Language, othering, and fascism

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. Author of the essential Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Walia has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee. The poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa once wrote that “The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks in the streets. Shutting down.” In this discussion, Walia and I talk about working to shut down the structural forces that are trying to force us to shut down, to drink shock and resist panic.We look at the fascistic violence happening in the United States, the Trump administration’s blood-soaked invasion of Venezuela, and the ongoing push, in Canada, for a border enforcement regime that aligns more closely with the United States’ crackdown on immigration. What, if anything, does the spectre of securitized borders mean in the context of rising eco-fascism and global resource wars? Canada claims to be a climate leader and yet remains a place for rapacious extraction; we profess to being a bastion of multiculturalism and humanitarian values, but wage war on Indigenous communities and perceived others. Walia helps us understand the links between systems of border reinforcement and the monopolization of violence by police. Under capitalism, this sort of fascistic slide is central to the consolidation of moneyed power. It facilitates oligarchic rule. And the accelerating annihilation of democracy should not come as a surprise in this context. If twelve people can possess the wealth of four billion, then democracy will not be allowed to live. If eighteen trillion dollars can be hoarded by a small group of elites, then democracy will be destroyed in order for that system to continue. But we can’t let it, because the possibility of self-determination and the social good are literally at stake. This is why Walia proposes the idea of becoming ungovernable: becoming capable of democracy in the direct sense of disrupting, building support structures for disruptors and generating the momentum needed to take power and protect all people. According to Walia, the infrastructure that the left requires to contest fascism will need to be developed outside the digital realm that you are currently reading this in. If solidarity is to become a serious threat to the status quo, it cannot be reduced to a sentence shared in the comment thread. A shift could send shockwaves, but we’ll need to reanimate the democratic muscles that seem to have atrophied over the course of neoliberalism’s deranged ascent.#leftpolitics #anticapitalism #anticolonialism #ice #fuckice #antitrump #antizionism #antifascism #socialism #venezuela #handsoffvenezuela #monroedoctrine #maduroarrested #nooneisillegal