For political dignity!
We are the descendents of colonisation, of the transatlantic trade, of economic or political immigration from the countries of the South.
We are the descendants of the colonized yet uneliminated by you.
We are the descendants of the slaves who survived human trafficking.
We are the ones who fled their countries bombed by NATO in order to turn them into vassals, countries most often plundered by the missionaries of democracy in order to perpetuate a model of overconsumption : yours.
We are the women oppressed by a feminism which has in ideological what is lost in practical : yours.
We are the migrants imprisoned for the crime of not having the right papers, the bodies beaten and pulled by the police, the non- and the sub-citizens sidelined from the supposed universality of rights of your beautiful Declaration of Human Rights.
We are the South in the North!
We recognize that among us there is also an internal hierarchy complicated by race, gender, class and other stratifications created by strategies of colonial division which have allowed hegemonic nation-states to capitalise. We are among the millions of people who constitute historical tides pushed into exile and wandering by Western capitalist expansionism.
In the Americas, we are silent and helpless accomplices to the colonization of indigenous peoples' territories and their cultural and physical genocide. In short, we are the subordinates of white supremacy.
Today we are experiencing a particularly hostile sequence. In Quebec, the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec) came to power and its priority was to strengthen measures to reinforce racists, xenophobics and Islamophobic tendencies.
Even natural allies do not seem to want to acknowledge the racist nature of these measures. All this while our politicians are complacent about the denial of racism in our society, thus denying in indifference what many Quebeckers are experiencing. They even unanimously passed a motion in the National Assembly banning anti-racist criticism on the pretext that it represented an attack on the nation of Quebec.
Despite all the work done to raise awareness and commemorate the terrorist attack on the Great Mosque of Quebec City, our political class is still silencing itself in the denial of Islamophobia. An indifference that adds to the suffering of the relatives of the 7 dead, 5 wounded, 17 orphans, as well as an entire traumatized community. Those who still deny its existence will continue to better hide their implicit complicity in the toxicity of the current social climate.
Worse still, in recent weeks, the Quebec government has introduced a liberticidal bill (PL21) that will limit the fundamental rights of many people by prohibiting them from wearing religious symbols. To ensure its adoption, the government will use the notwithstanding clause without any urgent or real reason to circumvent the Canadian and Quebec charters and avoid any constitutional challenge. This manoeuvre is only a cowardly electoral strategy that serves to favor the majorities and silence their real social demands having a real impact on the quality of life of all. Indiscriminately sacrificing the rights of a part of the people definitely discredits these policies which still struggle to justify the drifts of their neoliberal ideology.
At the federal level, Canada is no exception. The profiling measures promoted by the state objectively target the same bodies: since 2003, the incarceration rate for blacks has increased by 80% and that of Aboriginal people by 46%, while the number of white people has decreased by 3%.[1]
Globally, Canada contributes to the plundering of southern resources through its mining companies and imperialist policies in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Its role is not limited only to looting: 75 % of the world's mining industry is located in Canada, and 60 % of publicly traded mining companies are located on the Toronto Stock Exchange.[2]
Countries that resist the exploitation of their resources and aspire to put them to the benefit of their people will have to contend with imperialist covetousness. Faced with this, in order to build unity and resistance, we will need a work of politicization of the masses and democratic and egalitarian measures internally.
In 2015, Canada ranked second among arms exporters to the Middle East [3] and continues to sell arms to genocidal states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. These wars are generating exiles and suffering to which selective and closing migration policies are responding.
In a global context characterized by the rise of the extreme right, we are the people most affected. Electoral processes in the so-called countries of the free world, when they do not bring the far right to power, circulate its favourite themes: these contaminate liberal and so-called left-wing tendencies. All these phenomena give rise to fundamental questions: what safeguards still exist for Western democracies whose legitimacy is seriously undermined? Does an independent Quebec necessarily respond to a social, economic and environmental revolution to overthrow the established order in order to return it to the service of the people? Does it make sense to recognize the sovereignty of a colonizing people, a people who were masters of slaves, over the territories of the colonized peoples? We declare that there are no fundamental breaks in the historical relations between the Euro-descendants and the populations that are victims of racism in contemporary Quebec. The variations currently observed are part of the adaptation of these colonial logics and are not a marginal epiphenomenon.
We, members of this collective, reject the false dichotomies, either between federalists and sovereigntists, who are the primary beneficiaries of the capitalist system, or by a Quebec left unable to propose a break with the current status quo, which is based on the political, social and economic domination of non-white people. We have a spirit of solidarity for the indigenous peoples who have been wounded and left in indignity. We are aware that we are involved in the occupation of their territories.
Whether it is a question of acting on two-speed relations between the countries of the North and the South, or of leading the perpetual iron arm with institutional power and mobilizing militant movements, Canada and Quebec must make a radical critical return to their colonial past and present.
Our goal is to create spaces for politicization and political self-organization that challenge the existing system with a view to leading a common struggle of all the oppressed and exploited of the planet for political dignity without compromise.
We do not want the charity of the white left or its "fraternism". We refuse to be dictated our political agenda, as we have always done - mostly in vain - but relentlessly. We affirm our commitment to social and economic justice in the service of as many people as possible.
Quebec's militant history is rich in examples of a people inspired by the global and North American context: we can notably mention the act of resistance of Marie-Josèphe Angélique to, the struggle for Haitian independence, the Cuban revolution that influenced the Quebec independence movement, the Quebec movement against South African apartheid.
It was here in Quebec that the largest demonstrations against imperialist wars in North America took place in the 1990s. More than ever, in the context of capitalist globalization and in the face of the destruction of the planet, we must weave a resistance that breaks the colonial racial moulds in the convergence of struggles that would not be a hollow slogan, but the result of political alliances based on common interests.
It is here in Quebec that we are fighting for political dignity!
[1] 2013 Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator Onlinehttps://www.ledevoir.com/policy/canada/393751/over-representation of visible minorities in penitentiaries
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