Spectres of Fascism, Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives is a book edited Dr. Samir Gandesha, Director of the SFU’S Institute for the Humanities. It was published in 2020 but is drawn from a free school presented at the Institute in 2017. The following is taken from Professor Gandesha’s foreword:
The free school can be situated within programming that stretches back several years and specifically addresses the increasingly aauthoritarian cast of politics globally and in Canada in particular. In Canada such an authoritarian turn was closely linked to Stephen Harper’s project of transforming Canada into an “emerging energy superpower.” Broadly speaking, the Institute has focused its attention on the resulting criminalization of dissent in this respect, in particular through the use of strategic lawsuits to limit public participation (SLAPPs) and the Anti-Terrorism Act that was passed in 2015 and was designed specifically to target opposition, particularly from Indigenous communities, to pipeline projects…
Fascism is uncanny insofar as it is a phenomenon that seems to belong to a distant age in a previous century yet has been all too close at hand in the first two decades of the present one..
…The spectre of fascism returns, then, as a response to a particular financial and ecological crisis of capitalism. If twentieth-century fascism, in part, offered a solution to the economic slump via an acceleration of the extraction of absolute and relative surplus-value extraction by smashing independent trade unions and other working-class institutions, today fascism centres on a deepening of resource extraction on the very precipice of massive deskilling of labour, and widespread automation and employment of robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to wit: the prospective obsolescence of humanity itself…
Categories: Fascism
in-sights.ca 
In a January video a federal officer, in uniform, kicks a Renee Good memorial?
Was the video faked?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/real-video-shows-dhs-officer-defacing-renee-good-memorial/ar-AA1UbOzK?ocid=BingNewsSerp&cvid=6967b121ff304fd4959f253943acf2c5&ei=4
Claim: A January 2026 video authentically showed a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer kicking over a flameless memorial candle honoring Renee Good, the woman an ICE agent fatally shot in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026.
Rating: Mostly True (About this rating?)
The video was from January 2026 and did show a law enforcement official twice kicking a flameless memorial candle honoring Renee Good. The incident occurred in Sacramento, California.
What’s False: The officer who kicked over the candle was a Federal Protective Service officer, not an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent. The FPS is the subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for protecting federal government facilities.
In short, the clip was authentic — meaning it was not AI-generated or created using other video editing tools — and it showed a law enforcement official kicking over a candle at a memorial for Good in Sacramento, California, in early January 2026. However, the official was a Federal Protective Service officer, not an ICE agent. The FPS is the subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for protecting federal government facilities. Therefore, this claim contained mostly true information.
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How well qualified are new ICE hires?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-is-reportedly-hiring-people-who-can-t-read-write-or-pass-fitness-tests/ar-AA1UahqK?ocid=BingNewsSerp&cvid=6967b57c752647398596fe7592600c13&ei=65
A major hiring push at Immigration and Customs Enforcement is drawing sharp criticism after lawmakers revealed that some new recruits are struggling with basic reading, writing, and physical fitness requirements. As ICE races to expand its workforce, questions are growing about whether speed has started to outweigh standards.
During recent oversight discussions on Capitol Hill, senators raised concerns that lowered barriers and accelerated training timelines have allowed recruits into the pipeline who cannot meet fundamental expectations of the job. According to statements entered into the congressional record, some trainees reportedly could barely read or write well enough to pass open book exams designed to test basic understanding of immigration and constitutional law.
Those exams were not meant to be difficult. Recruits were allowed to use notes and reference materials, yet a significant number still failed. Lawmakers warned that if officers struggle to comprehend written legal guidance in a classroom setting, the risks multiply once they are operating in real communities where split second decisions can carry lasting consequences.
Physical fitness has also become a major point of concern. ICE requires recruits to complete modest benchmarks including push ups, sit ups, and a timed 1.5 mile run. Oversight statements revealed that a sizable portion of new trainees failed to meet those minimums. Some were described as severely out of shape despite certifying they were physically capable during the application process.
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But in History it’s not like a healthy state ever deliberately attacked the public…
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Red-Guards
While engaging in marches, meetings, and frenzied propagandizing, Red Guard units attacked and persecuted local party leaders as well as schoolteachers and school officials, other intellectuals, and persons of traditional views. Several hundred thousand people died in the course of these persecutions.
By early 1967 Red Guard units were overthrowing existing party authorities in towns, cities, and entire provinces. These units soon began fighting among themselves, however, as various factions vied for power amidst each one’s claims that it was the true representative of Maoist thought. The Red Guards’ increasing factionalism and their total disruption of industrial production and of Chinese urban life caused the government in 1967–68 to urge the Red Guards to retire into the countryside. The Chinese military was called in to restore order throughout the country, and from this point the Red Guard movement gradually subsided.
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/inquisition
inquisition, a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established by the papacy and, sometimes, by secular governments to combat heresy. Derived from the Latin verb inquiro (“inquire into”), the name was applied to commissions in the 13th century and subsequently to similar structures in early modern Europe. In 1184 Pope Lucius III required bishops to make a judicial inquiry, or inquisition, for heresy in their dioceses, a provision renewed by the fourth Lateran…
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https://www.britannica.com/video/Adolf-Hitler-power-Germany/-192588
NARRATOR: In truth, Hitler plans to govern alone, with only one party – his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The Nazi leader proposes the Enabling Act to parliament. While preserving the semblance of legality, the act essentially transfers state power to Hitler. His critics are intimidated.
ADOLPH HITLER: “You are self-pitying, gentlemen, and not fit for the present age when you talk already of persecution.”
NARRATOR: On March 23, the majority of delegates vote for their own disempowerment. Farmers’ Day 1934, the unions are destroyed, and other organizations are recognized by the National Socialists. The young people are told lockstep instead of diversity, order instead of liberty. It is not the individual that counts, but the ethnic community, not individual will, but that of their leader.
DORIS SCHMID-GEWINNER: “It was like soldiers. We had to swear to give our lives for Hitler and fatherland although we were only 14.”
NARRATOR: Rituals are used to bring individuals to heel.
SALLY PEREL: “The conformity, the expropriation of the German youth, the destruction of the individual. All this he achieved.”
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Very timely. I believe this quote from the Introduction accurately describes what we are witnessing in the U.S. today:
“I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.” – Theodor W. Adorno in a key lecture in the post-war Bundesrepublik.
The impetus for this national socialism within the U.S. is very presciently described in Chapter 13, authored by Joan Braune over six years ago. The role and influence of Steve Bannon here should not be underestimated. Especially since he mentored and introduced Stephen Miller, current Trump Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy during Trump’s first campaign and term. Bannon has described Miller as Trump’s prime minister and an evil robot. According to Joan Braune, Bannon has interest and praise for Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a genocidal French novel. She says, “All told, the novel is one of the most blatant pieces of racist propaganda imaginable.”
Given the current ICE crackdown and recent comments from Miller about the iron laws of the world, I found this passage about the novel striking:
“At the beginning of the novel, a retired professor casually murders a young hippie before going back into his house for a glass of wine. In his private monologue before the murder, he fantasizes about being a medieval crusader, a Christian soldier at the Battle of Lepanto, a Confederate soldier, a KKK member, a French soldier killing members of the Algerian uprising, and a cop murdering a Black Panther in a police van. As the professor meditates on his murder of the hippie, he considers:
That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest – none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all.
That ‘monstrous cancer’ is compassion for people not of one’s own race.”
The Trump regime has more than doubled the ICE force just since July and has requested additional funds to continue the buildup. Masked ICE forces will be on the streets killing, abusing, and disappearing citizens and non-citizens alike at the direction and approval of Trump and Miller for some time to come. Rather than tapering off, they are doubling down. And the retired professor from the novel above is their role model.
They aren’t waiting around for the catastrophes envisioned in the Fourth Turning (Is Here) or the Shock Doctrine to periodically occur. They are actively laying the groundwork to create them for exploitation everywhere we look.
My optimism that the midterms will stop them has dissipated. It will take much more than that to stop this runaway, and I’m no longer confident that the American people or their institutions are up to the job. Hope I’m wrong, but Bannon’s dream of total collapse looks likely to become our nightmare.
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