Fascism
is capitalism in decay.
Lenin
Canadians have
a great deal to learn about the various debates and policies
regarding freedom unfolding in the United States. At a time
when conspiracy theories and far-right nationalist groups
are gaining strength, it is crucial to understand how authoritarian
movements in both countries are using freedom to undermine
crucial notions of justice and liberty.
In the United
States, under the banner of right-wing demagoguery, freedom
is being employed to ban books by people of colour, Indigenous
people and members of the LGBTQ2S+ community. Reduced to
a banal throwaway term, freedom is invoked increasingly
to indoctrinate students by censoring history, eliminating
critical thinking from the school curriculum, and criminalizing
the actions of librarians and teachers who encourage historical
consciousness, pluralism and social justice.
In Canada, the
concept of freedom has failed to include the inherent rights
of Indigenous Peoples and often served as a cloak for maintaining
illegitimate relations of power. As professor Elisabeth
Anker noted, these are “ugly freedoms” far removed
from principled ideas, connected more to tyranny than emancipation.
Canadians and
Americans live in a time of menacing freedoms. The current
age of emerging authoritarianism is increasingly defined
by questions: Who qualifies as a citizen? How do we determine
the meaning of freedom? And what kind of future do people
want to create? The presence of “ugly freedoms”
is not new and its history is repeating itself with a politics
that is as cruel as it is dangerous and widespread.
Historically,
freedom has often been used not only by advocates of social
justice, but also by those speaking in the name of authoritarianism
and savage acts of violence to legitimize all manner of
injustices. For instance, it was used as a force for racial
cleansing and elimination, most notably in the slogan “Work
sets you free,” deceitfully posted at the entrance
to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In Canada, the
appeal to dictatorial freedoms has worked in service of
acts of genocide against Indigenous Peoples, including forced
removal from their lands, the horrors of residential schools
and a widespread cultural assimilation. In the U.S., it
produced acts of genocide against Native Americans, slavery
and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, among others.
The appeal to unjust freedoms continues in the present era
to legitimate and promote censorship, systemic racism and
naked forms of political opportunism.
What can be
done to preserve freedom as a crucial issue in the struggle
for democracy? Educators, parents, young people and others
need to ask: what does freedom mean in the service of democracy?
And how to radically rethink it as a central political and
educational category? A democratic conception of freedom
must primarily address the staggering levels of inequality
in wealth and power, the poisonous legacy of systemic racism
and an anti-intellectual culture that turns reason monstrous.
In the struggle
for freedom, what must be made clear to both the American
and Canadian public is what the poet Adrienne Rich called
the “concrete reality of being unfree, how continuous
and permeating and corrosive a condition it is, and how
it is maintained through culture as much as through the
use of force.”
The hijacking
of freedom not only raises crucial questions about whose
freedom is at stake in a time of tyranny, but also how to
fight for a version of freedom that is as expansive as it
is just — one that furthers rather than destroys the
promise of a substantive democracy.
For freedom
to breathe, it must join a revolution of values with the
crucial task of building a mass struggle over time. Under
such circumstances, we need not only a new definition of
freedom, but a notion of impatient hope rooted in the burning
imperative of collective resistance.
