After months of keeping us in suspense, Toronto city council has decided it has the authority to strip us of our democratic rights in a 16-9 vote by passing the so-called “bubble zone” bylaw, which makes protesting illegal within a fifty metre radius of places like religious buildings, schools, and childcare centres. Toronto is just the latest city to severely limit the right to protest, and due to incessant Zionist crybullying, several municipal councils in Ontario are following suit by wasting the public’s time and resources to engage in bad faith “consultations” on the necessity of banning pro-Palestine demonstrations and marches under the guise of “safety.”
Final results from the public consultations in Toronto show that 63% of 42,747 responses were either “somewhat unsupportive” or “strongly unsupportive” of the bylaw, meaning its passage occurred over the opposition of a majority of the public. Choosing to pass this bylaw despite the public feedback reflects the normalizing of a fascist philosophy of governance as our ruling class seeks to silence us for daring to speak out against the genocide it evidently supports.
While each bylaw that has been proposed or passed differ in the details, Vaughan’s protest ban (which will likely serve as a model for future bans) exempts labour strikes from the bylaw, a reassurance curiously similar to the one given by fascists in Italy and Germany as they were trying to reassure organized labour that it was not one of fascism’s targets. Eventually, those exemptions were taken away as fascism smashed organized labour in those countries.
Today, a similarly poisoned fruit is being offered to the labour movement. Despite reassurances offered by city councillors, workers must realize that our democratic rights are under attack. These protest bans are just the most recent example of how liberalism, through its alliance with Zionism, paves the way for fascism.
Fascist tolerance of the “economic” protest
As revolutionary fervour swept through Europe following the needless slaughter of the First World War, fascists had to cosplay as revolutionaries to deceive the working class into supporting their counterrevolutionary program. Organized labour, particularly in Italy and Germany, was mass-based and popular in the early interwar era, with factory occupations taking place in Italy and an abortive revolution occurring in Germany.
Following the ebb of the revolutionary tide, fascists wished to avoid a confrontation with organized labour initially. Even during the Italian fascist March on Rome in 1922, a proclamation read: “Labour has nothing to fear from the fascist power…Its just rights will be loyally guaranteed.”. In 1924, Mussolini warned Italian corporations, “the workers would have the right to act on their own account” if wages were not sufficiently raised. In 1925, Italian fascist Edmondo Rossoni declared, “We should not condemn a priori the strike as a weapon when its causes are economic.” Hitler wrote around the same time that “employees…have the right and duty to defend the interests of the community against the greed or unreasonableness of a single person.”
Fascists are first and foremost concerned with the vitality of the nation, as embodied by its economic “strength” and its people, or volk. Criticizing capitalist greed was a low-hanging fruit to pick for fascists given the societal upheavals against capitalism were still in recent memory. Ultimately, creating working conditions so poor that they resulted in a total economic shutdown was contrary to the national economic interest. The fascist obsession with strength and the glorification of the nation and its volk meant that strikes were justified, so long as they were economic. That’s why Nazis joined communists in an October 1930 strike of 100,000 metalworkers in Berlin, and instigated the Berlin transport strike in 1932. In Italy, fascists supported strikes by marble workers in the famous Carrara quarries in 1924 and issued an order for a general strike to the workers of the Togni factory in 1925.
However, the historical record paints a different story. As soon as fascists secured their power in Italy and Germany, they quickly banned the right to strike, went about destroying independent labour unions, forced workers to join fascist labour unions, policed any political agitation and prevented workers from striking for any reason. Both regimes also created “labour passports” which each worker carried with essentially as documentation of their loyalty or disloyalty to their employer, ensuring that any political agitation would result in their exclusion from employment in most workplaces.
Manufacturing historical amnesia
Limiting the right to protest, while obviously anti-democratic, takes on a fascist overtone when the narrative surrounding liberalism’s perceived opposition to fascism is compared to the actual historical record. What the record reflects is in fact how liberalism paves the way for fascism. That is why the Western ruling classes have such a vested interest in perpetuating a state of historical amnesia over popular memory of the response to fascism: to cover up their complicity and rebrand fascism using the warm, fuzzy language of “safety” and “vulnerable institutions.”
There is not a single Western, democratic liberal government whose forebearers were not complicit in the advance of fascism to power almost a century ago. Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, praised Hitler as a “great man.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously pursued a policy of appeasement, tolerating both the Anschluss between Germany and Austria, and the annexation of the Sudetenland by Hitler. There are countless other examples, particularly if one includes industrialists like Henry Ford.
Even when these “democratic” nations got a preview of WWII in the form of the Spanish Civil War, whose democratically elected government they abandoned to Franco’s fascists, liberal democracy continued to collaborate with fascists. Despite Italy and Germany openly flouting the “non-intervention” policy of the liberal democracies and supplying Spain’s fascists with weaponry, airplanes and troops to destroy Republican Spain, the liberal democracies of France and the UK signed the Munich Pact in 1938, giving Germany permission to annex the Sudetenland. To this day, not one “liberal democratic” government has apologized to the Spanish people for abandoning them to fascist takeover, because the ends justified the means, namely the destruction of a popular socialist government.
The western ruling classes saw fascism as a convenient counterforce to the appeal of socialism, and tolerated its increasingly violent methods against socialists and communists, foolishly believing that the fascists would never dare bite the hand that feeds. All of us know how that ended: another world war, tens of millions killed, cities incinerated and other horrors.
These same political systems have an interest in perpetuating the myth that liberalism contributed to the defeat of fascism, rather than the reality of liberalism’s collaboration with fascism to stop socialism. This myth of liberalism defeating fascism is a myth that serves the Western ruling classes. It is from this position of perceived moral superiority that liberalism declares that atonement for the Holocaust (which the western world created the conditions for) can only be achieved through unconditional fealty to, and normalization of, Zionism, even as it commits the crime of genocide.
Zionism is subverting the constitutional order
Throughout the genocide in Gaza, we have seen countless examples of how Zionism has been a vehicle for the spread of fascism at home: the increasingly repressive political atmosphere, the overt anti-Palestinian racism, the tolerance of Zionist violence, the routine journalistic malpractice to manufacture consent, and now, the stripping of constitutionally guaranteed rights dressed up as routine city council “business.”
Now, our core rights as a society have to be sacrificed because Zionists don’t feel safe, a laughable accusation coming from the side that supports murdering children. The real issue is that we have used our freedoms to challenge Zionist narrative control, self-victimization and law-breaking. The community has protested outside the synagogues Zionists use to break the law and illegally sell land in the West Bank, an act that apparently requires new laws rather than enforcement of the current ones that ban the sale of illegally occupied land.
The fact that numerous city councils in Ontario are entertaining this boldfaced attempt to silence one of the few ways we have to make our voices heard also raises questions about jurisdictional supremacy in the constitutional order. While the provinces and federal government have constitutional standing, municipalities do not. Yet, we are facing a situation where a constitutionally unrecognized level of government—without engaging in the debate over the appropriate status of cities in the Canadian constitution—can override constitutional rights by a simple majority vote of fewer than a couple of dozen people. This appears to be the new Zionist tactic, as city councils escape the scrutiny afforded to provincial and federal politics.
Whether or not more cities in Ontario pass similar protest bans, these unjust laws will not dampen support for the cause of Palestine. It will only highlight the contradictions between liberalism as it purports to be and liberalism in practice, and reflects its decay into fascism over the past 19 months.
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