Frogs and Goldfishes
I'm sure you know the boiled frog. The temperature constantly and slowly rising so at each moment the frog does not realize. Eventually, the temperature gets too hot, and the frog dies. There is also the goldfish, where a boy asks a goldfish how the water is, the goldfish replies “what the hell is water?”
Elon Musk is the first trillionaire. He is a private businessman. He stands in the White House alongside the president. He was invited to slash welfare services for the poor. Doug Ford got rid of freedom of information requests so people couldn’t discover his corrupt business dealings on his personal phone. The UK arrests people for letting juries know their rights. Go back a bit, an ICE agent murdered someone in cold blood on camera in the street, Carney was union busting Air Canada workers, and Starmer was doing mass arrests of people begging him to stop arming a genocide. All of these leaders support invading and bombing Iran materially and in language. While one invaded, the others imposed sanctions on the victims of the invasion. They all show concern about the left taking over, despite one being the far right winner and the others pivoting hard right the second their position was secured.
I don’t need to define fascism. I could read a wikipedia article, I could read several books and break down common themes, and I could line everything up for hours. It doesn’t matter. They will continue doing as they wish because it is their project. You could take a picture of a fascist in 4k holding a sign saying “I am a fascist” and write a book debunking every single one of their points, and it wouldn’t matter. They would wake up the next day and do exactly what they did the day before with the same or new points, and the same people would listen without blinking.
We could talk of national socialism, the idea of solving the problem of class conflict through national pride. We could call it MAGA. We could call it a sovereignty project of Canada Strong. We could call it national renewal to rebuild civic pride. What matters is that the poor need to get out of the way and let businesses build as they want, unimpeded, with full government support. Major projects will be announced, environmental concerns waived, indigenous rights pushed to the side, and protests squashed. The left are the issue, the ones to blame for getting in the way of good business. We must all work together to restore our national pride and increase the GDP.
We could talk of Austerity and corporate consolidation. As the workers are forced to sacrifice, as welfare is stripped, and the average person becomes yet more unable to afford food on the table and a roof over their head. Healthcare will be eroded and sold off; waterways will be privatized and ignored by a private corporation for profit. We all must sacrifice to keep the engine going, the engine that necessitates this crushing of the workers, the engine that ensures that the profits go to the rich, the austerity creating further problems that the next wave of austerity will promise to fix.
We could talk of abstractions from this framing. The racism, sexism, religious culture wars, and constant bickering that constantly assault your senses. We are told that foreigners are not the issue by the same people who will say they want to crack down on immigrants to solve the issue. We are told the antisemitism is a major issue by the same people who conflate anti-zionism with anti-semitism, thereby causing people to think that all jews are responsible for the actions of zionists. Women are told that their selectiveness and simultaneous whorishness are the problem by the same people who want to both strip them of their bodily autonomy and have casual sex with them.
As much as I find it cliché to talk of Orwell when it comes to real and serious business, you can understand why he said that you would be told to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Up is down; freedom is slavery; war is peace. The words and actions of the world become so discombobulating that it’s hard to make any sense of it all. When you ask a concise question, you will find a wall of words and abstractions so long and confusing that by the time you can figure out what they actually said, it is too late to realize that they never answered the question asked. The same will happen the next day, as well as the next, and the answers will come with a warm smile each time, enough to convince you that they actually think they’re trying to help.
It is natural then to go about your daily life, limit yourself to your own bubble, and find sanity. There is only one problem then: politics isn’t a game that some people play for fun. Politics is not people talking about things and sometimes passing a law. Politics is everything. It permeates every aspect of your life, every dollar you spend, every person you meet.
These wars are not something over there. This is real people with lives, dreams, families, friends, hobbies, joys, and beliefs getting murdered en masse. We have real politicians happy to ignore their own decision to reinforce armies that are eviscerating entire families of children who will show up home to find no loved ones and no house where their home was. This isn’t some other. This person, this child, is a reflection of you. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. The politicians who think it is OK to materially bolster as well as verbally support a country that just celebrated guards raping a prisoner on camera, then got caught in an uproar because they did not want to be denied the right to rape prisoners, are the same politicians making decisions about your rights.
Everyone knows what fascism is. Just ask them, they will tell you… something. It’s that bad thing that happened during WW2. What was the bad thing that happened at WW2? Well, you know, the Germans and the Holocaust. They were fine with containing and exterminating millions of people. This is true. The Nazis were also fascists before they did that. What were they doing before that? Well, that’s mysteriously forgotten. But let’s say the acceptance of an industrialized and militarized mass extermination campaign was the only thing that made them fascists. Our politicians are openly doing that right now.
This isn’t the first time either. After WW2, we backed the Korean War that killed 2 million Koreans in 3 years. We stayed with America for Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, the Congo, and more. We see this new wave of brutality now, the annihilation of humanity that we support for profit, and as much as we see it as new and devastating, this is what we do. Can we truly say that this is a new escalation? Maybe this is new in the sense that the state doesn’t even try to manufacture public consent anymore. Is going against democratic principles worse than mass murder programs? Going against democratic principles to bolster mass murder programs really isn’t new either. Maybe it’s just that we now have to see it.
The USA has MAGA, the glorification of the mythic past. It has ICE, which abducts undesirables, immigrants, off the street to send them to camps that we do not get reports from. They have gutted welfare for people who need it by implementing DOGE. It has tech billionaires surrounding the president at elections, openly backing and funding as they please. Alongside their allies, they pour massive amounts of money into undermining popular candidates to swing elections in favour of candidates that people don’t even know, and it works. They back a mass murder program. They invade and decapitate countries. They also install mass surveillance systems despite having massive disapproval from citizens and repeated lawbreaking by the owners of those surveillance systems. We get reports: fascism is a looming threat.
The UK is running elections on who can punish their undesirables, immigrants, harsher than the other. They have also been working on gutting their welfare even further than their already failed privatized waterways. As the UK has decided to back Israel in its mass extermination campaign of Palestinians, now including Iranian and Lebanese people, they decided the priority was to label Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. Palestine action has not killed anyone. They used this precedent to shut down and do mass arrests of peaceful protestors. It was found to be unlawful, then the government overruled it and kept the terrorist conviction in place. Recently, they invented a new legal precedent of not allowing defendants to describe their crimes, not telling the juries of what the sentences were. When the jury for Palestine Action activists found them guilty of criminal damage, the judge then convicted them of terrorism. This was not done for far right groups, and despite killing nobody (though injuring one officer), the activists were given far harsher sentences than far right members who murdered people. Starmer ran as a progressive, then, against the wishes of the voters, imposed this instead. We get reports: fascism is a looming threat.
In Canada, Mark Carney gave a good speech or two. Starting with his usual anti-communist talking points, he spoke of a world where we could recognize the old institutions as clearly unjust, not working, and proposed we should have a bold new strategy for the world with Canada leading the way. The bold new strategy was putting more faith in the old institutions and powers that be, and immediately backing the USA in a new war. He started off his government with strikebreaking to the point where it became the expected process for any high profile union going on strike. He is now looking into reducing the right to strike. He is full steam ahead on allowing more privatization of our public services, backing Doug Ford in openly corrupt development and lawbreaking, and stripping environmental protections and indigenous rights to allow more corporate development. We will do more austerity and we will lose our rights because this time, if we make it so that the government can pick private companies to make it so they don’t have to obey labour laws, we can solve class conflict through the image of a strong sovereign Canada in unity, and that will solve our problems. We are now running anti-immigration policy and deploying police armed with rifles to the streets in Toronto while expanding bubble zones where people are not allowed to protest. These actions are both explicitly and largely influenced by shutting down anti-Israel protests. We get reports: fascism is a looming threat.
A while ago I watched a video by Innuendo Studios that uses the story of the Rubicon, a river that Julius Caesar was not supposed to cross. He crossed it, triggering the Roman Civil War that he would go on to win. It’s really just a point of no return. He discusses this and the ‘rise’ of fascism by asking you what your Rubicon could be. Pick a line, and when that line gets crossed, you now have to call it fascism. Maybe having a billionaire throw up seig heils twice on stage while invited into the government? Maybe doing mass arrests of progressive protestors. Maybe allowing private corporations to ignore labour laws and cracking down on unions. Maybe arming and abetting an extermination campaign of Palestinians. Maybe allowing your allied countries to kidnap, sexually assault, and rape your citizens with no punishment for trying to bring the victims of that genocidal campaign aid. At what point are you forced to draw the line and say “this government cannot represent me or what I stand for.” At what point does it stop being more fascistic than last year and just become fascist.
Canada, the UK, and America are all completely incapable of taking a solid stance against an expansionary ethnostate colonial project determined to exterminate all of its neighbours. They all continued business as usual when Israel passed laws that would work with its already segregated legal systems to hand out the death penalty to Palestinians exclusively. They all had their different strategies. America would endorse a new war for Israel. The UK would send weapons and act as a base of operations for the war. Canada would block weapons to Israel, but not block sending the weapons to the states to go to Israel, and actively voted to keep this loophole open. Canada would block investigating where our weapons go and our complicity in war crimes. We talk big game of democracy and human rights, but the Palestine exception showed that the governments were and are more committed to shutting down any support for Palestine than they were and are to people’s rights. At the end of the day, questioning the backing of genocide is deemed more harmful than genocide itself.
The Epstein Files taught us in excruciating detail that billionaires can do whatever they want. Larger than just pedophilia, the island represents a spatial fix afforded to the ultra rich where they can live without the burden of any rules at all, all while they expect us to live with rules that they plan and impose on the rest of us in closed meetings we have no democratic access to. When we discovered this, it was a big story. It was overtly censored, with files redacting names of perpetrators but not victims, as well as pages taken down after being posted. In the end, where Israel shows that we will abandon all moral goals and commit genocide because it is politically expedient, the Epstein files and lack of subsequent punishment show that we live in a two tiered world, and there is no avoiding it.
As governments have panicked over the massive backlash of what they do to defend their wealthy donors and capital flow, instead of changing positions, they have decided to crack down. Data centres are pushed through relentlessly against the will of the people in the communities that don’t want them. It is promised as the future despite the fact that the population rejects it, but they ultimately have no choice. Like the Flock camera rollout, all consultations are pushed aside. As capital demands, we get data centres, camera monitoring, and a stripping of digital privacy to ensure people can be better held in line. Against all pretence of democratic process, these bills get rammed through by governments that know they don’t have to care for citizens who can’t hold them accountable.
We can revisit the boiled frog. The temperature constantly and slowly rising so that at each moment the frog does not realize. Eventually, the temperature gets too hot and the frog dies. Then the goldfish, where a boy asks a goldfish how the water is, the goldfish replies “what the hell is water?” Fascism is slowly boiling over, yes, as it comes for more and more people, as inequality crushes us, and as we find ourselves more and more likely to identify ourselves with something at odds with its constantly changing demands. Fascism is also something that we are so steeped in that we fail to realize that the process of fascism is as ingrained in our daily experience as the air we breathe without noticing. Sometimes it has a prettier face or a better speaker, but the results show that the crises we face are getting resolved in the same ways. Fascism is not around the corner. Fascism isn’t a looming threat we need to avoid. This is fascism. We are already here. They are hunting your neighbours to the last breath for standing for what is right. Act accordingly.
Funny fact about a cage, they’re never built for just one group
So when that cage is done with them and you’re still poor,
They’ll come for you
Oncle