Available in French at : https://antidev.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/hamilton-kanada-deuil-public-et-la-logique-guerriere/
The past week has seen two attacks in Canada against Canadian soldiers by Muslim men. In response, thousands of people filled the streets to wave flags and call for heightened surveillance, preventive arrests, and war in the middle east. The crowds are calling for a police state. It feels heavy, and we’re stuck watching with dread as the crowds seem intent on re-enacting propaganda scenes from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Except in Canada in 2014, instead of a torch the crowds are cheering on the progress of a dead soldier whose corpse was driven from Ottawa to Hamilton.
The politics advanced by these two spectacles are alarmingly similar: to defeat the enemy outside our borders, we have to defeat the enemy within. In theory, the military and police are distinct bodies with separate roles. But even though these attacks targeted soldiers and followed Canada’s decision to go to war in Iraq and Syria, the response to them will be through policing.
People are in the streets calling for a police state: Why isn’t everyone with an extremist ideology being watched around the clock? If you have enough suspicion to surveil someone, why can’t you arrest them? What additional powers do police need to surveil and assess who has an extremist ideology? They are calling for the further merging of policing and military roles, for the expansion of counter-insurgency warfare within the canadian territory.