Before dawn on January 3, the United States launched a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela during which its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped and flown out of the country. They were subsequently arraigned in a New York court on drug and weapons charges. Though there were no American deaths, at least 100 people were killed in the assault, including Venezuelan civilians and 32 Cubans.

Four days later, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, Jonathan E. Ross, fatally shot a 37-year-old American woman, Renée Nicole Good, three times in the face at point-blank range. Video analysis by the New York Times of “bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired.” Contrary to the claims put out by the Department of Homeland Security within two hours, this was a brutal murder—not self-defence.

What has any of this to do with Gaza? The short answer is: everything. For it was above all in Gaza that the new world order of which these are symptoms was forged.

The Donroe Doctrine

Later on January 3, Donald Trump told journalists that “We’re going to run the country [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”

With a nod to the Monroe Doctrine (which he has modestly renamed the “Donroe Doctrine”) of 1823, Trump warned that “Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force,” Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X, “But are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that. The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.”

By “steal our stuff” he meant Venezuela’s nationalization of foreign oil companies in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.

When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 aiming to depose President Gamal Abdel Nasser following his nationalization of the Suez Canal, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower pressured them to accept a United Nations ceasefire and voted for UN resolutions publicly condemning the invasion and approving the creation of a UN peacekeeping force. That was under the old post–Second World War “rules-based” order.

According to Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

Move fast and break things

As Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Trump made his determination not to have American hands tied by involvement in multilateral organizations, treaties, or agreements very clear from the get-go. On his first day in office, he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement.

Two weeks later he pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Council, prohibited any future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and ordered a review of US funding and involvement in the UN, including what he called the “anti-American” UNESCO (from which he would withdraw the US in July 2025).

Following that review, which was led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 7 this year Trump withdrew from a further “35 non-United Nations organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and “advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities.”

One of these was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which all other countries in the world belong. This frees up the US from any future international obligations regarding action on carbon emissions and global warming. Trump has long made it clear to the world that he proposes to “Drill, baby, drill!”

More recently (and very ominously), in the words of former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Trump has made “the momentous decision to constitute an alternative” to the UN, a so-called “‘board of peace’, with a remit for interventions far beyond Gaza, and with membership offered to about 60 favoured states, including Russia.”

That the UN opened the road for this when it cravenly endorsed Trump’s “Gaza Peace Plan” on November 17 is indicative of just how moribund the old order has become.

Triumph of the will

The invasion of Venezuela is not a one-off. Despite running on an anti-war platform, the use of force (or threat thereof) has been a defining feature of Trump’s presidency.

He has threatened to annex Greenland, “take back” the Panama Canal, and employ economic force to compel Canada to become “a cherished and beautiful 51st state.”

Notwithstanding his petulant lobbying for a “Noble Peace Prize” (like Obama) and his specious claim to have “ended eight wars,” in 2025 Trump bombed Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and the US has killed at least 112 people in strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Asked whether “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” J.D. Vance responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

On December 16 Trump declared “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela … Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” As of January 13, the US Navy had seized five tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump responded “We’re gonna keep it.”

Trump has now extended the blockade to Cuba, warning “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY [from Venezuela] GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He has also threatened to take military action in his quarrels with Mexico and Colombia. Nothing like showing them who’s boss.

Asked in a lengthy interview for the New York Times in January 2026 whether there was any limit on his powers, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me… I don’t need international law.”

A global protection racket

In a sharp reversal of the free trade consensus that has governed the world economy since the Second World War, Trump has imposed tariffs ranging from 10-41 percent on imports from all US trading partners, and certain goods (steel, aluminum, critical minerals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber) face higher levies. As I write, the legality of Trump’s use of tariffs is being litigated before the US Supreme Court.

On February 1, 2025 he imposed 25 percent tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, supposedly because neither country was doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl (and in Mexico’s case immigrants) across the US border. On March 24 he imposed 25 percent tariffs on all goods from countries that import Venezuelan oil—a tactic he extended on January 12, 2026 to “any country doing business with” Iran.

On July 30, 2025, Trump put tariffs on various goods from Brazil “due to Brazil’s actions regarding the prosecution of former President Bolsonaro, the regulation of online platforms, and other issues.” In August he imposed a whopping 50 percent tariff on India, which included a 25 percent punishment for continuing to buy Russian oil. In October he made a $20 billion line of credit to Argentina contingent upon his right-wing ally Javier Milei’s party winning the upcoming parliamentary elections.

On January 17 he threatened a 10 percent tariff, rising to 25 percent, on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland, which would “be due and payable until… a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”—despite having signed recent trade agreements with the UK and EU. Following pushback from European powers he backed down, announcing that talks with NATO chief Mark Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal.”

When French President Emmanuel Macron declined to join his Board of Peace, Trump threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and champagne.

It is clear that, irrespective of prior agreements or treaties, Trump will not hesitate to use economic means to achieve political ends. He’s running a global protection racket.

Strong-arming the courts

Not only has Trump flouted international law. He has gone out of his way to discredit international legal institutions, including the world’s two highest courts.

Accusing South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice” (ICJ) the Trump administration instituted a series of measures intended to discredit South Africa’s moral authority to bring the case, pressurize South Africa to drop it, and discourage other countries from joining it.

In February 2025, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for indicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes. ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan was the first victim. The US sanctioned four more judges on June 5, adding two more judges (one of them was Canadian justice Kimberly Prost) and two assistant prosecutors on August 20. Rubio sanctioned two more judges in December, and the administration is now leaning on the court to amend its guiding documents to exempt US citizens from its jurisdiction.

Such sanctions include an asset freeze, a prohibition on Americans doing business with sanctioned individuals, and a ban on their entering the United States. Unable to access the world banking system, victims—who also include UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—cannot even use credit cards or book a flight or a hotel online.

“The purpose is clear,” Prost told the Irish Times:

effectively, they are interfering directly with the independence of a judge. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the International Criminal Court’s independence as an institution.

Securing the home front

Trump has moved just as fast on the domestic front, in ways that test the legal limits of his executive power. His actions have resulted in at least 583 challenges in the courts. While lower courts have overturned many of his orders, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court—which previously gave him immunity for “actions relating to the core powers of his office”—has so far generally proved more compliant.

The administration took an axe to the federal government and its programs, with the loss of 317,000 jobs by the end of 2025. Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was created by executive order on Trump’s first day outside the normal machinery of government, was responsible for much of the early carnage. The now-defunct DOGE has been widely criticized as “illegal and unconstitutional.”

The 26 executive orders Trump signed on his first day—more than any previous US president—included a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government, attempts to limit birthright citizenship, and the declaration of a “national energy emergency” that has led to a bonfire of environmental regulations.

From removing over 8,000 government web pages related to DEI initiatives, “gender identity, public health research, environmental policy, and various social programs,” to excluding transgender soldiers from the military and athletes from women’s sports, waging a “war on science” and whitewashing how history is presented in the nation’s museums, Trump has used his executive powers to advance MAGA’s culture wars.

He also found time on his first day to unconditionally pardon almost all 1,600 rioters convicted in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and commute the sentences imposed on Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia members for seditious conspiracy. While this was within his powers as president, it shows scant respect for the courts. House Democrats are now asking how many of the rioters have joined ICE, which increasingly looks like Trump’s Gestapo.

The same contempt for the rule of law is shown by the fact that nearly a month after Congress set a deadline of December 19 for the release of all files relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump’s Department of Justice has made public only 12,285 out of over two million relevant documents, and many of these have been heavily redacted.

I am your retribution

Not content with stacking the governing bodies of public institutions from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center—to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with loyalists, Trump has good on his promise to his MAGA supporters that “I am your justice… I am your retribution.”

The president has purged the US military, the Justice Department, immigration judges, and at least 17 inspectors general (the independent watchdogs who oversee federal government departments). The list of those whose security clearances been revoked in retaliation for past actions deemed hostile to Trump is growing very long indeed.

Weaponizing the Justice Department, Trump has opened criminal investigations or prosecutions against, among others, Letitia James, Jack Smith, James Comey, John Bolton, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, John Brennan, and Jerome Powell, all of whom he has crossed swords with in the past. The administration’s response to pushback against the murder of Renée Good from elected city and state officials has been to issue subpoenas against Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey.

Trump has sanctioned big law firms (WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, Covington & Burling) because they represented clients of which he disapproved. Rather than face being shut out of business with federal agencies, excluded from federal buildings (including courtrooms), and losing security clearances, several firms have caved to Trump’s demands and promised millions in pro bono work to causes he supports.

Silencing speech

The administration has dismantled Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia and defunded PBS and NPR on grounds that the former has “a “leftist bias” and fails to project “pro-American” values and the latter do not offer “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

Trump removed Associated Press from the White House press pool and stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional power to decide which journalists have access to the president. In October, reporters from all but one news organization—including even the regime-friendly Fox News—turned in their Pentagon access badges rather than agree to new rules from Secretary of Defence (now styled “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth restricting what they were allowed to report.

Trump has personally sued, among others, ABC News (obtaining $15 million in an out-of-court settlement), the Daily Beast, CBS News (a $16 million settlement), the Des Moines Register, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is suing the BBC for defamation for no less than $10 billion, a sum that would bankrupt the UK’s public broadcaster (whose entire income in 2025 was £5.9 billion, or US$7.88 billion).

CBS cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert criticized Trump. The next month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel commented on the assassination of right-wing darling Charlie Kirk, leading Trump to muse: “They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” This is hardly a climate conducive to free speech.

Kneecapping the universities

A recent report by PEN America documents how:

From executive orders and memos, to investigations, the withholding of funds for research and financial aid, and efforts to detain, deport, or deny visas to international students and academics, the federal administration has weaponized every imaginable lever to bring the higher education sector to its knees.

The report instances more than 90 Title VI investigations, $3.7 billion in cuts from federal research dollars from previously awarded grants, and NIH and NSF funding cuts with an estimated annual cost of $10-15 billion in decreased US economic output.

The federal government has proposed suspending 38 universities including Harvard and Yale from a research partnership program because they engage in DEI hiring, fined UCLA $1.2 billion, and required that it not enrol “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.” Since January 2025 the State Department has revoked over 8,000 student visas, targeting in particular those who have taken part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Faced with these pressures many schools, including New York’s Columbia University, have traded academic freedom for federal dollars and accepted unprecedented political oversight of their hiring practices and the content of their research and teaching.

Others have resisted—up to a point. Though Harvard is suing the administration, it has suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

The cruelty is the point

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act allocated a mind-blowing $75 billion over four years (in addition to $10 billion already appropriated for 2025) to ICE to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. The law provided $45 billion to increase ICE detention capacity and $46.6 billion for the construction of border barriers and surveillance systems.

Advertising “You do not need an undergraduate degree,” a generous pay and benefits package, and a $50,000 signing bonus, ICE recruited 12,000 additional agents during 2025, expanding its workforce by 120 percent. Mobilizing “Uncle Sam” imagery, the ads are crafted to attract MAGA supporters, if not outright white nationalists.

DHS boasts that in 2025 “nearly three million illegal aliens… left the U.S.… including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations.” The conditions in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and other ICE detention centers are grim. A record 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025. The cruelty is the point—to strike fear.

An unknown number of those deported have not been given due process and in some cases have been sent to third countries with which they have no connection. In what is perhaps the most notorious case of denial of legal rights, the administration defied court orders and summarily deported 238 Venezuelan men to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, which is notorious for torture and “life-threatening prison conditions.”

ICE has conducted large-scale raids across the US aiming at 3,000 arrests per day. Though DHS claims its targets are “criminal illegal aliens across the country, including gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers,” ICE’s goons have rounded up people from factories, farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, churches, schools, and even immigration courts. In Minnesota Trump’s Gestapo are going from house to house, breaking down doors and arresting people. Seventy-five percent of those held by ICE in December had no criminal convictions. This is a reign of terror.

Trump has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, in the latter case to support ICE. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to dispatch troops to end the protests in Minnesota. “If I feel it’s important to invoke the Insurrection Act,” he told the New York Times, “I have the right to do pretty much what I want to do.” L’état, c’est moi.

Signs in the window

What has any of this to do with Gaza?

Invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the Czech greengrocer who places a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it, but to signal his conformity—and thereby helps reproduce the system that oppresses him—Mark Carney’s 2026 Davos speech showed rare honesty from a Western political leader:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful… So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

Then came Gaza. When the gaps became chasms.

When George H.W. Bush went to war with Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he sought and got authorization from the UN Security Council. When his son, George W. Bush, wanted to fight Saddam again in 2003, he and UK PM Tony Blair—the same Blair that is now on Trump’s “Board of Peace”—used fake intelligence to get support for going to war from the US Congress and UK Parliament. The UN was unpersuaded by their claims, but they went through the motions of playing by the rules before going ahead with a “coalition of the willing” anyway. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2024, Western powers, including the US, EU, UK, and Canada, responded with ever-escalating rounds of sanctions.

But with Gaza, it is different. As I have documented in more than 25 articles over the last two years, not only have Western governments, with the support of mainstream political parties and mass media across the political spectrum, armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for the genocide. They have thrown international law out of the window and perhaps fatally undermined the institutions that support it—the UN and its agencies, the ICJ, and the ICC. And they have sacrificed human rights and civil liberties at home, persecuting Israel’s critics under the specious banner of “combatting antisemitism.”

This was not Donald Trump’s doing. The responsibility lies squarely with Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Kamala Harris; with Rishi Sunak, David Cameron, Keir Starmer, David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper; with Justin Trudeau, Mélanie Joly, Anita Anand, and—it must be said—Mark Carney; with Emmanuel Macron, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. They dealt the final blows to the old order. Trump is just picking up where they left off.

Gaza’s revenge

Asked by Democracy Now! on December 26, 2025, to comment on “what’s happening in Gaza,” the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy replied:

What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it? And everybody’s sort of ambiguous—I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think, there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended. So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Trump’s triumph might be seen as Gaza’s revenge. Revenge for the West’s complicity in the worst crimes of the century. Revenge for its repeated trampling on international law. Revenge, above all, on the American Democrats who demanded everyone’s vote despite Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel and Kamala Harris’s refusal to break with his legacy—and told protestors against genocide to shut up because “I’m speaking!”

She is not speaking any more. Donald Trump is Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The imperial chickens are coming home to roost.

Derek Sayer is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History.

Canadian Dimension has decided to publish occasional French-language articles from progressive publications in Québec and elsewhere. We will continue to publish certain articles in translation but we’d also like to encourage our readers who are native French speakers, who are fluent in French or who are working on their French-language skills to read some articles in la langue de Molière.

Canadian Dimension tente l’expérience de publier ponctuellement des articles en français provenant de publications progressistes du Québec et d’ailleurs. Nous continuerons bien sûr à publier certains articles en traduction, mais nous aimerions également encourager nos lectrices et lecteurs francophones, ainsi que les personnes qui parlent couramment le français ou qui cherchent à améliorer leurs compétences en français, à lire certains articles dans la langue de Molière.

Si vous êtes de gauche, ou pensiez être de gauche, et que vous vous êtes extasié devant le discours de Mark Carney… on a un problème…

Ce discours est du bullshit premium. Du Davos-grade. Ça sonne “lucide”, “grave”, “historique”. Mais c’est surtout une opération de com pour vendre une ligne très simple: plus d’armement, plus d’extraction, plus de deals. Et un vernis moral pour que ça passe chez les centristes “progressistes”.

Carney commence avec les “valeurs”. Droits humains. Solidarité. Souveraineté. Intégrité territoriale. Ça fait propre. Puis il lâche une vérité qu’on connaît déjà: l’“ordre international fondé sur des règles” était une fiction. Il admet que “les plus forts s’exemptaient quand ça les arrangeait”. Il reconnaît que le droit international s’applique “avec une rigueur variable selon l’identité de l’accusé ou de la victime”. Donc il sait très bien comment ça marche. Mais il utilise cette lucidité comme décor. Pas comme engagement.

Le cœur du discours, c’est “vivre dans la vérité”. Il cite Havel et la “vie dans le mensonge”. Il raconte l’épicier qui affiche un slogan auquel personne ne croit, juste pour éviter les problèmes. Il dit qu’il faut retirer le panneau. Il dit qu’il faut arrêter de faire semblant. Et il promet le meilleur passage, celui qui fait applaudir les gens: “Apply the same standards to allies and rivals.” Appliquer les mêmes standards aux alliés et aux rivaux. Très bien. Parfait. Maintenant, qu’il le fasse.

Sauf qu’il ne le fait pas. Jamais. Il ne donne aucun exemple où le Canada appliquerait la même exigence à un allié puissant. Pire: il prouve l’inverse en direct. Il parle de l’Ukraine, clairement. Il dit que le Canada est au cœur d’une coalition et un gros contributeur par habitant à sa défense. Mais dans tout ce discours, il dit zéro fois Palestine. Zéro. Pas Gaza. Pas Cisjordanie. Pas occupation. Pas colonies. Rien.

Donc son “même standard”, c’est du bullshit. Quand ça vise un adversaire géopolitique, il brandit le droit, la souveraineté, l’intégrité territoriale. Quand ça concerne un allié, il efface le sujet. Et c’est exactement la définition de “living within a lie”.

Ensuite il vend un virage sécuritaire sous un nom cool: “values-based realism”. Traduction simple: on garde le vocabulaire des valeurs, mais on fait du rapport de force. Il le dit presque tel quel: on ne compte plus seulement sur la force de nos valeurs, mais sur “the value of our strength”. Donc la valeur, au final, c’est la puissance. Le reste, c’est du storytelling.

Après, il déroule le programme réel. Baisse d’impôts sur revenus, gains en capital, investissement. Fast-track d’un trillion en énergie, IA, minéraux critiques, corridors commerciaux. Et surtout, doublement des dépenses de défense d’ici 2030. Avec la liste qui va avec: radars, sous-marins, avions, troupes. C’est un projet d’économie de guerre soft, présenté comme une modernisation responsable. C’est ça le tour de passe-passe: faire passer une stratégie de puissance pour une stratégie de justice.

Il se présente aussi comme l’anti-hégémon, mais il construit un bloc. Il parle de “coalitions” et de “variable geometry”. En clair: on contourne les institutions quand elles deviennent gênantes, et on fait des clubs entre pays “compatibles”. Sur les minéraux critiques, il propose des “buyer’s clubs anchored in the G7”. Ça veut dire cartel d’acheteurs du G7 pour contrôler les règles du jeu. On appelle ça “résilience” et “standards partagés”. Mais c’est de la géoéconomie de puissance. Point.

Même son passage sur le “monde de forteresses” est hypocrite. Il critique les forteresses, puis il explique qu’il faut “strategic autonomy”, sécuriser l’énergie, l’alimentation, les minerais, les chaînes logistiques, la finance. Il décrit une forteresse, mais il la renomme. Il dit que c’est “partagé” et “efficace”. C’est la forteresse en costume.

Le résultat, c’est un discours qui veut te faire croire qu’il “nomme la réalité”. Mais il la nomme seulement quand ça sert son camp. Il promet l’universalité des droits, puis il sélectionne les victimes qui comptent. Il fait de grands sermons sur la cohérence, puis il évite le test le plus évident: la Palestine. Et il remplace le vieux slogan “rules-based order” par un nouveau slogan “values-based realism”. Même double standard. Même logique. Juste un rebranding pour que ça sonne intelligent.

Et le plus révoltant, c’est de voir des universitaires et des figures “progressistes” applaudir ce texte comme s’il s’agissait d’un moment historique, presque d’une fierté nationale. Sérieusement, ils ne sont pas tannés de se faire avoir par du storytelling de bourgeois en costume, emballé dans des mots comme “valeurs” et “droits humains” pendant qu’on prépare la militarisation et qu’on signe des deals? À force de crier au génie devant ce néolibéralisme impérialiste rebrandé en lucidité, ils finissent par être autre chose que naïfs: ils deviennent les attachés de presse bénévoles de la classe dominante.

Cet article a initialement été publié sur le blog À Gauche, qui propose des interviews de personnalités et de militants de gauche, ainsi que des extraits de réflexions et d’idées de gauche.

In downtown Toronto, whether it’s the chime of an app alert or the hum of two wheels weaving through rush-hour traffic, the faces you see delivering food, stocking shelves, and filling low-wage shifts are disproportionately South Asian migrants. What official discourse calls an “international student crisis” is not primarily a crisis of numbers, but a crisis of labour: a structurally produced, politically managed supply of cheap, precarious workers that Canada’s universities, employers, and state have come to depend on. As federal policy has turned post-secondary education into a revenue engine and work restrictions wax and wane with labour market needs, hundreds of thousands of international students have been funnelled into the gig economy, warehouses, kitchens, and service jobs that remain deeply undervalued, yet essential to the functioning of everyday life.

The frenzy over “unchecked” migration obscures this reality. Rather than a spontaneous influx of opportunistic newcomers, the recent growth in international student numbers reflects a carefully engineered labour strategy. Students are touted as economic windfalls—high tuition fees that prop up cash-strapped institutions and workers who fill staffing gaps big and small—yet their precarity is treated as incidental to policy. Poverty wages, debt-financed migration, and the threat of falling out of status are cast as the expected price of pursuing an education here, even as the state and corporations quietly rely on these same workers to power sectors that Canadian workers increasingly shun.

Yet even as international students have become hyper-visible in Canada, their categorization now unknowingly, and quite deceptively, includes those who could not continue their education for various reasons, those who have graduated, and those who have become undocumented. In 2023-2024 alone, nearly 7,000 media articles mentioned international students. Yet this heightened visibility obscures more than it reveals. Much of the furor surrounding South Asian migrants obscures how the figure of the recent South Asian migrant, often collapsed into the label of the “international student,” has become a testing ground for the expansion of precarious and gig labour, as well as for the consolidation of Canadian nationalist sentiment. While the relationship between capital and the nation is complex and contested, their overlapping interests demand a closer reading of the catch-all term “international student,” which deliberately masks questions of labour, class position, and exploitation.

The ‘other’ in the new Canadian nationalist wave

The resurgence of Canadian nationalism in the past year—ostensibly a response to US tariffs—has intensified racial and class anxieties. For the first time since Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada began polling in 1996, a majority of Canadians say there are too many immigrants coming to the country. For the first time, debates about international students featured prominently in the 2025 Canadian federal election campaigns, with both Conservatives and Liberals advocating cuts to international student intake. Public discourse frequently positions recent South Asian migrants or international students as contributors to rising housing prices, job scarcity, and a perceived lack of cultural integration.

So-called “Canada first” rhetoric purports to prioritize the welfare of Canadian nationals. Addressing a press gathering in 2024, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre described the “international student crisis” by stating, “It’s not about immigration; it’s about math.” His claim that the housing crisis necessitates a crackdown on migration obscures structural issues such as corporate greed and the reality that the housing crisis is not caused by immigrant students, many of whom live eight to 15 people in an apartment. Nonetheless, the simplicity of reactionary rhetoric appears compelling, as it suggests that there are simply not enough resources to go around.

This framing also obscures a more uncomfortable truth: the state is not merely failing to manage international student migration but actively relying on it. Senior federal officials have openly acknowledged that international students fill labour shortages in retail, food service, logistics, and other low-wage sectors, while paying exorbitant tuition fees that subsidize underfunded institutions. In this managed system of extraction, students are simultaneously framed as a strain on public resources and quietly relied upon to sustain both the labour market and the post-secondary education system.

Alarmingly, South Asian international students are also being used as a rallying issue for recruitment and organizing by the far-right in Canada. A rising coalition of white supremacist Canadian groups known as Diagolon launched a hate campaign targeting Indian students. Between 2023 and 2024, right-wing social media platforms such as 4chan, Gab, and Rumble (a video platform that officially hosted the Republican primary debates) saw increases of 122, 251, and 6,300 percent respectively in hate speech targeting Indians. Jeremy Mackenzie, founder of Diagolon, frequently tells his followers that Indians will “take over Canada,” invoking what is known as Great Replacement Theory and using phrases such as “Canindia” and “Canada is no more,” claiming that “Indian criminals” are replacing white Canadians.

In response, liberal and progressive discourses have pointed out the fallacy of these claims and emphasized the contributions international students make to the Canadian economy. In 2022, international students contributed approximately $37.3 billion through tuition, housing, and other expenses. International students pay more than five times the tuition of domestic students and have helped offset provincial funding cuts to education. During the pandemic, restrictions on the number of hours international students could work, typically capped at 20 hours per week, were lifted, and these students were encouraged to serve as essential labourers, while Canadians were asked to stay home. There is a distinct and convenient collective amnesia at play in the public discourse that moved from praising international students as frontline workers during the pandemic to positing them as “job stealers.” Progressive discourse has also focused on a new wave of racial tensions and harassment on university campuses.

What does it mean to think about the “international student crisis” from the left? First, a transnational and transhistorical perspective on student migration has been largely absent. Second, labour has often been treated as secondary to immigration and racial equity, rather than as integral to both. Thinking of this crisis from the left means moving away from treating international students’ precarity as a novel and isolated phenomenon and instead situating the current crisis within the longer history of the global circuit of capital, labour, and migration. It also demands centring labour as a constitutive site of struggle, one through which immigration regimes and racial hierarchies are actively produced and contested, not merely intersected.

A brief history of migration politics and the Indian subcontinent

Understanding the current international student crisis requires tracing the different phases of migration from the Indian subcontinent and the class dynamics that have shaped diaspora formations. Unlike large-scale migration from India to the United States, which has often been socially and economically privileged, Canada’s South Asian diaspora is older and deeply entwined with histories of colonialism and indentureship. This also includes migrations of people of Indian descent from British colonies such as Kenya, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago.

In Canada, South Asians, primarily Sikhs, arrived in the early 20th century as British subjects and faced numerous colonial immigration policies, including the disenfranchisement of natives of India not of Anglo-Saxon parentage in 1907, and the “Continuous Journey” regulation of 1908. In the 1960s, racial criteria in the Immigration Act were removed to meet economic demands, enabling the migration of skilled professionals who benefited from a new points-based system centred on occupation, skills, health, and language.

Nonetheless, during what is known as the “long 60s” of leftist political movements—that is, from the rise of Third Worldism at the Bandung Conference in 1955, through the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976—there was a distinct class consciousness among South Asian migrants and a desire for cross-racial class solidarities, especially among Punjabi farm workers. First-generation Punjabi workers drew clear connections between class struggles in South Asia and their new workplaces and social contexts. The East Indian Defence Committee, founded in 1973 to counter increasing racist attacks on South Asian migrants in Vancouver and Toronto, emerged under Marxist leadership that openly criticized upper-class South Asian community leaders and highlighted the entanglements of racism, classism, and the settler nation. Similarly, South Asian workers participated in the Afro-Asian Latin American Solidarity Committee in Montréal. While the diaspora was heterogeneous in language, class, caste, and migration pathways, migrants from the Indian subcontinent forged strong connections to global class struggles.

Beginning in the 1980s, with Canada’s neoliberalization, there was a shift in migration patterns from India. Canada increasingly attracted relatively wealthy immigrants from the Indian subcontinent until the late 2010s, with the exception of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. This period also marked the emergence of international students as a distinct migrant category. From the early 1980s, Canada implemented differential tuition fees for international students, attracting primarily wealthy students and reshaping public perception of international students as affluent foreigners, rather than as beneficiaries of foreign aid. In the 1990s and 2000s, post-secondary institutions aggressively recruited international students. A 2012 national report declared international education is “a more valuable export than unwrought aluminum or helicopters and airplanes.” Canada’s 2014 strategy called for institutions to double the number of international students by 2022, reaching over 450,000. During this period, there was also large-scale migration of tech workers from India. More than 80,000 tech jobs were created in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, which was said to be more than in San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC combined.

Over the past decade, however, migration patterns have shifted again. Since the late 2010s, rising unemployment, the persecution of minorities, the drug epidemic in parts of India, and geopolitical unrest across Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have contributed to new waves of migration from more diverse economic backgrounds. In the last few years, new private and often fraudulent post-secondary institutions have emerged, attracting many students from working class and rural backgrounds who have sold land and other family assets to migrate in search of a better life. There has since been a crackdown on these institutions, leading to closures that have left students stranded and with little recourse for justice.

According to a 2024 CBC report, funeral workers at the Lotus Funeral and Cremation Centre in Etobicoke, raised the alarm about rising suicide rates among recent migrants from the Indian subcontinent. The fact that the funeral home repatriates the remains of five to seven student workers every month attests to an epidemic that is largely ignored by both society and the state, and to the unbearable financial and social pressures these workers face. This new working class migrant group forms part of a global proletariat and offers new ways of thinking about left politics.

Labour and ‘international students’

International students now constitute a significant segment of Canada’s cheap labour force. From gig work and Amazon warehouses to factories and fast-food restaurants, they are often willing or compelled to work for less than minimum wage. These labourers are intentionally deskilled to remain disposable. Amazon, for example, uses algorithms to organize and manage labour processes, breaking work into simplified and standardized tasks that render workers easily replaceable. Gig work, such as Uber Eats delivery, offers a false promise of flexibility that appears suitable for students; yet most work 10-12 hours a day to make a living, waiting in the busiest parts of the city for their next order on the app and being paid only when they are actively delivering food. They are pitted against one another, constantly competing through algorithmic management while accepting wages below the legal minimum.

There is an urgent need to apply critical pressure to the category of “international students” from a labour perspective. The student designation allows both the public and workers themselves to frame exploitation as a temporary and expected phase of youth. In reality, these workers include graduates, those who are forced to discontinue their education due to financial hardship, and refugees working full-time as cheap labourers. In Toronto’s downtown core, for example, Uber Eats delivery workers range in age from their late-twenties to late-forties. The association of precarious immigration status with the economic, psychological, and social conditions implied by the category of “student” produces a highly exploitable labour subject. The focus on their status as students positions them as a special case and thereby further obscures their role in the nexus of capitalist labour.

Upon closer examination, what is often described in this manufactured common-sense narrative as “unchecked” large-scale immigration appears aligned with the provision of crucial material resources to national and capitalist interests. As economic and political tides continue to shift, these recent student migrants have borne the brunt of anger, including from other working class communities and from established South Asian diasporas. Rather than simply lamenting the crackdown on students, this moment presents new possibilities for organizing and cross-racial working class solidarities.

Centring the class position of international students, rather than their student status, places them in a longer historical arc of migrant labour, allowing paths to be forged alongside racialized and non-racialized workers. As transient gig work and transnational capital jostle for cheaper labour and more precarious conditions, this opens new avenues of struggle that do not rely solely on the exceptional circumstances of college shutdowns or shifting immigration rules. Critically, this rethinking allows for what is inevitably needed to confront the ever-expanding corporate hegemony and austerity agendas: the reimagining of labour struggles and the building of collective working class organizing.

Samuel Nithiananthan is a Toronto-based community organizer focused on housing, labour, and working class issues.

Sheetala Bhat is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English at York University. She specializes in South Asian culture and politics, global Hindu nationalism, migration and diaspora, and Indigenous theatre in Canada.

I have worked as a letter carrier at Canada Post for eight years. It’s the only union job I’ve ever had, and I have had plenty of jobs. Gas jockey. Dishwasher. Telemarketer. Burger flipper. You name a low-paying, thankless career and I have probably worked it. So, I am acutely aware, and thankful for, the reasonably good pay, job security and work conditions which I have enjoyed thanks to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

That is why it is so disheartening to see the current state of the labour movement, where government, corporations, and to some extent even the unions themselves, are committed to a neoliberal philosophy which increasingly diminishes the ability of workers to stand up to the powers that be.

My disillusionment about the state of the labour movement began with my own union. In December 2024, CUPW had an opportunity to do something historic. We were nearly a year into our latest contract negotiations, and the corporation was insisting on massive rollbacks to the working conditions for letter carriers. Canada Post claimed it was suffering major losses, though such accounting has been the subject of some debate, and to offset those losses we would need to adopt the ways of our competitors like Amazon. Essentially it boiled down to cramming a heavier workload into the days of labourers who were already highly susceptible to on-the-job injuries due to their strenuous workdays. In Canada, postal workers represent one of the top-four sectors that routinely suffer the highest number of disabling injuries, according to the most recent federal data from Employment and Social Development Canada.

Rightly, the union would not abide these impositions. When it was clear the corporation would not budge on their demands, union membership overwhelmingly voted to strike. For several weeks on the picket line we made our stand, buttressed by a good deal of public support. Morale amongst the picketers was strong despite the oncoming deepfreeze of a Canadian winter. Everything was as it should be when a group of workers decide to stand firm against deteriorating working conditions.

The cynics amongst us knew what was coming as December rolled around. We had seen this the last time CUPW had dared to strike during the Christmas rush, and we had also seen it imposed upon rail workers by the Trudeau government just a few months before our strike. Back-to-work legislation was coming which would effectively end our labour action.

Sure enough, that is exactly what the Trudeau Liberals did. Some may argue that in this particular case, it only paused the strike so that an industrial inquiry could be conducted to determine the best course of action to secure the future of the post office. But such arguments are naïve, especially considering the unsurprising result of the inquiry only granted Canada Post a mandate to claw back working conditions even further. The point is that the back-to-work legislation broke the strike’s momentum, diminishing public support and erasing the union’s leverage.

But it didn’t have to be that way. Union members were ready to defy the back-to-work order and decried it as an unconstitutional subversion of our right to bargain with our employer. Many voices called for CUPW to stay on the picket line and show that our right to negotiate a fair contract on our own terms was not to be compromised by the whims of the government. We will never know exactly how much support there was for such an initiative, because the union neglected to conduct an official poll amongst membership to ascertain what the appetite for such action was. Instead, CUPW meekly followed the back-to-work order, tacitly accepting that we can only conduct collective bargaining at the convenience and under the conditions of the very institutional powers we are bargaining against.

Many of CUPW’s 55,000 members were aghast at the union leadership’s decision to stand down. Historically, the power of the labour movement has always been derived from a willingness to engage in civil disobedience. But if the union leadership will not stand with you, the movement fractures, and what hope do you have?

Months later there appeared to be a glimmer of hope for people who believed that unions could still take such revolutionary actions. The flight attendants who worked for Air Canada, represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, similarly had their strike broken through back-to-work legislation, this time under current Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney. But the flight attendants, seemingly with the support of CUPE, did what postal workers did not. They defied the back-to-work order and their strike continued.

For a couple of days it was an inspiring scene. Union leaders boldly declared that not only were they undeterred by any fines which might be imposed upon them, they were even willing to go to jail if need be. Picketers held the line and the public largely marvelled at the brave stand they were taking, now not only for fair treatment from their employers, but from a government far too zealous about interfering in labour disputes as well.

It did not take long, however, for the heroic words of CUPE leadership to be shown as largely performative. A hurried deal was struck between union leadership and the employer that would immediately send the flight attendants back to work, even though it did not achieve the working conditions which the vast majority of the workers were striking for. The strike revolved around a demand to end the policy of only being paid for labour performed during the flight, but union brass caved and agreed to a deal which would still see significant amounts of unpaid labour on the ground.

Worse, the deal was structured in such a way that the union would not have an opportunity to vote to ratify the contract with respect to working conditions. They were only allowed to vote on the proposed wage scale in the deal, which was rejected by a staggering 99 percent of voting members—a figure which we can reasonably presume demonstrates discontent not only with the wage scale, but with the entire contract being forced upon them. And after such a show of displeasure, under the deal they would still not be allowed to resume their strike. Union leadership agreed to terms whereby this massive rebuke could only result in sending the matter of the wage scale to binding arbitration. Workers had no choice but to return to work under similar working conditions to those they had been fighting against. Union leadership had quashed their own strike action and then celebrated it as a victory.

CUPE and CUPW failed their memberships, and it is clear they did so out of fear for treading against the institution they were principally founded to oppose. These unions have grown old and large, institutions unto themselves, and have forgotten that the grassroots civil disobedience on which they were founded often required straying outside the legal framework the powers that be employ to quell the unrest of the labour movement.

This is unacceptable, because we need unions to be dynamic in this climate where governments largely serve the corporate class. The idea that a union can rely on the government to be a fair arbitrator between labour and capital has always been somewhat naïve in any jurisdiction. But now especially in Canada, where not only the federal, but also provincial levels of government have shown that they are ready to bust a union’s labour action.

Take the draconian way that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith ended the teacher’s strike in her province, by invoking the “notwithstanding clause” which allows a government to override certain Charter rights for up to five years. Smith used this measure to shield a bill passed by her government from legal challenges. The bill imposed a contract onto the teachers that they had already rejected during the bargaining process, rendering the union unable to go on fighting for better terms.

Or rather, it rendered them unable to fight on the terms set by the very government they were bargaining with. It has become clear that here in Canada, and anywhere that governments and corporations conspire to prop up the endless growth model of corporate capitalism by scaling back working conditions and wages for workers, that unions need to be willing to take more drastic actions. They need to be ready to defy back-to-work orders. Willing to engage in acts of civil disobedience which acknowledge that what is legal is not always what is right. Prepared to endure a public relations assault which casts them as lazy, greedy and disruptive.

In the wake of the Alberta teachers being forced back to work, there were grumblings amongst local unions of organizing a general strike. These, unsurprisingly, turned out to be performative bluster, with union leadership deciding instead to conduct a survey about how much appetite there was for some future hypothetical mass walkout. This is another sign that union leadership shares the mindset of the governments they are supposed to oppose, who love nothing more than to conduct studies and consultations on initiatives they have no interest in addressing any more seriously than kicking the can down the road.

Our unions have become sluggish and scared when we need them to be decisive and fearless. Unions were founded as a way for labour to stand up to the institutions that exploit them. But if they reject the subversive tactics of the past then they are in danger of becoming yet another appendage of those same oppressive institutions. It’s time for them to remember their roots.

Alex Passey is a science fiction and fantasy novelist from Winnipeg.

Given the rising tide of anti-Indigenous politics in Canada, it is crucial to pay close attention to how the far-right is deliberately weaponizing misinformation about residential schools to undermine truth and reconciliation. What might appear, at first glance, as isolated controversies or “debates” about historical facts are better understood as part of a coordinated political strategy aimed at eroding public confidence in Indigenous testimony, survivor truth, and the legitimacy of reconciliation itself.

As I have argued previously, and as recent events in British Columbia make abundantly clear, residential school denialism is not simply about disputing aspects of the historical record. It is a form of political propaganda. Drawing from the American far-right playbook, denialists seek to “flood the zone” with misleading claims, half-truths, and bad-faith arguments—overwhelming public discourse to the point where confusion replaces accountability, and doubt supplants well-established evidence. In this environment, even firmly documented truths become framed as “controversial,” while Indigenous nations are recast as untrustworthy or manipulative actors.

OneBC’s documentary Making a Killing exemplifies this strategy. Marketed as a provocative exposé, the film is in fact a piece of political propaganda designed to shake public confidence in residential school history and stoke anti-Indigenous resentment for political gain. By recycling far-right talking points, misrepresenting the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and narrowing the definition of genocide to suit its ideological ends, the documentary aims to convince viewers that reconciliation itself is built on a lie—and therefore should be abandoned.

To help people better recognize how this strategy works, I joined the Redeye podcast to discuss Making a Killing, its political context, and the broader growth of residential school denialism in Canada. As the conversation below makes clear, this denialism is not confined to fringe actors. It is increasingly being taken up by elected officials and mainstream political figures, particularly on the far-right, as part of a wider project to legitimize anti-Indigenous racism and defend the settler-capitalist status quo.

As I explain in greater detail in the interview that follows, we share an ethical responsibility to confront and counter this harmful wave of denialism. Reconciliation is not a matter of belief or opinion—it is a relationship grounded in truth. Allowing that truth to be deliberately distorted for political profit risks poisoning that relationship and deepening the injustices that reconciliation was meant to address.

Redeye (RE): This is the Redeye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon PST at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland in British Columbia.

On the podcast today, Sean Carleton of the University of Manitoba on the OneBC documentary Making A Killing and the growth of residential school denialism in Canada.

On December 2, the OneBC Party released its documentary Making A Killing: Reconciliation, Genocide, and Plunder in Canada. Since then, the writer and producer of the film, OneBC Chief of Staff Tim Thielmann, has been fired along with two other senior staff. MLA Dallas Brodie, who apparently carried out the purge, has herself been removed as interim party leader.

But the documentary lives on with Dallas Brodie voicing Thielmann’s script and interviewing all the guests. Two weeks after it was posted on YouTube, the film had over 360,000 views. Sean Carleton joins me today to talk about the film.

He’s a professor of history and indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, and he joins me today from Winnipeg.

Sean Carleton (SC): Hello, thanks for having me.

RE: I’m really happy we were able to connect. The film incorporates a whole mishmash of far-right memes, but what would you say is the central message?

SC: I think the best way to understand the documentary is as a form of political propaganda. It’s a promotional video for OneBC that openly and proudly engages in anti-Indigenous racism, residential school denialism, and debunked conspiracy theories to build and push the party’s brand by appealing to some British Columbians’ fear and growing resentment towards Indigenous people. The film uses the distortion of residential school truth as a vehicle to promote anti-Indigenous hate and the OneBC political brand.

RE: What does it want us to believe?

SC: Making a Killing wants Canadians to think they have been guilted into caring about Indigenous people based on a lie. If the foundation of reconciliation is a lie, then Canadians can feel good about abandoning reconciliation and stop worrying about building a better relationship with Indigenous peoples. That’s what is being manufactured in this documentary, a sort of disbelief in Indigenous people, an open embrace of anti-Indigenous politics, and the willingness to profit from misinformation in the form of a political party such as OneBC.

It’s not just OneBC that’s engaging in this kind of politics, but they’re trying to use this film as a way of garnering support and growing that resentment politics to poison the political relationship between British Columbians and Indigenous nations.

RE: What is the solution that Brodie and Thielmann propose to this problem? What do they say we should do?

SC: By the end of the film, the solution is to support OneBC, to support not only its anti-Indigenous policies, but also anti-LGBTQ2+ politics, anti-immigration politics, and so on. It’s using residential school denialism to push this simple formula: British Columbia needs a far-right party that is going to stand up for white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and OneBC is the only party that will. In this way, we can see the film for what it is: political propaganda. It’s not just a curious documentary, trying to get to the truth. It’s trying to appeal to fear by using a whole host of disingenuous tactics that are meant to foment anti-Indigenous racism and cash in on it politically.

RE: What are some of those disingenuous tactics that you saw in the film?

SC: It’s important to point out that the tactics of the film are not new. It’s really just a recycling of a lot of the popular far-right misinformation about Indigenous people generally, about reconciliation, but specifically about residential schooling in Canada. It’s textbook residential school denialism. If you pay attention to some of the sources that are being used, it’s Rebel News, True North, Western Standard, all of these far-right extremist internet platforms, and interviewing the most prominent voices in the residential school denialist movement.

There’s no effort at unbiased presentation of evidence. Actually, the best way to really understand what’s going on is if you skip to the end, you learn everything that you need to know about the reliability of the information being presented. There’s a credit that says: “no guarantee is made regarding the accuracy, completeness or current viability of the information presented.” That’s pretty telling.

None of the information is rigorous, peer-reviewed, nuanced, or expert knowledge supported by evidence. They admit that, but only at the end in the credits.

What’s really going on, then, is this deeply unethical, deliberately disingenuous presentation of cherry-picked information meant to promote and foment politically-useful hate. They are harvesting hate.

RE: They actually have an interview with a former residential school teacher.

SC: Yes, who they don’t identify. They allow this person, unchallenged, to say that everything was fine and the system was great. That’s a deeply unethical way of engaging with the evidence of the system.

They’re not the first to do this. They’re using a lot of the information and tactics from other far-right publications, such as Grave Error. For example, one of the tricks the film plays early on is it contends that Canada is being charged with the “mass murder” of Indigenous children. What they’re doing is they’re making a false equivalence between the fact that children died in residential schools—and church and state records have already confirmed more than 4,000 deaths—and mass murder. It’s a sleight of hand. That’s actually not what Indigenous nations or even the TRC concluded.

There is also a narrowing of the meaning of genocide to only mass death events, which is not how the United Nations defines genocide. Attacks on group life can take various forms, including removing children from the group or undermining cultural life—which is why the TRC used that term. But the film presents a simplistic understanding of “genocide equals mass murder” and then proceeds to question evidence of mass murder and therefore the applicability of the term genocide. That is the kind of deliberate twisting going on in the film; it’s a misrepresentation of what the TRC and Indigenous nations, including Kamloops, have proven already.

We know, for example, that there are confirmed deaths at Kamloops. Confirmed by church and state records, approximately 50. But, like other residential school teams, the nation’s doing additional investigation, including things like ground-penetrating radar, but also working with religious groups to gain access to more records that were not given to the TRC. They’re not the only nation doing this work. In Williams Lake, after the Kamloops announcement, the Oblates and Williams Lake team worked together to make 50,000 additional records accessible and those records have confirmed that the death rate in that school was three times higher than the TRC reported.

What Making a Killing is trying to do is shake public confidence in residential school truth and the truth of survivors to derail reconciliation efforts. It is part of the strategy of “flooding the zone” as a form of political propaganda that we’ve talked about before. What OneBC wants is to keep us stuck in the colonial cul-de-sac. The film is a really good example of how people are disingenuously engaging in debate, discussion, and dialogue about residential schools as a way of undermining truth and reconciliation and protecting that colonial status quo.

RE: You use the term propaganda and we tend to kind of throw that term around. What does it actually mean?

SC: In this sense, it’s really about presenting biased or misleading communication, often appealing to emotion, and using it to promote a specific agenda. Its goal is persuasion, not education. Propaganda often relies on tactics such as selectively presenting facts and deploying emotionally charged language—such as claiming there is a “blood libel” against Canada for the “mass murder” of Indigenous children—when that is not what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Indigenous nations are saying.

That’s the wilful twisting and deliberate appeal to emotion to try and persuade people that OneBC is the answer to stand up against the so-called “reconciliation industry.” When in reality, OneBC and many of the people interviewed in the film are part of the anti-Indigenous industry in Canada that is publishing books and articles and monetizing misinformation. Of course, we also need to talk about the fact that OneBC, which is now in turmoil, essentially siphoned off taxpayer money from its caucus funds to make this film.

They claim to stand up for democracy and accountability but here they are using tricks to essentially create a new party and get all of this public money and use it to make building relationships with Indigenous people harder.

Regardless of where you stand politically, the damage that is being done by this film—and denialist propaganda like it—makes it harder for anyone to work with Indigenous people, and since they’re the original people of these lands, they’re not going anywhere. It’s making that relationship much more difficult and risking the future for many British Columbians in the process. Reconciliation is a relationship. If we continue to poison that relationship, it’s going to make for turbulent times ahead.

RE: OneBC has now imploded as a party but Dallas Brodie and Tara Armstrong are still MLAs. Are these kind of views represented by other sitting MLAs?

SC: I think there’s a risk right now in seeing Dallas Brodie or Tara Armstrong as aberrations. Instead, they’re symptoms of a larger problem. When we dig a little deeper, we can see many politicians across the country, and in British Columbia in particular, who have been engaging in this residential school denialism. Many of them are on the far-right.

It’s not just OneBC. In fact, British Columbia Conservative MLAs like Sheldon Clare, who represents Prince George-North Cariboo, or Brent Chapman who represents Surrey South, have recently engaged in similar anti-Indigenous rhetoric.

Even John Rustad, former BC Conservative Leader, regularly promotes far-right residential school denialist talking points. This is a sign of not just the incursion of far-right American thinking—we need to see the problem as being much bigger.

If we think of people like Aaron Gunn, who is the MP for North Island—Powell River, he’s been working with the far-right, getting money from people in Alberta, trying to shift the politics in British Columbia, particularly in the rural areas, away from a sort of working class, NDP-supporting social democratic politics to increasingly a far-right politics, openly supportive of white supremacy and Christian nationalism and exploitive settler capitalism at every turn.

I think we do ourselves a disservice, then, to think of these people as exceptions, when in reality, there are a lot of people espousing these kinds of beliefs and trying to make it more legitimate. We see this recently in the open call to now repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), for example, whereas a year ago that would have seemed absurd. This is the result of the slow creep of anti-Indigenous politics lurking behind things like residential school denialism.

Increasingly, anti-Indigenous politics is just one plank in a growing far-right strategy. This also includes climate denial, anti-trans issues, and anti-migration rhetoric. We need to be vigilant so that this does not take root. We need to figure out ways to build better relationships with Indigenous peoples and create a stronger future for all British Columbians and Canadians.

RE: How can we push back against this anti-Indigenous racism, especially as courts increasingly recognize Indigenous rights that were long denied? For example, there have been recent rulings requiring reforms to British Columbia’s Mineral Tenure Act, as well as decisions involving the Cowichan Tribes and disputed land in Richmond.

SC: As a historian of British Columbia, I can tell you that the federal government tried to warn BC against the perils of not signing treaties with Indigenous nations and disregarding the land situation in the 1870s, when BC was admitted to Confederation. Colonial officials like Joseph Trutch preferred a more aggressive approach of just asserting sovereignty and then selling the land as the economic backbone of the new province.

Well, guess what? That was not a good idea. And now, chickens are coming home to roost.

While there are many problems with the treaty process, including where I live here in Manitoba, British Columbia is unique. Indigenous nations didn’t consent to Britain nor Canada’s assertion of sovereignty. Most weren’t even informed.

What I think a lot of political voices today are trying to do, as people like Khelsilem have pointed out, is capitalize on fear and propose particular kinds of solutions. Instead of reconciliation, far-right politicians are suggesting Canada should just bully Indigenous people into accepting that they have been conquered, which is actually not true historically.

So how do we fight back against this? Well, I think people need to understand the history first, so that we can truly learn from the mistakes of the past as we determine a better path forward, together.

Next, we need to understand that what Indigenous nations are trying to do is build a relationship of respect and reciprocity. I think the vast majority of Canadians and British Colombians want to find ways to move forward and build a strong future for their families, for the future generations.

We also need to be aware of the kinds of tactics and strategies being used by far-right actors who are trying to sabotage that process. British Columbians, regardless of their political stripe—I hope—can see through the propaganda that OneBC and others are creating and promoting. We might disagree on what building a stronger relationship with Indigenous peoples look like, but what OneBC is saying is that we should abandon reconciliation altogether.

That’s just basically going back to the 1870s approach, which created a lot of these contemporary problems in the first place. You know, I talked to a lot of people who say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was a long time ago; I’m not responsible.”

Well, it’s true, you didn’t make those decisions, but you are the continuing beneficiary of the colonial process nonetheless. And hey, the good news is that we all have an opportunity to make sure that Canada doesn’t double down on those mistakes, that wrong-headed approach.

Today, we can demand our politicians do better. That includes putting pressure on the BC NDP and all parties. If we want to have a better relationship with Indigenous people, we can’t just say, well, OneBC and the BC Conservatives are the problem. We also need to put pressure on the BC NDP to make good on their promises, to work and resolve many of these issues quickly and in a just and fair way.

If the NDP can do that, they will take a lot of steam out of OneBC and the BC Conservatives and the rising tide of anti-Indigenous politics. The longer they dither and delay, the more space they give to the far-right to harvest hate and benefit from it politically to the great detriment of society.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sean Carleton is a settler historian and associate professor at the University of Manitoba.

This month, Alberta school boards began removing dozens of books from library shelves to comply with a provincial government order banning literary materials deemed “sexually explicit.” The order was originally issued in July of last year, when Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides defined “sexually explicit” as a “detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act” and made no distinction between written and visual representations. Naturally, the order carved out an exemption for religious scripture—sparing the Bible—and informational, non-narrative books, like biology textbooks. However, critics were quick to point out that the order would effectively ban literary classics, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Faced with widespread public criticism, the original ministerial order had been gradually watered-down. In September, age ranges were introduced, with students between kindergarten and grade nine being blocked from accessing books with explicit and non-explicit sexual content, and students in grades 10-12 being allowed to read works with “sexual passages” but not “sexual imagery.” By December 2025, the final revision of the book ban only targeted visual mediums like graphic novels, leaving books without a pictorial component untouched. Instead of the hundreds of books implicated by the original order, the policy implemented last week resulted in the removal of just a few dozen titles.

In their attempt to ban books they deem sexually explicit, Danielle Smith’s government followed a script well-worn by politicians in red districts across the United States. Back in 2023, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis had Bill 1467 passed in Florida. It stipulated that “book selections be free of pornography” in school libraries—but instead of defining “pornography” the bill only referenced Florida’s Obscenity Statute 847.012, which describes obscenity as any visual or printed representation of “a person or portion of the human body which depicts nudity or sexual conduct, sexual excitement, sexual battery, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse.” With such a broad definition, even a glimpse of bare skin could qualify as obscene—so watch those ankles.

In both Alberta and Florida, this ambiguity is strategic. When the Canadian Civil Liberties Association criticized the ministerial order for banning George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Education Minister Nicolaides decried their comments as “false and shockingly deceptive”—this, despite the books obviously meeting the order’s criteria for removal. Likewise, when the Edmonton School Board released a list of over 200 banned books, Premier Smith accused them of “vicious compliance” for doing what her government had ordered. In this way, these vague, poorly-worded laws are deliberately intended to mean whatever their crafters want them to in the moment while still offering a veneer of plausible deniability when their implications are questioned.

Banning books is part of the Smith government’s broader social conservative agenda in Alberta. Restrictions have already been introduced on what pronouns and names students can use at school, what sport teams children can play on, and how children can identity without parental permission. Many of these policies target LGBTQ+ people, and the book ban disproportionately targeted works that portray queer sexuality. For instance, Mike Curato’s autobiographical graphic novel Flamer is frequently targeted by pearl-clutching conservatives because it depicts gay teenage sexuality. This is no surprise when one considers that, just like in the US, Alberta’s book ban was influenced by lobbying not from parents, but socially conservative activists.

The entire book banning saga began when a conservative interest group complained to the Alberta government in May 2025 about graphic novels it said were inappropriate for minors. Christian nationalist groups like Parents for Choice, Action4Canada, and Take Back Alberta claimed to speak for all parents, and the provincial government echoed their talking points by alleging that their legislation simply gives parents control over their children’s education. Yet, the illusion of parental or public oversight is dispelled by the refusal of school boards to say what books are being banned.

Released in February 2025, just months before Alberta announced its planned book bans, critic and essayist Ira Wells’ On Book Banning examines the history of libricide with a special focus on Ontario and Florida. Wells explains how, in 2023, Ontario’s Peel District School Board purged thousands of books from school shelves as part of an “equity based weeding process.” Ostensibly intended to remove books that reinforced discriminatory ideologies and to ensure that books reflected the “lived experiences” of students, the school board decided to throw out every book that was more than 15-years-old. The result was barren shelves. Despite originating from the other end of the political spectrum—the edict cited a need to “promote anti-racism, inclusivity and critical consciousness”—the motivation behind the removals was the same: protect kids from allegedly corrupting ideas. That attitude is needlessly coddling when a book is the least dangerous way to explore fraught ideas and topics.

In the internet age, attempting to save children from pornography by banning artbooks containing Michelangelo’s David is laughably quaint. A literary depiction of sexuality is about the safest way that a young person can encounter sexual topics today. Students are just a couple clicks away from all manner of sexual content online that is less appropriate for them than a masturbatory pun in the opening of Gulliver’s Travels. Alberta’s book ban also reflects an odd bias against visual mediums. Apparently, a written description of violent sexual assault (à la The Handmaid’s Tale) is more age-appropriate for 10-year-olds than an artistic depiction of consensual sexual activity (such as in Flamer).

A book demands something of its readers that few things do today: careful attention. Children are inundated with fast-moving, attention-dividing images across numerous heavily-subscribed social media platforms. A generation ago, parents fretted about the influence of television. Marshall McLuhan called TV and film “hot media” because they demanded little participation from their audience compared to “cold media” like literature. Yet, a 22-minute television episode from that generation moves glacially slow and requires more attention to follow compared to the 10-second TikTok clips and Instagram reels of today. Appreciating cold media takes mental participation: the critical exercise of our comprehension, imagination, and interpretive skills. This makes literature an ideal medium for presenting and experiencing difficult subjects; it demands enough of a reader that they are primed to engage with its contents more critically, and less passively, than they might if the same message is expressed in another format.

Book bans must be vigorously opposed at school board meetings and in the court of public opinion. School libraries are different from public libraries, and they should be curated for the students that they are meant to serve. However, curation of school library collections must be guided by certain principles. There is no obligation to include works that are pseudo-scientific or straightforwardly untruthful, and books that are included should represent a wide cross-section of ideas, experiences, and literary expression. The antidote for collections that are overly Eurocentric or lean towards the Western canon is not to toss those books in the trash, but to add greater variety from other traditions and cultures. What should not guide the curators of library collections is an excessive “safetyism” that aims to protect children from human sexuality or retrograde ideas contained within artistically significant works.

The opposition to Alberta’s book ban has been largely successful. Public outrage was instrumental in causing the provincial government to retreat from the original ministerial order’s puritanical censure of anything that hinted of sexuality to the declawed prohibition on a handful of graphic novels. In the end, the Calgary Board of Education is pulling merely 44 titles from its shelves, and Edmonton Public Schools has singled out just 34 of its over 700,000 books to remove. Like most of Danielle Smith’s tilting at windmills—an allusion I should avoid since she’d surely think Don Quixote is obscene—the book ban has proven to be a massive waste of government officials’ time and taxpayer money.

Eric Wilkinson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.

Canadian universities are rapidly becoming sites of repression rather than debate. Across the country, students protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza are facing suspensions, bans, police violence, and sweeping restrictions on speech and assembly—often imposed before any investigation has taken place. What is unfolding on campuses is not a series of isolated incidents, but a coordinated erosion of civil liberties that demands immediate public attention.

These patterns are readily visible in how universities have responded to pro-Palestinian students and organizers. McMaster University suspended a student group, Students for Palestinian Human Rights, for disrupting a board meeting, then banned three students from campus activities prior to their investigation concerning a pro-Palestine protest. At the University of British Columbia, the RCMP and campus security guards destroyed a sukkah erected by pro-Palestinian Jewish students, who sat praying in the rain.

This climate has also resulted in physical violence against students. At York University, one student was violently assaulted by a member of an extremist Zionist vigilante group. At two events involving Toronto Metropolitan University students, security guards used physical violence against protesters. In another, students were assaulted by an Israeli soldier who was hosted by a student group off-campus. This incident was followed by police arrests of five of the assaulted students.

This backlash has unfolded quietly but persistently. A recent article in Briarpatch surveyed protest policies at 17 universities with pro-Palestinian encampments. It found that nearly all campuses “either introduced or reinforced restrictions on the type or location of campus protests.” Many policies were so vague as to make these restrictions completely arbitrary. Other examples include Western University, which tried to implement a “no demo without permission” policy that was repealed. At the University of Toronto, “affixing signs, posters, or flyers (including the use of chalk, marker, paint, and projections) outside designated areas” has been designated as a form of vandalism. Most recently, faculty and students at Carleton University have been vigorously opposing an “Institutional Impartiality Policy” that bans departments and student groups from making public statements on political or social issues.

Universities did not stop at protest policies but also instituted new rules around events held on campus, supposedly the very purpose of the university itself—the exchange of ideas. McGill relocated an event hosting United Nations Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, in November 2024. Then, in response to calls by community groups to cancel an event with an Israeli influencer, the university suspended all extracurricular events on campus until January 2026. In September of last year, Wilfrid Laurier University abruptly cancelled the room booking for a talk on Canada and the genocide in Gaza, citing security concerns. More recently the University of Guelph capitulated to pressure to cancel a sold-out conference on Palestine (it was successfully rescheduled elsewhere).

In all of these cases, basic rights are being violated. The presence of vigilante security forces and aggressive policing on university campuses is part of a broader move towards eroding free speech and restraining free expression in Canada. The growing number of incidents suggests, alarmingly, that civil liberties in Canada are only relatively protected compared to what we are currently witnessing in the United States. These acts of repression are the inevitable result of a campus landscape that criminalizes Palestinians and their allies as “terrorists” and “terrorist sympathizers,” and contributes to a rising spectre of authoritarianism.

These campus-level decisions do not exist in isolation. They are reinforced by provincial and federal policy shifts that further constrain dissent.

At the provincial and municipal levels, restrictions on civil liberties impacting academic settings have been introduced through legislation and policy changes such as Bill 33 in Ontario. This legislation mandates police access to schools despite community concerns, changes post-secondary admissions requirements to “merit”-based (despite university autonomy to serve under-represented groups), and empowers the provincial minister of education to intervene to control the decision-making of school boards. In addition, the Ford government’s Strengthening Accountability and Student Supports Act introduces unprecedented incursions into the autonomy of universities and threatens academic freedom and freedom of speech. More broadly, municipal “bubble zone” legislation in Toronto, Vaughan, and Ottawa has been introduced that prohibits protest outside houses of worship and community spaces, with a wide berth of interpretation regarding the nature of the protest and proximity to such spaces during marches and rallies.

At the federal level, new ‘hate speech’ legislation in the form of the recently-tabled Bill C-9 signals a significant erosion of civil liberties, introducing new limits on Charter-protected rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Bill C-9 includes three new Criminal Code offences relating to hate-motivated incidents that will further limit speech and protest, increases penalties for hate related offences, and reduces oversight of policing by removing the longstanding requirement of the attorney general’s consent to proceed with hate speech prosecutions. The federal government has also introduced constraints on support for Palestinian human rights in its release of the “Canadian Handbook on IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism,” which erroneously posits that political association with anti-Zionism—whether held by Palestinians, Jews, or others—is a form of antisemitism.

These initiatives are all moves designed to restrict and police legal protest. Collectively, they have arisen in the context of a groundswell of activism and protest against Israel’s genocidal violence against the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank.

This form of authoritarianism is often accompanied by increased surveillance, securitization, and threats, alongside the repression of what ought to be understood as a new McCarthyism, in which political dissent is recast as a security threat and punished accordingly. Students on our campuses will not be protected from these types of attacks until the right to freedom of speech and assembly are protected and until the attacks on Palestine speech and action cease to be framed as antisemitic threats.

University administrations must exercise leadership against this climate of repression. Specifically, we believe that university and college administrators across Canada can begin by exercising extreme caution when pressured by pro-Israel lobby groups on issues relating to antisemitism, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and B’nai Brith. Reports such as the Jewish Faculty Network’s The CIJA Report, Independent Jewish Voices’ Unveiling the Chilly Climate, and Jasmine Zine’s The Islamophobia Industry Report all illuminate the underlying racism animating much of this advocacy work.

Universities and colleges should also promote and adhere to principles of academic freedom. This would involve taking a substantive approach and recognizing that incursions on student rights to speech and assembly also impact the academic freedom of professors. They should do more to halt violent threats and stop the actions of extremist—including Zionist—vigilante groups. They must also work proactively to enhance equity and safety on campus and prohibit violence against students.

Student protests should not be met with police and security. University administrations must protect legitimate protest as part of academic freedom: students’ capacity to express ideas is as integral to the university, as is professors’ capacity to teach in an atmosphere that protects academic freedom. Relying on policing and securitization interferes with this important commitment of university life.

Universities and colleges must also be courageous in addressing antisemitism on campuses and ensure that effective measures are taken to protect Jewish students, in line with established anti-racism policies and practices. They must learn to distinguish between “safety” and “discomfort” and recognize the troubling weaponization of antisemitism that has become pervasive in silencing Palestinians and their allies.

Most of all, they must foster campus environments that embrace discussion, debate, and robust academic exchange and stop enacting violence against students.

As members of the Jewish Faculty Network, which represents faculty from universities and colleges across Canada, we see an urgent need to save universities from themselves. If university administrations cannot uphold their basic purpose—the free exchange of ideas without fear or repression—then it will fall to faculty to defend it. The stakes could not be higher.

Shiri Pasternak is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Charles Z. Levkoe is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Equitable and Sustainable Food Systems at Lakehead University.

Jillian Rogin is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Windsor.

The United States is descending into a state of general lawlessness, both at home and abroad. From deploying domestic paramilitary units like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to snatch people off American streets and send them abroad, the government has now sent secret military special operations forces, including Delta Force, to abduct foreign heads of state from their homes and imprison them on US soil. Political human trafficking has become the law of the land under the Trump administration.

Before 2025, the two major parties engaged in a crescendo of lawfare against each other, employing the FBI, courts, and even the CIA behind the scenes to destroy opponents. Both routinely abused the rule of law, pardoning family members, wealthy friends, and business associates to protect themselves and personal connections. This rendered a travesty of the fiction that no one in America is above the law. Senior politicians enriched themselves, often becoming multi-millionaires after leaving office through special deals arranged while in power.

The recent invasion of Venezuela represents a gross violation of international law—a hypocritical disregard for sovereign boundaries that neoconservative ideologues and the echo chamber of captured US media have relentlessly levelled at Russia in Ukraine over the past four years.

Trump himself has publicly admitted that the operation was intended to secure American control over Venezuela’s natural resources, particularly its oil reserves. In other words: naked, old-fashioned imperialism aimed at plundering another nation’s wealth.

The pretext was the usual nonsense—charges of narco drug trafficking. This is the neocons’ substitute for “weapons of mass destruction,” previously used in Iraq, Syria, and Libya to justify military intervention. This accusation would not have worked against Venezuela, nor would older pretexts like Remember the Maine, the Tonkin Gulf incident, or “killing incubator babies.” The hawks needed a fresh false excuse, and from their magic bag of false flags and fake rationales, they pulled out “narco drug trafficking.” It fits Latin American interventions better, as Panama’s former President Manuel Noriega discovered in 1989.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who defended Venezuela’s sovereignty and criticized Trump’s aggression, should take note. And Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, beware: you could be next. Ditto Cuba.

Does Greenland have a president Trump can threaten? Perhaps the excuse will be that Chinese ships are melting the ice cap.

Make no mistake: Trump is not only waging naked military aggression to enact regime change. His bluster revealed that the US plans to install a new form of colonialism. Within 24 hours, he declared publicly that Washington intends to “rule” Venezuela directly until a compliant puppet regime is installed. Direct rule constitutes colonial imperialism.

As the saying goes, truth often emerges from the mouth of a drunkard. Trump, a braggart drunk with power, has spoken what the neoconservative imperial elite behind him are really planning.

In an attempt to spin Trump’s blunt admission, cronies like Marco Rubio rushed to the media to try to put lipstick on the “US will rule” pig, insisting there were no such plans.

Another neocon, Mike Walz, former national security advisor to Trump and now ambassador to the United Nations, claimed in an emergency speech that the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was not about colonial rule—or even a military operation. According to Walz, it was merely a “police operation”—accompanied by 17 warships, aircraft carriers, submarines, and 10,000 marines stationed on nearby Trinidad.

Rubio added that the US only wants Maduro to stand trial in New York, conveniently omitting the ongoing naval blockade of Venezuelan shipping. No further military plans, he insisted. Really? Anyone want to buy a bridge from him?

This is raw gunboat imperialism, reminiscent of the early-20th century, when the US invaded Latin American countries by the dozens. It also foreshadows plans to impose a new form of colonialism on Venezuela—and perhaps other nations that dare pursue an independent path from Washington.

Trump and his allies will try to disguise these plans through externally-managed elections this spring, whose outcome is already predetermined. The US-designated candidate, Maria Corina Machado, is packing her bags for Caracas, likely accompanied by US agents during the forthcoming sham campaign.

Imperialism in Venezuela has been a US objective for a quarter-century, just as it has been in Iran for nearly 50 years and Cuba for 65. In 2002, the Bush administration attempted to depose Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez after he nationalized American oil interests—an unforgivable capitalist sin. Chávez was rescued and reinstated by the Venezuelan people and armed forces.

Under Barack Obama, the CIA continued supporting opposition movements financially, aiming to overturn Venezuelan elections. Despite the US launching an economic war—wrecking currency, stoking inflation, blocking oil exports, and impeding medical and food imports—left-wing candidates kept winning.

During Trump’s 2018–2019 term, American efforts intensified: Venezuelan gold in Western banks and Citgo, the US-based oil company, were seized and handed to opposition movements. Still, no electoral success. Operations paused temporarily during the COVID recession and the chaotic US exit from Afghanistan, as Washington turned its attention to engineering a proxy war in Ukraine.

When Trump returned to office in January 2025, regime change in Venezuela moved to the forefront of US foreign policy. This time, the empire intended to act decisively—not merely via electoral interference but with special ops interventions and direct military action. The emperor removed his clothes and waded in—perhaps over his head, as time will tell.

One must see the bigger picture. Venezuela is not a standalone operation. Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba will recognize this. The invasion is part of a broader strategy to reclaim the Western Hemisphere, neglected while Washington was preoccupied in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. While attention was diverted, other powers quietly expanded in Latin America—most notably China.

Over the past decade, China invested heavily in Latin America through its Belt and Road Initiative, acquiring ports in Panama, constructing a massive EV plant in Mexico, developing ports in Ecuador and Peru, planning a trans-Amazon railway, striking a trade deal with Venezuela worth over $100 billion, and buying significant quantities of Venezuelan oil.

Washington wants that oil. With 13 million barrels daily of domestic production, US fracking wells are projected to decline within a decade. The US also needs additional oil for European allies, displaced by Russian sanctions. Venezuela is next door.

The Trump administration has refocused on the Western Hemisphere to restore economic hegemony and drive China—and its investments—out of Latin America, especially Venezuela. In the first year of Trump’s term, Mexico faced threats of drones and special ops, prompting cancellation of its China EV deal. Panama faced 1989-style threats, leading to cancelled Chinese projects and US private equity taking over ports. Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela all faced various pressures, including military threats, economic coercion, and political interference. The Delta Force abduction of Maduro and his wife is just the latest tactic. Stand by—there’s more to come.

Trump’s lawless actions are only beginning. Greenland may soon be next, with the goal of preventing Chinese and Russian Arctic shipping access to the Atlantic. US threats and bullying of Canada are part of a broader Arctic strategy, compelling Ottawa to develop its military presence alongside installations in Greenland and Alaska, with Canada footing part of the bill.

Trump’s strategic refocus—from Europe and NATO to the Western Hemisphere and Western Pacific—is outlined in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy. It is explicit: the empire is restructuring.

The deeper reason for this shift is the staggering cost of maintaining the global empire as previously structured. US defence spending alone exceeds $2.1 trillion annually when all hidden and indirect costs are included, with a national debt of $38 trillion and annual deficits of $1.5 trillion.

The empire can no longer sustain the old structure. Consolidation to the Western Hemisphere and Pacific Basin is a fiscal and strategic necessity.

That context explains current events in Venezuela and what is yet to come throughout the hemisphere, as the US resorts to direct military action to reassert control and unchallenged hegemony in its backyard once again.

Dr. Jack Rasmus is the author of several books on the United States and the global economy, including The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump (2020), Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy (2016), and The Twilight of American Imperialism (forthcoming later this year form Clarity Press). He is a host for the radio show Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network, a journalist, a playwright, and a former professor of economics at St. Mary’s College (retired). He worked for 20 years for various tech start-ups and global companies, prior to which he served for 15 years as an organizer and local union president with several American unions.

This article originally appeared on ZNetwork.

Following last week’s American military operation in Venezuela that captured President Nicolás Maduro, Canada’s political parties offered a spectrum of responses.

At one end, interim NDP leader Don Davies said, “The U.S. attack on Venezuela is neither an act of self-defence nor does it have UN Security Council authorization. It is therefore totally illegal and a breach of the UN covenants the U.S. has agreed to uphold as a member state.”

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet acknowledged US complaints against Maduro but said it was “troubling” that Washington was “risking violation of international law, particularly by resorting to military force at the peril of civilian lives and by detaining a head of state, even an illegitimate one.” Blanchet called on the United States to “respect the sovereignty of states” and to work through the United Nations.

The Green Party “strongly condemn[ed]… the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro” and denounced the operation “as a flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the fundamental principles of national sovereignty.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre offered “congratulations to President Trump on successfully arresting narco-terrorist and socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.” He then added, “Down with socialism,” strangely politicizing the operation while also acknowledging—however inadvertently—a long-standing truth about US regime-change politics that others preferred to ignore.

The most important statement, however, was the one issued by the Government of Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney criticized not the US, but Maduro’s “brutally oppressive and criminal regime,” and “unequivocally condemn[ed]” not America’s breach of international law, but Maduro’s alleged “grave breaches of international peace and security.” He responded to Washington’s military operation by “welcom[ing] the opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people,” before calling “on all parties to respect international law.” Carney offered no criticism of the American action. Indeed, his statement did not mention the US at all.

Even after it became clear that the US intended not merely to arrest Maduro but to “run the country,” Canada continued to criticize the Venezuelan government while refraining from criticizing Washington. On January 6, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand condemned Maduro for stealing the 2018 election and destroying the Venezuelan economy. Both claims are incomplete.

While Canada has a right to raise questions about Venezuela’s most recent election, it is irresponsible to declare the 2018 vote “stolen.” The case against that election rests largely on low voter turnout and the absence of a legitimate alternative candidate. But turnout was low because the radical opposition—at the request of the US—called on its supporters to boycott the election. And the leading opposition candidate, Henri Falcón, was, according to polls, tied as the most popular opposition figure. Maduro defeated Falcón by 6,245,862 votes to 1,927,387. No serious observer disputes that this was the result.

It is also irresponsible and misleading to place sole responsibility for Venezuela’s economic collapse on Maduro. US sanctions played a decisive role, cutting Venezuela off from the international financial system and reducing oil production by roughly 75 percent. Those sanctions contributed to what economists have described as the “worst depression, without a war, in world history,” and to tens of thousands of deaths.

By the time it was public record that the US intended not merely to arrest Maduro but to administer Venezuela for an extended period—abandoning any pretence that the operation was a narrow law-enforcement action carried out by the Department of War in support of the Department of Justice—Anand still refrained from criticizing Washington. Instead, she posted that she had “heard from Secretary Rubio on the importance of freeing political prisoners, putting in place conditions for a functioning democracy, and planning for elections with a legitimate president chosen by the Venezuelan people in the future.”

Canada’s diluted response to the US military operation in Venezuela is harmful to Canadian interests for three reasons.

First, Canada is a member of an international community governed by an architecture of international law whose foundation is the United Nations. Canada has long prided itself on being in the vanguard of that order. Yet none of the government’s statements raised concern about possible US violations of the UN Charter.

Second, Canada’s position is hypocritical and actively erodes international law. At its core, international law is a codified system grounded in the UN and meant to apply universally and impartially. Canada has not applied it in that way.

The Government of Canada has repeatedly stated that “Canada remains steadfast in its support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable war.” Ottawa has been unequivocal in describing Russia’s invasion as “illegal” and as a “violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and an attack against freedom, democracy, and international law, including the United Nations Charter.” Carney himself has said, “Canada stands with Ukraine, because their cause—freedom, democracy, sovereignty—is our cause.”

Canada has refused to make comparable statements about Venezuela’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

When the Trump administration made clear that it was the “formal position” of the US that “Greenland should be part of the United States,” Carney quickly affirmed Canada’s support for Denmark and Greenland, citing “basic principles… [of] self-determination of nations, sovereignty, [and] territorial integrity.”

He has not clarified that those same basic principles apply to Venezuela. By refusing to apply international law universally and impartially, Canada has contributed to its erosion.

Finally, Canada’s response to the US military operation in Venezuela harms not only international law and global stability, but Canada’s own interests. At a moment when Canada’s sovereignty has itself been repeatedly threatened by the Trump administration, it is not in Canada’s interest to set a precedent—or send a message to other states—that international law prohibiting violations of sovereignty and territorial integrity is optional, selective, or contingent on political convenience.

If Canada wants international law to protect its own sovereignty, it must defend that law everywhere—or risk losing it altogether.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history, including at Responsible Statecraft. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

The Government of Canada has recently negotiated agreements with Ontario and Alberta to streamline regulatory processes for ‘critical’ mineral mining and pipeline development. These agreements raise profound concerns about Indigenous rights, democratic governance, and climate responsibilities.

While the agreements are framed as pragmatic responses to investment uncertainty and vehicles for economic stability, their central commitments—to accelerate regulatory pathways for new mines and pipelines—threaten to erode constitutionally protected Indigenous rights and silence communities who have already borne the costs of extractive industries.

Compounding these trends is the federal push to overhaul how major infrastructure and resource projects are approved through legislation like Bill C-5—the One Canadian Economy Act and its Building Canada Act provisions—which aims to designate certain projects as in the “national interest” and expedite them through a new Major Projects Office.

Supporters argue that faster timelines are needed to attract investment and counter external economic pressures. But this fast-track framework concentrates sweeping powers in cabinet, allows projects to proceed with minimal oversight, and risks sidelining meaningful environmental review and robust Indigenous consultation.

Trading climate commitments for pipeline expansion

On November 27, Canada and Alberta signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), committing the Government of Canada to work with Alberta to “streamline” regulatory processes for an oil pipeline to the coast of northern British Columbia. It also commits the federal government to “adjust” legislation prohibiting oil tanker traffic on the northern BC coast.

In exchange for these federal obligations to help expand tar sands extraction, Alberta committed to support the construction of a massive carbon capture and storage project, increase the carbon tax on industry, and enrol Indigenous groups as co-owners of the new oil pipeline. The agreement was quickly denounced by First Nation leaders across Canada.

Coastal First Nations responded by reiterating their opposition to tanker traffic in the region. In a media release, Marilyn Slett, president of the Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative said, “we will never allow oil tankers on our coast… this pipeline project will never happen.”

The British Columbia Assembly of First Nations issued a statement denouncing the MOU:

The [agreement] between the federal government and the Province of Alberta exposes a fundamental contradiction and ongoing disregard for the rights, laws and sovereignty of First Nations on whose territories the proposed bitumen pipeline is proposed to be built. Canada’s words of commitment to reconciliation and climate action are weakened and deceptive as they make plans to prioritize a project that poses profound risks to First Nations’ lands, waters, and communities, risks that many First Nations strongly oppose.

Treaty 8 First Nations similarly rejected the MOU and called for its withdrawal. “We have formally notified the prime minister that any further attempt by Canada, Alberta, or industry to move ahead without us will result in immediate action,” Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi told the press.

The Assembly of First Nations subsequently passed resolutions calling for the MOU to be withdrawn and opposing oil tanker traffic in northern British Columbia.

Fast-tracking mining approvals in Ontario

On December 18, Ontario and Canada announced a cooperation agreement on environmental and impact assessment, which commits both governments to remove regulatory “duplication.” Canada agreed to defer to Ontario’s environmental assessment process for proposed projects that are primarily provincially regulated. This will reduce the role of the federal government in environmental assessment of new mining projects, as the Government of Canada will rely on Ontario’s system to address issues under federal jurisdiction.

In a press release announcing the agreement, the Ontario government suggested that the agreement would “unlock” the development potential of the Ring of Fire, a vast mineral-rich region in northern Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands that is being targeted for large-scale nickel, chromite, and other “critical” mineral extraction.

While removing so-called duplication may speed-up approvals for mining projects, it also effectively reduces opportunities for consultation with the public and mining-affected First Nations. As Ontario Regional Chief Abram Benedict explained:

This agreement prioritizes streamlining approvals while sidelining First Nations’ inherent jurisdiction and weakening the duty to consult. Governments cannot decide when consultation and accommodation are ‘appropriate.’ These legal obligations are owed to rights holders from the outset.

The Ontario-Canada agreement comes on the heels of a cease-and-desist letter from Neskantaga First Nation, demanding a halt to mineral exploration in the Ring of Fire.

In late October, Neskantaga requested a federal environmental assessment of the proposed Eagle’s Nest mine, the most advanced project in the Ring of Fire. In a letter to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, Neskantaga Chief Gary Quisses wrote:

[T]he proposed mine is likely to cause severe adverse effects in areas of federal jurisdiction, particularly on Indigenous peoples including our First Nation, fish and fish habitat, as well as migratory birds. Further, cumulative impacts from induced development caused by the approval of Eagle’s Nest, the most advanced mining project in the Ring of Fire, are also likely to be adverse, severe, and irreversible, including on the rights of Indigenous peoples, and Canada’s ability to meet its international climate change mitigation commitments.

While the Impact Assessment Agency has yet to publicly respond to Neskantaga’s letter, the Ontario-Canada agreement suggests that there will be no federal assessment of the Eagle’s Nest mine.

In fact, the project may proceed without any rigorous environmental assessment at all. Bill 5, the Protecting Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, allows the provincial government to establish “special economic zones” exempt from existing laws and regulations.

The Ford government has repeatedly indicated its intention to use the legislation to “fast-track” mining in the Ring of Fire. This would allow the government to bypass or seriously reduce some of the typical environmental assessment processes.

Schedule 3 of Bill 5 also removed provincial environmental assessment requirements for the Eagle’s Nest project.

The Ontario-Canada agreement raises questions about the future of an ongoing federal regional assessment in the Ring of Fire area. The assessment, which is co-led with 15 affected First Nations, would examine the cumulative effects of multiple potential road and mining projects in the region.

After years of negotiation, terms of reference for the assessment were issued in 2025. While the Ontario-Canada agreement makes no reference to the ongoing regional assessment, the commitment to avoid duplication in the spirit of regulatory streamlining suggests that it could be sidelined.

A step backwards for climate action and Indigenous rights

Both federal–provincial agreements mark a step backward for climate action. The climate consequences of expanding tar sands production are obvious. And while critical mineral extraction in the Ring of Fire is often presented as integral to energy transitions and climate mitigation, in reality the destruction of boreal peatlands is likely to release huge amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Indigenous rights in Canada are enshrined in Section 35 of the Constitution, which affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous peoples when development projects may affect those rights. In landmark decisions such as Haida Nation v. British Columbia (2004), the court emphasized that consultation must be meaningful and conducted in good faith.

These agreements move in the opposite direction. First Nations were excluded from their negotiation, despite the fact that both will have significant implications for how First Nations are consulted on major projects going forward. The commitment to reducing regulatory barriers risks treating consultation as a procedural box-checking exercise rather than a constitutional obligation. Compressing timelines, constraining environmental assessments, and shifting risk onto Indigenous communities undermines the principles of reconciliation and contradicts Canada’s stated commitment to uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

UNDRIP’s framework of free, prior, and informed consent requires that Indigenous communities meaningfully participate in, and consent to, decisions affecting their lands. Decision-making processes must be collaborative and grounded in respect for Indigenous laws and jurisdiction. Agreements designed primarily to expedite mining and fossil fuel infrastructure makes that kind of engagement structurally impossible.

Indigenous nations have clearly expressed concern over the government’s orientation to prioritize resource extraction over their rights, lands, and environmental well-being. Mines and pipelines carry substantial risks—spills, tailings breaches, cumulative habitat destruction, and long-term climate impacts that disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. By preemptively committing to faster approvals, these agreements signal a willingness to sacrifice Indigenous relations and environmental protection for short-term political and economic gain.

Recent history illustrates the consequences of such an approach. When governments attempt to push projects through without adequate consultation, they invite conflict, legal challenges, and public unrest. Court battles over procedural failures can delay projects by years, ultimately costing more—financially and politically—than engaging Indigenous nations as genuine partners from the outset. Indeed, the first attempt to build a tar sands pipeline to the northern Pacific Coast, the Enbridge Northern Gateway, ultimately failed because the courts overturned regulatory approvals due to rushed consultation processes.

Proponents of the agreements argue that creating a more “predictable investment climate” is essential for economic resilience. But doubling down on economically volatile and environmentally destructive sectors, while weakening Indigenous decision-making, sets a dangerous precedent. It locks the country into a dependency on oil that has too long constrained our political imagination, even as global markets shift toward decarbonization.

Towards a just transition

Indigenous nations have demonstrated leadership in renewable energy initiatives, conservation strategies, and community-driven economic development. A sustainable future will require building these partnerships—not sidelining them. Rather than accelerating approvals, Canada could support Indigenous-led land-use planning and regional assessments, expand investment in renewable projects, and engage in long-term economic diversification that aligns with global climate realities.

These agreements represent a choice: to remain on a path defined by extraction, polarization, and constitutional risk, or to imagine an economic future grounded in partnership, democratic accountability, and environmental responsibility. After all, the social and ecological costs of extractive dependency are becoming increasingly undeniable.

A more sustainable path forward begins with genuine engagement, respect for Indigenous peoples, and a commitment to shared governance. A just future cannot be built through rushed agreements that ignore Indigenous rights. It must be built with Indigenous nations in a spirit of collective stewardship.

Tyler McCreary is an Associate Professor of Geography at Florida State University and author of Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities (University of Alberta Press, 2024).

Warren Bernauer is an Assistant Professor of Environment & Geography at the University of Manitoba and Canada Research Chair in Energy Transitions and Social Justice in the North.

In recent months, Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated his great readiness to unleash state violence and, as a sitting US president, he has an enormous capacity to do just that. On the face of it, it would seem unlikely that the Trump name would in any way be associated with the pursuit of peace but, strangely enough, he cherishes the idea, to an almost obsessive degree, that he may be remembered in such terms.

The dust has barely settled on Trump’s assault on Venezuela, which was an unassailably violent affair. According to CNBC, “[s]pecial operations forces from multiple service branches and more than 150 military aircraft” were involved in the attack. Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello reported that over 100 people were killed by the display of US power.

This intervention involved the forcible abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who is also a major political figure in Venezuela. It was preceded by a series of extrajudicial killings and the Trump administration is quite clear that further attacks will be mounted if the Venezuelan authorities don’t accept US control of the country’s oil industry and comply with other demands. Al Jazeera reports that Trump is keeping US ships at the ready for another assault in order to emphasize the need for submission.

At the same time, it is very clear that the Venezuelan operation was not some uncharacteristic outburst on Trump’s part. Politico informs us that he has also threatened aggressive action against Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico and that “the threats of military force against—and the broadly more muscular posture towards—Latin America speak to how the administration is prioritizing the region and willing to use all the tools at its disposal to achieve its aims close to home.”

Bloody track record

A violent application of an updated Monroe Doctrine is undeniably underway, and Trump’s commitment to peace in other parts of the globe is also highly questionable. The ceasefire he boasts of in Gaza has involved a great deal of bloodshed since it went into effect. Al Jazeera reports that “Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 969 times from October 10 to December 28, through the continuation of attacks by air, artillery and direct shootings.”

With horrible irony, a recent Associated Press article was headlined “Israeli strikes kill at least 13 across Gaza, as Trump is expected to announce Board of Peace.” This formation, which Trump himself will chair, is a classic example of colonial trusteeship that will exclude the Palestinians and further their dispossession. As Progressive International explains, it “would place Palestinian land and labour under the control of foreign investors—from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to no doubt the real estate empire of the Trump dynasty—without a single Palestinian voice in the process.” This speaks volumes to the particular brand of ‘peace’ that Trump is peddling.

Despite the continuing genocide in Gaza and the ongoing dispossession of its inhabitants, Trump emerged from a late December meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ready to declare that “Israel has been doing its part in the Gaza ceasefire” and to lay the blame entirely on the Palestinian resistance, calling on Hamas to disarm. He also took the opportunity to suggest that US support and involvement in another Israeli attack on Iran was highly likely.

Trump’s peace-loving credentials are further undermined by the fact that his Department of Defense has been renamed the Department of War. Fully in keeping with the ugly spirit of that initiative, “the US [has] carried out—or been a partner to—622 overseas bombings in all, using drones or aircraft, since January 20, 2025, when Trump took office.” This involved attacks on seven countries during 2025.

Despite this bloody track record, Trump has gone to great lengths to present himself as an accomplished peace broker but his loud claims have not gone unchallenged. Time comments rather bitingly that “[e]ven as a cease-fire between Thailand and Cambodia brokered by President Donald Trump earlier this year is falling apart, the self-styled ‘President of Peace’ has continued to tout his ability to resolve global conflicts.”

The Time article also argues that Trump’s “transactional” approach to conflict resolution is clumsy and questionable. He “has been able to broker several deals that led to pauses in violence in the short-term. But his unilateral approach to achieving them—at times bypassing multilateral institutions and enforcement mechanisms—also makes the long-term outcomes uncertain.”

If Trump’s dedication to the cause of peace is worse than dubious, there is no doubting the strength of his desire to be viewed in that light. He fervently hoped for a Nobel Peace Prize and, when this failed to materialize, he gleefully accepted the preposterous and hastily generated “FIFA Peace Prize.” This was handed to him, in an effort to stroke his vanity, at the 2026 World Cup draw in Washington, DC.

So well-known is Trump’s craving for peace honours that María Corina Machado, the right-wing Venezuelan oppositionist who received the Nobel Peace Prize this time around, is actually offering to turn her medal over to Trump. NBC News reports that he insists that his decision to freeze her out of any leadership role, following the US attack on Venezuela, has nothing to do with her taking the prize instead of him. Nonetheless, she has hopes that her fortunes as a puppet of Washington may be enhanced by such a grovelling gesture of submission.

Fake peace

Trump’s self-aggrandizement and absurd pretensions aside, the question arises of how someone with such a record of death and destruction can seriously claim to be a dove of peace. In this regard, it is striking that Trump is hardly the first war criminal to covet or receive such honours. In 2009, Howard Zinn commented that “I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel Peace Prizes.”

If mass murderers and those who direct military aggression on a devastating scale are held up as champions of peace, it starts to become clear that this concept has been seriously distorted. The term ‘peace’ has been applied in a very particular way within capitalist societies that has nothing to do with the right of people to live lives that are free from the threat of violence. In fact, the exact opposite is the case and this fake notion of peace has a very long and particular history that predates Trump by several centuries.

In Anglo-Saxon England, the system of public order that the ruling establishment maintained was referred to as the King’s Peace. It wasn’t at all focused on the well-being of the mass of people but was devoted to an enforced stability in which the powerful and propertied could thrive at their expense.

By the 1500s, under the Tudor monarchs, as the process of driving the peasants off of their land holdings intensified and the creation of a modern workforce that was suited to the needs of capitalism advanced, this concept of a ‘peaceful’ and exploitative form of public order was taken further.

As the clearing of the land increased the levels of destitution and desperation, brutal repressive measures were employed to preserve social stability. As the Renaissance English History podcast explains, “[p]unishments were harsh. To set an example, even for small infractions, there was vagrancy, which was considered both a social problem as well as a crime.” Laws like the Vagabonds Act of 1531 made it illegal to be homeless or unemployed with offenders, whipped or branded.”

The selective notion of ‘peace’ imposed by the English Tudor authorities has proven to be remarkably durable and sets its stamp on modern capitalist societies. As the police clear a path for the scabs that cross a union picket line, they will maintain that they are only there to ‘keep the peace.’ Anyone who tries to stop them might be charged with “disturbing the peace” and be brought before a “justice of the peace” who will set bail conditions that include an obligation to “keep the peace and be of good behaviour.” This ‘peace’ of theirs is obviously ready to tolerate a great deal of inequality and injustice.

It becomes clear that Trump’s fake peace has a long history that has consistently served the interests of exploiters and oppressors. For them, it means the preservation of their wealth and power but, for the rest of us, it demands submission on pain of consequences that are far from peaceful.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy is a chilling document that maps out a plan for naked and brutal imperialism, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet, it confidently asserts that “President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace.” A very important point of qualification is included here, however.

The actual objective being pursued by the Trump gang is described as “peace through strength” because “[s]trength is the best deterrent” and this unsurprisingly requires “the world’s most capable military.” Since the Korean War, people all across the world have experienced the death and destruction that “peace through strength” keeps in reserve and unleashes when it feels it needs to. Trump is utterly devoted to this blood-soaked approach to international dealings.

Clearly the kind of peace that Trump deals in is a lie and an exercise in coercive brutality. A ‘peace’ that serves the interests of exploitation and injustice needs to be disturbed and, indeed, shattered. The famous and celebrated proposition that without justice there can be no peace has never been more relevant than it is at this terrible and dangerous moment.

John Clarke is a writer and retired organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Follow his tweets at @JohnOCAP and blog at johnclarkeblog.com.

Last year, Mark Carney presented himself to Canadians as a seasoned, level-headed economist and an “elbows up” negotiator ready to confront the sovereignty threat posed by Donald Trump. He was rewarded with a strong minority government—and an unusually generous grace period from the public. Yet he has used that time to pivot sharply away from the image of the rounded economist, who promised a mild neoliberal blend of efficient government, sustainable finance, non-market housing, and union jobs, toward something far more familiar: the caricature of a Goldman Sachs lobbyist.

First, he purged moderate progressives like Nate Erskine-Smith and Karina Gould from cabinet, eliminated the minister of labour position for the first time in a century, scaled his commitment to non-market housing down to nearly nothing, and spoke of the “sacrifices” required from working Canadians while facilitating the “capital formation” of the rich. Then he wrecked his “honest talk” image, first by trying to peddle “decarbonized oil” and then by trying to pass off the Ksi Lisims LNG fracking project as Indigenous-owned when it is Indigenous-opposed, entirely owned and operated by Texas-based Western LNG, and backed by MAGA-supporting Blackstone (British Columbia Green Party leader Emily Lowan more aptly called it “elbows up for Epstein” given the project’s connections). He capped it off by scrapping taxes on the luxury yachts and private jets of the ultra-rich. He has not mentioned any agenda item to reduce Canada’s exorbitant wealth inequality—with the recent World Inequality Report estimating that the top one percent now owns over 29 percent of the nation’s wealth. And it is therefore not unreasonable to draw a comparison between “elbows up” Carney’s response to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela—likely a precursor to further territorial ambitions, from Greenland to deeper incursions across the hemisphere—and the logic of appeasement associated with Neville Chamberlain a few generations ago, if not its precise historical circumstances.

But so far the bar keeps lowering conveniently for Carney. The last election, aided by our first-past-the-post system, turned Canada into a two-party duopoly, and Carney’s supposed main adversary is a foaming-at-the-mouth McCarthyite in Pierre Poilievre. We have a race-to-the-bottom neoliberal politics fighting over fewer and fewer principles, with a well-sealed Overton window spanning from those who could get a job at Goldman Sachs and those who want one but aren’t qualified. Carney creeps towards a majority by consolidating the neoliberal consensus, recruiting Conservatives while shedding obligations to deliver benefits to working people.

And surely, winning the Liberal stronghold riding of University–Rosedale in Toronto will further cement this consensus. Nevertheless, the Liberals do have to win the riding again in a byelection now that former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has announced she will be stepping down as an MP to take a position as an economic advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. While flipping the seat is a longshot, Pierre Poilievre can attest that stranger things do happen.

Canadians should have a good look at the prospects for making a push for the NDP in University–Rosedale. First, there is the “Pascal’s wager” logic of the race: gunning for the NDP is a low-risk, high-reward proposition. In the unlikely case vote splitting causes the seat to flip Conservative, little of the federal picture changes. If the seat flips NDP, however, Canada’s dangerous consolidation into a right-wing two-party duopoly—so instrumental in producing the downward spiral of our neighbours to the south—is greatly stalled.

Then there is the benefit of broadening the policy conversation, specifically with a democratic left voice. Now it is true that voice is currently rather faint: the NDP are reduced to a paltry seven seats, have lacked clarity of vision since at least the Mulcair days, and won’t choose a party leader until March. It is also true the party has an internal cleavage over the status of Yves Engler as a candidate—though I suspect Engler would be in solidarity with an effort to take the riding. Nevertheless, it has become refreshingly clear—from both their candidates and their interim leader Don Davies—that the party is resisting the neoliberal temptation to follow others in an endless slide to the right and is instead seeking to retrench more coherently towards its social democratic roots. Candidates are putting forward bold, comprehensive proposals that would make Tommy Douglas proud: head-to-toe health care, federal jobs guarantees, the mass-production of cooperative and non-market housing, and free electrified public transit, among others. The NDP were right on Gaza, and both the interim leader and its candidates have correctly identified the invasion of Venezuela as the imperialist violation of international law that it is.

Lastly, and most speculatively—but nevertheless worth considering—there is the question of global preparedness. It is possible, for a variety of reasons, that we may see a global shift in political economy in the coming years. Most of those reasons, unfortunately, have to do with the need to rebuild after potential disasters: AI bubbles may burst, extreme weather events may intensify, and Trump’s imperialism now places us in astonishingly precarious times. Others, more optimistically, have to do with democratically elected governments changing the rules in favour of the working class, following the victories of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle. We may yet find ourselves seeking to align with a more progressive global era, much as many did in the post-war years. In short, Canada should have wheels in motion for a world beyond neoliberalism, and bringing our social democratic party back into the conversation would strengthen that preparedness.

Most importantly, Carney should understand that his fight must be to win the working class. So far, he has not thought it necessary to prepare for that fight. For Canadians, replacing a Liberal stalwart with a New Democrat could hardly send a clearer warning shot.

Colin Bruce Anthes is an artist, educator, and democratic economy organizer. Colin has been artistic director of two theatre companies, taught in five post-secondary institutions across Canada, and founded Community Wealth Candidates in 2021. He has been a contributor to theAnalysis.news since 2022.

On September 29, 2025, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, Donald Trump announced his 20-point Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan to the world. Over the next few days the US president put heavy pressure on Hamas to sign up to his deal, threatening that Israel “would have my full backing to finish the job” of destroying the group if they didn’t.

Though neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian organization had been involved in drawing up Trump’s 20 points, Hamas signed an agreement with Israel at noon on October 9 to implement the first phase of the plan, which came into effect the next day.

This agreement—which, let us be absolutely clear, is all that Israel and Hamas have signed up to so far—committed both sides to a ceasefire in Gaza, following which Israel would withdraw its forces to an agreed-upon “yellow line” and “not return to areas it has withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

In the 72 hours following the IDF withdrawal, all Israeli hostages in Gaza (or their remains) were to be exchanged for “250 life sentence prisoners [in Israeli jails] plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”

“Full aid” would also “be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip… at a minimum in consistence with the January 19, 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid.” The latter stipulated the entry of at least 600 trucks, including 50 fuel trucks, per day.

Though this aspect of the October 9 agreement received less media attention than the release of the Israeli hostages, it was critical for the Palestinians. The world’s top authority on food supply, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), had declared the “irrefutable” existence of famine in Gaza more than a month earlier.

The Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit

The ceasefire officially began on October 10. Hamas released its last 20 living hostages, and Israel began to release Palestinian prisoners on October 13.

At the Sharm el-Sheikh “Peace Summit” in Egypt that same day, Donald Trump declared that “the war in Gaza is over.” His audience included over 30 world leaders, among them Mark Carney, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Giorgia Meloni, as well as leaders from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Middle Eastern and Muslim states and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

The “president of peace” (as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio baptized his boss) was praised on all sides. Elbows up as ever, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered “congratulations to President Trump for his essential leadership” in delivering this “historic peace plan… opening a new chapter for Israelis, Palestinians, and the world.”

Their enthusiasm is comprehensible—though totally unfounded. For months, Western leaders outside the US had been facing mounting public opposition over their support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as well as growing concerns over their own potential liability for complicity in what was increasingly widely being recognized as a genocide. Tensions between the US and its allies peaked when (to Israel’s fury) Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and several other Western countries recognized a Palestinian state at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York.

Trump’s Gaza plan provided them with an off-ramp. As I wrote at the time, “One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.”

The end of the war?

The reality, however, is less rosy—as everybody present in Sharm el-Sheikh must have known.

To begin with, the October 9 agreement did not commit either Israel or Hamas to accepting the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan. Hamas had always been ready to engage in prisoner exchanges—that was, after all, the reason they took hostages on October 7—Israel rather less so. Other issues have proved more intractable.

Several members of the Israeli government stridently opposed the ceasefire, and Netanyahu himself likely only entered into it under pressure from Donald Trump (who was openly campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize). Challenged by the opposition to endorse Trump’s plan, Netanyahu’s coalition boycotted a Knesset vote on the issue.

In the ensuing days and weeks, Israeli leaders made it clear that they remained opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state now or ever and had no intention of pulling the IDF out of Gaza anytime soon. Fifty-three percent of the strip, including almost all of its arable land, lies in the area the IDF now controls behind the yellow line.

For its part, on October 24 Hamas communicated that while it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’” as the Trump plan envisaged, it was not prepared to disarm without serious negotiations on establishing a Palestinian state.

Like much of what comes out of the US president’s mouth, Trump’s statement in a December 29 interview with PBS Newshour that “Hamas pledged, they swore that they were going to disarm” is quite simply false.

Very far from the Gaza “war” being over, the thorniest issues—Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territories, disarmament of the Palestinian resistance, and the realization of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state—have yet to be resolved. So does the fate of Gaza’s surviving civilian population of over a million people, trapped in appalling conditions between the yellow line and the sea.

Two earlier ceasefires had enabled exchanges of hostages, in November 2023 and January 2025. Israel multiply breached and finally unilaterally ended both. There was—and is—no good reason to think the outcome will be any different this time around.

UN Security Council Resolution 2803

Notwithstanding these serious obstacles to a real peace, in a landmark resolution of November 17, which passed by a vote of 13-0 (with Russia and China abstaining), the UN Security Council welcomed Trump’s plan and endorsed its key provisions.

Resolution 2803 “authorized” a “Board of Peace”—whose composition is not specified in the resolution, but which will be chaired by Donald Trump himself—to:

• Set up “a transitional governance administration, including … a Palestinian technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians from the Strip”
• Establish “a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF)… with forces contributed by participating States”
• Create a “newly trained and vetted Palestinian police force,” which will work with the ISF to ensure “the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including… the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”

“As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw from the Gaza Strip… save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” the text goes on. The “standards, milestones, and timeframes” will be “agreed between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors [the US, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar], and the United States.”

Astonishingly, there is no provision for any Palestinian input into this most important of issues—for both sides. If the Palestinians give up their arms with no internationally backed guarantee of eventual statehood, they are defenceless in the face of an army that has repeatedly proved its ruthlessness. But so long as Hamas is not disarmed, Israelis fear a repetition of the dreadful events of October 7, 2023, which triggered the present so-called “war” and have been invoked to justify every Israeli action since.

The deal of the century?

These transitional arrangements, says the resolution, will remain in place “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

Both the PA and Hamas denounced Trump’s 2020 plan (which he modestly called “the deal of the century”) at the time, with Hamas describing it as an attempt “to liquidate the Palestinian national project.” Among other things, the plan would have allowed Israel to annex much of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, leaving behind a demilitarized Palestinian “state” made up of a series of Bantustans.

Only “after the PA reform program is faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced,” Resolution 2803 continues, “the conditions may”— note it says “may,” not “will”—be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.”

The postponement of establishing even a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood to the indefinite future—while effectively giving Israel and the US a veto over the process—is particularly ironic, coming so soon after Canada, the UK, and all the rest purportedly “recognized” the state of Palestine.

Unsurprisingly, Hamas and the other factions in Gaza rejected Resolution 2803. In their view, Trump’s plan is no more than a “form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the [Israeli] occupation against our people.”

The legal background

It is difficult to overstate just how major a departure Resolution 2803 is from the UN’s previous policies on the Palestinian question—and from the body of law established by the world’s two highest international courts.

After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Security Council Resolution 242 called for:

Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict [and]… Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area…

Israel ignored Resolution 242, as it has ignored literally hundreds of UN resolutions since—usually with the support of the United States, which has frequently employed its veto to shield Israel from sanctions or other UN action. The US has vetoed no less than six United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions in the course of the current “war” alone.

Responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and it must “end its unlawful presence… as rapidly as possible,” “cease immediately all new settlement activities,” and “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The justices went on to stress that “all states,” as well as international organizations (including the UN), were “under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance” in maintaining the occupation.

Recalling the ICJ ruling as well as earlier resolutions, on December 3, 2024 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requiring Israel to “comply with international law, including ceasing all settlement activities and evacuating settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vote was 157 in favour, eight against, and seven abstentions. Though both the US and Israel opposed the motion, the overwhelming majority of Western democracies, including Canada and the UK, backed it.

On November 21, 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998 as “an independent, permanent court of last resort… to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression,” issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Though not recognized by the US or Israel, this is the same court that convicted Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadzic for their part in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and—with US approval—indicted Vladimir Putin in 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s response to the ICC indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant has been to impose sanctions on both the court and several of its individual officials and judges.

The UN betrays Palestine—and itself

The Security Council’s acceptance of the Trump “peace plan” is a watershed moment for the postwar international order. It marks the definitive abandonment of attempts to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute within this framework of international law, and their replacement by obeisance to the imperatives of great power realpolitik.

Though Russia and China both criticized the Trump plan, they conspicuously did not veto Resolution 2803. Russia has no more interest in upholding international law than Israel or the US, given its invasion of Ukraine, while China would welcome a free hand in Taiwan, which it has always insisted is an integral part of its national territory (and therefore not governed by international law regarding relations between states).

In a blistering response to Security Council Resolution 2803 Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, got to the heart of the matter.

“Despite the horrors of the last two years and the ICJ’s clear jurisprudence,” she wrote:

the Council has chosen not to ground its response in the very body of law it is obliged to uphold: international human rights law, including the right of self-determination, the law governing the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the UN Charter.

Instead, “the resolution risks entrenching external control over Gaza’s governance, borders, security, and reconstruction” and “betrays the people it claims to protect.”

Specifically:

A military force answering to a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by the President of the United States, an active party to this conflict that has continually provided military, economic and diplomatic support to the illegal occupying Power, is not legal. It is a brazen attempt to impose, by threat of continued force against a virtually defenceless population, US and Israeli interests, plain and simple.

Essentially, it will leave Palestine in the hands of a puppet administration, assigning the United States, which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established.

In abnegating its legal responsibilities and outsourcing Gaza’s future to Trump’s “Board of Peace,” she charges, the UN has betrayed not only the Palestinian people but its own founding principles as embodied in Articles 1 and 2 of the UN Charter.

You cease, I fire

Nearly three months have passed since the Gaza “ceasefire” came into effect. Israel has repeatedly stalled progress on moving to phase two of Trump’s “peace plan” until all the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages have been returned—no small task, given the difficulty of recovering them in Gaza’s devastation. By December 4 the remains of all but one hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, had been recovered. Israel is still stalling.

Though both sides have accused the other of multiple violations of the ceasefire, the monstrous asymmetry of casualties suggests the fault lies overwhelmingly with Israel.

Since October 10, at least 416 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,110 wounded in Israeli attacks. Over the same period, just three Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza. According to Palestinian sources, two of them died when their vehicle ran over unexploded ordinance, and not, as Israel claimed, in a Hamas ambush.

While there hasn’t been a single reported incident of Hamas firing rockets into Israel, the Gazan authorities claim that between October 10 and December 28 “Israel shot at civilians 298 times, raided residential areas beyond the ‘yellow line’ 54 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 455 times, [and] demolished people’s properties on 162 occasions.”

In total, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 969 times from October 10 to December 28. To describe Trump’s ceasefire as “fragile,” “precarious,” or “tested,” as mainstream Western media habitually do, is to stretch the meaning of words beyond all credibility. On the Israeli side, at least, this has been a ceasefire in name only.

Restriction of aid

Let me finally turn to the only other provision in Trump’s Gaza Plan aside from the exchange of prisoners that was actually agreed in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas on October 9, the resumption of “full aid” into Gaza.

Israel has failed to open the Rafah crossing into Egypt, as is explicitly mandated in the Trump plan, and has severely restricted and on occasion completely stopped traffic at other crossing points throughout the ceasefire. While the number of humanitarian aid trucks that have been allowed into Gaza since the ceasefire is disputed, it is clearly far fewer than the agreed minimum of 600 per day.

Per the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, “Due to Israeli restrictions, as of December 16, only 57 percent of the 556 aid missions planned by the UN and its partners were carried out, including the delivery of vital aid and equipment, medical evacuations, and infrastructure repairs.”

According to Oxfam, posting on December 22:

Since the current ceasefire began on October 10th, Israeli authorities continue to arbitrarily reject scores of shipments of life-saving assistance into Gaza. Almost $50 million worth of food, water, tents, and medical supplies is still being held up at border crossings and warehouses. Oxfam alone has $2.5 million worth of aid sitting in Jordan, including 4,000 food parcels.

Expressing “serious concerns about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains catastrophic,” on December 30 the foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement calling upon Israel to fully open all the crossings and “lift unreasonable restrictions on imports considered to have a dual use… includ[ing] urgently needed medical and shelter equipment.”

Hobbling of INGOs

The statement further demanded that international NGOs “are able to operate in Gaza in a sustained and predictable way,” and that “the UN and its partners can continue their vital work.” It emphasized that “this includes United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], which provides essential services, such as health care and education, to millions of Palestinian refugees.”

This last point matters because Israel banned UNWRA—the single most important agency for coordinating aid efforts in Gaza—from operating in Israel from January 2025, on the basis of accusations (for which it provided no evidence) that some of its employees participated in the Hamas October 7 attack. That ban remains in place.

Tightening the screw further, on December 29 the Knesset passed a law cutting off electricity and water supplies to facilities owned by or operating on behalf of UNRWA in the occupied Palestinian territories, and banned provision of telecommunications, banking, and other financial services to the agency.

Under rules introduced in March 2025, Israel required aid organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to submit lists of their Palestinian staff by December 31 for vetting by intelligence services. Fearful that this would put their employees in danger of targeting by the IDF, many refused. Their fears are well founded. In 2024 alone, 125 UNRWA aid workers were killed in Gaza, the highest death toll in UN history.

Despite the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has insisted on implementing this so-called “security” measure. As a result, 37 INGOs have now lost their accreditation and will have to cease operating by March 1. These include Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Vision International, ActionAid, International Rescue Committee, CARE, Medico International, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

These restrictions on aid entering Gaza are too numerous and systematic to be an accident. The guns may have temporarily quieted, but Israel is continuing its ethnic cleansing and genocide by other means.

As winter bites, the old, the infirm, and above all the children will continue to die. In these circumstances the survivors may be that much more willing to abandon their homeland for “voluntary” exile. In another press conference with Netanyahu on December 29, Donald Trump suggested that more than half the population would like to take advantage of such an offer (“To me it’s common sense”).

Coincidentally or otherwise, on January 2 Israel became the first country in the world to recognize the breakaway state of Somaliland, an enclave strategically situated on the coast of the Gulf of Aden. The government of Somaliland has denied agreeing to host Israeli bases or accept displaced Gazans, but suspicions remain.

What comes next?

Three months on, the prospects for Donald Trump’s “comprehensive peace plan” are looking decidedly shaky. Having got all its hostages back, and secure in its military occupation of 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, Israel may decline to move on to phase two and find some excuse to resume the conflict as in the previous ceasefires.

Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm in the absence of guarantees of eventual statehood that Israel will never give—what more, after all, do Palestinians have to lose by keeping their weapons? Meantime the states that were mooted as contributors of troops to Trump’s proposed international stabilization force, including Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia, are reportedly getting cold feet about being dragged into the quagmire.

But in a sense none of this matters. The Trump plan has done its job. Gaza is out of the headlines, the allies are back on board, and the US is calling the shots—with the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council, which has accepted the inevitable.

The “rules-based order” established at the end of World War II is over. The world is entering “a new era of great power competition; a generational struggle to maintain peace through strength”—to quote US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, speaking after the US invasion of Venezuela—an era in which right gives way to might.

Resolution 8302 is the embodiment of that capitulation. Gaza is the future. And not just for Palestinians.

Derek Sayer is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History.

If Western politicians truly cared about upholding international law, the recent US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and attacks on Venezuelan territory would have sparked an outpouring of indignation. Such outrage was understandably on display when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. At that time, Western leaders were eager to present themselves as the most ardent defenders of international law in response to Moscow’s clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Yet while international law is enforced strictly against the ‘bad guys,’ comparable violations by the ‘good guys,’ justified as serving a supposedly righteous cause, are met with indulgence. With regard to recent events in Venezuela, Prime Minister Mark Carney, having condemned the Maduro regime for breaches of international law, posted on X on January 3 that “The Canadian government therefore welcomes the opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people.” This without mentioning the fact that Trump’s actions were themselves a grave breach of the international law that Carney, and by extension Canada, claims to uphold. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre went further, stating in a post on X that same day, “Congratulations to President Trump on successfully arresting narco-terrorist and socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro, who should live out his days in prison.”

While we might dismiss Poilievre’s cheerleading as the sort of thing one might expect of a Conservative leader in opposition, Carney’s response has more significance because it is the response of the government. Carney is not alone in tacitly condoning Trump’s actions because he sees them, at least in part, as having been carried out in the name of a good cause. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was also unwilling to simply come out and condemn the US action for what it was—a clear breach of international law—suggesting that “The legal situation regarding the US intervention is complex. We are taking our time to consider it.” His foreign minister was also unwilling to stick his neck out, instead highlighting, as apparent justification for US actions, that “Maduro led an unjust regime; eight million people have left the country. There are political prisoners.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s quip that if Maduro could be removed then the “US knows what to do next” verges on being trite, and probably doesn’t help his cause outside the West.

As a recent editorial in the Kyiv Post pointed out, Zelensky has little choice but to appease Trump despite the damage it will do to his wider credibility. It would also be easy to suggest that both Carney and Merz are simply trying to avoid offending the US president, but that is too simplistic an explanation. Most Western leaders lean towards seeing the world in black and white terms—they are the ‘good guys’ at the head of ostensibly liberal-democratic regimes in which the economic order is a free-market capitalist one. The ‘bad guys,’ meanwhile, are at best pretending to be democratic and tend towards a less-than-capitalist way of organizing economic activity. Putin and Maduro clearly fall into the latter category, whereas the ‘good guys’ like Zelensky fall into the former. Back in December last year, when hosting Zelensky in Halifax, Carney quite clearly stated that “Canada stands with Ukraine, because their cause—freedom, democracy, sovereignty—is our cause,” the press release having already stated that “Ukraine is at the frontline of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.”

Carney’s line might be more palatable if Western leaders would actually stick to their purported principles. Clearly ‘sovereignty’ is not an absolute in the minds of Western leaders who are willing to exaggerate the threat from the ‘bad guys’ to justify ignoring sovereignty on a whim, as the case of Maduro highlights. Not all that long ago the West was willing to participate in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, in what was a clear breach of Libyan sovereignty, in order to prevent a dictatorship from crushing a rebellion. However, crushing rebellions with the loss of civilian life that might entail is not the core issue here, as Western unwillingness to take robust action against Israel for its disproportionate response against the people of Gaza shows. In the case of Ukraine, the West was quite willing to tolerate considerable civilian deaths in the Donbas in 2014-2015 as a new Ukrainian government of questionable democratic legitimacy sought to crush uprisings there that had meaningful local support, even if they were supported by Russia.

Which of course brings us on to the second of Carney’s trio of causes: democracy. Other than the West being willing to ignore the people of Gaza’s apparent right to self-determination, the West has been willing to condone ultranationalist governments in Ukraine trampling all over democratic values, not only in the overthrowing of a democratically elected president but by then banning any parties that might pose a challenge to them. Justified by the apparent expediencies of war the West has been willing to tacitly condone the Zelensky government’s subsequent banning of a further slew of leftward leaning parties on the unsubstantiated grounds that they are ‘pro-Russian’—because it is all in a good cause.

Certainly, US and Western toleration of the questionable behaviour of foreign leaders that are on ‘team West’ always makes me think of a famous quote often attributed first to Franklin Roosevelt to describe the Nicaraguan dictator Samoza: “[He] may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” While it is unclear whether Roosevelt actually said this, this quotation has subsequently been attributed with variations to other US politicians, probably because it does encapsulate something meaningful about both a US and wider Western view of the world.

Having looked briefly at both ‘democracy’ and ‘sovereignty’ that leaves us with the very nebulous notion of ‘freedom’ in Carney’s triad of causes that he ostensibly champions. It remains to be seen what sort of “freedom, democracy and sovereignty” the Venezuelan people will enjoy going forward. It is difficult to imagine the US being satisfied if the Venezuelan people were to ‘freely’ elect a left-wing government, and it is all too likely that their affairs will ultimately be ‘managed’ by the US in the sort of way that such things were managed during the prolonged US-led Western occupation of Afghanistan. I would like to be proven wrong—but if past behaviour is the best indicator of future behaviour, then both many of the Venezuelan people and I are likely to be disappointed.

As Western politicians celebrate the ramifications of the US riding roughshod over international law in Venezuela, they do so within a political bubble. Outside that bubble, much of the remainder of the world has seen it all before. There is clearly one set of rules for ‘us’ and ‘our people,’ and another for ‘them.’ Western ‘values’ (as opposed to power) have never had the sort of credibility across much of the world that Western politicians seem to think they have, and those outside the Western bubble who are critical of its hypocrisy now have yet another example to help them make their case.

Professor Alexander Hill teaches at the University of Calgary, and is a leading expert on the military and political history of Russia and the Soviet Union since 1917. He is a fellow of the university’s Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies.

After four months of US President Donald Trump’s sabre-rattling, set against the backdrop of the most menacing and massive buildup of American military might since its 1989 invasion of Panama, US helicopter-borne troops finally swooped into Caracas in the middle of the night on Saturday, January 3, 2026. They scooped up Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and disappeared back into the darkness. By the end of the day, both were in jail in New York, facing criminal charges including “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine-importation conspiracy and weapons charges.”

Trump, who had previously justified US intervention in Venezuela by trumpeting a variety of legally dubious claims, including that he was protecting the US against the threat of Maduro’s “narco-terrorist organization,” finally abandoned all pretence.

The United States, he declared, will now “run” Venezuela for an indefinite period and will take “a tremendous amount of [oil] wealth out of the ground… in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”

That is the truth—and the challenge for the rest of the world. Including Canada.

International reaction was swift. Venezuela’s ideological supporters (China and Russia) condemned US military actions. Latin America is divided, with right-wing governments (Argentina’s Milei and Ecuador’s Noboa) supporting the operation, while others (Mexico’s Sheinbaum and Brazil’s Lula) condemned the raid.

For much of the rest of the world, however, especially Canada’s European allies, the response has been more complex and nuanced.

That’s because there have long been questions about Maduro’s electoral legitimacy. He was first elected Venezuelan president in 2013, winning by just 1.6 percentage points. By 2018, with his country’s economy in freefall and many of his opponents in jail or in exile, Maduro’s claim to have won re-election with more than two-thirds of the vote rang hollow. More than 50 countries, including Canada, anointed Juan Guaidó, the little-known leader of the National Assembly, as the country’s rightful leader. Maduro outlasted Guaidó. In 2024, Maduro once again claimed electoral victory, despite even louder questions about the vote’s legitimacy.

So, while the European Union rightly noted Saturday that the Maduro government “lacks legitimacy,” its statement about the US capture of Maduro emphasized that “under all circumstances, the principles of law and the UN Charter must be respected.”

A spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres expressed concern at the “dangerous precedent” of the United States’ action, adding that Guterres was “deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected.”

What does international law say? Article 2 of the UN Charter lays out clearly the rights and obligations of all members. Section 4 notes that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

Article 2 is the bedrock international covenant that allows us to criticize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threats to absorb Taiwan.

Which brings us back to Canada. Canada’s response to what happened in Venezuela was neither complex nor nuanced. It was supine.

In a mealy-mouthed, three-paragraph, 190-word post on X, Prime Minister Mark Carney danced and dodged, avoiding any direct criticism of what most experts consider the United States’ flagrant violation of that international law.

It’s worth parsing Carney’s posting. It begins with its own expansive version of virtue-signalling:

One of the first actions taken by Canada’s new government in March 2025 was to impose additional sanctions on Nicolás Maduro’s brutally oppressive and criminal regime—unequivocally condemning his grave breaches of international peace and security, gross and systematic human rights violations, and corruption. Canada has not recognised the illegitimate regime of Maduro since it stole the 2018 election. The Canadian government therefore welcomes the opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people.

OK, but what about the US attack that very day on a sovereign nation in clear violation of international law?

Canada has long supported a peaceful, negotiated, and Venezuelan-led transition process that respects the democratic will of the Venezuelan people. In keeping with our long-standing commitment to upholding the rule of law, sovereignty, and human rights, Canada calls on all parties to respect international law.

So, finally, 112 words into his self-justifying, self-satisfied statement, Carney finally offered nine words that actually, sort of responded to what was happening. Canada calls on all parties to respect international law. And that was it. Moving on.

We stand by the Venezuelan people’s sovereign right to decide and build their own future in a peaceful and democratic society…

But Carney never once called out the United States for its failure to respect that international law.

The Canadian government, cowed by an erratic and often vindictive Trump, has seemingly adopted what it believes is the pragmatic position, placing trade concerns with Washington (and the need to renegotiate the Canada-Mexico-US trade deal) above international law—and self-respect.

By contrast, our other partner in that trilateral trade arrangement, Mexico, did not shy away from the crux of the situation: “The Mexican government strongly condemns and rejects the military actions unilaterally,” it said, specifically describing Washington’s actions as a “clear violation of Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations.”

We need to remember who we are dealing with. Donald Trump is a president who has already unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, who claims the right to seize control of Greenland by force, who has threatened to dispatch US troops to Mexico, and, of course, who has expressed a lust to make Canada the 51st US state.

Venezuela may be—probably is—just the opening gambit in implementing Trump’s grand vision of a radically expanded, expansive version of the Monroe Doctrine, which sees the entire Western Hemisphere as Washington’s plaything. That aspiration was made explicit policy in the recently released US “National Security Strategy.”

In light of all that, can we really afford to be so quiescent and cowardly?

The words of German pastor Martin Niemoller about complicity in the face of Nazi brutality may well be pertinent: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out […] Then they came for the trade unionists […] Then they came for the Jews […] Then they came for me.”

First, they came for Venezuela.

John Kirk is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University and the author/co-editor of 21 books about Latin America.

Stephen Kimber is an Inglis Professor in the School of Journalism, Writing & Publishing at the University of King’s College and the award-winning author of 14 books, including What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five.

Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left

David Camfield

Fernwood, 2025

David Camfield’s latest book, Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left, is an interesting and ambitious effort to critically evaluate the experiences and political legacies of what Camfield calls “already existing socialism” (AES) and present an alternative tradition, one with which he identifies.

He sets out to examine the reasons for the failure of AES to lead to any genuine form of communism and to draw instructive lessons from those experiences. He critiques political traditions based on what he considers erroneously positive assessments of the AES experiences and supports an alternative strategic tradition with a view to building a working class movement that can overthrow capitalism, transcend class society and evolve towards communism. He calls that project “reconstructed historical materialism, an unorthodox anti-racist feminist Marxism, and socialism from below.” He compares this with AES socialism and looks at the implications of both for shaping political understanding and for contemporary working class political struggles. In all this, he is partially successful.

State socialism and AES

He begins with an analysis of three forms of what he calls “state capitalist” socialist experiments in Russia, China, and Cuba. He maintains that they were never really able to serve as the base for a transformation beyond class society because they were essentially dictatorships, ruled by newly generated capitalist classes, and hence the social systems characteristic of AES are referred to as “state capitalist.” They ruled over the working class through authoritarian means while directing and appropriating the surplus created by workers and peasants for their own profit and benefit.

His arguments are backed up by historical descriptions of each of these states, citing respected historical scholars. As I am not sufficiently conversant with the Cuban experience, I will restrict my comments to Camfield’s treatment of the Russian and Chinese cases.

On one level, his arguments and description are unassailable and useful. AES countries were clearly incapable of the kind of transition needed to build communism, and there are or were a stratum of rulers over the working class who held power in the AES countries, whether defined as classes or bureaucratic strata. But the description of these societies and the ruling stratum in each is often overdrawn, simplifying the nature of political institutions and neglecting real elements of class struggle and social contradictions that characterized these social systems. At the same time, it is one of the book’s main strengths that its reading of the AES experience throws into relief the dangers of a deficit of democracy, a theme that Camfield returns to again and again, both in this book and other writings.

In the introduction to Red Flags, Camfield lays out his criteria for measuring a given system’s potential for a transition towards communism. It is a critical component of his reading of the AES societies and, while those criteria contain utopian elements, such as the elimination of markets and state power, the reflections are worthwhile.

For instance, he asks:

Were social relations changing in ways that meant that the arrangements bred by capitalism and other forms of class society were starting to be replaced with new ones that had the potential to eventually flower in the withering away of class division, markets and state power?

Like many critics of the Soviet and other AES systems, he contends that the ruling party ruled in the name of the working class, while the latter clearly had no say in the nature of that rule. In this view, the ruling party served as the political instrument of the exploitative, new capitalist class and used the state and economy to aggrandize itself.

But this is only partially correct: the ruling strata in the AES were not capitalist, and although they controlled the state and the means of production, they were nevertheless constrained by the peculiar collectivist nature of the state socialist regimes they constructed.

Russia

Camfield offers a solid analysis of the Russian revolution. He acknowledges that it would have been impossible for the soviets to maintain a leading role in governing and coordinating or replacing the state in the face of the isolation of the country, the destruction of governing institutions, the dire economic conditions and civil war, as well as the relatively small size of the working class itself. This necessitated a strengthening of a new (and elements of the old) state apparatus, including restarting, coordinating and developing the economy, but also gave rise to repressive institutions. Camfield harbours an unrealistic expectation, however, that the institution of the soviets could actually have had the potential to replace the state. On their own, these direct institutions would be insufficient to meet the complex requirements of building, coordinating, and transforming a complex society and could only serve as one component of the larger structures needed for this endeavour.

Government by direct assembly on the level of an entire country is not possible. The necessity of governing and building entails making laws. It requires an executive to make policy and organize their implementation. Moreover, if we are talking about the replacement of one social system with another, faced with violent or even non-violent opposition from a former ruling class, it is hard to see how to dispense with a strong state.

Direct assemblies or councils such as soviets could constitute one component of a system of building working class or subordinate class participation in creating, defending, and institutionalizing a new system, but these cannot substitute for state institutions or democratically elected representative law-making bodies (see Ralph Miliband’s Socialism for a Sceptical Age, Verso, 1994)

In my view, Camfield overestimates the power and relative weight of this form of democratic institution, reflecting his rather one-sided and problematic characterization of the nature of the state.

In general, though, he provides an accurate description of the development of the state/party dictatorship and the formation of a caste or class of people using its monopolization of state power to direct and control the development of the Soviet economy. But this was a different kind of ruling class than that described by Camfield as ruling under a regime of “state capitalism.” In the Soviet Union, the leaders of the party-state were constrained to act in particular ways that prevented individual appropriation of the means of production, and the society was not governed by the rules of private ownership, competition, and private accumulation. The nature and form of the appropriation of working class surplus was different than under capitalism. The ruling elements, many of whom came from management and engineering backgrounds, did not constitute a class. They couldn’t buy or sell means of production, pass them on to their progeny, or reserve positions of power to them.

Moshe Lewin, one of the most perceptive historians of Soviet social and economic history, whom Camfield cites liberally, argued in Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New Press, 1995) that, at some point, the Soviet Communist Party ceased to be “political” as it was swallowed up by the economic development and management process, essentially becoming a party of bureaucratic managers. Yet Lewin also disagrees with ascribing class status to the Soviet hierarchy of managers.

Although he offers a brief critique of the limits of Soviet central planning, Camfield does not provide sufficient explanation for the internal logic of the social system that was created and the social contradictions that arose apart from references to the exploitation of the working class and the peasantry in the agricultural sector to provide the surplus that the new ruling stratum (that he calls a class) appropriated and managed. Were the bureaucratic planners, managers and bureaucrats, as well as workers, all cynical about the goals of social and economic development? Were they exclusively or primarily concerned with furthering their personal interests in class rule? Were there efforts to think about the system itself, its goals, and where it would lead? Evidence suggests that things were far more complicated than Camfield allows, since proponents of various kinds of non-capitalist reform—such as Yakov Kronrod in the 1970s—remained embedded in various levels of the bureaucracy (Kronrod’s writings were described in David Mandel (ed.), Democracy, Plan, and Market: Yakov Kronrod’s Political Economy of Socialism, Ibidem Press, 2017, and cited by Sam Gindin in his essay “Is Socialism Possible”)

China

Camfield frames China as another AES state that eventually mutated into a more openly capitalist model, while acknowledging some of the differences between it and the USSR, particularly with respect to the nature of the regime’s revolutionary origins, the successful and less brutal collectivization process, and the anti-imperialist component of the Chinese revolution, among other points.

He sees both the Mao Zedong and post-Deng Xiaoping leadership as rooted in the lack of control and power of the masses from below. He describes the Chinese revolution as less democratic and participatory than the Russian revolution since it was not rooted in “mass struggle from below democratically organized by the exploited masses themselves.” As well, it was based in the peasantry, with urban workers playing a very limited role.

Collectivization in China was part of an effort to both increase the productivity of rural production and create collective institutions; Camfield, however, downplays the social transformation component. And while acknowledging that the poor and landless peasantry had an interest in the process, he also cites historians who claim that collectivization resulted in the “total dispossession of the peasantry” and view the Chinese case as scarcely different from the model developed in Stalin’s USSR, with its massive mobilization of social resources and ecological destruction.

As Camfield sees it, the persistence and strengthening of the state represented the creation of a new class bringing with it a different form of class exploitation and oppression. It consisted of “top party-state officials, including enterprise bosses and military leaders.” In this system, neither workers nor peasants had any democratic say in their workplaces, or in the economy or political system more generally.

There are a number of contradictions and problems in this reading of China that lie mainly in what is left out: for instance, the debates that took place within and around the CCP surrounding the development of a socialist society in conditions of single-party rule and economic backwardness, as well as discussions of different conceptions of how to industrialize (and the meaning of industrialization), as well as concerns about the development of a stratum of bureaucrats and the role of the working class.

In the USSR under Stalin, the debates on how to develop and transform the society in a non-capitalist manner were quashed, the protagonists were murdered or purged, and the Stalinist faction imposed its will and shaped the USSR’s development. In China, though, after the initial period, there were debates inside the CCP, from the mid-1950s through to the end of the Cultural Revolution, about how to avoid the pitfalls of the Soviet form of development. Reflecting ongoing struggles in the society as a whole, these debates were centred on Mao and his faction within the party. They had to do with balancing rural and urban development (the Maoist idea of “walking on two legs”), the role of the working class in industrialization, in urban workplaces and in the countryside, bureaucratization and the power and role of those entrusted with managing the system, and the importance of being both “red” (committed to working class power and participation) and “expert.”

The key theoretical issue underlying these debates was the continuation of class struggle under socialism. Of course, as Camfield notes, any issues that Mao raised were addressed only within the confines of the ruling party’s ongoing political monopoly; when that monopoly was threatened or questioned in any way repression followed. Still, they contained germs of critical questions of socialist development and social structure.

Certainly, mass movements initiated by Mao and others, such as the Cultural Revolution, were contradictory at best, and ultimately failed. While they involved people thinking about bigger issues regarding the future of the revolution, they were lacking in democratic institutional forms and practices and degenerated into warring factional violence, needless death, and tragic outcomes for millions of people. They evolved in the absence of real democratic power or limits on the power of the Party and without autonomous political organization at the base. In the book, Camfield describes the Cultural Revolution period as a monumental struggle for power within the “exploiting” party, with ominous implications for society as a whole. But it was more than a power struggle between elite factions in the CCP: it raised fundamental questions about power, class formation and relations, bureaucracy, and the nature of socialism in that country.

As Lin Chun (The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, Duke University Press, 2006, and Revolution and Counterrevolution in China: The Paradoxes of Chinese Struggle, Verso, 2021), among others, has shown how China’s political evolution, and the chaos and instability unleashed in these failed campaigns culminating in the Cultural Revolution, ultimately resulted in a backlash and the consolidation of the technocratic and bureaucratic party-state elements that congealed around Deng Xiaoping. This ultimately paved the way for the authoritarian capitalist developmental system of today.

It is important to keep in mind that regardless of the level of authoritarian power wielded by the Chinese state over all aspects of society through the CCP, there remains enormous support for the regime and the Party, as a result of the legitimacy gained through their revolutionary legacy and origins, and the successful (if unequal and decidedly non-socialist) growth of the economy and rise in living standards.

And while there is no denying the disastrous ecological consequences of China’s economic growth, in the form, for example, of contributing to climate change as the world’s largest user of coal, Camfield’s description of China’s environmental role is tendentious, omitting to mention the measures China has taken to transition away from fossil fuel dependence. It has invested massively in new forms of renewable energy. Of course, efforts to address climate change are ultimately incompatible with rapid and continuous industrial growth, a dilemma faced not only by China but also much of the developing world.

Camfield’s analysis of China would have benefitted from reflection on a set of questions that China’s experience raises about moving towards socialism or communism in societies that have to combine modernization and revolutionary social and political transformation simultaneously. Are there forms of development that allow for democratic participation and working class control in a society where the working class is very much a minority? Can development take a different form than that of traditional capitalism or the Soviet model—which put the development of heavy industrial productive forces above any putative commitment to social transformation, equality, or fulfillment of collective needs, and ultimately adopted an ideology of patriotic modernization that measures success by military power and GDP? What political forms created by the working class as state institutions can give rise to a different kind of development, one based on the egalitarian and participatory ideals of communism?

Engaging with AES lessons

Following his discussion of various AES states, Camfield anticipates and addresses some critiques of his assessment in a series of chapters which provide deeper insight into his overall political framework.

He contests contentions that left critiques of AES states are either tantamount to anti-communism or feed it, and he rejects the notion that such critiques are ‘purist’ at best or racist at worst (coming from critics in the Global North). He also disputes the notion that the development of the productive forces in AES states proved the success of these kinds of societies and that, somehow, in spite of their contradictions, these experiments were on the road to real communism. He rejects the proposition that state property was proof of socialism, and disagrees that these societies were improvements over capitalism.

His points here are largely well taken: the AES states were not communist in any real sense, and critiquing them in the name of workers’ democracy and genuine efforts at social transformation is hardly anti-communism. Industrial development and modernization is a measure of growth, not communism. With respect to the question of whether AES states were a form of state capitalism, Camfield describes an internal structure that seemed to mimic capitalist relations: workers worked for wages and had no control over their workplaces or the economy as a whole, which operated on a perpetual war footing, as was characteristic of major powers such as the USSR and China. He argues further that the integration of the AES states into the capitalist world economy, which pressured these countries to compete with capitalist states regarding productivity and military power, forced them to alter their internal social relations.

As he puts it, “AES societies were and are capitalist because the surplus labour that the ruling class extracted from the direct producers was allocated in ways that were powerfully influenced by competition between states in the global capitalist system and because the ruling class did its best to restore labour productivity to match the levels that existed in the advanced capitalist societies.”

But is capitalism defined by the allocation of surplus labour and wouldn’t any socialist experiment be subject to such pressures? Clearly, the inability to develop beyond a mobilizational economic development model associated with centralized, undemocratic state planning helped doom the USSR, and its sister societies in Eastern Europe, but this is not tantamount to state capitalism. Of course, China did, indeed, ultimately develop a kind of state capitalist model, with its almost full insertion into the capitalist world system as a major player and with the growth of a significant bourgeoisie.

State power

Further along in the book, Camfield explores how Stalinism and the positive assimilation of the AES experience by some leftists distort how they—and many activists today—understand socialism. Addressing the question of state power, he criticizes the orthodox Marxist-Leninist vision of moving through a prescribed state-owned stage of ‘socialism,’ towards an eventual communist stage. He contrasts state ownership of the economy with direct working class control:

What is essential is economic and political democracy… direct control by the people of the whole administration of the community. Seeing the path to communism through the prism of AES makes for profoundly distorted vision… It leads to the idea that a society can be in transition without being democratic.

And later:

…viewing the goal and path towards it [communism] through the prism of the AES, as many socialists and communists still do, makes for a statist vision of an alternative.

Readers of Red Flags may rightly ask how societies can move beyond ownership and control by the capitalist class and market competition, overseen by the capitalist state, without some form of state ownership of the means of production.

While AES states (and their defenders) claimed that state appropriation of private capital through mass nationalization was a necessary step in guaranteeing an eventual transition to communism, the Party/state used state ownership to consolidate their dominance over the working class and to pursue a decidedly non-socialist form of development.

But, in acknowledging this, Camfield seems to be suggesting that state ownership can never contribute to building a socialist economy or serve as a constructive component of a transition to communism.

Clearly, although partial state ownership also plays a role in different kinds of capitalist economies (we are all too familiar with nationalized capital that continues to operate much like it did in the private sector), it might indeed be a necessary step towards taking power from capital and socializing production and services through a socialist-led transitional period of enhancing the power of the working class and creating deepening democratic forms of planning, coordination and governance. It depends on the organization and mobilization of the working class and the development of democratic and participatory institutions that can move society in a socialist direction.

When looking at a transition to a communist society and economy, Camfield seems to regard all forms of governing institutions associated with a society in the process of transformation as necessarily guaranteeing control from above. Coordination, planning, experimenting with different forms of production, and collective ownership and governance require new institutional forms. This means some form of the state. Transformation has to include these kinds of transitions. Making them democratic and participatory is one thing, but supposing that the state can be completely eliminated is far-fetched (on this point, see Sam Gindin’s “Socialism for Realists,” Catalyst, Vol. 2, No. 3, Fall 2018).

The ideological legacy of AES and strategies for revolutionary change

Camfield traces the legacy of Stalinism and AES for the ideology and practices of the followers and supporters of that tradition, emphasizing that Marxism-Leninism was not based on Marx or Lenin’s ideas and practices, but was a creation of Stalin, as the ruling ideology of that regime. Mao’s critique, in his view, is really nothing other than a more voluntarist version of this ideology, “an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism.”

The creation and spread of Marxism-Leninism has had a deep and lasting impact on the communist movement. In fact, Marxism-Leninism remains hegemonic in many of the communist-inspired movements and those remaining in power today. Camfield identifies present and historical undemocratic practices in mass movements and political practices, and critiques what he calls the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist “strategy for revolution,” consisting of various failed strategic approaches.

They include such practices as popular fronts with so-called progressive capitalists and the “stages” approach, which argues that revolution or working class interests need to be subordinated to capitalist democratic stages that need to be consolidated before fighting for socialism. One can surely recognize the approach of the South African Communist Party in tailing behind the African National Congress’s black capitalism stage in South Africa.

These are certainly useful critical points. But there have been important historical moments when popular fronts were necessary, such as in the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s. The key element in these periods was the need to maintain socialist and working class autonomy and independence in challenging fascism and Nazism, uniting all the forces that can be united against the fascist threat to the survival of human civilization. One example was encouraging working class resistance to speed-up and wage controls during the Second World War in the face of government enforced anti-strike laws, supposedly to support the war effort. The US had an agreement between the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the government to prevent a strike, while the Canadian government imposed a strike ban.

Here, Camfield criticizes left parties that succumb to electoralism, and argues against the idea, espoused by social democratic parties, that socialism can be attained through a series of moderate reforms and political action limited to legal and electoral activity. Yet, in making this important point, Camfield would appear to eschew all forms of electoral participation, arguing against any strategy of reforming and undermining the bourgeois state as a larger component of eventually coming to power. Instead, he poses the need for “dual power.”

For Camfield, the parliamentary path to power is a trap. Getting elected means accommodating and facilitating capitalist rule. As well, he seems to allow no role for even explicitly socialist political parties and sees no strategic importance in challenging capitalist power by working to reform and transform the state. Change has to come through insurrectionary movements.

He writes:

…a government in office in a capitalist state, which includes military, police, judicial, penal, and other institutions, is incapable of getting such a transition underway. It cannot break the grip of capital on social life—the prerequisite for launching a transition towards communism—and put exploited and oppressed people in charge of their own destinies. This is because the power of capital to make profits cannot be broken gradually. If the ability of capital to make profits is seriously threatened “a genuine economic and social earthquake is touched off”… that can only be resolved by reimposing capitalist order or by socialist revolution that puts the direct producers in control of society… a rupture would, at some point have to involve new, radically democratic institutions of popular power, akin to the soviets…

This raises the question of how the working class can build itself into an independent political force and come to power, and what approach it should take to the capitalist state. Camfield scarcely addresses the role of the state in capitalist societies or, more specifically, its functions, as outlined by Leo Panitch, for example, in his famous 1977 essay collection The Canadian State. We do not get a sense from Red Flags of how to deal with the state in working to build a revolutionary socialist movement today.

Of course, the state and capitalist society need to be radically transformed in any eventual ascension to power by the working class, but this must begin through struggles for reforms in contemporary bourgeois society. In Camfield’s view, there seems to be no place for structural reforms that alter the role or structure of the state, such as nationalizing finance and transforming it into a democratically-run utility, or nationalizing transportation to facilitate diminishing the role of individual auto transport, as well as promoting full electrification and the creation of a robust and dominant mass transit system, eliminating reliance on fossil fuel. To make this happen requires radical changes to the structure of the state, driven by a political movement of working people prepared to demand and shape them, while challenging capital. Fighting for these reforms isn’t a substitute for building working class power but it is a critical component.

As well, taking political measures that challenge the power of capital requires electoral participation and victories, all the while building power in workplaces and communities. This requires challenging the power and structures of state institutions as a condition of laying the necessary groundwork for revolutionary transformations.

Democratic institutions and movements from below also have to be built, and the powers of the state to control them—police, courts, the army, as well as private finance, capital’s ownership over the economy and dominance in social reproduction and life—have to be challenged and circumscribed. For all this it is necessary to have a political party rooted in a variety of movements working to transcend the capitalist system itself.

Getting elected on a socialist platform or with a commitment to constraining the operations of capitalism would certainly lead to a revolt by capital, setting in motion necessary struggles at the level of the state, economy, and social life to make a break with the capitalist system. The working class would have to be united behind such a project for it to succeed. Building the kind of unity that would make a socialist movement hegemonic among the working class takes time, especially now when the working class is segmented, divided, and more or less defeated as a political force for radical change.

I would also argue against Camfield that it requires engaging in parliamentary politics—and, most essentially, building parties of the working class—but without being limited by it (surprisingly, Camfield only mentions Gramsci once, when he refers to him as a Stalinist, and offers no discussion of the role of hegemony in the struggle for socialism). Working class people in bourgeois democracies expect socialists to engage in parliamentary activity. Doing so is not ipso facto opportunist or social democratic; it reflects an understanding of both the way workers embrace democratic rights, think and act, as well as the task of taking power and transforming the state—not eliminating it.

Camfield rightly identifies most defenders of AES as opponents of radical forms of working class organization and action and unsupportive of radical structural reforms. As he notes, they tend to support limiting political struggle to legalistic and electoral activity.

But although Camfield recognizes the need to fight for reforms he never refers in any positive way to radical socialist participation in parliamentary politics or elections, even though the form of political rule in bourgeois societies is, for the most part, parliamentary or republican democracy.

As Lenin observed in his famous pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, workers do not spontaneously become class conscious socialists in the absence of education and political intervention by political parties. Indeed, the strikingly interdependent relationship that developed between the Petrograd working class and the Bolsheviks that Camfield points to—a relationship that is documented in detail in David Mandel’s The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power—was a result of the tireless work of the Bolsheviks and the initiative and insight that the working class movement developed.

Campism, credulity, and international relations

Red Flags includes a relatively short, but important section on what the author sees as the manifestation of AES and Marxist-Leninist influences in the context of current international politics. He calls this perspective “anti-NATO neo-campism.”

This view, he argues, is rooted in one of the “founding assumptions embedded in ML culture,” namely the “duty of unswerving loyalty to the leaders of the USSR.” It was demonstrated in the justification and support of the Nazi-Soviet alliance at the beginning of the Second World War, and took the form, in the post-war period, of viewing that the world as divided into two camps, one imperialist and the other anti-imperialist.

In the current era, this misguided perspective identifies “the fundamental political division in the world as one between the US and its NATO allies on the one side, and, on the other, a camp of states that allegedly challenge imperialism, of which ‘socialist’ China is the mightiest.” Camfield argues that this is behind the support by some communist organizations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and of their echoing Putin’s claims of fascist influence in that country.

Further, according to the twisted logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” those who hold this view are scarcely critical of any regime opposed to the United States. Here Camfield includes China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Syria, for example.

He argues that this neo-campist view of the world is rooted in “serious misunderstandings of global capitalism today.” Underlying his argument here is a contention that the form of imperialism has not changed substantially since the First World War period, described by Lenin. It remains a hierarchy in an imperialist chain. This chain is made up of a number of tiers, descending from the US. The US is the imperialist superpower, with lower tiers of secondary imperialist states on down to sub-imperialist powers and subordinate peripheral states. In this view, the declining US superpower is not the only imperialist power. Russia and China, former AES states, are both capitalist and imperialist.

Camfield contends: “people who fail to understand these dynamics can easily end up politically backing states in conflict with the US that are just as much part of capitalism as the state at the top of the imperial chain. One result of this stance is a refusal of international solidarity with people fighting for democracy, social reforms and radical changes within China, Russia, and other societies where rulers class with the US.”

Another claim he makes is that the culture of anti-NATO neo-campism leads to support for the “dubious claims” made in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other places where there is conflict between the US and its NATO partners and their enemies. By implication, people with this perspective refuse to accept evidence of oppression by governments in the anti-NATO camp against minorities or the working classes in those countries.

Camfield’s treatment of these issues is, to say the least, highly contentious within the contemporary left, and it would have served the book better had he acknowledged and engaged with the serious ongoing debates. Certainly, there are those who dogmatically and simplistically divide the world into the two opposing “camps” and Camfield is right to affirm that the enemies of the US are not worthy of support by socialists and the left simply by virtue of this opposition.

But recognizing that the interests of certain authoritarian regimes, such as Iran under the Mullahs, Assad’s Syria, or Putin’s Russia conflict with and those of the United States does not necessarily imply support for those regimes.

Camfield’s characterization of the nature of imperialism and the current state of contemporary global capitalism is particularly problematic. and is certainly the subject of debate amongst socialist thinkers and activists. In The Making of Global Capitalism Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin maintain that subordinate capitalist countries operate through and within the US imperial system, as their capitalist economies continue to exploit and oppress their own working classes as well as other countries. Recognizing the dominant role of the US in the world system doesn’t mean that all countries competing within that system are necessarily progressive or aspire to unseat the US. But they are also arguably not imperialist, in the sense of vying to create their own empire.

Calling opposition to NATO “anti-NATO neo-campism” is particularly problematic. Yes, there are those who will support anything that Russia or China does, but that is different from those who see the expansion of NATO as part of a project of surrounding and potentially planning for the dismemberment of Russia, as many on the left do. It doesn’t mean support for Putin characterizing Russia as some kind of progressive bastion against the US, or agreeing with the bloody invasion of Ukraine. Neither does it mean acquiescing to what will potentially be an effort to keep Russia and Ukraine bogged down in a seemingly endless bloodbath. It does mean realistically analyzing the larger geopolitical designs of the US and its mainly conservative allies in NATO (and the capitalist and pro-US nature of NATO) without romanticizing or idealizing resistance to it.

These are extremely controversial and conflicting understandings of the current conjuncture with enormous implications for the left. I thus found Camfield’s too brief set of assertions in the concluding section of Red Flags overly polemical. Targeting the dogmatic ‘campist’ perspective held by supporters of the ML tradition as the main pole of reference for challenging NATO and analyzing the world political system leaves out other critical and competing understandings prevalent on the left today. It would have been much more constructive here to have a more robust discussion that posed the critical issues and questions and principled differences within the socialist and anti-imperialist left on these questions.

An alternative tradition

In the concluding chapters of Red Flags, Camfield discusses the political tradition that underpins his thinking. He calls it “socialism from below,” in contrast with “various forms of socialism from above,” including reformist parliamentary socialism and Marxism-Leninism. Communism, as he sees it, has been enhanced as a worldview and political project by its connection with “opposition to patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, and cis supremacy in the 20th and 21st centuries.”

This tradition encompasses a variety of anti-Stalinist thinkers and activists tied together by their opposition to rule over the working class by a small minority and a commitment to building new, revolutionary participatory and democratic institutions. Camfield points to a particular line of intellectual development from Marx, Engels, and William Morris to Rosa Luxemburg, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cornelius Castoriadis, Karl Korsch and others, as well as anarchist communists that is marked by a commitment to the right of working people to self-organize and act in their own collective interests, unencumbered by authoritarian or would-be authoritarian leaders. Luxemburg is central in this tradition, particularly her defence of democracy as essential for working class rule and revolutionary transformation, and her insistence, reflected in her critique of Soviet Russia, that coming to power must reflect the clear and unambiguous will of the majority of the working class.

Turning to the contemporary conjuncture, Camfield discusses the inhospitable conditions for communist ideas given the widespread defeat of working class movements and such developments as the fall of the USSR and China’s Tiananmen Square massacre as well as the full integration of Russia and China into the global capitalist system. While he does not identify the USSR and China as socialist, he registers a sense of a dimming of the possibility of alternatives in the social imagination as marking our own era.

He laments the dearth of nodes of collective organization and resistance in the working class, the lack of the influence of socialist ideas in spite of the many hardships and challenges that working people face, and the strength of the populist backlash within the class. He does temper this sobering picture by emphasizing the growing resistance to neoliberalism that has arisen with every successive economic crisis. But he also finds discouraging the response in the form of reformist socialism, represented, for instance, by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Bernie Sanders, and Jeremy Corbyn (more debatably, he includes French socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon in this category).

In a couple of paragraphs, Camfield quite eloquently depicts the magnitude of the global climate crisis and explains why fully addressing it requires an end to capitalism. Transitioning from fossil fuels, challenging, transforming, and limiting capitalist forms of individual consumption, and recognizing the limits of resources and energy that gainsay the addiction to growth are all identified as critical for a revolutionary socialist movement. He argues for the conversion of productive capacities from mass consumption and military production and as well as for democratic planning, echoing British journalist George Monbiot’s appeal for “private sufficiency, public luxury.”

What hope for communism?

In a final chapter, Camfield sums up the many factors that make contemporary capitalist society ripe for transformation into something qualitatively better, and he explains why the working class remains the only potential agent of this necessary change. In what could be described as a rather utopian take on how such change might come about, Camfield envisions the possibility of the working class taking power through a series of mass demonstrations and working class actions culminating in dual power, harkening back to the early days of the October Revolution in Russia, when workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up alongside the existing, albeit crumbling, state and government. He writes: “The missing key is self-organized mass movements of direct producers that threaten to surge over the defensive barriers and diversionary channels erected by the capitalist states and create dual power.”

Although forms of workers’ councils and direct democratic experiments have appeared periodically, the fact that this has led to a political and social revolution only once in over a century, and ultimately proved unsustainable, should at least give us pause. In bourgeois democracies, how will communists do education with workers to move in this direction, given the hegemonic and repressive hold that capital has on working people? Since Camfield never really assigns that kind of a role to a political party, he must suppose that workers will spontaneously draw revolutionary conclusions from their experiences of struggle. There seems to be no place in his vision of social change for engaging political institutions to transform and democratize them, working to get elected on a program of socialist transformation, or challenging capitalist control over investment, property and key economic activities. Red Flags makes a strong case that a deficit of democracy has doomed revolutionary and left movements to failure but it is less convincing in its suggestion that insurrectionary activity can by itself suffice to secure political power.

There is of course much of value in the left traditions Camfield discusses and draws on in Red Flags: moral and principled support for democracy and condemnation of authoritarianism; a belief in the capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and build a different kind of society; an openness to identifying and confronting other critical social contradictions and forms of oppression beyond class.

While I have some substantial disagreements with both the descriptive and prescriptive dimensions of Red Flags, the book is certainly a stimulating contribution to the debate on how to move forward as socialists, and what lessons we can learn from the past.

Herman Rosenfeld is a Toronto-based socialist activist, educator, organizer and writer. He is a retired national staff person with the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor), and worked in their Education Department.

Of all the ridiculous contortions Western media have performed over the past two years to whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide, the breathless handwringing over the supposed calamity of Israel becoming a “pariah state” is an almost touching display of fevered wishful thinking. In headline after headline, article after article, the self-styled “liberal” press—Haaretz, the New York Times, and the Guardian foremost among them—frets that Israel’s supposed “missteps” might place it at risk of becoming a rogue state, as if unrestrained brutality and open contempt for international law were mere errors of judgment. But only in a looking-glass world could Israel’s pariah status—blindingly evident since its inception—ever be in doubt. If the term has any meaning at all, Israel is its archetype, and always has been.

Yet Israel’s propagandists manufacture a “legitimacy crisis,” rebranding warranted criticism as an effort to “delegitimize” the state and endanger Jews globally. This claim is a fiction, meant only to turn culpability into perceived persecution and cover up well-documented crimes. Honest observers know this is no sudden descent: Israel’s contempt for law, morality, and human life itself is foundational—it was born in blood and terror. Recognizing this longstanding pariah status is essential to challenging the impunity that ensures Israel’s lack of accountability.

Pariah from the first day

While critics rightly note that history did not begin on October 7, 2023, focusing narrowly on Gaza’s post-2006 siege—or even the 1967 occupation—obscures a much older reality. Long before its formal founding in 1948, Zionist militias waged organized terror to force Palestinians from their homes. From the 1920s onward, Zionist organizations such as the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi carried out bombings, assassinations, and mass intimidation, establishing a political culture in which terror was not exceptional, but intrinsic to their operations. Fittingly enough, two leaders of these terrorist groups would later become prime ministers of the pariah state.

Such a framework of terror set the stage for the 1948 Nakba, during which over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land. Israeli forces committed brutal massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura—but these are only the most infamous examples. In 1947-48 alone, at least 30 documented massacres left hundreds dead, including children, women, and the elderly. And at countless lesser-known sites civilians were mutilated, raped, and executed en masse. In a perverse calculus, Israeli forces classified all males between 10 and 50 as legitimate targets, effectively sentencing children to death. These were not wartime excesses but deliberate campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, repeated hundreds of times in the decades that followed.

Nor was the violence confined to shootings. Early Zionist forces pioneered forms of collective terror. Jewish militias rolled explosive-filled barrels into Arab neighbourhoods, set streets ablaze, and machine-gunned residents trying to extinguish the flames. Biological warfare was deployed via typhoid in water supplies, and cars rigged with explosives were sent to Palestinian garages, delivering indiscriminate carnage. This tradition of inventive cruelty persists, most recently in the exploding pagers in Beirut that killed dozens and injured thousands—a crime against humanity—appallingly celebrated by Israel’s prime minister during a January 2025 White House visit when he presented a “golden pager” to the US president.

Since the 1967 occupation, any residual doubt about Israel’s pariah status has vanished. A permanent regime of domination has taken shape: relentless illegal settlement expansion enforced by settler militias operating without fear of repercussion; the 700 kilometre apartheid wall annexing land, isolating communities, and entrenching de facto borders; environmental warfare through sewage dumping, land theft, and the uprooting of over a million olive trees; the routine use of “skunk water” to contaminate homes and neighbourhoods; mass imprisonment without charge; routine torture, sexual violence—including the use of dogs—forced stripping and filming, child detention, and deaths in custody; collective punishment through siege, starvation, and displacement; systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and cultural life; repeated regional attacks carried out with complete exemption from consequences; and targeted assassinations at home and abroad—Israel is the West’s leading practitioner of political assassination.

As in every colonial project, dehumanization lays the groundwork for atrocity. An Israeli prime minister openly described Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs,” while another politician referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes,” and still another proclaimed that “every baby in Gaza is an enemy.” Soldiers transform barbarism into spectacle—dancing in looted clothing, mocking the dead, and flaunting stolen children’s belongings. Such institutionalized dehumanization conditions both perpetrators and bystanders, attempting to normalize atrocity and render extreme violence thinkable.

This societal and ideological cruelty is mirrored in Israel’s state-level lawlessness and impunity. The country refuses to submit to international norms: it is an undeclared nuclear power that evades Non-Proliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency inspections; the most condemned state in United Nations Security Council history, with dozens more resolutions blocked by the US; declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to be plausibly committing genocide and maintaining an illegal occupation; sanctioned by the UN General Assembly; and subject to International Criminal Court arrest warrants for its prime minister and defence minister. From its earliest militias to today’s state apparatus, this unbroken pattern of systemic terror marks Israel unmistakably as a pariah.

Israel insists it faces scrutiny like “no other country,” yet its unprecedented impunity is staggering. Rooted in privileges entrenched since 1948 and reinforced by Western weapons, intelligence, diplomatic cover, and propaganda, this shield is the central barrier to accountability. Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel’s serial breaches of the October 10 ceasefire—violated at least 738 times, resulting in 356 Palestinian deaths (including 67 children) and 908 injuries—an outrage that would provoke global hysteria were Hamas to kill even a fraction of that number of Israeli combatants—let alone civilians—during a truce. Such repeated breaches illustrate the selective application of legal standards: Israel ignores rulings, defies international law, and relies on allies to block enforcement. Activists, journalists, and politicians who dissent face harassment, doxxing, and career reprisals. Unchecked and even celebrated, Israel’s impunity makes atrocity routine, inflicting relentless horror on the Palestinians while the world stands silently complicit.

The antisemitism vaccine

Israel’s impunity is sustained by an “antisemitism vaccine”: critics are met with ritualized accusations that instantly inoculate the state against scrutiny. Western media amplify a narrow circle of pro-Israel groups—often themselves purveyors of anti-Palestinian racism—who label opposition to apartheid and genocide as bigotry. The tactic is crude but effective, turning denial into proof and diverting attention from Israel’s crimes. Even pro-Palestine movements are driven into excessive self-policing over an antisemitism problem that is grossly inflated, draining energy from confronting genocide and apartheid. Meanwhile, an entire scholarship industry debates the obvious distinction between opposing a state and hating a people.

Real antisemitism is serious, but most reported incidents fall into the category of nonviolent “general mischief,” and claims of a global resurgence conflate criticism of Israel, social media posts, insults, and false-flag incidents with genuine attacks on Jews. Because criticism of Israel is routinely framed as antisemitism, surges in such accusations during Israel’s genocide were entirely predictable. At the same time, by claiming to represent all Jews, Israel perversely encourages both the uninformed and actual antisemites to blame Jews collectively for the state’s crimes.

This dynamic is institutionalised through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, now adopted by over 46 countries. Framed as a response to a so-called “new antisemitism,” it fixates on speech rather than structural injustice, collapses political critique of Israel into bigotry, and functions as a tool to discipline institutions and guard Israel from scrutiny—a purpose its architects clearly understood. Canada has gone further, issuing a 2024 handbook that effectively treats Palestinians and their supporters as presumptive bigots simply for exposing the factual reality of Israel’s crimes—a logic as absurd as declaring that anyone who reports a fire is an arsonist.

The result is a transnational enforcement regime: dissent is suppressed across universities, NGOs, and public institutions, while well-funded groups rebrand Palestinian solidarity as antisemitism. The smear is devastating—UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese recalls feeling “sick in her stomach” when first branded an antisemite. Of course, the premise behind these accusations is absurd: we are expected to swallow, with a straight face, that lifelong advocates of racial justice, Indigenous rights, labour protections, climate action, and the like are, when protesting a genocide in real time, suddenly driven by hatred toward Jews rather than the same moral commitments that have guided them throughout their lives. That such accusations are not laughed out of newsrooms or institutions, despite originating from obviously partisan pro-Israel groups, underscores the extraordinary privilege enjoyed by those who deploy them. And naturally, this selective policing of antisemitism starkly contrasts with the indifference shown toward deadly anti-Muslim violence.

The politicization of “antisemitism” has never genuinely served Jewish communities, as the hypocrisy of self-styled watchdogs makes clear. The Anti-Defamation League shrugged off Elon Musk’s Nazi salute as “an awkward gesture” while condemning New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani merely for criticizing Zionism. After the horrific Bondi Beach shooting, Israel rushed to blame anti-genocide protests, making accusations before any evidence emerged, exposing the deliberately twisted logic of these smear campaigns. At the same time, the most dangerous antisemitism comes not from critics of Israel, but from the far-right (white nationalists and Christian Zionists) a reality that these zealous watchdogs consistently fail to acknowledge. It is hard to imagine how they can combat antisemitism effectively when they so studiously ignore its actual sources.

Meanwhile, Zionist institutions fracture Judaism into an exclusionary ideology grounded in racial supremacy, subverting its core values of altruism, truth, justice, and peace. By insisting Jews worldwide support Israel’s crimes, they enact the very antisemitism they claim to combat, falsely casting all Jews as supporting genocide while pretending that the vast and growing numbers of Jews who oppose Zionism and condemn Israel’s crimes do not exist, rendering the entire Jewish dissent invisible. This strategy undermines rather than protects Jewish communities.

Ongoing Nakba

The antisemitism vaccine has helped to clear the path for mass slaughter. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has escalated decades of oppression into outright genocide. With a likely death toll exceeding 100,000—possibly several times higher—Palestinians face mass killing and suffering without precedent in modern history. Gaza has been bombarded with some 85,000 tons of explosives per square kilometre, roughly six times the force of Hiroshima. Civilians account for at least 83 percent of casualties, including hundreds of journalists and aid workers. Soldiers have deliberately targeted tents, “safe zones,” and aid queues—massacring more than 2,600 and wounding at least 19,000 hungry civilians lining up for food. There are documented cases of soldiers methodically shooting children, aiming at different parts of the body according to a schedule, “like a game of target practice.” Beyond Gaza, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem despite no Hamas presence there.

Over 4,800 amputations have been recorded, including an estimated ten children per day losing one or more limbs. Hospitals are crippled, clean water and medicine cut off, and infectious disease spreads unchecked. At least 9,300 children under five now suffer acute malnutrition. Medical personnel are abducted, tortured, or killed, leaving Gaza’s hospitals barely functional. Food, water, fuel, and electricity are deliberately restricted; farmland is destroyed; homes, schools, and universities reduced to rubble. Nearly two million people have been displaced, often repeatedly, as civilian life itself is pushed to the edge of survival.

Beyond indiscriminate violence lies targeted terror. At least 56 Palestinians have been tortured to death since October 7. Intellectuals, writers, and professors are deliberately assassinated, including “the voice of Gaza,” Refaat Alareer, murdered along with his family. Israel employs AI-generated “kill lists” and the “Where’s Daddy” system to track Palestinians in their homes and exterminate entire families. Drones broadcast recordings of crying infants and screaming women to lure civilians from shelters before opening fire. The documented collapse in birth rates and soaring infant mortality point toward deliberate reproductive violence, part of a broader strategy to reduce the Palestinian population itself and counter Israel’s perceived demographic threat.

The scale, brutality, and sadism of this campaign exceed the descriptive capacity of ordinary language. Viewed against a history of orchestrated violence and dispossession since 1948, it is unmistakably the conduct of a pariah state—otherwise, the term is meaningless.

To sustain this unrelenting violence, Israel recasts all Palestinian resistance as “terrorism,” a narrative amplified by Western powers and media, ignoring the right of occupied peoples to resist under international law. Commentary—even on the left—routinely begins by vilifying Hamas. Exclusive focus on Hamas’ October 7 war crimes is obligatory, despite lingering questions about Israel’s own conduct, including the use of the Hannibal Directive and its refusal to permit an independent international investigation. If anything, the October 7 attack resembles a “slave revolt”: a violent rupture by a population caged, brutalized, and denied political redress. Former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk noted that, while evidence of Hamas atrocities must be investigated, the attack itself “appears entirely justifiable and long overdue.” The ICJ might have tested the war crimes charges against three indicted Hamas leaders, but Israel assassinated all three.

Hamas, contrary to mainstream portrayals, is a legitimate political and social organization engaged in a national liberation struggle while providing extensive humanitarian services to the Palestinian community. Its military wing wages an armed resistance which, by any objective measure, is heroic, with scant resources and improvised arms facing a military of overwhelming size and firepower—the epitome of a genuine resistance. Yet following Israel’s lead, some Western powers (fewer than one percent of UN members) designated Hamas a “terrorist organization.” After Hamas’ 2006 electoral victory, Israel imposed a blockade and launched repeated full-scale attacks, slaughtering civilians and methodically demolishing Palestinian civil society—what Israeli officials cynically term, “mowing the lawn.” In response, Hamas expanded its tunnel network to counter the blockade and protect civilians from airstrikes, a rational defensive measure compelled by the international community’s abandonment of the Palestinians.

‘Liberal’ pariahs

This attitude toward Palestinian resistance permeates Israeli society, with even liberal commentators routinely branding Palestinian fighters as “terrorists.” The result is a level of public support for systematic state violence that is profoundly disturbing. Some Middle East scholars have described Israel as a “sick, dysfunctional and twisted entity” and a “lunatic society,” and this is not hyperbole. Polls since October 7, 2023, show overwhelming Israeli Jewish support for the genocide: only four percent say the military response has gone too far, and nearly half expressed support for the killing of all civilians in cities seized by the Israeli military. Such moral collapse helps explain scenes that would be unthinkable in any functional democracy: civilians blocking and looting aid for starving Gazans, or the minister of national security openly proposing the execution of Palestinian prisoners (he was recently seen wearing a hangman’s noose lapel pin).

In this context, so-called liberal Zionism is revealed as a fiction, if it ever existed at all. What remains is a rhetorical husk that launders settler-colonial domination through the language of democracy and human rights, insisting that apartheid and genocide are mere aberrations caused by the wrong leaders. Near-universal public support for mass killing strips this claim of any credibility.

Abroad, Zionist institutions reinforce this denial through decades of myth-making—from the fantasy of a desert made to bloom to the lie of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Emotional attachment to Israel is cultivated through religious, cultural, and institutional embedding, helping explain why even progressive Jewish organizations often fall silent—or worse, close ranks—as atrocities escalate.

Israel’s impunity, however, is not sustained by Jewish Zionism alone. In the US, Christian Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists by roughly 30 to one, offering vast financial and political support to Israel while adhering to a delusional, apocalyptic ideology impervious to reason or moral appeal and premised on mass Jewish death. Smaller but influential counterparts in Canada form a powerful faction within the mainstream Conservative Party, helping to fund and sustain Israel’s crimes and enforce repression at home.

Thus, settler-colonial domination and ethnic supremacy are not deviations from the project but its core principles; there is no “liberal” variant. Extensive societal support for genocide underscores the futility of appeals to moderation or internal restraint. If liberal Zionism ever existed, it lies buried beneath the rubble of Gaza.

‘No other country’—singling out the pariah

Israel protests being “singled out,” with defenders invoking Sudan, Myanmar, or Dresden, as if other atrocities negate its own. The reality is the reverse: for decades Israel has been singled out for extraordinary privilege—lavished with US, British, and Canadian arms, diplomatic cover, and political indulgence unmatched by any other state. Its profusion of UN resolutions reflects not bias but the frequency and brazenness of its violations. Far from holding Israel to a higher standard, the ICC asks only that it obey the most basic laws, which it violates on a scale without parallel against a population held captive longer than any other on Earth. If any state warrants exceptional scrutiny, it is the one committing exceptional crimes.

Moreover, our governments not only defend Israel but actively repress those who challenge its crimes—monitoring protesters, criminalizing Palestine solidarity, and threatening critics with job loss, legal action, or arrest. Richard Falk was detained at the Canadian border for Palestine-related work, yet IDF soldiers implicated in war crimes freely speak and recruit on campuses. The public is subjected to relentless gaslighting designed to compel it to prioritize the sensitivities of a genocidal state over the suffering of its victims. In effect, our governments help enforce a domestic regime of “civil terror” on behalf of a pariah state.

Jewish lobbying persuaded Canada to cut the 35-year funding of KAIROS, an ecumenical human rights organization, while pro-Israel charities funnel hundreds of millions to Israeli projects—including military operations—often in breach of tax rules, implicating Canadian taxpayers in ongoing atrocities. Meanwhile, Canadian politicians insist that Israel is an “eternal friend and ally” with whom we share “core values,” a relationship reinforced through intelligence sharing, military cooperation, a free-trade agreement, and the continued covert sale of Canadian weapons in violation of obligations to avoid complicity in war crimes.

Together, these practices reveal how deeply Israeli privilege is entrenched in the US and Canada, and how systemic the suppression of dissent has become. The scandal is not excessive criticism of Israel’s crimes, but that a pariah state committing mass atrocities enjoys such unparalleled immunity from exposure and accountability—no other country is granted such impunity. That our democracies permit a small, distant, violent state to exert such corrosive influence over our civil liberties is staggering. If Israel is singled out, it is because our governments have bound us to its crimes—arming it, shielding it, and punishing those who object—leaving Canadians not merely justified but morally obligated to call out, confront, and resist those crimes.

Confronting the pariah

Israel’s trajectory reveals a stark truth: it cannot reform itself. Like apartheid South Africa, it is a pariah state sustained by ruthless domination and violence. Though the term carries no formal legal weight, it signals a regime that has forfeited any claim to normalcy. The pariah designation must be applied unapologetically—by governments, journalists, scholars, and human rights advocates—until Israel’s defiance of law and humanity is decisively held to account.

Historian Ilan Pappé has observed that Zionism is in its terminal phase—and for the sake of Palestinians and the world, one can only hope he is right. Israel must not be allowed to cloak its brutality in legitimacy. Palestine must remain front and centre in public discourse, even as Israel and the US divert attention from Gaza, the West Bank, and their expansionist agenda. Global pressure is the only path to accountability and justice. Until then, the label “pariah” must be invoked relentlessly, rolling off our tongues as naturally as “Hamas-run health ministry.”

There was a time when morally timid, self-styled progressive politicians and community leaders, who privately recognized the truth but lacked the courage to say it aloud, comforted themselves with the meek platitude that a “true friend” of Israel would urge it to change course for its own good. That pretence is over. Israel has made it unmistakably clear that it is no friend to humanity and will never permit a Palestinian state, stripping away the last fig leaf under which Western leaders once sought shelter.

Therefore, if pariah status is to mean anything, it must be operationalized through decisive, coordinated measures. This includes ending occupation and apartheid; suspending Israel from international institutions, including the UN General Assembly; enforcing comprehensive military embargoes; imposing coordinated diplomatic, trade, financial, academic, and cultural sanctions aligned with global BDS efforts; and implementing truth and reconciliation with reparations. Governments and civil society must pursue accountability through the ICC, ICJ, and other legal mechanisms; leverage these mechanisms to restrict travel for complicit officials; compel corporate divestment from apartheid; safeguard activists from repression; hold media accountable for exposing propaganda; and prioritize Palestinian-led movements, centring voices long marginalized even within advocacy spaces.

Western support for Israel—rooted in historical guilt, strategic interest, cultural affinity, domestic politics, religious ideology, money, and propaganda—functions as a lethal buffer against accountability. These ties must be severed. The relentless suffering of Palestinians demands it: dead and traumatized children, obliterated communities, erased futures. The world’s inaction compounds the moral outrage and leaves a vacuum for Israel to claim a “legitimacy crisis,” all while it delegitimizes itself through its ongoing crimes.

Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa has observed that Israel has inflicted a profound “moral injury” on all of humanity through its sadistic barbarism. This underscores the urgent need for global citizens to confront it as the enduring pariah it has always been, hold it fully accountable, and maintain relentless pressure until a just order rises from the ruins of its inhuman, savage oppression—and Palestine is free.

Ross MacKay is Professor Emeritus at Vancouver Island University, and a founding member of Mid-Islanders for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

After more than two decades of coup attempts and destabilization efforts against Venezuela, the United States has escalated its campaign with direct, illegal, and unprovoked military strikes on the South American country. Explosions rocked Caracas in the early hours of January 3—by daylight, plumes of smoke rose over the capital. US bombing also targeted the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira, striking airports, residential areas, ports, military bases, and surveillance antennae. According to Venezuelan officials, the attacks have caused dozens of casualties.

Compounding the assault, the US military invaded Venezuela and kidnapped sitting president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an operation involving “a joint force of over 150 aircraft and special operations teams.” The Trump administration now plans to try Maduro and Flores in New York on long-discredited narcotrafficking charges.

According to one report: “Data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime shows that Venezuela is not a cocaine-producing country, and last year’s U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report on drug trafficking focuses on Ecuador, Central America and Mexico, with little emphasis on Venezuela.”

Nevertheless, Trump has claimed that “the illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network… responsible for the deaths of countless Americans. Maduro and his wife will soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil.”

France, Spain, Russia, China, and the European Commission have all stated that the US military’s operation against Venezuela broke international law. Regional leaders have also condemned the illegal bombing of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said, “The Colombian government rejects this aggression to Venezuela’s and Latin America’s sovereignty.” Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum issued an “urgent call to respect international law…and to cease any act of aggression against the Venezuelan government and people.”

Cuba condemned the US attack on Venezuela as “state terrorism,” while warning that the Latin American “zone of peace” is being “brutally assaulted.” Brazil’s Lula asserted that the US had crossed an “unacceptable line.” Chile’s Gabriel Boric offered “condemnation” of the US operation, while Uruguay noted its rejection of “military intervention by one country in the territory of another.”

In Latin America, only the right-wing, Trump-aligned governments backed the operation—namely, Ecuador, Argentina, Panama, and Bolivia.

The US attacks on Venezuela are a flagrant violation of international law. Article 1 of the UN Charter calls for “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” while Article 2 says that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

The war on Venezuela is not over. Trump has already threatened a second, larger strike if the Venezuelan government does not submit to his demands for a total economic and political remaking of the country. At the same time, he has proclaimed that the US government is “going to run” Venezuela and openly signalled Washington’s intentions to seize control of its resources. Trump has declared that US oil companies are preparing to move into a post-Maduro Venezuela. “We have the greatest oil companies in the world,” he said, “the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.” Vice President JD Vance reinforced this message by declaring that “the stolen oil must be returned to the United States,” invoking Trump’s stated goal of reversing Venezuela’s 1976 oil nationalization, a policy later strengthened under the presidency of Hugo Chávez.

There is no ambiguity here. The Trump administration is openly telling the world why it bombed Venezuela and kidnapped Maduro: the US aims to occupy the country, either directly or through proxies. Trump has said that he is “not afraid of boots on the ground,” making clear that direct military occupation remains on the table, all in service of exploiting and profiting from Venezuelan resources. The geopolitical motive must also be stressed. Advocates of Maduro’s overthrow frequently point to Venezuela’s close relationships with China, Russia, and Iran, as well as Caracas’s support for Palestinian liberation. Opposition leader María Corina Machado has gone so far as to claim that Venezuela has “already been invaded” by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

Canada’s government has refused to join the global outcry against the war. In fact, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand tacitly endorsed the kidnapping of Maduro by immediately affirming that Ottawa has “refused to recognize any legitimacy of the Maduro regime.” Anand called on “all parties” to abide by international law—ignoring the fact that one party, the US government, has openly and consistently shredded international law through decades of unprovoked aggression against Venezuela. This includes years of crushing sanctions, CIA operations, and Trump’s “total naval blockade” of the country.

Anand’s unwillingness to condemn the US war on Venezuela comes as no shock. The minister has previously refused to describe the US military’s extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean as illegal. Even less surprising is Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s shameless praise for Washington’s criminal aggression. “Congratulations to President Trump on successfully arresting narco-terrorist and socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro,” he wrote in a social media post. “Down with socialism. Long live freedom.”

For his part, interim NDP leader Don Davies said that Trump’s attack on Venezuela “is neither an act of self defence nor does it have UN Security Council authorization. It is therefore totally illegal and a breach of the UN covenants the US has agreed to uphold as a Member State… The U.S. can have no credibility upholding international law and the rights of nations when it blatantly violates those principles itself.”

Missing from these statements is one unavoidable fact: Trump’s war on Venezuela is also a war on Latin America. It is part of his administration’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, as codified in the National Security Strategy of November 2025, which explicitly commits the US to restoring “American preeminence” in the Western Hemisphere.

This revival of gunboat diplomacy is driven not only by hostility to leftist governments, but by Washington’s anxiety over China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence, its obsession with migration and drug trafficking, and a naked hunger for resources and strategic control. The result is an increasingly forceful and erratic US posture toward the region—marked by election interference, sanctions, military threats, and open coercion—that treats Latin America as a domain to be disciplined rather than a collection of sovereign societies. Trump has already interfered in elections in Argentina and Honduras, and he is openly threatening Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba.

Amid these escalating US aggressions, the Liberal government remains silent and refuses to stand up for the sovereignty of the region’s peoples. This is unacceptable. Canadians who oppose Washington’s barefaced imperial violence—and Ottawa’s complicity in it—must mobilize and raise our voices for change. It is our responsibility to the hemisphere, and to the planet, on which we live.

Owen Schalk is the author of Targeting Libya: How Canada went from building public works to bombing an oil-rich country and creating chaos for its citizens, an exploration of Canada’s pivotal yet little-known role in Libya’s history, now available from Lorimer Books.

Although celebrated linguist, foreign policy critic, and leftist icon Noam Chomsky had previously acknowledged his relationship with child rapist and serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, it was the recent release of photos of the two engaged in seemingly pleasant conversation on Epstein’s private jet that exploded on social media.

In her meditation on the power of images, the late Susan Sontag wrote that the “ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, ‘There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.’”

The photos illustrate what Chomsky himself confirmed was an unapologetic association with Epstein—for which, he told the Harvard Crimson in 2023, he had no regrets. They immediately drew powerful insights into what that reality must have been like. Author Cryn Johannsen writes that she found it “deeply disturbing that so many men seem to overlook this relationship and continue to defend the now disgraced leftist intellectual.”

Women’s rights activist and professor Kavita Krishnan was equally disturbed, and took issue with Chomsky’s statement that Epstein had “served his time” and therefore had a clean slate. She asked whether Chomsky would have issued a similar rationale for a wealthy CEO trafficking working class children to perform dangerous work. She concluded that “the rules seem different when the working-class children in question are girls, trafficked and enslaved not for factory labour but for sex work. In Chomsky’s political world, these individual survivors of sexual predation are invisible.”

Miriam Markowitz, the former deputy literary editor of The Nation (a touchstone liberal-left publication in print since the end of the US Civil War), had for months before the photo release challenged colleagues and online followers to centre the Epstein survivors. Her calls were amplified last week by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who highlighted Markowitz’s reminder that “the elite plan is clear: slavery… We are all swimming in a sea of misogyny so gigantic we only notice when there’s a shipwreck, and usually not even then. See: the survivors.”

Then emerged a classic rejoinder from The Nation that appeared hauntingly familiar to anyone who had read and understood the propaganda model at the core of Chomsky and Edward Herman’s classic text, Manufacturing Consent. Written in the magazine’s authoritative essay style, the piece—titled “What the Noam Chomsky-Jeffrey Epstein Emails Tell Us”—and much of its subsequent apologia seems an effort to rally elite progressive opinion to establish the narrative of Chomsky as a naïve but well-intentioned rube who, despite being one of the best-read, whip-smart individuals on the planet, somehow was unaware of who he was dealing with, much less the trail of human misery left in Epstein’s wake.

Written by professor Greg Grandin, it produces a laudatory resume of Chomsky’s considerable achievements and glowing references, then proposes that the man often described as the world’s most important intellectual was perhaps just too preoccupied to notice. “Tunnel focused on geopolitics and on crimes of state,” Grandin writes, “Chomsky apparently didn’t see what others saw clearly: that Epstein was a pimp servicing a privatized global aristocracy, and that his victims were children.”

Such “Great Men of History” rationalization was immediately challenged (Markowitz herself called for the piece to be retracted with apologies issued, to no avail), prompting a follow-up comment in which Grandin, a historian, also carelessly and ahistorically asserted: “I think we live in a world different from the one Chomsky came up in, where it is no longer morally acceptable, if you claim the egalitarian vision Chomsky did, to spend time with people like Epstein.”

While it hardly seems controversial that such an association was never morally acceptable, what seems telling is that Chomsky, who built his career on a foundation of morally righteous outrage and indignation at the crimes of state, simply did not care enough to concern himself with the serious crimes of his associate.

As Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write, Chomsky “was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s New York mansion—he says he enjoyed the intellectual conversation at the parties. There is debate among agonized leftists about whether Chomsky used the girls. This is beside the point. [Virginia] Giuffre said rightly that every person who entered that mansion could see the sexy photos of young girls all over the wall. They knew, all of them. They just didn’t care about working class women.”

Equally telling is that in the four years after Epstein’s death, and long before Chomsky suffered a massive stroke in 2023, Chomsky made no public statement condemning the crimes of a man he had socialized with and sought out to handle some financial matters, much less assert solidarity with Epstein’s victims in the manner he might have done were it Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who condemned the mass rape of Guatemalan women.

Epstein’s victims have been largely cast aside in these discussions as mere backdrops whose suffering is occasionally acknowledged but then followed by endless caveats trying to contextualize and diminish Chomsky’s normalization of a child predator.

None of this requires us to discard Chomsky’s intellectual contributions. Manufacturing Consent and For Reasons of State, among many other books and essays, remain powerful tools for understanding how power operates and how elite institutions rationalize violence. What this episode forces us to confront is something more unsettling: whether the ethical standards articulated in those works are meant to apply universally, or whether certain figures are granted exemptions by virtue of fame, prestige, and standing within elite circles.

It is helpful to examine Chomsky’s own work in this regard. In his still relevant 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” he critiques an academy and media milieu in which “it is an article of faith that American motives are pure and not subject to analysis,” condemning those state-aligned thinkers who use their prestige and academic standing to justify horrific crimes. In one pointed response, he rightfully condemns state apologist Arthur Schlesinger’s rationalization for bombing Vietnam as a statement that is “less an example of deceit than of contempt for an audience that can be expected to tolerate such behaviour with silence, if not approval.”

Yet when the world’s most important intellectual was asked about his own dealings with a moral monster (the private jet, the dinner with accused child molester Woody Allen, the emails, the financial dealings), he immediately shut down the conversation as “not subject to analysis” with exactly the kind of “contempt for an audience that can be expected to tolerate” that association with the silence he described above. In a much-quoted email, Chomsky lashed out at Wall Street Journal reporters: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.”

Had Chomsky taken his own advice seriously, the response required no rhetorical brilliance—only moral consistency. He could have said: Yes, I knew him. I made a profoundly bad and harmful decision in socializing with and engaging him for financial help, even knowing he was a convicted sex offender. The record since then makes clear that he committed horrific crimes against women and girls. I regret my choices, and I stand in solidarity with the survivors. Here is how I intend to make amends for my role in normalizing a predator.

Instead, he chose silence and dismissal.

The 2023 Wall Street Journal email came four years after the unsealing of an indictment in which Epstein was charged with “sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.” The indictment alleged that, between 2002 through 2005, Epstein “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money. Epstein allegedly worked with several employees and associates to ensure that he had a steady supply of minor victims to abuse, and paid several of those victims themselves to recruit other underage girls to engage in similar sex acts for money.”

On these crimes, Chomsky was silent. And that was a choice.

Chomsky defenders—not of his work but of his poor choices—continue to claim his advanced age must be a consideration here, but in one of his final interviews on a wide range of topics a month before his stroke, he was lucid enough to discuss Cambodia, Iraq, disinformation systems, and much more.

It is difficult to believe that someone as widely read as Chomsky would not have done a simple Internet search on his associate before deciding to engage him for bank transfers and embark on a private jet flight to visit Allen, against whom high-profile allegations of child molestation were made by his daughter, Dylan Farrow. With respect to the latter, there was a similar lack of sympathy from Chomsky for the child involved: “I’m unaware of the principle that requires that I inform you about an evening spent with a great artist.”

Had Chomsky or one of his researchers done that easy research they would have found, in addition to news of the 2008 conviction and secret agreement not to lay federal charges that would have resulted in far more jail time, that on November 22, 2011, the Palm Beach Daily News reported that Epstein “must register in the state of New York as the highest and most dangerous level sex offender,” which meant “high risk of repeat offense and a threat to public safety exists,” according to the state’s guidelines. According to the four-page ruling, although Epstein was ultimately convicted on two counts in 2008, there was plenty of evidence there were many more victims.

Survivor Maria Farmer made her first complaint about Epstein to the FBI in 1996 but says it was ignored. Almost 30 years later, with the release of the Epstein files, she told NBC News, “I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.” At one point, Farmer reported, Epstein threatened to burn down her house if she did not take photographs of young girls at swimming pools for him.

Burning down houses and raping their female inhabitants is the kind of imperialist standard operating procedure that Chomsky spent his life condemning in Southeast Asia, in East Timor, in Iraq, and in El Salvador. But when it came to the threat of and commission of such crimes in his own social circles, Chomsky resorted to the oldest excuse for silence on male violence against women.

It was a private matter, he insisted, and nobody’s business.

Chomsky can no longer offer apologies or consolation to the survivors. But that does not relieve us of the responsibility to do so, part of which is acknowledging that someone who had such a huge impact on so many of us made such profoundly disturbing moral choices.

Matthew Behrens is a freelance writer and social justice advocate.

Designating major drug cartels as global terrorist organizations and declaring a national emergency, the Trump administration has launched the largest US military deployment in Latin America since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Under Operation Southern Spear, US forces have carried out targeted strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels, killing couriers and small-boat crews in actions that human rights groups warn resemble a “murder spree” more than law enforcement. These killings are not incidental. They are staged as spectacles of retribution: highly visible demonstrations of force aimed at projecting resolve and deterrence.

Aside from the legal and ethical issues with a policy of extra-judicial executions, the strategic rationale for staging these costly spectacles is dubious at best. First, it diverts critical resources from major criminal networks sourcing narcotics. The Drug Enforcement Agency’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment identify the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartel groups as the major suppliers to the US of fentanyl and other illicit drugs—Venezuelan traffickers are minor players. Second, destroying the vessels and assassinating couriers eliminates the material evidence and critical intelligence on networks that could be gathered from arrests and interrogations.

In a paper from 2016, lawyer Kevin Lerman points out that drug mules are “pawns of the drug conspiracies” representing the lowest rung of the narcotics trade. Similarly, writes University of London professor Jennifer Fleetwood, couriers are the “most powerless and most exploited in the international drug trade,” typically snared into the web of the cartels by poverty, debt or coerced into collusion. If caught, cartel bosses will vigorously disown them and not waste a penny on their legal defence. These readily replaceable mules now fill US prisons while narco lords and their financial kingpins, with few exceptions, have faced little or no repercussions. The fragmented evidence on the profiles of the mules now being blown apart by US military power largely echoes this depiction: fisherman and migrants from coastal regions of Venezuela struggling in poverty with few alternatives to provide for their families.

These pawns of the drug industry now face the full weight of lethal US military power bereft of any due process. Extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings, once viewed as a weapon for criminal non-state actors—anarchists, terrorists or death squads—has become a weapon more widely deployed by an array of state actors including Russia, Iran, and Israel, among others. That normalization did not begin with Trump. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the US asserted the executive authority to place individuals on secret kill lists and order their execution without charge, trial, or judicial oversight, relying on classified legal opinions to shield those decisions from public scrutiny. Obama refined this power, institutionalized it, and embedded it within a durable legal architecture designed to survive presidential transitions.

Trump’s current killing spree at sea is not an aberration but the logical culmination of that bipartisan project, now stripped of even the pretense of restraint. Given the scale of violence inflicted by cartel leadership, one could plausibly argue that narrowly targeted operations against the upper echelons might disrupt criminal enterprises. Why, then, is this inherited power being wielded not against kingpins, but against expendable foot soldiers—fishermen, migrants, and couriers whose deaths serve spectacle rather than strategy?

While narco elites have not been targeted for assassination, some have been caught in the net of the law. In 2002, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was charged with operating a “narco-state” that enabled “a corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States.” He was convicted to serve 45 years in prison for deploying his political power “to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” On December 1, 2025, years of investigative and legal work were swept aside and Hernández was granted a full and unconditional presidential pardon. Ross Ulbricht, the billionaire founder of the Silk Road marketplace, was arrested for his role in enabling a vast Bitcoin laundering network on the darknet that facilitated the global trade in narcotics. In 2015, he was convicted on an array of charges—distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, money laundering, and traffic in fraudulent identity documents—and sentenced to double life in prison plus 40 years without the possibility of parole. On January 21, 2025 Ulbricht similarly received a full and unconditional presidential pardon. In justifying pardons for these wheelers and dealers in the global drug trade, there was no reference to the facts supporting these convictions, only vague presidential laments they had been treated “very harshly and unfairly.” It unveils, yet again, that soft, mushy spot in Trump’s heart for the plight of authoritarian elites and billionaires of all stripes.

On another front, undocumented immigrants, most without any criminal record, are being seized from homes, shops, and streets, shackled and imprisoned, without any hint of due process, all designed to create the public spectacle of a regime that is “tough on crime.” Elites flex their economic and political power with impunity, while the full force of state disciplinary force is unleashed on expendables. Alessandro Manzoni’s novel, The Beloved, offers a powerful meditation on the plight of those caught in the crosshairs of such as system: “the law was like a net spread to catch the little birds, while the great ones broke through it and flew away… the poor were punished for trifles, while the rich committed crimes with impunity.” His words still resonate in our time.

The world Manzoni depicts was haunted with religion, but so too is ours—much as some wish it weren’t so. As this war on narco-terrorism presses on, with its weekly public witch-burnings, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been staging performances of faith before his military personnel, including a ritual recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, as images of American military power—tanks, warplanes, bombs—flash across the screen. Manzoni challenged the collusions of religion and power. Hegseth’s particular brand of Christianity is marked by a fervent embrace of this brew. It is part of a wider Christian landscape littered with an array of troubling political theologies—Christian Reconstructionism, Dominionism, and the New Apostolic Reformation—that have been reshaping US religious culture. Their impact on American politics has only grown over the generations and their adherents now occupy the halls of power.

Like witch-burnings, the killing of drug mules is designed to be a dramatic spectacle, a theatre of punishment, for public consumption. But this costly spectacle is getting muddier and messier with more murdered mules and pardoned narco elites cluttering the stage, while cartels continue to hum along in full production. Adding to this muddle is the forced marriage of Christianity to state power with the secretary of war commandeering Christian faith to adorn his chest-thumping displays of military power. Countering these trends will require major conjunctions of political and spiritual intelligence to chart paths through this swollen tangle of power, populism, and politicized religion.

Daniel Cere is Associate Professor of Religion, Ethics and Public Policy in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University.