CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT:

INFILTRATION AND OTHER SINS:

The following is from the membership blogs section of Linchpin, the publication of the Ontario Common Cause group. See the end of this story for Molly's comments. This one should probably go into an article on the 'Why Anarchist Projects Fail' series.

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Youth and Supporters of Indigenous:

Beware of Cops in Sheep's Clothing:
Mohawk Nation News
MNN. July 20, 2008. Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino’s fascistic actions against Indigenous people are not new. His illegal dirty tricks to trap Mohawks and Shawn Brant in particular have been developed and practiced in cop training school. He’s following an old pattern. Really old. Cops are basically well-paid thugs. We’ve seen some of the police training videos. Police are trained to instigate violence.

Way back in the Winnipeg Workers(General-Molly) Strike in 1917 (1919-Molly)the police were found to be responsible for the violence. In relations with the Ongwehonwe, it is once again armed state forces, police or military that have caused violence and deaths time and time again. Remember the Mohawk Oka Crisis in Kanehsatake in 1990, Gustafsen Lake in B.C. in 1995, the killing of Dudley George at Ipperwash, and all of the recent confrontations at Six Nations and Tyendinaga! The violence on all occasions was started by the cops and their instigators.

We’re not the only ones targeted for abuse. The 1970 Quebec nationalist movement that wanted to create an independent socialist state was almost completely taken over by the RCMP. Many of the people in the movement were young idealistic students and professors. The police turned their movement into a violent crisis. British Trade Commissioner James Cross was kidnapped and Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped and murdered.

Bombings were threatened. The FLQ was used to provide all the justification that war mongering individuals in the Canadian government needed to launch an All-out offensive. Pierre Trudeau, that sneaky “rat fink” who sold out integrity, instituted the War Measures Act authorizing extraordinary actions by the RCMP. Rule of law was suspended. The armed forces were deployed. Thousands of innocent youth and students were arrested and held without charges for weeks and months. The same kind of tactics are being used against Indigenous today.

Trudeau claimed this use of state force was necessary to protect Canada from the “scourge of terrorism”. There was no terrorism except the terrorism from within that was planned and orchestrated by the RCMP.

The MacDonald Commission of Inquiry into Certain Acts of the RCMP revealed that the FLQ was completely infiltrated by police agents from the very beginning. The 1981 report found police agents were responsible for planning and carrying out terrorist activities within the FLQ. The RCMP used paid agents and other Canadian and Quebec groups to spy on and discredit the youth and student movement. It is very likely that they are doing the same again.

The students who support the Ongwehonwe and human rights, freedom of speech, decency and fair play, are all extremely vulnerable. The so-called forces of law and order have a long history of infiltrating student and popular movements in order to create violence that will enhance the power of the police and military forces.

During the October Crisis the Commission described 11 different types of dubious or outright illegal operations that were carried out by the RCMP. These included:

RCMP agents made secret allegations against tens of thousands of Canadians and shared them with police in other countries including the U.S., India, Pakistan, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Britain and Ireland. They’re still doing that. Remember Arar who was sent on an “extraordinary rendition” flight to be tortured.

RCMP stole membership lists from the Parti Quebecois and looked for people who could be recruited to be their agents.

RCMP burned barns in Quebec as part of training sessions for terrorist activities; they gave weapons, explosives and cash to members of the FLQ and trained them to use them.

Did the public learn anything? The cops have become more secretive. That’s when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service CSIS was formed. They have an “Indigenous sector” and they have classed Mohawks as terrorists and insurgents. This means that our rights have been taken away from us without trial or due process or even notice. Or maybe they have secretly declared war on us without the knowledge or consent of the Canadian people. We must always keep in mind how far these state funded “power freaks” will go to achieve their nefarious ends.

Molly Notes:

The use of agents provocateurs has a long and dishonourable history . The frequency with which they are used and the methods they employ vary from country to country and time to time. It should be noted that the author is obviously quite young and also much more concerned with indigenous rights than with anarchism- the article was first published, after all, in the Mohawk Nation news. That doesn't mean that it is wrong; it is generally correct. What it does mean is that the author both overstates his case and fails to report some of the more egregious examples. The police infiltration and attempts to provoke violence at the recent protests in Montebello for instance. Or perhaps the most prominent example, the Air India case, where numerous people have suspected the involvement of Indian security in setting up the tragedy. This pattern traces way back. Molly's favourite is the Ohkrana arranging the assassination of a government minister (no doubt a personal enemy of the person in charge of the Ohkrana at the time) in Tsarist Russia to help discredit the narodniks. Her second favourite is the shady relationship between Stalin, when he was an up and coming revolutionary, and the same Ohkrana . Was he an agent ? Yes and no. He wasn't paid by the government, but he was totally happy to arrange the arrest of his competitors within the Bolshevik Party who might be obstacles to his rise.

The latter case leads into the "overstating the case" part of this. There is little doubt that every radical movement will be infiltrated by the police at some point. They'd hardly be doing their job if they didn't. The statement that there was "no terrorism" during the FLQ crisis except that instigated by the RCMP is a gross overstatement. The RCMP were, indeed, complicit in some of the terrorist acts of that era, but they were innocent of most of them. It's quite simple actually. The acts were done to "establish credibility" amongst an already existing group of people who thought that terrorist tactics were a fine and good thing. I think that the balance of evidence suggests that the Canadian government did not want the turn to terrorism in the early 70s, but that they were simply following the sort of bureaucratic procedure that the above author alludes to. No doubt!!!!! the government of the day was very happy to use the ill advised acts of the FLQ of the time to advance its own interests, but it ascribes a superhuman capacity for planning, execution and subsequent cover-up to the RCMP of the day that simply isn't credible to say that they were the authors of the act.


Whether they "knew about it and let it go ahead anyways" is a totally separate matter. Radical groups in general (especially the deluded radicals of the early 70s) and anarchist groups in particular have more than enough nuts and aggressive people in their ranks to make it a waste of time for the agents of the state to try and build terrorist groups from the ground up. At best the agents often merely catch up to the nuts in their race to martyrdom. Just make sure that your "ears" are connected to such formations so you can keep track of them, and then let (human) nature take its course. Arrest them early if it is a simple police matter. Arrest them late if other goals can be achieved via their actions, whatever these others goals may be, police work or political. Establish your "cred" if it is necessary, but don't make potential disasters for your bosses. THIS accounts for the great 99% of police activity within radical organizations. One should also note that simple "disruption" os a radical movement is often the goal rather than discredidation. You don't have to break the law to spread rumours (more often true than not) about the leadership of a group that you think should be destroyed. Why bother to plot and plant a bomb when simply telling the truth will suffice ?


I have only hinted at the complexity of such situations above. In countries such as the USA (especially with its multiple secret police agencies) and Canada (with the RCMP and CSIS, along with the laughable "military intelligence" centred in Ottawa) an extra layer of bureaucratic rivalry interposes itself. Agencies not only don't cooperate. They often have quite different goals, and what they both encourage and simply permit may be at total variance. The goals of some sort of semi-mythical "ruling class" may have nothing whatsoever to do with the goals of people in a certain bureaucracy, especially as it relates to another. The Air India case is the primary Canadian example of such cross- purposes.


That's all well and good, but what does it mean in terms of practical proposals ? For some time now Molly has been proposing the following:
1)That any anarchist organization worthy of the name should make its opposition to violence quite explicit in its founding principles. This is common sense. You are exposed to arrest and harassment simply for being what you are. Why, on God's Green Earth, do you want to give the prosecution a freebie in eventual trials ? Violence will happen. Mass violence. So-called "revolutionaries" can neither anticipate nor provoke such incidents. All the bullshit about being so smart as to be a "revolutionary" is just that-bullshit. Revolutions happen. They are not created by revolutionaries !!!!! Talking about a revolution never lays the ground for such a thing. Tiny little terrorist acts which usually approach the term of "juvenile violence" are even less likely to do anything practical.
2)Quit demonizing the enemy !!!! The police are neither "pigs" nor "thugs". In a radical sense they are opponents who are both bigger and smarter (because of their wide base of recruitment) than you are. Treat them as the opponents they are. Respect for the opponent is one of the cardinal rules of military strategy. Those who believe their own propaganda are often doomed to fail. In a more class-based view of society today they are "necessary" in our present time. YES I mean that. The role of the police is not just to protect class rule, though they do that often enough. They are also the agents of enforcing what we, the great majority of the people, consider to be "acceptable behavior" . Hopefully in an "anarchist society" we would have no police, but until that great millennium one can say that far too many "revolutionaries" would institute a police force that would be far more brutal and effective than what we have today. As to "demonization" I will guarantee that the people entrusted to enforce social norms in an anarchist society will be exactly the same as our present police. The difference would be that there would be fewer rules to enforce and that the general population would be enforcing much of what is presently "police functions".
3)Molly has a "simple solution" to this conundrum. Molly believes that anarchism should be organized, and she also believes that such anarchist organizations (in the plural) should have the maturity to denounce anarchist "deviations" in no uncertain terms, as well as to both denounce violence carried out by non-anarchists and to point out the greater violence of the state. THIS is not "taking the other side" as ideologues would claim. It is simply the mark of a mature movement that actually thinks rather than just acts.