anarchism – The Hungover Pundit

Pride 2019 Part 8 – Conclusions

This afternoon lawyer Scott Bergman is presenting his independent review into the events surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019 to Hamilton’s city council.

As I posted earlier this week, I’ve been working through Mr. Bergman’s report, and I’ve been generally quite impressed by it. When I wrote my earlier post, I was still slogging through Part 7 – The HPS Culture, Training and Initiatives, and it was difficult going, especially as it clearly demonstrated an inherent bias against “anarchists from The Tower.”

The Tower’s organizing collective issued a response to the independent report yesterday, and it’s pretty blunt about both the shortcomings of the report – particularly the recommended responses – and pessimistic about the report’s impact on policing in Hamilton.

(Full disclosure: I am not a part of the seven-member organizing collective, although I am very much in support of and stand in solidarity with both this specific statement and with the actions and efforts of both The Tower and Hamilton’s anarchist community generally.)

And, having been so glowing in my praise for Mr. Bergman’s efforts in the early part of the report, I also have to say that I was also rather disappointed upon reading Part 8 – Recommendations.

Pride 2019 Part 7 – The Reports

For the first time in quite a while I’m getting back to the blog. I’m going to do my usual caveats: between health problems, the COVID-19 lockdown (we’re currently on day 101 of a very strict self-isolation) other projects, major dental surgery and a family crisis, I’ve let my writing fall by the wayside. I need to stop doing that, I know. Inertia is difficult to overcome when you’re in pain, and that’s an explanation, not an excuse.

Ironically, the other problem I’ve faced is that there’s so much going on in the world that it’s difficult to get started. With the coronavirus pandemic, the anti-lockdown/paranoid racist protests, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing massive reaction across the US and the world, the ongoing police violence towards protesters… it’s overwhelming. As a writer, having too much to address is often as bad as too little.

Like, where do you start?

Well in my case, I’m going to start with yesterday’s release of Scott Bergman’s Independent Review Into The Events Surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019. (The full 125-page report can be downloaded in PDF format from the criminal-lawyers.ca website, and the executive summary has been published at in its entirety at Raise The Hammer.) Mr. Bergman’s report was commissioned by the City of Hamilton to understand what happened before, during and after last year’s attack by hate groups against Hamilton Pride, particularly regarding the behaviour and reactions of the Hamilton Police Service.

Core Concepts 6 – Anarchism

The other day I had an online interaction in one of the groups I follow: Someone trollishly interjected the opinion “Anarchists should be behind bars. How is that even debatable?” into a completely unrelated discussion of last Saturday’s incident at the Yellow Vests demonstration in Hamilton. The incident in question was a Yellow-Vest “protester” harassing, attacking and assaulting an LGBTQ+ family; including threats of abducting the family’s kids and, it has come to light, spitting on a three-year-old child. (No arrests have been made, by the way, and City Hall’s response was to advise the family not to attend counter-protests at City Hall anymore.)

But it’s the anarchists who should be unilaterally locked up, right.

So I — politely enough — challenged the guy advocating for blanket arrest of an entire ideology, and as the discussion progressed he got more and more trollish, even claiming that he “used to be an anarchist” but that “anarchists that act out their beliefs should be punished” and so forth. It was your basic “I’m a troll and it’s fun to make extreme statements to see how people react” nonsense that I try not to encourage. My primary takeaway from the interaction wasn’t that this guy could be convinced — feeding trolls for the sake of feeding trolls isn’t my bag — it was that a lot of people in the group lacked an understanding of what Anarchism, as a political philosophy, is and isn’t.