing. As if this did not, as it did, actually change Canada by the threat that the conscience driven NDP posed to the existing political order.
Now, according to the new preamble:

New Democrats belong to the family of other progressive democratic political parties that govern successfully in many countries around the world. In co-operation with like minded political parties and governments, New Democrats are committed to working together for peace, international co-operation, and the common good of all - the common good being our fundamental purpose as a movement and as a party.

A totally meaningless statement that says the NDP belongs to a "family" that includes two of its three primary political "opponents", the Greens and the Liberals.  Are they not "progressive" and "democratic"? Do they not seek to work for the "common good of all", whatever this means? Including, of course, business people and the upper middle class.
And the new (proposed, though we all know it will pass) preamble also states:

New Democrats seek a future which brings together the best of the insights and objectives of Canadians who, within the social democratic and democratic socialist traditions, have worked through farmer, labour, co-operative, feminist, human rights and environmental movements to build a more just, equal, and sustainable Canada within a global community dedicated to the same goals.

A pleasingly inclusive statement that is also subtly dismissive. Removing as it does the commitment to end poverty, a fundamental trust that a socialist party has with the poor. It is also like those people that all leftists have met, at parties or meetings,  who go on about how left wing and radical they once were, and how much they still admire that, but how they had to "grow up" and "mature" and become "responsible" in their thinking. It is always a condescending and particularly unoriginal way of justifying "selling out", and it remains so here.

Yes, we were socialists once, but that was a long time ago. Now we need to get elected. For Canada and, presumably, future generations. Or whatever.

But now, on the eve of its dismissal, let us take a moment to lament the passing of what made the NDP something different in the United States and Canada.

The cynic, largely correctly, will point out that the NDP has been irretrievably lost to a crass form of diluted and empty parliamentary careerism for many of those involved for at least a decade. And it is also true that retaining the original preamble, in light of the victory  of Mulcair and the Layton right-shift, would be little more than a token and entirely symbolic last grasp at the memory of how profound what the party used to stand for was; but somehow I think that would still be a powerful if unfulfilled beacon.

It would be a memory and a constant reminder to those who now hold the reigns that it was not always so, and that so many sacrificed and struggled for an ideal very much apart from the hegemony of today. It would be a memory and reminder of Tommy Douglas fighting the War Measures Act despite public opinion polls because it was the right thing to do. It would be a memory and reminder of the inspiration that the idea of socialism once was to the oppressed, the workers and to those who felt that they had no future, and that it could be today to those whose futures are dying on the alter of grotesque inequality, runaway climate change, and triumphant corporate state capitalism.

It would be a tiny echo, if nothing else, reverberating in the ears of those who now hold the reigns in the NDP, reminding them of the promise of the New Jerusalem that lies just over that receding horizon of the possible. A promise that without which the future is nothing other than a discussion among the loyal parliamentarians of the state as to how to divide up the leftovers. A promise that, without which, poverty is no longer something to be eliminated, but rather "mitigated". A promise that, without which, the idea that the workers can one day own the factory is simply a fantasy.

So, while there is no real reason to mourn the passing of a preamble that was in practice already tokenism, there is an important symbolic one.

When this preamble passes into the mists of history this weekend, so too will the ghost of the NDP of Tommy Douglas. The NDP of socialism and principle.

The NDP that mattered.

The perils of populism: Andrea Horwath, taxes, road tolls and the 'war on the car'

History is ripe with irony, though the irony is generally lost on those in the midst of it.

Today we have the irony of an Ontario New Democratic Party (ONDP) running on a "pocketbook"-driven right-wing populist platform that is antithetical to the founding principles of their own movement, and doing so with seemingly no sense that they are, in reality, engaging in the final sacrifice of these principles on the alter of the moral false god of power.

Recently, in the Toronto Star, Trish Hennessy and Hugh Mackenzie argued very persuasively that austerity, the lack of economic growth, and tax cuts are inextricably linked (as I have previously, among others, argued on the pages of rabble)  and they outlined a list of entirely responsible changes to taxation policy that, sadly, absolutely no one at Queen's Park is remotely interested in implementing.

In the present context of neo-liberal austerity and ideological consolidation, and this is very specific to this context, there is not a single case or situation in which advocating for tax cuts is "progressive" let alone left-wing. In fact, in the present context, any calls for tax cuts are inherently reactionary and enabling of the forces, like the Hudak led Ontario Tories, who have been successful in making Canadians believe that the very notion taxation is burdensome and somehow damaging to a "middle-class" lifestyle.

All tax cuts, including cuts to consumption taxes, benefit the austerity agenda and aid in perpetuating the growth of our culture of extreme inequality. This is due to the fact that taxes, socially speaking, are redistributive in the present context by definition.  The "bottom" 50 per cent (if not more) of income earners will always get far more out of increased or maintained taxes (in terms of services, health care, social security, etc,) than they put in.

Hudak has outlined a plan of tax and service cuts that, if implemented, are nothing short of an attack on the very foundations of the Ontario economy and that would guarantee a U.K.-style economic collapse.

The Liberals, being Liberals, have coasted through their years of power by being Mike Harris with a human face; cutting taxes and, until 2008, evading the consequences of it due to the fortuitous situation of a global economy firing on all cylinders.

New to the game is the ONDP, who have only recently become certified tax fighters, and so-called "consumer activists" on the backs of the environment as well as the actually poor and "working poor". As the ONDP (and the NDP in general) is fixated on the notion of power, they have embraced the underpinning of a consumerist culture with a zeal that is, even now, rather surprising.

They have adopted the Ralph Nader like "consumer protectionist" values of American "progressives" in the era just prior to the rise of neo-liberal forces and replaced formerly held notions, however vague, of class with a non-ideological version of them.

Thus they eschew, when it matters, (such as when holding the balance of power as they have since the last election) issues such as welfare (which they allowed to be cut, in real terms, in the last Ontario budget) or programs related to poverty and instead emphasize making life more "affordable" for the middle-class; a class that is seemingly very large given that the ONDP has only advocated raising personal taxes on the top third of Ontario's "1 per cent"... those making over $500,000 a year!
Beyond the silliness of centring a supposedly leftist or progressive agenda around policies such as "rewarding job creators" (namely small business, the worst employers in the economy) through tax cuts (which is what the ONDP is proposing for incorporated "small businesses"), one has to begin to question the zeal with which the ONDP embraces that retrograde symbol of '50s Americana: the car.
Horwath's unwillingness to discomfort the "middle class" at all in the aim of changing personal behaviour  to aid obvious budgetary and environmental goals has already been demonstrated by the entirely wrong-headed, pseudo-populist campaign the ONDP has led against the HST on home heating.

The campaign is driven by a desperation to appeal to middle-class and upper middle-class home owning consumerists. Most tenants, for example, do not actually pay for home heating. So they already pay no HST. Much worse, the HST cuts would apply to everyone, including Bridal Path mansion owners. Apparently Conrad Black needs a home heating tax cut. If helping low-income citizens, as opposed to attempting to appeal to the upper middle class, was the actual goal, the ONDP could offer rebates capped at a certain amount per year of home heating consumption (say $500-1000)... thereby excluding rich people, the upper middle class and those indulging in unnecessary gas consumption. They are not doing this.

Given the very pressing need to see middle and upper income citizens alter their consumption patterns, an across the board HST cut on home heating is outright reactionary.

The ONDP is on the wrong side here. David Suzuki was right about that.

Even worse, Horwath and her caucus are almost Rob Ford like in their enthusiasm to end the "war on the car."

Thus we find Horwath virtually completely rejecting a recent proposal by the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT) to raise revenues to fund transit and road infrastructure by implementing a variety of new taxes, including:

-  A regional sales tax.
-  A $1 a day parking space levy.
-  A 10 cents per litre regional fuel tax.
-  High-occupancy toll lanes in which drivers of single occupancy vehicles would pay 30 cents a kilometre.

She does so by stating "I've said all along that the solutions have to be found, but when the solutions are simply putting the burden of the costs on families who are already struggling, I'm concerned." She then claims that none of this should even be discussed until the government has closed a variety of unspecified "corporate tax loopholes" that she implies would allow for the funding, a claim that is as manifestly and easily proven to be false as were Ford's claims of being able to fund his platform by ending the "gravy train". While the loopholes should be closed, given all the things that need to be covered in the Ontario budget, these loopholes amount to a minuscule addition to the revenue stream. Any revenue generated by them would also unquestionably be more than lost through the implementation of the tax cuts the ONDP advocates.

Her position is even more astounding given that investment in transit infrastructure will directly benefit those Ontarians who are most "struggling" in Toronto, those who rely on public transit.  They have carried the financial burden of subsidizing the car-culture-driven lifestyle of suburbanites for a very long time. Apparently Horwath wishes to extend this.

While the TRBOT proposals are, of course, self-serving and do not go nearly far enough, (as they exclude the obvious need for increased personal taxes, something neither the ONDP or anyone else is advocating for either), they are not wrong. In fact road tolls and transit focused taxes such as those they are advocating for are long overdue.

As a society we desperately  need to shift people out of cars and onto mass transit. It is the morally and environmentally correct course. It also directly benefits our lowest income citizens in entirely obvious ways.

This is not the first time that Horwath has sacrificed environmental and transit concerns for suburban car owners. Back in 2011, as Martin Regg Cohn noted:

 Andrea Horwath’s love affair with the car is also boundless -- she made lower gas prices a major campaign plank, promising to shave a few pennies off the HST at the pump. And her antipathy to tolls prompted a stunning public rebuke of star NDP candidate Paul Ferreira, who was trying to win back the seat in York South -- Weston.

Ferreira’s crime was to call for an adult discussion on gridlock: “I think we owe it to voters, to residents, to citizens to have mature conversations on topics like that. Should there be road tolls?” he asked in a CBC radio debate on GTA issues. “I am proud to say that in 2006, when I ran for city council in this city, I proposed levying a toll on the DVP and the Gardiner Expressway.”

Horwath did not find his musings amusing.

“Definitely no tolls!” she told reporters the next day. “I’ve been pretty clear about that so I was quite surprised to find that this is something Paul said during a debate. He knows very well that that’s not in my plans. If he’s trying to do that then it will stop at my desk."

Of course Ferreira was right and Horwath wrong.

But it would seem the "mature conversation" is no more likely to be had within the ONDP now than it was then. And transit users, environmental policy and lower income Toronto residents will pay for this.

Online misogyny, Sarah Thomson and the new culture of backlash

Sarah Thomson. The latest in a long line of women, from before Anita Hill on, to fall victim to the reality that many men (and sadly women) will take the word of a rich or powerful male, or excuse their behaviour, over the completely plausible claims of a woman. Even when, as in this case, the man in question has a long history of having a problem with the truth.

To those who have somehow missed the latest scandal to hit Toronto's Ford administration, Thomson is a former mayoral candidate who ran against Toronto's present mayor Rob Ford in 2010, and who says that Ford groped her and made inappropriate comments to her at a social function a week ago.
Her account has been disputed, of course, by the mayor, as well as by his staff (a hardly disinterested group) and others, including a Richmond Hill City Councillor who has himself been accused of inappropriate conduct.

Much ink has been wasted on entirely unproven whisper campaigns about Thomson, when we know the actual, public record truth about Rob Ford and his past conduct.

Ford is a rich man, raised with a silver spoon firmly in mouth, who has somehow managed to get out of drunk driving and drug possession charges in Florida that would have landed most in that state in jail, who has a proven track record of behaving inappropriately when drunk, who has had his wife call the police on him on multiple occasions, including one time where he was actually charged with spousal abuse, who broke the rules when it came to campaign finances and got off only due to the cowardice of a municipal committee, (to name just a few of many incidents), and whose entitled arrogance is not only predictable... it is justified by the fact that he is never held to account for the actions that would end the carriers of so many others.

Yet we are supposed to doubt Thomson's account?

Beyond the self-evident idiocy and misogyny of this, and beyond the totally reactionary nature of disputing a woman's claims of sexual assault or misconduct based on her "character" or her supposed "mental instability," a week later what has happened to Sarah Thomson is a case study in the nature of today's online and media misogyny.

It is as if the last 40-plus years of feminist struggle and education around issues of sexual assault simply never happened.

This is not a question of Ford's guilt or innocence in a legal sense, which would be for the courts to decide if Ms. Thomson were to lay charges. It is the fact that so many are so outright dismissive of, indeed hostile to her claims, finding the very idea that a powerful man  could do such a thing so brazenly and publicly must either automatically be a lie or that what he did was really no big deal. The fact that so many would act as if rape culture didn't exist. The fact that so many feel it is acceptable to attack a woman who says she was victimized either because they like Ford, dislike her, or both. And that they would use all the historic methods of attacking a woman's claims as if we have learned nothing as a society about just how, sadly, rather ordinary and commonplace such incidents of groping and sexual assault actually are (A very good overview of the legal issues around this, and, among other things, why going to the media instead of the police may have been a sensible choice, can be found at Slaw, an online legal magazine).

Take the completely irrelevant claims that Thomson is "not playing with a full deck" put out to discredit her by Ford, and parroted all over the place by his supporters and others. This is not only unsubstantiated, but even if it were true that Sarah Thomson had mental health issues, this has no bearing, at all, on the legitimacy of her claims. This tactic of claiming that a woman who suffers from mental health issues is disqualified from being taken seriously when she makes accusations of sexual assault is an old and particularly vile one. One would have hoped that it had been relegated to a previous era unenlightened as to the realities of sexual assault, but apparently this is not the case.
Much of the print media has joined in the action, casting doubt on Thomson's claims in columns and opinion pieces in ways they never would were it to involve someone other than the far right's Teflon mayor.  Examples range from a totally disingenuous column in the Toronto Sun by Jerry Agar stating that Thomson's story "lacks consistency" (and, among other things, citing the online news poll of a right-wing talk radio station as "evidence" that Torontonians agree with him!) to the appalling column by Christie Blatchford that starts with a heart-warming anecdote about how proud her dad was when a famous hockey player grabbed her knee under the table at a dinner event when she was a young woman and ends by telling Thomson that if she was unwilling to go to the police and if "she believed the mayor had just been a boor, she should have kept her mouth shut; wherever did the notion of discretion among ostensibly capable adults go?".

How very original of Ms. Blatchford, telling a woman who says she has been groped or assaulted by a powerful man to shut up and show some discretion.

Much worse are the deeply disturbing and profoundly misogynist  comments that can be found all over the Internet from her Facebook wall to almost any article on the subject you will find online. They are indicative of a new climate of hate towards women and a newly emboldened sense among many men (and some women) that they can publicly say whatever they want and not have to fear being held to account for it, no matter how disgusting.

From the commenter who said " Maybe you'd be better accommodated in jamaica (sic). cheap pot and genuine ass-grabbers.", to the one who opined "You Kevin are a complete fucking idiot. Typical liberal. Stating she is a role model when she is nothing more than a lying, deceitful whore," to "There was a lot nicer looking women at that party, so WHY would he grab your wrinkly old ass? And get rid of the dreads.", to much, much worse. And these were taken from her Facebook page alone!
This is by no means, as we all know, happening to Thomson only. Disgraceful misogyny is normal online and is regularly directed at women; whether public figures or otherwise. One aspect of this is what is known as the "manosphere," the online web of misogynist hate sites where the type of rape culture denial and language we are talking about is commonplace. The Southern Poverty Law Center drew attention to this in the spring of last year.

More insidious and pervasive is the daily misogyny one runs into on mainstream websites in the comment sections. With the advent of the Internet  most North Americans now constantly and repeatedly  encounter such explicitly misogynist language anytime they look at online discussions or forums that have anything at all to do with specific women or women's issues, never mind discussions of female movie stars, sports figures, singers, etc. This no doubt helps to fuel the politics of backlash as this relentless online misogyny makes every sexist pig aware that they are not alone.
Constant exposure to it also leads many men to feel that it is acceptable to talk this way in public, and it is impossible not to think that it is having an impact on the way young men, raised on the Internet, see and talk about women.

Rebecca Meredith, asking rhetorically after being subjected to misogynist heckling at a university debate, writes:

Worse still, outside the world of debating there are those who think nothing of posting on the internet terrifying and often violent threats towards women they have never met, and happily discuss on forums how they will ‘bag the next honey’ on a Saturday night by plying her with alcohol.
How on earth did this happen? And why? Years ago such behaviour was regarded as not merely ungentlemanly but a symbol of the yob. How has it now become acceptable among some well-educated young men?
What has heralded this tide of fury and disregard for women? After all, these men must have mothers, sisters or girlfriends.
Yet they seem to find the topics of rape and abuse hilarious, or worse, typical ‘water-cooler conversation’.

One of the many millions of girls and women publicly abused and denigrated by the rise of this newest, latest, internet driven culture of misogyny.

When women come forward, as Sarah Thomson did, to face a barrage of hatred, not only do they not deserve to have their characters, mental health and motives insulted and dragged through the mud, they also deserve our support.

Guess what's coming to U of T: The Men's Rights Movement, Janice Fiamengo and Paul Elam

The Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) is back in action on the University of Toronto's campus through its campus Men's Rights Awareness group. CAFE, as I have previously outlined, is an umbrella group for a variety of MRA sub-groups, many targeting university students, that claim to be about "fairness" and "equality" while promulgating a variety of falsehoods and inaccuracies that seek to both undermine feminism and also to perpetuate their reactionary ideological myth that men also face systemic injustice and discrimination as men. They describe this as "misandry," which they posit as a counterpoint to misogyny.

However, CAFE, unlike most of its American counterparts, is always sure to put on a face of openness and tolerance to mask their agenda.

Back in November CAFE hosted an event at which Warren Farrell, a guru of the MRA, spoke. This was protested by student activists, a protest at which the activists attempted to block access to the event, which led to some arrests. It also led to a subsequent campaign of vicious and obscene intimidation specifically targeting female anti-MRA U of T student activists by the U.S.-based misogynist hate site, A Voice for Men (AVfM). Information about this campaign was posted on the CAFE website, despite their outward claims of not being associated with AVfM, and details of the protest, as well as the subsequent actions by AVfM,  can be found in an article about this I wrote for rabble at the time.

Now CAFE's U of T branch is hosting another speaker; a speaker whose rejection of the social progress that society has made to redress centuries of injustice and discrimination goes well beyond her attacks on feminism.

Janice Fiamengo, an English Professor at the University of Ottawa, was proudly announced by CAFE to be the latest addition to their Advisory Committee on January 5th. Not long afterwards CAFE (1) announced that she would be speaking at their next on campus event, to be held Thursday, March 7th, What's Wrong with Women's Studies? Academic Censorship, Feminism and Men.
CAFE describes the event in this way:

Dr. Janice Fiamengo, U of Ottawa English Professor, discusses the problems of academic feminism at Canadian universities: dubious scholarship, indoctrination, dogmatic teaching approaches, limitations on free speech, effects of “equity hiring,” and the consequences for men in the humanities.

According to CAFE:

The University of Toronto has kindly offered us complimentary use of one of their beautiful theatre venues, for reasons related to the law-breaking protest that occurred at our last event. CAFE offers its appreciation to the University for its strong commitment to free speech on campus.

In a recent Metro News article (2) we find Fiamengo:

 In her upcoming talk, Fiamengo will say that feminism has changed from the pursuit of equality to the pursuit of women’s power.
“It became about women’s power in certain areas and it came to represent men in very negative ways, as oppressive, as dominating, as violent, as discriminatory, as exclusionary,” she said. “It became about women’s victimization and their moral superiority as victims.”
Fiamengo believes that feminism, through the influence of women’s studies courses, has alienated young men in humanities courses.
“If I were a young man going through university, I couldn’t bear to sit through course after course drumming home that I am part of one half of the human race that is violent, responsible for the ills of the whole society,” she said. “In English, there are fewer and fewer young men and I can certainly see why.”

Fiamengo and the self-described "moderate and inclusive" CAFE are seeking to redress a new injustice.

Interestingly and tellingly, the same article includes an interview with a U of T activist who has clearly, and understandably, been intimidated by the actions of the Men's Rights Movement after the November protest:

Heather, a feminist and social justice advocate, says at least one of those young women has been exposed to online bullying and harassment. For that reason, she doesn’t want to see the Janice Fiamengo talk go forward. However, she doesn’t know if she will take place in any kind of protest because she fears the backlash.
Heather, who asked her last name be withheld because she doesn’t want to become a target for harassment, said she doesn’t think a talk criticizing women’s studies belongs at the University of Toronto.

Heather may be right. In fact, the gutless Texan thug, Paul Elam has this to say, about the upcoming event:

University of Toronto Student Union, it is time for you to just shut up, get out of the way and let other people share ideas whether you like them or not.
Of course, it is up to you. You live in a free country as long as people like you are not running it. But whatever you choose to do, you might want to consider what happened the last time you had a bright idea.
And last November, we were not even prepared for anything to happen.
You can bet we are now.

Subtlety  is not his strong suit. Given that "we" cannot possibly include him, as he is in Texas, one can only assume he is talking tough for his brothers in Canada. Namely, CAFE and the U of T Men's Right's Group. Given that they did not disavow his previous campaign of intimidation, they are unlikely to disavow this one.

I wonder if the U of T administration sees this as just more "free speech"?

But it would seem, returning to Fiamengo, that anti-feminism is not her first attempt to strike at the politics of modernity and inclusion, and it would seem that there are other reasons that many might doubt the legitimacy of a campus club that, while claiming to be a moderate and inclusive voice, would have her as a speaker and adviser.

CAFE's newest front person is an outright reactionary and Islamophobe who is rising through the ranks of the extreme right online community by writing for hard right American websites and espousing obviously  extremist views.

In fact, in the most recent article she posted, on February 25,  Fiamengo (who is, one might add, notably obsessed with, and largely only published in, the United States, with its Fox News, talk radio ultra-right subculture) led in with:

Proclaiming himself a conciliator and a moderate with a vision of Americans “stand[ing] with each other” and “paying their fair share,” President Barack Obama is in fact one of the most partisan presidents ever to occupy the White House. Fine-sounding words notwithstanding, he is a leftist ideologue and no-holds-barred political fighter whose practice has consistently been to demonize the American equivalents of the hated kulaks (farmers) and petit-bourgeoisie (small business owners) persecuted in the Soviet Union. Obama’s enemies include those “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as well as the presumably benighted bigots who fail to realize that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” With his anti-American, neo-Marxist outlook shaped by mentors and heroes such as Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, and Jeremiah Wright, Obama is naturally inclined to be suspicious of freedom and to feel sympathy for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is, to say the least, a fascinating way to characterize the President of the United States. A President who has, in fact, been astonishingly aggressive, imperialistic and  violent in his on-going extra-judicial war murdering people in the  Middle East (including hundreds of innocent bystanders) without any pretense of a trial or due process. To say that this would be the characterization that would be made by an extreme-right zealot would be obvious.

Fiamengo posted this, as she has many other anti-Islamic articles, on David Horowitz's notoriously bigoted frontpagemag.com, a website that promotes Horowitz's outright racist musings like those found in his joint diatribe, Black Skin Privilege, which is promoted as showing that "in fact the most insidious bias in our culture today is black skin privilege."

It would seem that not only have women and feminists unjustly taken power, but so have blacks and other groups.

Fiamengo is not at all shy about this, attacking Islamics directly and vociferously. She wrote an article on Horowitz's racist site in praise of Gavin Boby, an English bigot who crusaded against mosques in British neighbourhoods, sadly often successfully. She writes glowingly:

Only in a nation hobbled by political correctness of the most mind-boggling sort could a speaker proposing nothing more shocking than residents’ right to defend their neighbourhoods be so vociferously denounced. The self-righteous outcries at Boby’s “fearmongering” came not only from the predictable sources -- in this case the Canadian arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), fawningly reported on by the press despite its close ties to terrorist organizations -- but also from self-proclaimed free-thinkers and mainstream journalists. When everyone involved declares their commitment to free speech while seeking to suppress, distort, and censor Boby’s message, one is left staggered by the House of Mirrors confusion passing for informed debate in this country.

Of course, she is writing of the "right" of residents to "defend their neighbourhoods" from mosques. Places of worship. In an article decrying the supposed lack of "free speech" she praises a bigot and others who would seek to deny freedom of speech to Islamics by denying them the very ability to build houses of worship.
She then, as she is aiming at an American audience, goes on to condemn the "notoriously left-wing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" for not taking up Boby's cause.
But Fiamengo is not content with Islamics. She also "outs," in the extreme right American Libertarian site, PJ Media, the supposed preference given to Canada's Native People and other peoples in a stunningly offensive diatribe in which she belittles fellow academics who come from backgrounds that she sees as having been "favoured".
In one of her multiple attacks on the very students she teaches, who she herself holds in total contempt, she states:

Indeed, some students become so immersed in Leftist ideology -- a kind of secret society whose code language they have learned in fear and trembling and now exercise with pride -- that they believe it the only possible view of the world and have never seriously considered alternatives except as the deplorable prejudices of the hateful unwashed. Their conviction of rightness has revealed itself in a multitude of anti-intellectual and repressive behavior on university campuses across the country.

One could go on and on. There are many more examples of her work that are readily available online.
I have contended, as have others, that the so-called Men's Rights Movement is little more than a wing of a broader North American reactionary movement that uses false and grotesque arguments of reverse sexism ("misandry") and reverse racism to oppose efforts by historically oppressed communities to redress this oppression. They do so by claiming to be "radical" and fighting for "justice" and "freedom of speech" when in fact they are nothing but a continuation of the same old racist and sexist counter-movements that have sought to keep things the way they are from the beginning of all the movements for social justice of the 19th and 20th centuries.

These movements are interconnected. They all share the essential false analysis and they are all equally lying when they claim that all they want is "fairness". They are all explicitly either racist, sexist or retrograde. Often they are all of these.

Crossover backlash reactionary Fiamengo simply proves this.

(1) As an interesting side note, it is well worth checking out the demented, juvenile and misogynist ranting and "commentary" on the Facebook wall for the event.

(2) Humorously and pathetically Paul Elam of AVfM requested that his followers comment collectively on the Metro article, which they did. The comments on the article require no commentary.

No exception for Assange: Rape apologetics and the left

Posted on rabble, this piece is co-authored by Matt Fodor
 
Fallen left heroes.

Their mythology is often the hardest to defeat.

Just the other night, Bill Maher, the libertarian who, due to his willingness to confront the "sacred cows" of the right, has become a seeming icon to many on the left, conducted a live TV interview with Julian Assange, safe as he is from serious accusations of rape, secure in the Ecuadorian embassy, and with millions of uncritical supporters around the world, including Maher.

Maher said "I hope you get out soon Julian," at the end of a discussion of  the apparent importance of Wikileaks, acting as if Assange was already in prison for his "political activities" as opposed to being in hiding in the U.K. to avoid charges of sexual assault in, and the likelihood of extradition to, Sweden.

And now Assange appears to be running for office in his native Australia. Some think he might win.
Assange has become another in a tragically long series of men, leaders within their own left groups or within their specific context, that the left has given a "pass" to on allegations of rape and misogynist violence, both ignoring the abuse of women and making it clear that this is seen to be subordinate to the "greater" importance of the fight against the "capitalist class" or "imperialism."

The appalling example of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the U.K. recently covering up the actions of its male "cult of personality" leader is a case study in how leftists are willing to sell out women who have been victimized by the left's internal misogyny. There is nothing new about this, and leftists have come blindly to the defense of rapists before, as they did in the case of Mark Curtis in the U.S. in the '80s, who everyone now acknowledges was obviously guilty.

Despite this, but due to the persistence of patriarchal ideas within western socialist and left movements, yet again we are hearing the same falsehoods in defence of a man accused of serious crimes against women.

While the authors of the piece accept the important principle that people are innocent of all charges until proven guilty in a court of law, we also accept the equally important principle that men, no matter what other noble causes or actions they may have taken in the past or what ideology they represent, must answer to criminal accusations of sexual assault in these same courts.

Normally, this is hardly a controversial position in the left. But, even now, many months later, and due to what can only be described as a convoluted series of falsehoods and half-baked conspiracy theories, there remains widespread support within the left for Assange. Even important leftist thinkers, like Noam Chomsky, usually immune to conspiracist ideas, have taken up Assange's cause and repeated the "arguments" of his sycophants, even though these are often demonstrably false.

Given how many sisters fought for generations to try to get society to take sexual violence seriously, and given that they have counted the left as their allies, this is simply not acceptable.

For Assange's supporters, the charges must "really" be about Wikileaks. And after the two women filed complaints they were subject to horrendous attacks and demonization. Rumors soon began to circulate, without a shred of evidence, that this was a "honey trap" and that one of the women was a "CIA agent." For far too many on the left, a conspiracy theory trumps taking women's claims seriously.

As the evidence against the "conspiracy" theories swirling around Assange is very clear, it is to these that we will first turn.

Assange and the alleged "honey trap" 

There are several claims made by Assange’s uncritical supporters that are just outlandish.  For instance in a documentary for ABC Australia, “Sex Lies and Julian Assange,” Assange’s U.K. legal adviser Jennifer Robinson actually stated the following:

You only need to look at the way that Red Notices are used around the world. Red Notices are normally the preserve of terrorists and dictators. The president of Syria does not have a Red Notice alert. Gaddafi in Libya, at the same time Julian’s arrest warrant was issued, was not subject to a Red Notice but an Orange Notice. It was an incredibly… it was incredibly unusual that a red notice would be sought for an allegation of this kind.

This a flat-out lie. This “traffic light analogy," parroted repeatedly by Assange supporters, does not apply to Interpol notices. A Red Notice is not more severe than an Orange Notice.  Here is what the various ‘colors’ actually mean:

Notice type:
Details:
Red Notice:
Requests (provisional) arrest of wanted persons, with a view to extradition. An Interpol Red Notice is "the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today". Interpol does not have the authority to issue arrest warrants in the formal sense of the word, as this is the domain of the sovereign member states.
Blue Notice:
Requests additional information about a person in relation to a crime.
Green Notice:
To provide warnings and criminal intelligence about persons who have committed criminal offences and are likely to repeat these crimes in other countries.
Yellow Notice:
Asks for help locating missing persons (usually minors) or identifying people who are unable to identify themselves.
Black Notice:
Seeks information on unidentified bodies.
Orange Notice:
Warns police and other international organizations about potential threats from disguised weapons, parcel bombs, or other dangerous materials.
Purple Notice:
To provide information on modus operandi, procedures, objects, devices and hiding places used by criminals.
Interpol-United Nations Security Council Special Notice:
Issued for groups and individuals who are targets of UN sanctions against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This was created in 2005 at the request of the UN Security Council through the adoption of resolution 1617 and implemented through the adoption of Interpol resolution AG-2005-RES-05.

In fact, of the more than 10,000 notices issued in 2011, 7,678 were Red Notices. Nor is it at all unheard of for Red Notices to be issued for rapists. A cursory look at the current Interpol database includes persons wanted for rape, as well as for theft, fraud, armed robbery, assault and drunk driving. Again, Red Notices are issued for any suspect who has left the country. 
There is also no basis to Assange’s own claim that Sweden is the “Saudi Arabia of feminism.” It is simply untrue that what Assange is accused of in Sweden would not constitute rape in the U.K. and it is unconscionable for any progressive-minded person to dismiss these charges on this basis. The City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court ruled :

The framework list is ticked for rape. The defence accepts that normally the ticking of a framework list offence box on an EAW would require very little analysis by the court. However they then developed a sophisticated argument that the conduct alleged here would not amount to rape in most European countries. However, what is alleged here is that Mr Assange “deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state”. In this country that would amount to rape.

This was upheld by the High Court:

It is clear that the allegation is that he had sexual intercourse with her when she was not in a position to consent and so he could not have had any reasonable belief that she did.

Nor is it true that Assange is ‘merely’ wanted for questioning.  As David Allen Green points out:

Assange is not wanted merely for questioning.
He is wanted for arrest.
This arrest is for an alleged crime in Sweden as the procedural stage before charging (or “indictment”).  Indeed, to those who complain that Assange has not yet been charged, the answer is simple: he cannot actually be charged until he is arrested.

The oft-repeated claim by Bjorn Hurtig that Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny had given Assange permission to leave the country is false, as is the claim that Ny had refused to arrange for an interview with Assange. According to the court record :

The lawyer gave live evidence covering in some detail the attempts made to secure an interview with his client. On 15th September Ms Ny told him there were no “force measures” preventing Julian leaving the country, i.e. he was allowed to leave. He asked when his client would be interrogated but was told the officer she needed for the investigation was sick. He phoned his client to say he was free to leave the country to continue his work.

 As for the claim that Ny ‘refused’ to interview Assange:

In cross-examination the Swedish lawyer confirmed that paragraph 13 of his proof of evidence is wrong. The last five lines of paragraph 13 of his proof read: “in the following days [after 15th September] I telephoned [Ms Ny] a number of times to ask whether we could arrange a time for Mr. Assange’s interview but was never given an answer, leaving me with the impression that they may close the rape case without even bothering to interview him. On 27th September 2010, Mr Assange left Sweden.” He agreed that this was wrong. Ms Ny did contact him. A specific suggestion was put to him that on 22nd September he sent a text to the prosecutors saying “I have not talked to my client since I talked to you”. He checked his mobile phone and at first said he did not have the message as he does not keep them that far back. He was encouraged to check his inbox, and there was an adjournment for that purpose. He then confirmed that on 22nd September 2010 at 16.46 he has a message from Ms Ny saying: “Hello – it is possible to have an interview Tuesday”. Next there was a message saying: “Thanks for letting me know.  We will pursue Tuesday 28th at 1700”. He then accepted that there must have been a text from him. “You can interpret these text messages as saying that we had a phone call, but I can’t say if it was on 21st or 22nd”. He conceded that it is possible that Ms Ny told him on the 21st that she wanted to interview his client. She requested a date as soon as possible. He agrees that the following day, 22nd, she contacted him at least twice.

…Mr Hurtig was asked why he told [former Swedish judge] Brita Sundberg-Wietman that Ms Ny had made no effort  to interview his client. He denied saying that and said he has never met her…He agrees that where he had said in his statement (paragraph 51) that “I found it astonishing that Ms Ny, having allowed five weeks to elapse before she sought out interview”, then that is wrong. He had forgotten the messages referred to above. They must have slipped his mind.

Hurtig’s antics led the judge to rule that Hurtig made “a deliberate attempt to mislead the court” and in fact did mislead expert witnesses Brita Sundberg-Wietman and Sven Allam. Hurtig received a disciplinary warning from the Swedish Bar Association

What of the claim that Sweden would extradite Assange to the U.S.? Isn’t it reasonable for the Swedish government to issue a guarantee before Assange is extradited to Sweden? Is their refusal to do so a sign of complicity with the U.S. government, and that the charges are ‘really’ about Wikileaks? It is our argument that such claims are absurd and would not be raised by progressives in any other context.

With regard to the guarantee, Glenn Greenwald demanded that Green retract his “clear and crucial falsehood” that the Government does not have a final say in the extradition process and thus can issue such a guarantee. In a critique of Greenwald, Stockholm University law professor Mark Klamberg  notes:

The problem is that Greenwald earlier and later in the same text argues for a sequence that would put the Government before the Supreme Court. In essence he is arguing that the Government should have the first and the last say with the Supreme Court in the middle. That would make the Supreme Court redundant which is contrary to the sequence that is provided for in the Extradition Act which I have tried to describe. It may also violate the principle of separation of powers.

And Pal Wrange, also of the Stockholm University law faculty, points out , while it is true that the Government makes the final decision:

Even if the Government has leeway under national law, it is bound by international law. Both the Swedish and the UK Governments have extradition agreements with the US, and these agreements provide that extradition shall take place, if the legal requirements are met. Hence, the Government could not provide a guarantee, without potentially violating an international obligation.

It is difficult, to put it mildly, to take the claims that Assange would simply be handed over to the U.S. seriously. Espionage is considered a political crime in Sweden and Swedish law as well as its extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political crimes.
Consider the case of Edward Lee Howard, a CIA agent who sold secrets to the Soviet Union, devastating U.S. operations in Moscow, and who was arrested for overstaying his visa in Sweden. The U.S. government requested Howard’s extradition, which Sweden refused. The prime minister of Sweden at the time was Carl Bildt, the current Foreign Affairs Minister who Assange supporters claim is a U.S. ‘lapdog’ who would immediately extradite Assange after “a single phone call” from the White House.

One final question that is never answered by Assange supporters: wouldn’t it have been far easier to extradite Assange to the U.S. from the U.K., which is much more of a ‘lapdog’ than Sweden? The U.K., unlike Sweden, does have an extradition treaty with the U.S. for espionage. Indeed, it would be much more difficult to extradite Assange from Sweden, as it would require the support of the governments of both Sweden and the U.K. Both are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights which forbids the extradition to countries where the accused could face the death penalty.  He cannot just simply be handed over to the U.S.

The left and rape culture

In August, 2012, during one of his regular broadcasts noted British leftist and Respect Party MP, George Galloway, when coming to Assange's defence stated:

Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100% true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don't constitute rape...At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.
Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him, claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know. I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion....
Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you're already in the sex game with them. It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said: 'Do you mind if I do it again?.' It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning.

While this is a particularly appalling example of a leftist man showing a total lack of understanding of what constitutes rape and of the terrible impact of sexual violence against women, what is equally notable is that, when the controversy that erupted around these disgraceful, misogynist comments had run its course, it was not Galloway that had been forced to resign in disgrace from his "leftist" party.
Rather it was its female leader, Salma Yaqoob who resigned. Resigned due to the fact that she had publicly criticized Galloway and, instead of rallying to her support, as they should of, the leadership of Respect stood by Galloway, their sole MP and their central male "cult of personality" figure.
This is both a telling and very sad statement about the left. It has, all too often, put blind support for its men and male leadership ahead of justice for women. It has accepted the false notion that, somehow, some systems and types of oppression take precedence over others; specifically over the oppression of women.

Galloway, by no means, is alone among the many leftists who have come Assange's defence. As noted earlier Noam Chomsky has, with idiotic and facile claims about Sweden's alleged lack of sovereignty. So has Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolfe, Michael Moore and altogether too many others.
This is a terrible error and it helps to reinforce the global culture of rape that the left has claimed to have traditionally opposed, as well as being yet another example of leftists making excuses and exceptions for one of their male leaders or heroes.

The left should not make an exception for Assange.  As David Allen Green puts it:

Assange has challenged the arrest warrant in Sweden.  It was upheld.
He then repeatedly challenged the European Arrest Warrant in the United Kingdom.  He lost at every stage, but each of his many legal arguments were heard and considered in extensive detail.
And in doing this, Assange had the assistance of first rate legal advice and advocacy from some of the UK's leading human rights lawyers, and he also had the benefit of having been granted bail in England in the meantime.  The extradition was fought by him all the way to the Supreme Court.
Assange has been afforded more opportunities to challenge the warrant for his arrest than almost any other defendant in English legal history.  This is hardly "persecution" or a "witch-hunt".

Furthermore, as Rebecca Solnit recently wrote for Aljazeera:

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

We cannot abandon our sisters on the supposed alter of class anymore, and we can no longer pretend that "other" oppressions somehow take precedence over the oppression of patriarchy. Nor can we continue to give precedence to male leaders over serious accusations of rape.

Assange, while not guilty of any crime yet, clearly and demonstrably should face trial in Sweden. And leftists should abandon the apologism for his alleged actions and those of other left wing men when they are accused of sexual crimes and remember that, yes, left-wing men do also commit rape and sexual violence, and no one, no matter what else they may have done, should be above answering for it.

For more information on the Assange case, we highly recommend the excellent website Wikiwatch (http://www.wikiwatch.org.uk/) as well as Green’s article “Legal Myths About the Assange Extradition” (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2012/08/legal-myths-about-assange-extradition) in The New Statesman.
Matt Fodor is a Toronto based writer and academic. He is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University.
Michael Laxer is a political activist, a two-time former candidate and former election organizer for the NDP, was a socialist candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 and is on the executive of the newly formed Socialist Party of Ontario.

Resolutionary Socialism: Why a leftist agenda within the NDP is futile

There can be little doubt anymore, other than to the willfully blind, that neither the federal NDP nor any of its provincial wings are socialist parties. The shift towards centrism and the embrace of neo-liberal hegemonic economic ideas, such as Tom Mulcair's recent backing of corporate free trade deals, has become obviously irreversible. The NDP, which sees itself not as a movement to change society, but rather as a "government in waiting", entirely within the framework of capitalism, has turned a corner.

This change is now of a fundamental nature. The basic characteristics of the party are different.

In an article written with Andrew Klochek prior to the launch of the Socialist Party of Ontario, we wrote of how dramatic the ideological shift is. This article not only remains true, but its conclusions, from an ideological point of view, are even more pronounced then they were then. The shift is accelerating. As a new federal convention approaches we are sure to see "socialist" removed from the constitution of the party, which it, for those who care about honesty, should be. It will only be acknowledging reality to remove "socialist" as the NDP bears no resemblance to a socialist party at all. There is no commitment, even in a long term Bernstein sense, to creating a socialist economy.

Given that this ground has been covered, it is not, here, my intention to cover it again.

However, despite these shifts, despite the unrelentingly rightward turn, despite defeat after defeat for the left within the NDP over the last 40 years, many socialists, even revolutionary socialists, remain within the NDP and insist that the only way to push a socialist agenda in Canada (or any of its provinces outside of Quebec) is to fight within the context of the NDP to seek to "convert" NDP members and to, somehow, change the NDP from "within".

The purpose here is to move beyond the ideological problems with supporting the NDP and working within it, though we will, when appropriate, touch on that as well, and to show that this is also tactically wrong. It is a strategy that is a proven failure. As such, continuing to pursue it is both destructive to the alleged intent and harmful to the socialist idea in Canada itself.

Resolutionary Socialism

Leftists within the NDP, especially those organized within some of the party's entryist groups(1), engage in what could be called the theory and practice of Resolutionary Socialism(2).

Resolutionary Socialism is the notion that the point of a socialist movement is to agitate within the country's existing  "mass worker's party" to get resolutions passed at conventions and get people elected to the party's governing bodies with the intent of shifting the party to the left and towards a radical or, in some cases, revolutionary socialist idea.

Then, presumably, either the left will seize control of the "mass worker's party" or, when the revolutionary or radical "moment" comes, they will march out of the party, red flags blazing in the wind, taking the radicalized elements of the membership with them.

This tactic is now, more than it has ever been, entirely detached from reality.

As a bit of history, one of the constant refrains of socialists working within the NDP is that they are trying to recapture the energy and "success" of movements like the Waffle in the 70s, the CAP (Campaign for an Activist Party) in the 80s and the NPI (New Politics Initiative) in the 90s, all of which vied for power internally and managed to secure 25-35% support from the membership of the party.

What they fail to note is that every one of these intiatives failed.

This is not a reflection, at all, upon the activists. They were all entirely noble in their efforts.

It is, however, what happened.

Every single one of these "high water marks" for the left within the NDP ultimately receded and dissolved. The Socialist Caucus has been in existence within the party since 1998 and has been an unhappy handmaiden to the period during which it shifted right most dramatically.

In each case, after the movement crested the party leadership consolidated its hold and pushed both the platform and practice of the party not in a left direction, but in the opposite direction.

But Resolutionary Socialism has been dealt an even greater blow in that, as is obvious to any detached observer, the resolutions no longer matter. For the simple reason that the "Democratic" in NDP is a sham. To an even greater extent than in the past the deck is rigged. The "left" of the party cannot win.

The NDP now routinely prevents left candidates who are not willing, ultimately, to play ball,  from either seeking nominations or, should they win them, actually running for the party. This includes, most obviously, the leader the Socialist Caucus itself, Barry Weisleder, whose nomination in Thornhill was revoked by the party. But there are many other examples.

Resolutions Committees within the NDP ensure that "left" resolutions basically never make it to the floor of conventions anymore anyway. If they do, and if, in the unlikely event they pass, they then fall into the black hole that is the party's membership's "platform" (not to be confused with the farce the leadership and its strategists trot out at election time, which is the actual platform), a platform that is never publicly published and that the party has claimed does not even exist! If you doubt this, feel free to ask for the memebership's platform anytime you want.

Do not hold your breath while waiting to receive it.

There are other instances of the party, provincially or federally, either preventing its membership from exercising democratic control, or simply disregarding or invalidating the results when they do.

In fact, given that the right shift depends on the isolation of the party leadership from any embarrassment that might be caused by the membership, I think one could easily argue that the membership of the NDP has less power than any membership in any political party in Canada.

To be blunt, it is a fight that cannot be won. To describe it as utopian would be unfair to utopianism, which is predicated on the principal that its struggle is Sisyphean. This is a case of activists tilting at windmills without recognizing that they are doing so.

Even worse, they do so without understanding that the membership of the NDP is not at all what it used to be. Many members seek to be on board with a "winner". They are politcal junkies or careerists as opposed to socialists.

They are, in fact, in my opinion less likely to be recruited by a socialist movement than the general public, especially if socialists work with certain specific communities. 

Why working within the NDP helps the NDP's right

The basic idea of the leftists in the NDP is that they are fighting within a party receptive to leftism.

This disregards the party's last 40 years. It also disregards the fact that many members of the NDP are members of the party precisely because they want to be a part of a party that will take power, and some hope to directly gain from this (as they have already by the party "winning" opposition).

Further, it is predicated on vanguardist ideas of "enlightening" the "masses" within a "mass" political party, a notion not only elitist and facile, but also assuming (as the vanguardists always do) that the NDP membership are sheep waiting for a true leader to show them the true path.

Even when dealing with actually working class members, this principle is already false. But the NDP membership is comprised of many professionals (such as teachers, professors, social workers, white collar civil servants, etc.) and its basic class composition is not a "mass" party at all in the way the leftists mean "mass".

In fact, I think it is quite likely that the membership of the NDP is actually less likely to be responsive to radicalism and leftist ideas than, say, citizens in Parkdale in Toronto. Or in downtown Winnipeg. Or in Cape Breton.

Within the NDP you are talking to a membership that has joined in or stayed within a party in spite of its shift.

The radicals have already left.

By going door-to-door, as they do, for a neo-liberal party espousing a neo-liberal ideology, and by encouraging leftists to join this party, leftists within the NDP aid the party establishment as opposed to hindering it. They reinforce the party's hold on Canada's left politics.

Working within the NDP, as a leftist, means directly contributing to the rightward shift as it  allows the party a thin veneer of "left-wing" credibility by your presence, and they can take you for granted, which they do. 
 
Since you cannot win internally, you do not worry them at all, and if they win government leftists who cause trouble will be out. You can count on this. 
 
However, if real left candidates, as in Quebec with Quebec Solidaire, were to even get 3-5 % of the vote in downtown Toronto, (a totally achievable goal, for those who insist on being "realistic") thereby no longer allowing the NDP to take the support of left-wing citizens for granted, then the mainstream "left" party has to take notice. And its positions and policies will change accordingly.
 
This has happened in Quebec and Europe...and it will not happen in English Canada without this.

As is usually the case, the threat to those who operate within circles of power and electoral politics and who accept, as a starting point, the "realities" of our system,  has to come from outside. It cannot come from within.  

(1) I have written of these groups before in a piece on my blog.

(2) With apologies to my dear friend, and long time comrade, Andy Lehrer, from whom I stole the term.