It’s been a busy week in Canada for those of us who keep track of far right and fascist groups in this country. On the 19th a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, Ryan Thorpe, broke a story following weeks of effort to infiltrate an organization calling itself “The Base”; a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi terror network. In that story, he revealed that one of the Winnipeg-area members of The Base was Canadian Armed Forces Reserve Master Corporal Patrik Mathews.
That The Base is operating in Canada is not a surprise, if you follow far-right monitoring groups like The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, The ARC Collective or Yellow Vests Canada Exposed. There’s been indications that Mathews has been postering and trying to recruit for this network for months. The Base’s presence in Canada, for all it wasn’t on the mainstream media’s radar, has been tracked for months online, especially by Vice reporters Mack Lemoureux and Ben Makuch. In their coverage, they reveal that The Base has been steadily ramping up their recruiting and planning “hate camps” to provide paramilitary training for their members. That one of their recruiters has turned out to be a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, though… that was a bit of a shock.
It was also, on a personal level, a bit chilling to learn Mathews was behind a recent flurry of false-flag Twitter accounts. That caught my attention because some of those Twitter accounts were following my Twitter account. You expect bad actors online, but its a seriously weird feeling to know that accounts like @pegrumbler and @antifaselkirk, which I blocked on the advice of YVCE earlier this month, were actually the sock-puppet accounts of a committed neo-Nazi terrorist who was trying to infiltrate anti-fascist online spaces and spread disinformation. (I assume he was following me because I’m a frequent re-tweeter of specifically Canadian anti-fascist content.)
Earlier this year, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had largely dismissed the growth of white supremacy within the military. A report from November 2018 revealed that in the previous five years, since 2013, sixteen members of the armed forces had proven connections to six different hate groups, and that the Military Police were concerned that the armed forces might harbour dozens more. These groups included high-profile extremist organizations such as neo-Nazi terrorists Atomwaffen Division, the Hammerskins, the Quebec-based white nationalist La Meute, the paramilitary Three Percenters militia, the violently anti-immigrant Soldiers of Odin and, of course, the alt-right street gang calling themselves the Proud Boys… whose infiltration of the military, and the military’s failure to respond, had made news the previous summer. Sajjan and the leadership of the CAF attempted to downplay the concerns that white supremacists were active in Canada’s military, emphasizing that their numbers were extremely small compared to the over-all size of the Armed Forces.
Once his involvement in The Base was revealed in the media, police arrested Patrik Mathews at his house and seized a number of weapons. The Department of National Defence is under increasing public pressure to address the growth of white supremacy in the military and is backtracking on the earlier statements that it wasn’t too big a concern, including the claim that the military was “dealing with” Mathews weeks before the story broke.
In the past week I’ve had conversations with friends who are military — either veterans or active service-members — and I’d describe their general response to the revelation of Mathew’s activities as a combination of frustration that this has been allowed to continue and contempt that he’d be involved with such things in the first place. Several people have made comments along the line of “He’s in the Reserve, so that limits what they can do”, which I find interesting — are reservists held to a looser standard on hate-group connections than the regular force? That’s just one of many questions that need to be asked about the presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the military in this country.
The public outcry, the media pressure and the push for investigation and reform… all this is as it should be. Canadians cannot tolerate fascist and neo-Nazi hate groups operating in the military. Of course, we shouldn’t tolerate them operating in our police forces, either.
Or, for that matter, marching around our streets.
When the story broke a friend of mine observed on Facebook that an organization like The Base — explicitly terroristic in goals and organization — made the Yellow Vests “look like a ladies’ sewing circle.” It’s an amusing statement… but it misses an important point: Seemingly mainstream(ish) groups like the Yellow Vests are often the first step in fascist radicalization whether they care to admit it or not.
A nascent Yellow Vester might be attracted to the group because they genuinely believe that Justin Trudeau is doing a bad job and oil pipelines will stimulate the economy… and also because they’re predisposed to agreeing with the YV’s false claims that immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, are costing Canadian jobs and benefits. And then they’re marching in the street with homophobes and calling the Soliders of Odin “security” while they beat up anti-fascists. And then they’re standing next to and amplifying the voices of literal Nazis. It’s a surprisingly short trip, from what I’ve seen.
Of course, I genuinely doubt that anyone who’s genuinely stable has ever gone out and just declared one day “Fuck yes, I’m a Nazi!” from zero to sixty in three seconds. They get there by gradual degrees, being radicalized by exposure to fascistic ideas and participation in increasingly fascistic activities… and they won’t admit to themselves that’s what’s happening. Hell, even a lot of the shitheels who openly espouse fascist and neo-Nazi ideals deny outright being fascists and neo-Nazis, as I learned a few weeks ago when Solider of Odin Glen Robertson got extremely agitated when I called him a fascist at a counter-protest.
But as philosopher Oliver Thorne stated, “Fascists will say they’re not fascists, just as racists will say they’re not racist and bullies will say they’re not bullies. If we confine our anti-fascist activities only to those who openly identify as fascist, we’ll miss some of the most dangerous ones… an even cleverer way of framing the question is less who is a fascist and more who is doing a fascism?“
This is why anti-fascist organizing at street-level is so damned important. This is why we as anti-fascists need to resist the growth of these “alt-lite” organizations such as the Yellow Vests, because these “more mainstream” rightist organizations feed into more radical groups. And then the radical groups feet into the extremist groups. And the extremist groups plan on killing people.
Does that mean every Yellow Vester is going to become a terrorist? No, of course not. Most of them are just happy to be hanging out in a circle-jerk environment that validates their ignorant self-entitlement, racism and homophobia. And while the group overall seems to be drifting every further further into right-wing intolerance, only a tiny fraction of the group will move on to more violent organizations like the Soldiers of Odin or the Wolves of Odin (or whatever fucking Noun of Odin they want to call themselves) where they impress each other with tough talk and fantasies of swarming outnumbered queers. And of those groups, only a fraction of their membership will be radicalized to the open terrorism of groups like Atomwaffen or The Base, who’ll plot to bomb mosques and blow up power infrastructure… but even a handful of people in the terrorist networks are too many.
One of the core tenets of anti-fascist organizing is that the growth of fascism can (and should) be stopped while it’s still small. Some of that organizing involves dramatic street-level confrontations with fascist groups, some of it involves non-violent counter-demonstrations like the No Hate In The Hammer gatherings in Hamilton, but the vast majority is exactly the type of thing that CAHN and YVCE and the ARC Collective and the Southern Poverty Law Centre and similar groups are doing: Intelligence gathering, monitoring hate group activity and informing the public.
The work of journalists like Thorpe, Lemoureux and Makuch here in Canada, and of Gwen Snyder and Michael Hayden in the US (and hundreds more across North America and the world) is a vital part of that effort to monitor and expose hate groups. They should be applauded and saluted for their efforts… and the not-inconsiderable risks they take in the process.
Monitoring and exposing fascists isn’t “attacking the free speech” of fascists, as is often claimed online… usually by the fascists themselves. In fact, it’s the exact opposite — it’s using the power of free speech to uncover and expose hate groups. No one is denying the right to free speech… but freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. (Or, as the anti-fascist song goes: “If you’re a Nazi and you’re fired, it’s your fault!” *clap* *clap*.) You don’t want to be outed as a fascist and have to deal with the fallout? Don’t be a fucking fascist. It’s as simple as that.
The fate of Master Cpl. Patrik Mathews is still unclear. He was arrested during the police raid on his home and later released. The police and armed forces are investigating him, and they’re playing their cards extremely close to their vests. Almost certainly he’ll be dishonourably charged from the Armed Forces (or resign under threat of such.) It’s still unclear whether he’ll face criminal charges for his involvement with a terror organization… although if he’d been exposed as a member of Al-Qaeda I’m sure he’d have been chained to a wall somewhere long since. (I’m not the first to point this out, and I won’t be the last, but it’s a curious link that the English translation of Al-Qaeda is “The Base.”)
Anti-fascist activists and hate-group watchers have been warning that white supremacy and fascist organizing is on the rise. Let’s hope the discovery of a neo-Nazi terror recruiter kicks the Canadian government and Armed Forces in the ass hard enough to finally start treating this threat as seriously as it deserves.
