The only moment that matters regarding the Pope’s visit to Canada to apologize to Indigenous people for the Church’s enormous role in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of First Nations, was an unscripted one. It was when an Indigenous woman stood up and sang the Canadian anthem in Cree, with tears streaming down her face.

Much of the media has been reporting this moment as if she were singing as a sign of respect. This is nonsense. You can see the righteous defiance in her face and hear it in her voice. Women, after all, have been excluded in most of the official ceremonies. They have not been granted an audience with the Pope. But this woman got his attention anyway, not only defying a legacy of colonial oppression, but the patriarchy itself. “She was telling him that this (land) was a pure place – a clean place – prior to the settlements,” said Ermineskin Nation, Chief Randy Ermineskin. She basically told the Pope and his priests to go home until real, substantive reparation to Indigenous peoples is enacted.

Sometime after the Pope was finished with his apology, another unidentified woman yelled: “Repudiate the doctrine of discovery! Renounce the papal bulls!” The papal bulls were 15th-century edicts that the Catholic Church and colonial settlers used to justify the violent theft of Indigenous land and centuries of genocide. This, and the odious “Doctrine of Discovery,” have not yet been rescinded by the Church.

The Indigenous response to the Pope’s visit and apology has been mixed. Some have expressed that it has brought healing, while others have said that it merely ripped open old wounds. For more than a century, the residential school system in Canada, which was essentially run by the Church, forcibly separated more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their families. Thousands suffered unspeakable horror, from beatings to starvation to sexual abuse, at the hands of priests and nuns.

So, this one woman’s defiance is the only moment worth paying attention to in this charade of contrition. Until the Church addresses the emotional, mental and material consequences of its murderous legacy, these words will remain as hollow as the trunk of a dead tree.

Kenn Orphan, July 2022

*Photo is of this remarkably courageous woman standing up to the Pope. Source: Reuters.

What is it about this photograph that is so intriguing? This is the Carina Nebula taken by the James Webb Telescope (NASA). We are looking at a nursery of stars, many far bigger than our own sun. And we are also looking back in time. Deep time. Yet there’s something intimate about it, even though there aren’t any pareidolic references for us to easily latch on to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this image. Perhaps it has such power to so many because we can imagine our souls being birthed alongside these behemoths of condensed energy in great flashes of light. And even with all that bombast in expression, the colourful gasses appear as a gossamer veil that comforts new skin. Any birth is both violent and caressing at the same time, after all. Maybe, therefore, so many of us can relate.

And I keep thinking of where I am viewing it. The living crust of a tiny world, in a tiny solar system, on the edge of a tremendously vast galaxy. A tiny world whose thin, life-giving and sustaining ribbon of air and water is imperiled by the supposed “apex species” that resides upon it. Where the sea and the atmosphere are boiling and seething ever greater with each passing year thanks to the excesses and greed of just a segment of our kind. And for what gain? Power? Status? Access to luxury? Nationalism and flags? Celebrity? Religious dominance?

I think about the video of an orangutan attempting to fend off a bulldozer from her home with only her arms. Being knocked to the forest floor, broken and bloodied. Her home to be razed to the ground likely to become a piece of disposable furniture to be sold in some big box store thousands of miles away, then to be set out on the curb a year later after the trend has run its course. Or maybe to extract palm oil to be used in some overpriced latte at a Star Bucks in LA, where rich people complain about the homeless.

And then I think about that photograph taken in 1946. The one with the military generals and the lady with the atomic bomb hat, slicing into an atomic bomb shaped cake. This was barely a year after hundreds of thousands of human beings were incinerated in two cities by similar bombs. It was celebrating the beginning of years of nuclear detonations on a once pristine atoll in the Pacific, forever polluting the waters and the people who called it home. Celebrating it all, with cake. And I remember how that chapter of madness in history did not end. That the world stands at the precipice of nuclear annihilation again.

I keep thinking of what I would tell a future generation about us on this tiny world. But I’m less and less certain there will be future generations to tell. At least, not of our kind. Perhaps, in deep time, there will be another sentient race of beings who evolve on this celestial stone to create a powerful mirror to see back in time, into the heavens, like we have. Perhaps crows or ants or hydra. Will they be in awe of it too, enough to pause the great wheel of self-destruction that is consuming us now, even just for a moment?

If a nebula can tell us of our beginning, can it tell us how we will end?

Kenn Orphan, July 2022

Image Credit: The Carina Nebula taken by the James Webb Telescope.

It is shocking to hear of the assassination of Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan. But while we should condemn political violence, we should also not whitewash his legacy.

Abe was arguably the most far-right leader of Japan. Under his leadership, the country took a more reactionary turn toward aggressive, militaristic policies. Relations with South Korea and China suffered, since Abe made historical revisionism part of his policy. And corruption scandals plagued his government.

Abe denied the Japanese government’s role in forcing Korean women into sexual slavery, as “comfort women,” during WW2, only to mildly roll back that statement later by acknowledging a report made in 1993 by his party that admitted such involvement. He visited the controversial Yasakuni Shrine, a site where nationalistic, historical revisionists cast Japanese war criminals in WW2 as martyrs and liberators. Even the Emperor, himself, refused to visit this place.

It is telling that Abe gained praise from far-right, fascists like Steve Bannon, who called him “a great hero to the grassroots, the populist, and the nationalist movement throughout the world.” Some even said Abe was Japan’s Trump, an accolade that should make any sane person of conscience cringe.

So, as the Western press lavishes endless homages to Shinzo Abe, we should be careful not to gloss over his legacy. His assassination is tragic because political violence is loathsome and should be condemned, especially with the world in its current tenuous and fragile state. But not because he was a great man.

Kenn Orphan, July 2022

*Photo is of Shinzo Abe. Reuters.

Author’s note: this essay is an updated and expanded upon version of one published in May of this year.

There was a part of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, that is perhaps the most unsettling to me. The protagonist, Offred, is walking past the notorious Wall in the Republic of Gilead. This Wall, once part of a prestigious university in Cambridge Massachusetts, is now being used as a place of public execution, where corpses are left hanging for days to send a message of compliance and terror to the citizens of this authoritarian, theocratic state. Defy “God’s law” and you will suffer the punishment for doing so.

When Atwood penned her famous book in 1985, she could not have imagined just how prescient it would be seen decades later. Then the Hulu series was produced. It differed in many significant ways from the book. The character of Offred, for instance, did not have the same agency or defiance as the one in the television series. She was a witness to the brutality of the Republic of Gilead, but she didn’t actively participate in resisting it as Elizabeth Moss’ portrayal did. Although the series was powerful, well written and well acted, the book presents us with a more universal experience of a person living under authoritarian cruelty.

But it came in the time of Trump. A time of unmasked misogyny. Resistance, or even the facsimile of it, became a popular rallying call. Now, we watch stupefied at the continuing resurgence of fascism, dressed up in the guise of Christianity, in the same nation that would eventually become Atwood’s fictional Gilead. The decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade may be one of those prophecies foretold.

With the admission of some of the most far-right, religiously conservative justices, the writing was on the wall for the SCOTUS to eventually overturn the historic Roe v Wade case. When it did this, the national right to abortion for women ended and several states automatically made abortion illegal. Many others will follow. It isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine an eventual national ban on all abortions coming down the pike relatively soon, and the reversal of other landmark cases, including marriage equality.

To reduce this all to only one or two issues would be missing the broader picture. To be sure, the war on women’s rights, primarily the right of a woman to control her own body, is a fundamental feature of fascism. Misogyny is a central tenet. But this Supreme Court has wasted no time in bolstering other elements of fascist terror. Now gun owners and the police state, thanks to the neutering of Miranda rights, have more rights than women.

These decisions aren’t mismatched. They are intentionally placed obstructions to democracy. When a public is terrorized by armed gunmen in ordinary settings like a grocery store, a school or a parade, they often become paralyzed by fear. And this plays into the hands of any authoritarian government.

American fascism isn’t following the same course as in pre-World War 2 Germany. It is more akin to Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile, where far-right mobs were emboldened with the task of terrorizing the general public, while the church and the state worked hand in hand to design a framework of oppression; culturally, legislatively and judicially. From both above and below, Americans are being subjected to an unprecedented attack on their basic freedoms, liberties and civil rights.

Without a doubt, fascism has always been a current running just under the surface in American culture, religion and politics. As anywhere it surfaces, fascism has characteristics unique to the society it rises in. And American fascism has always cloaked itself in white supremacy and Calvinistic theology. It is an ideology grounded in racism, exclusion, rigid gender roles and fear.

When Offred saw the bodies on the notorious execution Wall she remembered something her brutal overseer Aunt Lydia once said: “Ordinary, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.” This speaks to the things we come to accept as just part of ones day in the society in which we live. The normalization of things we might once have thought inconceivable, or even horrifying.

The US isn’t at this point yet. But it is worth taking into account Offred’s thoughts on how life was before this reign of terror began, and the feelings of complacency many of us share with her, even as the world around us rapidly morphs into something unimaginable:

“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantly: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

Offred reflects on her complacency often. She thinks about not attending rallies or marches. And of her mother who did. But, like so many of us, she simply wanted to get her and her family through life hoping it would all work itself out. Our place in history, however, doesn’t function like that. We are participants in it whether we like it or not. And the biggest danger we face is our apathy in the face of authoritarian brutality and violent repression.

Fascism is intentional. It is intentional in its obsession with a fictional and romanticized past. A sentimental vision of a history that never happened. An addiction to the glorification of nationalistic militarism. It is intentional in its drive to silence voices that criticize its narrow understanding of history or the place and treatment of women or of minorities. It is intentional in its misogyny, its racism, its homophobia, its xenophobia, its violence. And given the right circumstances, like economic disparity, ecological crises or institutional rot, it can sweep through any society like a flood. And it can create a new normal in the blink of an eye, leaving us grieving for the life we once thought was simply ordinary.

Kenn Orphan, July 2022

A father hid his young son in a dumpster as he searched for the rest of his family amid rapid gun fire…

A war zone? No. Just another day in the US. Independence Day, in a nation whose Supreme Court is intent on demolishing independence for half the population, while granting even more rights to those who want to terrorize it.

Even from abroad, I know many of my American friends are feeling anxious. Many are grieving. With each civil liberty being chipped away, they feel helpless as they watch their country slipping steadily down a steep hill toward a Christo-fascist nightmare. Holidays like the 4th of July only make this grief more acute. The absurdity of flags and anthems extolling “freedom” and “liberty” all while those very terms are denuded of any value they may have once had. And now, yet another mass shooting to add to an ever growing list.

In truth, there have always been times in the States where Americans sought to escape their republic. But I’ve definitely noticed an uptick over the past five years. And I’ve had many reach out to me inquiring on how to flee successfully. Yet, I still see so many Americans doing everything they can to prop up the cadaver of American democracy while slapping makeup and perfume on it so as to mask its putrescence. A kind of kabuki theatre of democracy with all the appropriate props for the charade. Regardless of the effort, the writing seems to be on the wall. The US is a failed state where democracy is essentially dead in all but appearance.

If we are to be honest, it was inevitable that the misery the American Empire brought to millions in the Global South would eventually come home. How many democratically elected leaders have been overthrown by the US? How many coups and plots fomented by the CIA? Lumumba? Mosaddegh? Allende? How many Americans have even heard of these people? How many killing fields have been drenched in the blood of innocents thanks to American wars of conquest? Korea? Vietnam? Cambodia? Laos? Panama? Guatemala? Iraq? Libya?

And in reality, the Global South also includes millions of Americans who have been relegated to capitalism’s sacrifice zones. Those who reside on the margins of empire. Forgotten and ridiculed for being poor. Shot by militarized police in the streets or in their homes or incarcerated for being Black. Brutalized, erased and disenfranchised for being Indigenous. Caged and whipped by jackbooted thugs for being undocumented. Maligned and criminalized for being houseless.

None of this is new. After all, the US was built on the soil of a mass grave. Its powdered wig, ethnic cleansing, slave-owning, founders designed the farce that would become the “American Experiment.” White supremacy permeated its roots since its “revolution” was only intended to maintain an economy of slavery and genocide. In fact, its governing houses were constructed by forced labour. A bloody war had to be fought to end slavery, and even after the war was over, it codified racism in segregation while terrorizing Black people with the threat of lynching for decades. Starting with the decimation of the bison, its ecological diversity has been relentlessly raped for material gain. Capitalist exploitation is the sacrosanct religion of the land. In fact, the only thing that has made America “exceptional” has been its ability to convince so many of its subjects that its cruelty is virtuous and ordained by the benevolent hand of the Divine.

Yet even with this rancid past, ordinary people rose up against such tyrannical oppression. Workers protested their exploitation, often falling to the slaughter of federal and state troops. Slaves revolted, often suffering horrifically for doing so. Women, Black and Brown people, Indigenous, Queer and other marginalized segments of society united in solidarity to demand their human rights. People from all walks of life banded together to demand environmental protections. And many times, they succeeded in forcing the hand of power.

But over the last few years these hard won battles have come under brutal attack by a far right that has felt simultaneously threatened as it feels emboldened. As civil rights and liberties are rendered inert, guns proliferate. Mass shootings have become normalized. Membership in white militias is growing. Housing and healthcare are being increasingly allocated toward the rich as a luxury. The demographics of the state are shifting, all while the levers of power in that state are being sequestered by an ever shrinking minority in the ruling class. And this is the essence of fascism: the human, the living and the earth are nothing, the weapon, wealth and power are everything. With the only opposition seeming to lie in the inept, corporate-owned, and thoroughly ineffectual Democratic Party, it is no wonder there are so many feeling disempowered in the face of such blatant, unabashed authoritarianism.

Many liberal, white Americans are feeling anxious today because they are finally experiencing a taste of the brutality their ruling class, with the capitulation of the bourgeoisie, have delivered to millions of people for decades. They are grieving and that can be a positive catalyst. It has the power of uniting people in solidarity against injustice. But it can also be paralyzing. By all accounts, the rise of an even bolder fascism in the US is inevitable. One can only hope that the rise of its nemesis is equally so.

Kenn Orphan, July 2022

*Photo is of Patriot Front at Boston 4th of July celebration. AP.