A Brief History of Canadian Nazis

And other racist assholes

Fellow Canadian writer Tabatha Southey exposed Jordan Peterson for being full of shit before it was cool, authoring a piece for Maclean’s in November 2017 titled “Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man’s smart person?” It was a rhetorical question, because holy shit yes. The notorious psychologist turned motivational guru for angry bigoted white guys who can’t get laid has only gotten worse, his followers even dumber. Yesterday Peterson tweeted this:

A few seconds on Google is all it would have taken. Opening a book at any time in your life likely would have done it. Or perhaps coming out from under your fucking rock to pay attention to all the mass graves of Indigenous children found at Canadian “Residential Schools” during last year.

Peterson can’t be that clueless. We are witnessing live on Twitter each day his downward spiral into … something not good. My first piece on him followed a few months after Southey’s, and I wrote two follow ups here and here because he kept spewing dumber and dumber shit. He’s added anti-vaccination and climate change denial to his repertoire of dumbfuckery since. I’m using his tweet as an impetus to get Canadians to wake up to the rampant racism our country is built on that persists to this day.

In October of 2020 I wrote this piece about the Canadian residential school system, which was later published in my latest book. From the piece:

It was a place where the Canadian government sent Indigenous children to “kill the Indian in the child.” But sometimes they just plain old killed the child. Either way, it was a literal ethnic cleansing.

The Canadian Residential School System began in 1874 and comprised of one-hundred-thirty schools across the nation. They were run by Christian churches and took Indigenous children from their families in order to assimilate them into white culture. Over its existence, approximately a third of all Indigenous children in Canada were placed in such schools. The schools were rampant with physical and sexual abuse, as well as death. Several thousand children died over the years.

The last such school didn’t close until 1996. How is that not a culture of white supremacy?

Let’s now spend those few seconds on Google searching for “Canadian Nazis”.

Oh shit would you look at that.

There was an actual Canadian Nazi Party from 1965 to 1978. It was later rebranded as the Heritage Front, which existed from 1989 to 2005. The Nationalist Party of Canada still exists, which describes itself as white nationalist and has a history of antisemitic and racist publications. That’s not to be confused with the Canadian Nationalist Party, another white nationalist party formed in 2017. There is also the antisemitic New Constitution Party, led by James Sears. Sears, who has spent time in prison for willful promotion of hate, ran for Toronto City Council in 2014 and managed to get 797 people to vote for him. It’s also worth noting that the KKK had several chapters across Canada in the 1920s and 30s.

After World War II as many as 5,000 Nazi war criminals fled to Canada, and not one was ever successfully prosecuted.

It’s not just our history, but our racist present that Peterson willfully ignores. White supremacy is rampant in our nation. Hell, this 2017 video shows Peterson interviewing noted Canadian white supremacist and eugenicist Stefan Molyneux spewing “scientific racism” nonsense about how certain races have lower intelligence. Peterson also interviewed Canadian Gavin McInnis in 2016, the same year McInnis founded the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group that has been named a terrorist organization in Canada. What were they talking about? The alleged plague of “cultural Marxism,” a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory about a plot to destroy white Christian culture in the west.

And more recently, this fucking convoy.

Oh but there was only one Nazi flag! There were also Canadian flags defaced with swastikas, plenty of Confederate flags, and also lots of Trump flags. And yes, that last one is also becoming more and more associated with racism. Not to mention the leaders of the convoy are known white supremacists and there were numerous tales of the convoy participants spewing bigoted hate at Ottawa residents. This is the same convoy that numerous Conservative Party of Canada Members of Parliament, a major party that has held power several times, have shown ample support for, including the current CPC leader. Here she is wearing a MAGA hat.

Just last week in Toronto a Jewish school teacher, who is also the daughter of Holocaust survivors, was surrounded by three of her middle-school students who flashed the Heil Hitler salute at her. The same day antisemitic graffiti was found at the school. Around the same time a bomb threat was called into the Ottawa Children’s Hospital by a person spewing antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate. Speaking of anti-Muslim hate, a right-wing terrorist murdered six people in a Quebec City mosque in 2017. Quebec City, by the way, is home to the neo-Nazi group Atalante Quebec.

I met a notorious Canadian white supremacist in the early 90s. Well, I was in the same room as him, at a wedding. I’m still angry at myself for not punching the fucker in the face. I was told not to ruin the wedding. I think it would have made the wedding awesome. Anyway, his name was Jim Keegstra; he was mayor of the Alberta town of Eckville from 1974 to 1983, and also a schoolteacher. In 1984 he was convicted of teaching Holocaust denial and antisemitism to his social studies class.

When I was doing my bachelor’s degree in history a group of friends were chatting and the subject of the Holocaust came up. One member of the group, whose parents were Austrian, started spewing Holocaust denial, saying it never happened. I fucking lost it and began screaming at him and had to be held back before it came to blows. I never spoke to him again.

Peterson saying Nazis and white supremacists don’t exist in Canada isn’t just willfully ignorant, it’s gaslighting bullshit that promotes white supremacy. He seeks to normalize such hateful behavior and make it seem patriotic and naturally Canadian. Peterson, who has been vocally in favor of the racist convoy and repeatedly tweets profanity at Prime Minister Trudeau, laughingly equates the battle against fascism as fascism. When I criticized Peterson on Facebook yesterday one of his fans replied that “Trudeau has done things that would make Hitler blush.”

The stupid man’s smart person indeed.

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About the photo: This image was taken in Toronto in 1981. The KKK members were expressing their defiance to an anti-racism group protesting their presence.