Cops and LAM Go Hand in Hand (A Tale of State-Sponsored Antifascism, 1997)
This article was written twenty years ago for the magazine Antifa Forum; the details are not going to be of any real significance today. Nonetheless, it is being uploaded simply because the issue of state-recuperation of antifascism, and its perils, is sadly likely to become very germane in the future. Plus, it provides a little bit of interesting history of antifascism in Quebec.Across North America people of varying political persuasions are taking a stand against racism. As revolutionary anti-fascists we of course believe that racism must always be opposed, but this doesn’t mean that every opponent of the extreme right can be trusted. Our battle is with all oppressors and all oppression, and those who through some fluke of political expediency join us in opposing boneheads[1] and Klansmen may very well end up being on the other side of the barricades when our methods become too radical, or our targets too mainstream.
This was brought home to many activists in the summer of 1996, when the biggest riot to hit the province in thirty years broke out in Quebec City. Early on the morning of June 2th, following the official St-Jean Baptiste celebrations, more than two thousand people thoroughly trashed the provincial capitol, repeatedly routing the police and managing to enter and set fire to the National Assembly (where the provincial government meets). While by no means the first event of its kind – 1996 was the third year in a row that there had been riots on St-Jean Baptiste in Quebec City, and in 1997 there were riots in the capitol and the city of Montreal – it was by far the most severe. There was over a half a million dollars in damages; over $200,000 to the National Assembly alone, and eighty-one people were arrested and charged with assault, obstructing police and participating in a riot – some receiving jail sentences of over one year.
There is little mystery as to the causes of this violence. The Federal Liberal government’s austerity measures have trickled down to the provinces, adding frustration and anger to an already far from tranquil social situation. The police in Quebec City, like cops everywhere, seem to take pleasure in getting into people’s faces and exercising their power however they see fit. The past few years have seen an increasing tendency on the part of many people to stand up to this bullying, and police harassment has led to more than one evening of violence, of which June 24th 1996 was simply the most noteworthy because the most successful.
Rather than concentrate on the St–Jean riot, though, this article will focus on the repression in engendred. Of particular interest to radical anti-fascists in this story was the role played by “one of our own” (sic), the World Anti-Fascist League[2], in bringing down the heavy hand of the State on a section of the radical left.
Who’s to blame?St-Jean Baptiste Day is a popular Québecois holiday associated in many people’s minds with wild partying and saying “up yours” to the police. In 1994, two police cars were set alight in Quebec City in a night of skirmishes in which 24 people were arrested. The next year 40 people were arrested in similar confrontations. When 1996 rolled around everyone expected a repeat performance. All of the signs were there: mounting tensions between police and young people, ever-increasing frustration amongst the ordinary people suffering the government’s neo-liberal restructuring… police harassment had already sparked two nights of rioting in the province, in Quebec City on May 3rd followed by Montreal exactly two weeks later. After the former, where 16 out of over 1,000 rioters were violently arrested, the Deputy Mayor of Quebec City explained his surprise by saying that “normally these events occur on St-Jean Baptiste.”
Despite the fact that many people thought they knew what would happen, the extent of the 1996 St-Jean riot caught everyone by surprise. Thousands of people looted stores and smashed up the city, repeatedly driving off the police. Perhaps anticipating accusations of “mindless violence”, some brave souls made their way to the National Assembly where so many decisions affecting, and harming, their lives are made and proceeded to trash it, too. Windows were broken, statues knocked over, and fires were set. The five-person security detail assigned to guard the buildings was helpless, and calls to the Quebec Provincial Police for backup went unanswered for hours.
Needless to say, the morning after this carnival everyone who might be held accountable was looking for someone else to hold the bag. The media spotlight was on the Quebec Municipal Police Department, which had clearly failed to maintain control. Comparisons were made with Montreal, where police managed to control a crowd several times as large without incident. Martin Forgues, a pretender to the Quebec Mayor’s office, laid the blame squarely at the cops’ feet, insisting that if better planning wouldn’t have prevented the riot it would have at least lessened its toll.
In the hopes of shifting the blame and saving some face, Quebec City Police Chief Normand Bergeron publicly declared that the riot was the result of a political conspiracy. An “extreme right wing group with international ramifications” had instigated it, he said.[3]
No one has ever offered any evidence to back up these allegations, and a year and a half after the fact it is clear that the police chief was either lying or repeating lies others had told him. Yet the accusation established the framework for scapegoating: political conspiracy. Never mind that vast the majority of those arrested had no known connection to any political organisation or movement. The first attempt to save face had been made, and now the fun could really begin!
Perhaps because of the nature of Bergeron’s accusation the media rushed off to the World Anti-Fascist League, the standard source reporters in Quebec consult for information about the far right. Yet the WAL’s researchers were not satisfied with refuting this hairbrained theory. Instead they offered a competing story of their own. While agreeing that the riot was the work of professional agitators, they accused Bergeron of being “out in left field” for blaming the extreme right.
According to the League, which at the time was still viewed by many as a progressive organisation, the agitators who had managed to get 2,000 people to trash the provincial capitol came from the extreme left. According to WAL spokesperson Peter Vorias, an anarchist organisation called Demanarchie was to blame for all the trouble[4]. Alain Dufour provided the scintillating details: Demanarchie was a “widely read” and “highly influential” radical left-wing newspaper whose “call to riot” had been obeyed on the 24th!
These accusations, while initially dismissed by the police, were quickly seized upon as the ideal alibi for those who feared being rebuked for neither preventing nor containing the St-Jean carnival. Not only that, but the spectre of left-wing insurrection, no matter how ridiculous, provided an excellent excuse to go “fishing”, to gather information on these would-be revolutionaries.
The day after the WAL broadcast its conspiracy theories a comrade was arrested for selling Demanarchie at the Place Youville, the popular youth hangout where the Quebec City riot had started. This activist’s house was then searched by police who seized his computer and several hundred copies of the newspaper. Next, police raided the home of Food Not Bombs members who had signed for the post office box FNB shared with Demanarchie. (Food Not Bombs is a radical anti–poverty organisation.)
Three people were arrested when police found a few pot plants at the FNB activists’ home. Their subsequent trial was rife with political commentary. At their bail hearing the prosecutor described them as dangerous agitators and noted that even though they had not been in Quebec City the night of the riot they had distributed subversive propaganda in order to get “others to do the actual work” for them. The judge subsequently refused requests for bail, saying “It would make me feel ill to free anarchist philosophers” and, alluding to the marijuana plants claimed that they were conspiring to “make the people fall asleep to better be able to indoctrinate them”!
Although possession of such a small quantity of pot would normally bring only a small fine, the activists received sentences ranging from one to three months in jail, as well as two years probation and a one-year ban from the areas around Place Youville and the National Assembly.
Following these arrests, Quebec City and Quebec Provincial Police searched the apartment of a Demanarchie member in Montreal, seizing his computer and several boxes of documents. Although he was never charged with any crime, his computer was only returned three months later in a damaged condition.
Other activists known to work with Demanarchie noticed officers from various police forces keeping them under surveillance. QPP officers interviewed one Demanarchie member, presenting him with a list of names of militants from anti-poverty and anti-racist organisations, wanting to know which ones were members of the anarchist collective.
This wave of repression galvanised alliances between anarchist and other left-wing activists in Montreal and Quebec city. Soon anti-fascist militants and researchers from across North America were publicly denouncing the Quebec police and WAL for this clampdown on the radical left. An anti–racist youth group in Alberta, known as the “Edmonton Anti-Fascist League”, even went so far as to change its name to “Edmonton Anti-Racist Action”!
All of which brings us to the question this essay will examine: why did the WAL decide to finger a revolutionary left-wing group to the cops and media?
As will be detailed, such unprincipled behaviour is not at all out of character for this organisation. Most likely, these professional “anti-fascists” knew they were bullshitting, but decided to take advantage of police chief Bergeron’s penchant for conspiracy theories and the media’s post-riot hysteria to smear a group they certainly viewed as competition on the street. Demanarchie filled a need the WAL might have filled when it was first founded, and was trusted and respected by many of the young people who Dufour and Company have always treated as their target audience.
The World Anti-Fascist LeagueThe WAL first appeared on the Montreal scene in early 1989. At the time, it was basically a bunch of friends in the skinhead and punk milieux who hoped to offer some protection from boneheads at shows. Although a small group, they managed to paint some graffiti, make some patches, and provide security at a number of gigs throughout the summer. Nevertheless, if not for an ill–fated bonehead attack they would probably have remained largely unknown outside of the hardcore music scene.
On the night of October 13th a group of boneheads associated with the GB Skins gang attacked a crowd outside a downtown Montreal nightclub where the French anti-fascist band Berurier Noir was playing. The band had invited the WAL to take care of security, and the club had its own bouncers working that evening as well. When the neo–nazis showed up and started smashing people’s heads in the club’s security responded by locking the doors, so that neither the boneheads nor their victims could get into the gig. Refusing to abandon their friends outside, however, people inside the club spontaneously rushed the doors, took to the street and chased the boneheads away.
This was one of the first times that people managed to repel such an attack at a Montreal gig since boneheads first became a problem in the city in the mid-eighties. The police showed up after the nazis had been chased off and waited outside, billy clubs in hand, to disperse the crowd as it left the show. Even so, the evening had been a political victory, one that was claimed by the WAL. Suddenly there were weekly meetings, membership soared to over one hundred, and an anti-fascist youth group was formed.
At first the WAL’s energies were concentrated on providing security at shows and patrolling the downtown strip around the Foufounes Electriques (a popular youth hangout at the time). As in many other cities, the prime victims of bonehead beatings at the time were youth in the punk and anti-racist skinhead milieux, and this area was their hangout, and thus the spot where boneheads were most likely to make trouble for them. WAL members played an important part in establishing a safe anti-racist scene. They opposed the neo-nazi United Skinheads of Montreal and helped drive its leader Alaric Jackson out of town.
For the most part the people who came to meetings did so out of a personal opposition to racism or, just as often, because the League offered a sensible response to the neo-nazi boneheads who had crashed their shows for years. There was some good gut-level politics but little real political experienc, so a kind of clubhouse atmosphere prevailed. While this is fine for a small group of friends, and may pass within an affinity group, in larger organisations such a situation is far from conducive to democratic decision-making or power sharing.
And so it was perhaps inevitable that within a short period of time power was centralised in an informal hierarchy. Alain Dufour quickly established himself as the uncontested leader, a turn of events that represented the beginning of a long and as-of-yet uninterrupted conservative trend within the organisation. Under pressure from police Dufour had the WAL repudiate street-level confrontation of fascists. By 1991 the group had reoriented itself once and for all towards simple research and public intervention in the form of occasionally co-sponsoring rallies, holding press conferences and releasing information in the form of bulletins and, more rarely, annual reports on developments within the far right. In the process it had disbanded a street gang of over 100 anti-fascist youth, many of whom went on oppose racism in other organisations.
In and of themselves, these developments would not indicate a slip into reactionary politics. Research is necessary in order to develop an analysis of the far right within society. Without such an analysis, the impact of anti-fascist activism remains severely limited, and instead of thinking strategically we are left stumbling around in the dark. But when a group lacks any coherent thoughts about the social relations that spawn racist and fascist politics one’s perception of the far right is likely to be skewed. Such an absence of sound analysis led the WAL to adopt, more or less consciously, a liberal point of view whereby the extreme left is just a tad better that the extreme right, if even that.
While such “left equals right” nonsense does lead to regressive or at best confused politics, it is unfortunately common currency among mainstream anti-racist organisations. One can be forgiven for wondering whether they adopt this position as the result of debate and analysis, or simply because it is a convenient excuse to freeze out radical anti-fascists, something many would do anyway in order to ensure funding and eliminate competition. (The fact of the matter is that for such groups’ anti-racism is often little more than a specialized section of the service industry, in other words a business with a bottom line.)
A certain kind of revolutionary anti-Stalinism can also play into this liberal confusion, as hostility towards moribund left-wing organisations leads some to confuse Left and Right variants of authoritarianism. While there are no hard and fast rules and there may or may not be much essential difference between the two, strategically it is generally best for radicals to attack the latter by all means necessary and to resist the former through reasoned argument and debate.
In the WAL’s case, this liberal predilection was coupled with an utter lack of ethics and integrity on the part of core members. They repeatedly provided false information regarding their membership, finances and relations with other groups. They also lied about the activities of the far right, all the better to hype themselves as the anti-racist experts with the goods on what’s going down.
To return to our business analogy, if some anti-racists are professional swastika counters, this had become a swastika counting racket.
According to documents released by the Research Group on the Far-Right and Its Allies, the WAL went so far as to knowingly spread disinformation about a neo-nazi gathering in 1992, repeatedly telling journalists that it was to be held in the city of Sorel after having already communicated to other anti-racist organisations that this information was false[5]. A letter from the WAL to the English anti–fascist magazine Searchlight seems be bear this out.
WAL members have also misrepresented themselves as belonging to other organisations[6], and the group has repeatedly exaggerated its own influence, pretending to be a true world organisation with chapters in Europe and the United States. Around the time of the Gulf Massacre the WAL set up a front group called the Gathering for World Friendship which falsely claimed to have helped to organise a demonstration of over 150,000 people in Paris. The RAM, as the Gathering is known by its French acronym, claimed to have chapters around the world, while in fact only having a single address, in Montreal.
At other times the League has claimed to have been involved in organising conferences and gatherings, while in fact all this involvement amounted to was having one of their members take the microphone near the end of an event[7]…
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the organisations hostility towards any radical social perspective, the personal lives of key members in the World Anti–Fascist League have also been fraught with unacceptable and reactionary conduct. As revealed on the French–language television programme Le Point[8], Antonio Lorte, the vice–president of the League, was found guilty of selling a half kilo of cocaine and sentenced to two years probation and banned for two years from carrying any weapons. As troubling as the sale of hard drugs like cocaine is, far worst is the testimony one of his live–in girlfriends gave at his trial. She testified that she had been physically and sexually abused by him between 1987 and 1994, describing being burnt with a blow torch and cut with knives after an “interrogation” by this misogynist.
While radical anti–fascists acknowledge the need to fight against capitalism, the State and the patriarchy, one would hope that even liberal anti-fascists, even people with whom we share nothing politically, would have enough human decency to condemn and repudiate such a man. Unfortunately, in the case at hand this seems to be too much to ask for.
Guarding Their TerritoryEver since 1991, when it rejected the role of radical street gang, the WAL’s relations with other organisations have been far from ideal. One group that was repeatedly smeared by Dufour and his pals was the Canadian Centre on Racism and Prejudice. Probably because it was based in Montreal, and thus threatened the WAL with competition on its home turf, the CCRP was repeatedly attacked as a “Marxist-Leninist” and “violent” organisation.
It should be noted that the CCRP, far from being a Marxist–Leninist or revolutionary organisation, included religious ministers, community activists and mainstream anti-racists on its board. Whatever made it verboten in the WAL’s eyes, it is hard to believe that it was its non-existent revolutionary politics. At one point in time the Centre even received State funding, and according to its “Time for Action” brochure it “conducted workshops and seminars for journalists, government, and law enforcement agents.” Hardly a radical attitude, to say the least!
The battle lines between the CCRP and WAL seem to have been drawn in 1990, when they both participated in the same coalition, Montreal Debout. This was a broad-based alliance of community groups that wanted to respond to the apparent increase in racism in the Montreal area. The coalition’s main public activity was to hold a rally against the far right on a rainy September Sunday afternoon. As many nazi boneheads as anti-racists showed up, and while the latter were largely unprepared for combat the former were brimming the aggression and clearly would have enjoyed a good fight. If not for the timely appearance of the Montreal police (who couldn’t really let a bunch of kids with doc martens attack a coalition that included the likes of the YMCA) it might have got ugly.
As it was, the rally left many organisers severely pissed off with WAL members who, according to Martin Theriault, had agreed to provide security at the event. According to several witnesses the only act of “security” anyone from the WAL carried out was the identification of local KKK leader Michel Larocque, who was spotted taking pictures of anti-racists, and the removal of his camera by Alain Dufour. Yet despite the fact that this is what several people claim to have seen, Dufour subsequently denied this chain of events and the Klan leader ended up accusing Martin Theriault and community activist André Querry of stealing his camera. All of which led to a year of court appearances for Querry and Theriault, with Larocque testifying on the stand that Dufour had saved his life from the dangerous anti-racists! (This bizarre twist seems more ominous when one notes that two years later Dufour would claim that Larocque was his informer in the Klan.)[9]
Although Querry and Theriault were both found not guilty, their legal bills amounted to over $5,000. A Support Committee for the Montreal Debout Accused sent out an appeal for funds and planned a benefit evening at a local progressive bar. Far from collaborating with this effort, WAL research director Nic Pouliot contacted Daniel Levitas of the US-based Centre for Democratic Renewal and requested that the CDR not provide any assistance to the Committee![10] Then, just three days before the Support Committee’s planned benefit party, the WAL called for a public assembly against racism to be held the same evening at a different venue!
As we will see, this episode was just the beginning of the WAL’s work to undermine the Montreal left.
Down the dirty road to snitchdom…The first indication that the WAL might actually choose to examine and investigate organisations other that the white racist right came in 1992. Just as Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X was released, WAL published a document entitled “The Malcolm X Movement amongst young Blacks”, which attempted to paint a rough picture of the history of Black people and the Black liberation movement in North America. While certainly pretentious, this work did distinguish between the conservatism of the Nation of Islam and the anti-racist Afrocentrism of local Black community groups like A.K.A.X., and unambiguously declared that Black Liberation was a goal worthy of support.
Yet if at the time this interest in the Black Liberation movement may have seemed to some to be well intentioned or even positive, in retrospect it seems quite sinister. The report’s introduction explained that the reason the WAL was releasing a study on the Black Liberation movement was not out of any desire for an alliance with revolutionary Black organisations, but rather to meet its law and order responsibilities as a law and order anti-racist organisation. The authors claimed that the League had received many calls from white people claiming to have been stabbed or beaten up by Blacks wearing Malcolm X regalia (baseball caps, T-shirts, etc.), and that it was the WAL’s job to examine this as another version of racism.
Nowhere in the document was anything mentioned about contemporary State repression of Blacks in the USA or Canada, this despite the fact that plenty of information on the subject was made available to the WAL’s researchers. In an appendix to the document, Alain Dufour condemned “Black Supremacists” while remaining silent about the white supremacist State with the crazy line that “if we don’t denounce them, its the police who are going to denounce them, and we know that when the police gets mixed in its alot more dangerous than when its community groups doing the condemning.”
In other words, Dufour was offering his services as a soft cop seeing as the cops in uniform can be so unpleasant to deal with. Further evidence of the WAL’s perspective on relations between the “cultural communities” and the cultural majority can be gleaned from several public statements. In a promotional brochure for the WAL-front group “RAM” (see below), a list of “social problems” that provide fertile ground for racism is provided; along with unemployment the RAM lists “the creation of ethnic ghettos in certain neighbourhoods”.
Also in 1992, in an interview with a pacifist magazine, Dufour spelled out his perspective on the Montreal police. When asked his opinion of the force he answered that while there were problems and some cops were homophobic and racist, there were also good cops – he even cited the example of one “good cop” who wanted to join the WAL. When pressed on this point and asked is he felt there was systematic discrimination on the part of the police Dufour responded in the negative, adding that “there are progressive police officers who give an opportunity for us to sensitise people in that milieu. The WAL is there to sensitise them and even to help train them if they want.”[11]
Keep in mind that the Montreal police had been involved in the shooting deaths of four Black and two Hispanic men in the preceding five years, and not a single officer has ever been found guilty of any crime in connection with these murders. Montreal cops harassed and arrested (and continue to harass and arrest) Blacks more than whites on the street, while leaving clubs, every day of the week… and the one time that a police chief publicly admitted that his cops might have acted improperly it sparked a demonstration of several thousand police officers in uniform. (I am referring to police chief St-Germain’s admission in 1992 that his officers may have made some errors in the case of Marcellus Francois, who was murdered while sitting peacefully in his car. His assailants were plainclothes cops who had failed to identify themselves, and mistook him for another man who, apart from the colour of his skin, looked nothing like Francois.)
The WAL had certainly strayed from its origins. Such is, of course, to be expected: all groups develop politically, meaning that they change. Organisations formed to deal with specific concrete situations like boneheads at shows can develop in different ways: good things or bad things can happen. In the case of the WAL, the latter unfortunately outweighed the former by far.
The first public evidence of the WAL’s interest in the left came in 1993. Klan members and neo-nazis were holding a weekend gathering in the small community of La Plaine just north of Montreal. Reporters, cops and anti-racists were swarming over the town, looking for stories, troublemakers and information.
Members of the CCRP had met with members of the community, who with few exceptions were not too pleased with all the hubbub and commotion. On the Saturday evening there was a community meeting, and it was decided to have a public gathering against racism the next day. The idea was to give residents a chance to express their outrage at the presence of neo-nazis in their town, and nothing more.
As CCRP members were scouting out the site of the meeting the next morning Quebec Provincial Police officers approached Martin Theriault and requested that he accompany them to meet with their captain at city hall. According to Theriault, the police captain informed him at this meeting that he “knew” that the organizers planned to have the rally attack the nazis. The CCRP member denied that this was the case, and reassured the top cop that the rally would remain peaceful – and demanded to know where these allegations of violent plans had come from. At which point he was told that the Minister’s office had received a tip from Nic Pouliot of the World Anti-Fascist League.
While this story does raise some questions – like how often do police reveal their sources? the QPP was way pissed off at the WAL that weekend for renting a helicopter and doing low swoops over the Aryan Fest, and one might be tempted to think that this was all just an attempt to make trouble for Pouliot and company – subsequent events do lend credibility to the theory that Pouliot would engage in such behaviour.
When Alex Roslin, a journalist with a local weekly entertainment tabloid, reported Theriault’s allegations against Pouliot, the WAL research director denied snitching to the cops but explained that “I would do it if I knew of a case of direct confrontation. We don’t exactly have time to track left-wing groups but if I had the manpower and resources I would.” To justify his interest in the Left, Pouliot referred to the issue of “political correctness” on university campuses, claiming that “It’s frightening and I consider it to be the same as fascism.”
Shortly following this Pouliot allegedly left the WAL, but this did not end his relationship with the League. While apparently freelancing as an anti-fascist researcher he was repeatedly spotted with WAL activists, and more recently took responsibility for designing the League’s web site.
Nor did Pouliot’s distancing himself from the WAL do anything to temper the group’s leftphobia. In a letter to Voir, another weekly entertainment tabloid, the League explained that when “communists choose to support organisations such as the Shining Path (Peru) and use the same methods such as terrorism, we will take a stand”.[12]
Such redbaiting most likely represents only the tip of the iceberg. After all, if WAL officials are willing to make such statements in a public forum, imagine what they must say in private. There is some evidence that the group has smeared its anti-racist rivals in this way: according to Martin Theriault, Alain Dufour has told Steven Scheinberg of B’nai B’rith Canada that the former president of the CCRP was a former “secret leader” of the Communist Party of Canada. More recently, after the Research Group on the Far-Right and Its Allies published a report denouncing the WAL’s role in destabilizing the Left, Dufour charged the group with being “a front which its members use to promote their Maoist ideology… those people practice entrism.” Dufour defined entrism as “a method taught by Mao. It consists of infiltrating different organisations in order to use them to spread propaganda.”[13]
Shortly following the WAL’s declaration regarding Shining Path Maoists, Radio Canada reported that the group had shared information with both CSIS and the Quebec Provincial Police’s intelligence unit.[14] The WAL claimed at the time to have only shared information about neo-nazis, but in a letter he wrote in 1996 Pouliot claimed that his “work at LAM included working with police to stop a number of criminal activities. Although most of it was dealing with radical right wing groups, once in a while we dealt with those peace loving rock throwing anarchist (hahahaha).”
