On December 7, 2022, German police raided more than 130 homes and made 25 arrests across 11 German states in connection with an alleged coup plot by adherents of the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement.Footnote 1 This was one of the largest counterterrorism investigations in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Shortly after, the Public Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice issued a press release outlining details of the group's planned activities. According to intelligence, the group had been planning their coup since November 2021.Footnote 2 Its armed wing would attack the German Parliament and overthrow the constitutional order. The group would then establish a state modeled on the German Reich of 1871 with an interim government led by Prince Heinrich XIII, the group's seventy-one-year-old leader. A former MP of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) was to become Justice Minister and so-called Heimatschutzkompanien (regiments to protect the Homeland) would consolidate the new system and eliminate remaining political opponents on the local level.Footnote 3
As shocking as this news story was—and is—it is perhaps surprising to note that there has been a Reichsbürger real estate agent and alt-right German “colony” on the eastern Canadian island of Cape Breton since the early 2000s.Footnote 4 How should we understand the attraction of Canada to the Reichsbürger, one of several groups of émigré German far-right sympathizers over the years taken with the promises of this northern nation? While we are tempted to think of them as transplanted fascists and conspiracy thinkers radicalized by COVID—and some of them are—we are better served by considering them against the backdrop of a much longer history of transatlantic hate networks that gave succor to something we might call “illiberal drift,” which Helena Rosenblatt argues points to the tensions and inequalities within liberalism that can produce manifestations like these in established democracies.Footnote 5 Indeed, as we'll see here, there is great compatibility between the settler colonial project and the illiberalism of the far-right. Recognizing some of these shared values nudges us to think more deeply about the relationship of liberal democracy to white supremacy, populism, and fascism.
Although it had surfaced as an idea in the nineteenth century, explaining Caesarism in the French case and the slide toward twentieth-century totalitarianism in Germany, there is a tendency to view illiberalism as a post-1945 concept and phenomenon, bound to authoritarian governments on the right. Of course, the term was in wide use by earlier generations of German historians who saw the nineteenth century as indelibly marked by examples of “liberalism in an illiberal society.” In the introduction to his essays on the political culture of modern Germany, Fritz Stern hoped that the German case might serve as “an object lesson in the failure of illiberalism.”Footnote 6 Decades later, the fall of communism brought the term back into use. In 1995, Daniel Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David Martin Jones edited an influential volume on the authoritarianism of Asia Pacific democracies as a challenge to the optimism of Francis Fukuyama's end of history dictum. And in a similar vein, Ivan Kratsev and Fareed Zakaria took to the pages of Foreign Affairs in 2018 to explain how the crisis of democratization in the former Eastern bloc led to populist and authoritarian rule in Poland and Hungary.Footnote 7
Increasingly, political scientists and political philosophers like Marlene Laruelle have started to see illiberalism as marking the space in the middle of a “continuum from democracy to non-democracy, describing a move from the former to the latter.” It is sometimes used to challenge the inevitability of liberalism itself as an ideology and ideal, identifying ideologies and practices from within and outside to decouple it from democracy.Footnote 8 Historians such as Tyler Stovall have gone in another direction still, drawing out liberalism's internal contradictions and citing the exclusivity of definitions like freedom and liberty as always already racialized and white.Footnote 9 Meanwhile, scholars of contemporary Canada have long noted the anti-democratic tensions within what historian Ian McKay has called the “liberal order framework.” In a much-cited article from 2000, McKay points to the clumsy relationship of liberalism to democracy among the Fathers of Confederation to say nothing of the denial of rights to specific classes, races, and groups by policies that undercut individual and collective self-determination.Footnote 10 In the intervening years since McKay's landmark piece, this argument has only grown stronger in tone. In “reckoning with the realities of Canadian history,” University of British Columbia historian Henry Yu argues that “the valorization and expansion of democracy” in this country “was inextricable from the dynamic changes in the politics of white supremacy.” Whether in the form of abstract universalism or the protection of property, the liberal project in Canada was “predicated for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the inclusion of new members in the body politic” while actively “depriving resources and opportunities for, others.”Footnote 11 Not a few Canadian historians question how free, open, and democratic a settler colonial state can be if it promotes the active discrimination of a large portion of its population. And they are not alone.
Indigenous legal scholars have also detailed the circumscribed definitions of sovereignty at play in Canadian liberal democracy where whiteness has served as a territorializing force to dispossess First Nation, Inuit, and Métis people from their land. Indigenous groups have been systematically denied rights to language and culture which distanced them from collective traditions and identity—all through legal and constitutional means. Indigenous scholar Val Napoleon, writing together with Hadley Friedland, argues that Canadian liberal constitutionalism itself denies the precedents and power of Indigenous legal traditions.Footnote 12 In Red Skin, White Masks, Dene political scientist Glen Coulthaud claims the very concepts of freedom, popular sovereignty, consent, property, recognition, and equality are inextricable from the coercive practices and ideologies of settler colonialism, which uses myths around land use and occupancy, space, history, and heritage to justify European hegemony.Footnote 13 Settler colonialism reveals a political-economic system that mixes liberal and illiberal features, liberal in the sense that there is the architecture of universalism, individual rights, and corporate or group identity protections and illiberal in the way that these same rights are fundamentally inaccessible to all.Footnote 14 Viewed this way, we can see the appeal of Canada for far-right adherents as a place where foreign and homegrown ideas of race, nation, empire, and sovereignty came into contact, creating conditions that might be attractive to hate groups and mainstream society as well.Footnote 15 As we will show here, media, both analog and digital, helped move things along.
In what follows, we sketch out the emergence, migration, and circulation of far-right and right-leaning ideas in Canada with a focus on synergies in the 1920s and 1930s within the settler colonial state, and the role of newspapers and film in firming up fascist messaging. We then turn to an examination of the postwar revivification of fascist activism including the activism of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel and his role as an early adopter of digital media. Finally, we return to the German far-right colony in Nova Scotia to plumb the role of social media itself in forging a place for white supremacist groups in contemporary Canada. Ultimately, we argue that a focus on cultural imaginaries, networks, and media provides compelling evidence of the transatlantic traffic in hate between these two countries, which might be opened up to further analysis in thinking about the place of illiberalism and specifically illiberal forms of memory in democratic settings.
Illiberal Memory
The postwar era and especially the fall of communism gave rise to an international memory boom as nations wrestled with their own legacies of violence.Footnote 16 This process of introspection took on different forms from apologies for past crimes to truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials, and the construction of national monuments and museums. In many Western nations, memory activism at both the state and societal level buttressed liberal notions of universalism and democratic pluralism, although not all citizens were able to lay claim to those ideals equally.Footnote 17 As Gavriel Rosenfeld has argued, democratic memory regimes were further challenged by another form of memory, an illiberal one, that served conservative political projects through an emphasis on pride and national unity, overlooking more sinister moments in a nation's past.Footnote 18 Yvonne Rosteck has suggested illiberal memory is particularly entrenched in countries that have done little to confront their own divisive historical legacies.Footnote 19 It gains expression in monolithic preoccupations with heritage, civilization, and national rootedness over and against fraught, contingent, and complex explorations of national and colonial history.
Illiberal memory centers on ideal types of good and bad citizens, heroes and scapegoats, who help form the boundaries of desired and disdained social, gender, and ethnic ideals. Like illiberalism, it is not just prevalent in countries that have taken the authoritarian turn. It has found a home in modern democracies as well and helps explain the appeal of certain countries to the far-right. In early-twentieth-century Canada, white supremacists such as Adrien Arcand helped till the ground for a new form of illiberal memory, drawing on principles from fascist Germany and Italy and mixing them with the homegrown antisemitism and anti-Indigeneity that were pervasive in the settler colonial state.Footnote 20 As historian Tyler A. Shipley highlighted in 2020, this was a strategy that resonated with political officials at the highest Canadian level, as when people like Prime Minister Mackenzie King started “flirting with Fascism” in 1937.Footnote 21 Arcand's disciple, post-1945 German immigrant Ernst Zündel, continued to nurture these social, cultural, and intellectual relationships, using gaps in the Canadian Criminal Code to fullest advantage in spreading hate propaganda and Holocaust denial. In the 1990s, the shift from analog to digital participatory media provided new possibilities for the transfer, circulation, and consumption of civilizational rhetoric and heritage on a mass scale.Footnote 22 As we well know, online hate has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges of our time. And, as this article argues, we need to analyze this challenge as a transnational or even international phenomenon without neglecting historical context.
We cannot forget that Holocaust denial held pride of place in these illiberal hate networks. From his Toronto-based publishing house, Zündel made use of demonstrations, street violence, pamphlets, books, and lectures to broaden his base. Web 2.0 allowed populist and far-right adherents to build on this scaffolding and exploit these transatlantic pathways further. The networks Zündel established mirrored similar connections between the United States and Germany, as Michelle Lynn Kahn has addressed recently; indeed, he is an important node in illiberal memory transfer, using existing gaps in constitutional and legal frameworks to maximum advantage.Footnote 23
Alongside the shift in media and the scale of outreach is a shift in content. Whereas in Zündel's era, the focus was almost exclusively on antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and (neo-) Nazism, in the digital field the spectrum of hate broadened, giving witness to transatlantic online communities like the Wissensmanufaktur with its image-heavy, Eurocentric digital footprint designed to attract adherents to Canada's maritime coast. By focusing in on a few examples from our growing corpus of digital datasets, we are able to see illiberal memory in action in a contemporary setting, taking shape, as digital memory scholar Andrew Hoskins argues “on the fly,” through a mix of conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, and settler colonial myths around the bounty and exclusivity of the natural landscape.Footnote 24
Imported from Germany?
The transatlantic exchange of ideas and ideologies between Germany and Canada had already started in the nineteenth century, as migrants fled in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848–1849 (not only in German-speaking lands in central Europe) and again after the imposition of the German Anti-Socialist Laws in the 1880s. Such migrations remained suspicious—the fear of “imported anarchists” is only one exampleFootnote 25—and even the second and third generations were not immune from criticism as German-Canadians had to prove their loyalty during both world wars.Footnote 26 The interwar period presented a new situation still: fascism and its German version of National Socialism emerged on the scene as a legitimate political alternative in North America, especially in the wake of the economic crisis after 1929 and fascism was supported by foreign Nazi organizations, including some members of the German legation.
Canada was fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Well into the 1920s Canada was still popularly regarded by Germans as a terra nullius, a land without Indigenous peoples.Footnote 27 Although a British ally in World War I, it retained its allure as a white settler colonial landscape well-suited to European adventurers.Footnote 28 These fictions and contradictions animated the transnational history linking these two countries. In times of crisis, illiberal ideas emanating out of Europe held traction and appeal for far-right-leaning emigrants. They mixed easily with homegrown racisms that held import of their own.Footnote 29
When Hitler came to power in the spring of 1933, a fascination for fascism had further taken hold in Canada and manifested in the formation of several “Swastika clubs” in larger cities, such as Toronto. Such groups played a major role in the Christie Pits Riot in August 1933, when a mob “paraded a huge white sheet with a swastika” while attacking Jews in Toronto and shouting “Heil Hitler” (Figure 1).Footnote 30 This incident of organized racism received widespread media coverage at the time. But the original coverage was not limited to people of German descent.Footnote 31 Immigrant diasporas and their press played a pivotal role in spreading fascist ideas locally while antisemitism itself was widespread in public opinion in Canadian nativist and nationalist politics.Footnote 32 The fascination with the “new movements” in Europe was not necessarily universal. Canadian journalist Matthew Halton described in some detail in the Toronto Daily Star in 1933 the scope of antisemitic laws in Germany. He returned to Germany in 1936, where he reported critically on the Olympic Games and the gross manipulations of German propaganda.Footnote 33
Individuals displaying swastikas, days before the riots at the Christie Pits (Toronto Daily Star, August 8, 1933).
Unfortunately, Halton's was not the only stance on Nazism in Canada. There were several different networks and individuals that helped spread Nazi propaganda throughout the country, in addition to diplomats and other state officials. The five German consulates provided “the movement with support in the form of funds and propaganda materials.”Footnote 34 These connections between Canada and Germany relied heavily on strategies of “cultural diplomacy,” when the German state, still isolated in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, tried to reestablish exchanges of students and research alongside economic ties.Footnote 35 With the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, this strategy became even more aggressive as the foreign organization of the German Nazi Party (NSDAP) reached out directly to German passport holders in Canada (Reichsdeutsche). In 1934, the German Bund Canada (BDC) was founded in Waterloo, Ontario, and the people of German descent (Volksdeutsche) started their own organization, together with a newspaper.Footnote 36 The prevailing image of Canada changed in the German perspective as well, at precisely the same time.
As we saw earlier, from a “German” point of view, Canada earned the perception of being a “land without people,” in contrast to Hans Grimm's notion of the German “people without space,” a reference to Germany's lost colonies after World War I. This narrative was related to the idea of a German Lebensraum im Osten (German living space in the European East), a settler colonial ideal exploited by the Nazis in justifying the Holocaust.Footnote 37 Another German view of Canada began to change in the 1920s. As a member of the German Reichstag put it in 1927, Canada was in danger of shifting from a country based on the cultural autonomy of immigrant communities to one of assimilation and “forced denationalization.”Footnote 38 The völkisch ideology of the Nazis seized on this criticism of cultural assimilation. It supplanted the longer-standing romantic view of Canada in both image and ideology, rooted in late-nineteenth-century central European travel writing and imagination in novels, for example, from German writers such as Karl May. While the German (and after 1938 Austrian) Alps were described as “beautiful,” the Rocky Mountains in Canada appeared to German writers now as “cold and (as) hard as their name.”Footnote 39 The country's socioeconomic and political system, based around a British-style liberal government and American-styled consumer capitalism, was also summarily rejected.
This shift in perception impacted German immigration to Canada more generally and was an argument for the Heim ins Reich (return to the German homeland) campaign, focused on the many Volksdeutsche in the country. The most important organization to promote this idea was, globally as in many other countries of the time, the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland. It provided publications and periodicals to local public libraries in Canada with the hope of reaching a German or “German-rooted” audience.Footnote 40 Such activities were meant to destabilize Western societies, still recognized as enemies from World War I. In some cases, this propaganda succeeded in spurring return migration. But especially after 1939, these activities fomented suspicion and led to the scrutinization of German-bound people to Canada, though not initially to mass internment. This, however, would soon change once war was declared, resulting also in the little known policy of interning Jewish refugees, some of whom had fled Hitler's racial laws.Footnote 41 But there is another transnational aspect worth mentioning here, which Bàrbara Molas has pointed out most recently in her paper on the 1935 foundation of the Classocracy League of Canada:Footnote 42 Although a small organization, the Classocracy League unified Ukrainian ultraconservative thought and Italian ideas of elitism with fascist corporatism. Aligned by an illiberal vision of Canadian identity based around European and Christian supremacism, the main and mostly Montreal-based protagonists were transnationally linked to organizations such as the Francoist Friends of National Spain and the Christian National Social Party.Footnote 43
While German-Canadian and other diasporic groups were mobilizing along illiberal lines, French Canadian journalist Adrien Arcand starting pushing in the same direction. In February 1934, Arcand formed the Parti National Social Chrétien (National Social Christian Party), later known as Canadian National Socialist Unity Party (since July 1938 called the National Unity Party, or NUP), and drew crowds of more than 100,000 people to his rallies in Montreal. The fierce antisemite had contact with the German Nazi Party via the United States already in 1932; corresponded with the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley; had relations with Virginio Gayda, an Italian newspaper editor and “unofficial spokesperson for the Mussolini regime”; and proudly declared himself the “Canadian Führer.” An ardent Anglophile despite his Francophone heritage, he advocated for a romanticized fascist Canadian state within a staunchly conservative British Empire. Arcand organized an international exchange of fascist pamphlets and newspapers. The organ of Arcand's NUP, Le Fasciste Canadien, promoted the publications of fascist groups from countries in Europe and beyond. Arcand also gave space in his 1933 founded weekly newspaper Le Patriote to translated articles from German antisemitic journals such as Der Stürmer.Footnote 44
As mentioned previously, these transnational networks resonated with homegrown antisemitism and an openness to National Socialism, at least in the early days. Prime Minister King visited Germany in the summer 1937 and even had an audience with Adolf Hitler. Following the tone set by British appeasement policy, King did not oppose the German strategy to gain “living space” in the European East. Before he met with Hitler, he was even received by Hermann Göring, who thanked him warmly for a gift to the Berlin Zoo: a Canadian buffalo, whose extinction was—of all animals in Canada—an outgrowth of the violent settler colonial project in North America.Footnote 45
Such fascist ideas and antisemitic policies did not go unchallenged. Newspapers and journals from several Canadian political parties aligned with the workers’ movement, influenced by immigration, and the global antifascism of Italian immigrants started to mount an opposition.Footnote 46 Artists like poet and novelist A. M. Stephen responded with a 1934 pamphlet he titled Hitlerism in Canada, and the founding manifesto of the Canadian League Against War broached similar topics.Footnote 47 Jewish communities and organizations like the Canadian Jewish Council and the Jewish Immigration Aid Society advocated against antisemitism and for more acceptance of refugees first from Germany and later from all over Europe; similar to the United States, Canadian immigration restrictions remained antisemitic and racially biased throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.Footnote 48 Familiar with everyday racism in their own lives, Jewish Canadian organizations were quick to push for a boycott of German goods following the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.Footnote 49 German officials were criticized vociferously during the Olympic Summer and Winter Games in 1936 when Canadian communist and other newspapers blamed the material pouring out of the German diplomatic missions in Canada as pure propaganda.Footnote 50
We do not know much about the influence of regional media outlets on public debates on the national level. But regional case studies like Lauren Wheeler's work on the Winnipeg Free Press indicate there was criticism of antisemitic policies and attitudes both inside and outside Canada. In the spring of 1943, this newspaper even advocated for a general (and unusual) pro-refugee position.Footnote 51 As forward thinking as these actions were, structural racism on the ground continued to shape how the fascist racial mission unfolded in Canada. While Winnipeg has a history as a haven for left-leaning social justice causes and groups, Indigenous people who worked the city's saw mills tended to eschew the labor unions, the heart of the activist left, seeing them as colonial institutions.Footnote 52 Winnipeg was also home to the second major far-right organization, the Canadian Union of Fascists (CUF), which was busy publishing its own newspaper, The Thunderbolt.Footnote 53 Antisemitism was a mobilizing force in Canada on both sides of the political spectrum.
Public opinion changed more generally in Canada over the course of the 1930s, especially with reports about the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938 in Germany and Austria, which led to the termination of student exchanges at Canadian universities until the 1950s.Footnote 54 With the outbreak of World War II, obvious Nazi organizations such as the BDC and Canadian parties such as the CUF disappeared overnight; the Canadian government declared Arcand's NUP illegal in June 1940.Footnote 55 While Canadians of German descent were not subject to internment like the more than 20,000 Japanese Canadians—a distinction based on a much older white and European settler colonial racism—they nevertheless remained at the center of the Canadian debate about a possible fifth column of Nazi supporters.Footnote 56 This theme was even taken up in feature films such as 49th Parallel (Great Britain, 1941) about a group of Nazi spies that arrived via submarine in Nova Scotia and passed through the country, before stopping in a German Mennonite village in the province of Manitoba (Figure 2). It was, to a certain extent, the German propaganda and Heim ins Reich campaign that triggered the suspicions and questioned loyalties pictured in this movie. Such proof of loyalty became more and more important after Canada entered World War II in September 1939. Already in 1940, Canadian authorities interned political activists such as communists and union functionaries. Among them was Adrien Arcand, who had been interned with 850 Canadian fascists.Footnote 57
German-rooted Mennonites in Manitoba speak out against the propaganda of German spies they had welcomed to their community (screenshot from 49th Parallel, 1941).
The postwar era, with Canadian soldiers returning from the front, was shaped by the reestablishment of contacts between Canada and Germany. This included new labor migration made up of displaced persons and people “in transit” because of the war.Footnote 58 They were also accompanied by collaborators and war criminals.Footnote 59 The relationship between people involved in Holocaust-related crimes and postwar immigration to Canada, and how this has shaped the politics of memory, is still an ongoing debate.Footnote 60 A further complication is the fact that some of the remnants of the homegrown pre-1930s fascist networks did not entirely disappear after 1945. John Ross Taylor, former secretary of the Canadian Union of Fascists, died as late as 1994. He was an associate of Ernst Zündel who came to Canada in the late 1950s to avoid conscription into the Bundeswehr.Footnote 61 After 1945, Adrien Arcand became Zündel's main mentor and a fellow Holocaust denier.Footnote 62 Although fringe groups like these may seem quaint and inconsequential—Arcand purportedly received funding from Conservative Prime Minister R. B. Bennett as late as 1930 to smear the liberal candidate for Prime Minister—they were buttressed by public opinion that helped spread support for nativist and nationalist sentiment already firmly rooted in Canada.Footnote 63 As much as Zündel represents a bridge to these earlier ideas and networks, he also represents an important transformation in the construction of illiberal memory, accelerating in the process the shape, form, content, and transmission of Holocaust denial.
Media Hybridity, Holocaust Denial, and Hate in the Postwar Era
Despite the continuation of fascist networks and sympathies, the postwar era in Canada was also marked by a rise in Holocaust consciousness and the popularization of Holocaust memory in the public sphere. In keeping with Holocaust memory activism in other countries, the first monument dedicated to Holocaust victims in Toronto was unveiled in 1962. The growing prominence of Holocaust memory was further reflected in universities and schools, with the incorporation of Holocaust awareness material in the classroom alongside invitations to Holocaust survivors to discuss the topic with students.Footnote 64 In that same decade, the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) began to organize several national public events to commemorate the Shoah and push back against the revivification of fascism in a new form. Other groups acted locally to pressure the Canadian government to deport Nazi war criminals. There was a great need for such actions. Research suggests that approximately 3,000 Nazi criminals had, in fact, made their way to Canada.Footnote 65
As we have seen, antisemitism was not simply a product of immigration; it was part and parcel of the everyday life experiences of many Jewish Canadians before, during, and after the war. Barring Jews from joining social clubs, restricting access to housing, education, the labor market, and discrimination at summer resorts were continued practices well after 1945.Footnote 66 Alongside structural racism, Steven Baum and Anita Bromberg found evidence of more insidious forms of “Antisemitism—Canadian Style,” in which a person's “Jewishness remains culturally invisible or it is sanitized and shaped to fit Christian expectations. Or it is simply not mentioned at all.”Footnote 67 Antisemitic discrimination was alive in the postsecondary education sector as well. Until the reforms of the 1960s in McGill's and the University of Toronto's medical schools, Jewish students could not exceed 10 percent of the graduating class.Footnote 68 The rise of new rights movements (labor, women's, Indigenous, gay and lesbian, regional) challenged the liberal order framework Ian McKay described as Canada's ongoing political project, which endeavored to reinvent itself after 1945. Holocaust consciousness played a pivotal role.
The Canadian Jewish Congress mobilized to combat a rise in anti-Jewish and anti-African-Canadian hate in the early 1960s. To this end, it lobbied the Liberal government of Lester B. Pearson to incorporate aspects of the 1948 Genocide Convention into the Canadian Criminal Code, specifically around the promotion of genocidal acts, hate, and the recognition of minority rights. Owing to a “lack of human rights culture within the Department of External Affairs,” Canada had originally opposed the inclusion of cultural genocide in Article 2 of the convention because it might encapsulate many of its own policies against First Nation, Inuit, and Métis people at home.Footnote 69 When in 1965 Justice Minister Guy Favreau brought into being the Cohen Commission to tackle the problem of hate propaganda directly, the commission opted for an even narrower definition of genocide than in the Genocide Convention, circumventing any mention of forcible transfer of children as this came dangerously close to the policy of compulsory education in Indian Residential Schools, which continued to operate in Canada until 1996. Yet even this was not enough for lawmakers who debated whether genocide was even possible in a place like Canada. As Senator Arthur W. Roebuck remarked in 1966, “Canadians … are a kindly and tolerant people … We have good will for all mankind, irrespective of colour, race, or ethnic origin.”Footnote 70 Senator George H. White was more indignant when he argued that proposed anti-hate legislation “was an insult to every individual Canadian. Are the citizens of Canada being put on a par with the Germany of Hitler and his gang of storm troopers and SS guards, and on a par with the people of certain other countries from which there are reports from time to time of acts of genocide?”Footnote 71 Despite a growing sense of urgency around Holocaust memory and preoccupation with definitions of genocide brought about in part by the rise in Holocaust consciousness, settler colonial attitudes and structures continued to mitigate anti-hate protections.Footnote 72 Liberal constitutionalism sat easily alongside illiberal memory and ideals.
While Holocaust memorialization slowly gained traction, it was countered by alliances of Holocaust deniers and neofascists, who spread illiberal memories of Nazi policy to bolster the circulation of antisemitic conspiracy theories, general racism, and disinformation with the express purpose of dehumanizing victims of the Shoah. Drawing on homegrown antisemitism, the basis for postwar neo-Nazism in Canada was already set by people like Adrien Arcand. Similarly, the Canadian National Socialist Party, commonly known as the Canadian Nazi Party (1965–1978), founded and led by William John Beattie, acquired status within the new neo-Nazi ecosystem.Footnote 73 In the news article “My 16 Months as a Nazi” (1966), private investigator John Garrity, employed by the Canadian Jewish Congress to infiltrate the Canadian Nazi Party, documented the strong ties between US and Canadian activists including the flow of propaganda material from the United States into Canada, underscoring transnational ties that continued to exist throughout the twentieth century until today.Footnote 74
Another important site of memory negotiation was the German-Canadian community itself. Recent research on the Kanada Kurier, a German-language periodical dating back to 1889, reveals how the newspaper's comments or letters-to-the-editor section (Leserbriefe) countenanced antisemitism and outright Holocaust denial. These sentiments were frequently embedded in comments about World War II and German victimization more generally, showcasing the prevalence of antisemitic sentiment, topoi, and stereotypes within German-Canadian identity discourses.Footnote 75
Central to the acceleration of antisemitism and Holocaust denial was Ernst Zündel (1939–2017). A German immigrant who entered the Canadian neo-Nazi scene in the 1960s, Zündel became a ruthless promoter of Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi ideology. In fact, he was one of the most notorious Holocaust deniers with strong transatlantic ties to the German neo-Nazi movement and beyond.
Having met Adrien Arcand in the late 1960s, Zündel came away with a new and extremist understanding of his own German ethnicity, one that he had to “protect” against, in his view, the growing “anti-German propaganda” in Canadian society. Zündel found the Holocaust to be the “hoax of the century.” In 1978, in response to the popular American miniseries Holocaust, lauded for the way it helped bolster Holocaust consciousness, Zündel founded “The Concerned Parents of German Descent.” This assembly of Toronto-based ethnic Germans protested at several Ontario TV and print media stations to prevent the miniseries from airing in Canada, confirming Zündel's identification with a hateful and extreme antisemitic understanding of German ethnicity.Footnote 76
Zündel took every possible opportunity to spread his hatred and antisemitism globally. In an essay that Zündel directed at the “Islamic World,” published in 1980, he envisioned Holocaust deniers and Islamic leaders might join forces in the fight against common enemies.Footnote 77 This publication and the denial prototype “Did Six Million Really Die?” (Zündel authored the foreword and postscript), amounted to false news charges as they point to the existence of a contemporary conspiracy by Freemasons, Jews, and bankers to persuade the world that the Nazi regime had killed 6 million Jews during World War II.Footnote 78 Zündel intensified his efforts to promote neo-Nazi material, which included radio and TV shows, as well as the production of pamphlets, essays, audiotapes, videotapes, and books (including his book entitled The Hitler We Loved and Why), seeking to undermine and counter the historical truth of the Holocaust.Footnote 79 In order to distribute his material transnationally, Zündel established his own publishing house, Samisdat Publishers,Footnote 80 and shipped his propaganda to forty-five countries including Germany,Footnote 81 where his media outlets and content were picked up by German neo-Nazi groups and movements.Footnote 82 During a crackdown in 1981, the West German government seized a large amount of illegal denial literature and Nazi memorabilia; Zündel was one of the largest suppliers. Ever in search of fame, he found the added popularity a welcome side effect.Footnote 83
Zündel knew how to stage himself and his project strategically: he gained popularity, both in Canada and Germany, especially during his false news trials in an Ontario court.Footnote 84 Interestingly, he was not charged under the more specific hate speech provisions, defined in sections 318 and 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code (which were used in other hate speech cases as well), but under section 181, in relation to false statements.Footnote 85 In 1985, he was convicted of “knowingly publishing false news” in connection with his Holocaust denial materials and sentenced to fifteen months in jail.Footnote 86 Although this conviction was later overturned due to procedural errors, he was retried and again convicted in Canada in 1988. In 1992, however, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the law against publishing false news was unconstitutional and too vague.Footnote 87 Although the resolution of the case was by no means a rejection of the principle of criminalizing hate speech, Zündel was celebrated for his victory for “free speech” among his peers, and he resumed his activities.Footnote 88
In the mid-1990s, he was summoned as a witness during the trial of the German neo-Nazi Bela Ewald Althans, who was a leading figure in the German neo-Nazi movement. Althans, protégée of Zündel, became an important node in Zündel's network in Germany.Footnote 89 Other nodes in this transnational network included figures such as the aforementioned William John Beattie, but also the far-right activist Paul Fromm,Footnote 90 who served as a public school teacher with the Peel Region Board of Education in Ontario, from which he was suspended.Footnote 91 With the advent of the internet, Zündel saw a new avenue to distribute his propaganda and to continue to form alliances globally, entering a hybrid period in which he continued usage of analog media while experimenting with digital forms.
His newest addition to the canon of hate, the internet page “Zundelsite” not only featured his own work but also promoted other well-known Holocaust deniers such as David Irving. This medium was hosted in California and managed by his third wife, Ingrid Rimland. In 1996, in another legal attempt to prosecute Zündel, the Canadian Human Rights Commission responsible for enforcing Canada's Human Rights Act ruled that the Zundelsite “was ‘malevolent in its depiction of Jews,’”Footnote 92 exposing a minority to hatred, contempt, and danger, underscoring that hate does double damage, to the individual as well as the community targeted. The tribunal found in 2002 that Zündel violated subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHA) by communicating hate messages on the internet and noted that “these messages create an environment in which it is likely that Jews will be exposed to extreme emotions of detestation and vilification.”Footnote 93 Confirming that freedom of expression is fundamental to a free and democratic society, the tribunal's decision underscored that limits on expression are also reasonable and justified.Footnote 94 Consequently, the tribunal ordered the removal of the internet page, which could not be enforced because the site was hosted in the United States.Footnote 95 By 2002, Zündel had already fled to the United States in order to securely continue his activities benefiting from the First Amendment because it grants almost absolute power to print and publish whatever one wishes and, therefore, protects hate agitators from persecution.Footnote 96 In this sense, the Zündel case is illuminating as a window into some of the issues that surface today around how to tackle online hate speech as it circulates across borders and jurisdictions.Footnote 97 Online hate has moved out of the shadows of the internet, and numerous groups and individuals have created a more visible profile both on social media platforms and on unregulated fringe messaging boards alike, with the latter offering havens for a “no-limits” approach to content.Footnote 98
In 2003, Zündel was arrested in the United States for immigration violations and deported back to Canada. In March 2005, he was deported from Canada to Germany, where he was promptly arrested. The Mannheim Regional Court sentenced him to the maximum penalty of five years in prison for Volksverhetzung (demagoguery). According to the court's conviction, Zündel had continued to repeatedly deny the Holocaust on the internet and in other media outlets.Footnote 99
Holocaust denial and revisionism uses pseudoscientific veneer to mask its basis in hate, dehumanization, and disinformation. With books, videos, conferences, and in the hybrid mediascape of the early internet, it surfaced in the form of historical expertise. Holocaust deniers claimed to be scientists and experts in historical research. The most prominent examples include Ernst Zündel, David Irving, contributors to the California-based Institute for Historical Review, or the American Fred Leuchter, the self-styled engineer who claimed that science shows genocide did not take place in the German extermination camps. Professional historians have spent years taking on these claims in public fora including lectures, publications, and in high-profile court cases. Despite this, revisionism—what historian Richard J. Evans called “telling lies about Hitler”—established itself as an auxiliary ideology in the service of far-right extremist imaginaries with the expressed purpose of intervening in the writing of history to “correct” the historical register through falsification.Footnote 100 Deniers such as Zündel or Irving adopted the language of scholarly authority. And, while organized efforts to falsify the historical record in this most obvious fashion have been dealt with somewhat effectively through hate speech laws, immigration law, human rights tribunals, and high-profile court cases, the appeal of populist and neofascist thinking, especially around the falsification of the historical truth, has not receded in today's world. Alongside these longer-standing hybrid media networks, new digital media affordances have changed the landscape of hate and mis- and disinformation once again, providing new nodes in these existing transatlantic populist and far-right networks where the relativization of German crimes manifests in everyday acts and speech.
The history of hate speech legislation reveals the pervasiveness of homegrown antisemitism and settler colonial structures and mindsets that circumscribed minority rights and protections. Holocaust consciousness propelled social justice mobilizations around anti-Jewish and anti-Black racism, raising awareness about genocide as a way to combat hate. While liberal protections of freedom of speech and personality rubbed up against Canada's evolving human rights framework, delaying hate speech legislation for twenty years from the late 1960s to the 1980s, illiberal memories of Canadian righteousness and toleration ensured these same protections would fail to transform policies aimed at Indigenous death and dispossession. As we'll see in this next section, transatlantic hate networks linking European right of access to the land with the romance of physical escapism continued to animate the next generation of far-right conspiracy theorists, who found an ideological home in Canada.
“Nova Scotia Nazis”: Far-Right Mobility and Colonial Imaginary in Practice
Zündel's vision for the transnational communication of far-right ideas through newer and larger digital networks has become an inescapable feature of our twenty-first century.Footnote 101 As the example of the alt-right German “colony” in eastern Canada indicates, actors have capitalized on hybrid cycles of communication between sites in the digital and physical worlds.Footnote 102 Nova Scotia's “public past” as Ian McKay named it, exalting whiteness, nature, empty spaces, and land for the asking—long promoted by the province's tourist board—served as an added lure to this far-flung part of the maritime east coast.Footnote 103 In July 2020, an investigative article in the German news magazine Der Spiegel (later declared to be one of the magazine's most read of the year) revealed that “hundreds” of German citizens associated with the far right, among them former Tagesschau news presenter Eva Herman, were purchasing real estate in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.Footnote 104 According to German media coverage, Herman and her partner Andreas Popp were attracting potential German migrants to their “colony of the like-minded” through annual, conspiracy-theory-laden seminars and the resale of large land packages.Footnote 105 A former associate of Popp, real estate salesman Frank Eckhardt was also reported to be targeting similar potential German “Neusiedler” or “new settlers” in a separate scheme, offering property to those seeking the “freedom” and “self-determination” of rural Nova Scotia.Footnote 106 Using both written records and personal testimonies, Spiegel writer Martin Doerry reveals that Popp, Herman, and Eckhardt have married ideological networking, colonial imagination, and for-profit business in successful schemes to transplant far-right-leaning German citizens to Atlantic Canada.
Somewhat evocative of Zündel, Popp has released collections of far-right conspiracy theories through his own publishing company, while Eckhardt has reportedly used his real estate dealings to share Holocaust denial material with potential clients—ranging from quoting German neo-Nazi Gerard Menuhin to mailing computer disks of falsified reports and Nazi propaganda.Footnote 107 Beyond these parallels, however, their activities are recognizably informed by the far right and alt-right of the present. Herman, whom Doerry describes as a potential “stool pigeon” (“Lockvogel”) for members of the AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland), operates a channel on Telegram, which serves as a popular social media platform for the alt-right on both sides of the Atlantic. Hermann and Popp cohost videos on their Wissensmanufaktur website, where they discuss self-defined “crises” such as the Great Replacement or the Great Reset, both known far-right conspiracy theories accelerated by the internet. Eckhardt, who participates in more analog methods of knowledge sharing such as mail, still evokes popular online far-right “traditionalist” language on his real estate website, promising his clients a “healthy, self-sufficient” lifestyle and access to abundant natural resources away from authoritarian governments (Figure 3).Footnote 108
Screenshot of Frank Eckhardt's real estate website at https://fe-propertysales.de/en/.
More generally, and echoing back to earlier-twentieth-century phenomena outlined at the beginning of this article, the systems and networks created by these far-right personalities hinge on a colonial imaginary in which Canada, specifically Cape Breton, serves as a potential homeland for ideological refugees from a collapsing Europe. Beyond signaling their appreciation for natural splendor and land ownership, Popp and Herman regularly integrate Canada's inherent coloniality to reinforce their visions for utopian community building. In a 2012 video promoting his “refuge” in Cape Breton (and hosted by Querdenker Michael Friedrich Vogt), Popp describes how his audience of “free-thinkers” is stimulated by the energy of a country that “still has Indians” (Figure 4).Footnote 109 Rather than relying entirely on depictions of “empty” land for the taking, Popp and Herman resort to a romanticized colonial imaginary that treats Indigenous people as anthropological curiosities, admirably out of step in a modernizing age. Querdenker—a strange coalition of German esoterics, leftist anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists—have emerged on the scene in recent years to protest government overreach, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Canada's settler colonial past and present hold a distorted resonance for them. On Herman's own website, a 2021 post about the Canadian Red Dress Project, which raises awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, uses the history of colonialism as a cautionary tale for Europe, where she implies that assaults against European white women by (what is implied to be) nonwhite immigrants will soon require Germany to have its own Red Dress installations.Footnote 110 Self-insertion into a narrative of Indigeneity thus serves to not only legitimize their claims to land ownership in Canada, but also provides support to their larger racist, anti-immigration views.Footnote 111
Excerpt from “Refugium Cape Breton Island—Michael Vogt zu Gast bei Andreas Popp,” 2012.
Doerry's findings on these attempted “colonies” were shared widely by German and Canadian media outlets (Figure 5). CBC Nova Scotia reacted with their own investigation into Eckhardt, including interviewing the German couple that received Nazi materials.Footnote 112 After reporting on the Spiegel findings, the Halifax Examiner was contacted by Popp and Herman, who denied any connections to Eckhardt and his Holocaust denial.Footnote 113 Notably, although Canadian media outlets and politicians made their disapproval of these ideologies clear, aspects of Popp, Herman, and Eckhardt's vision resonated with Canadian attitudes toward (European) settlement: in an opinion piece published by Saltwire, author Bob Martel insists that the “German immigrants [he] know[s] are chasing the Cape Breton dream, not some Nazi nightmare.”Footnote 114 Claiming that he himself has no contact with far-right-leaning Germans in Cape Breton, Martel's commentary nonetheless reinforces a colonial narrative of belonging taken on by the far-right “colony”—resting on the rightful desire for a “simple, rural lifestyle,” as well as the imagined colonial world of Karl May's western novel, The Treasure of Silver Lake, which Martel argues German migrants may be seeking to emulate.Footnote 115 Patricia Anne Simpson identifies this framework of references in her 2016 article on Germany's new online-based far-right personalities, in which she argues (in reference to Popp) that “the identification with First Nations … invokes the German love of author Karl May, but also the mythos of the ‘vanishing race’ and alignment with warrior cultures.”Footnote 116 Self-identification with popular cultural narratives are therein not confined to specific national contexts, but have the capacity to inform the self-legitimization, entitlement, and even public acceptance of far-right actors moving and operating transnationally. And indeed, there are countless examples of mainstream media headlines normalizing Canada as “wild” or available space.Footnote 117
Examples of mainstream media headlines normalizing Canada as “wild” or available space, including Doerry's own inciting article.Footnote 118
Although the Nova Scotia “Nazi colony” remains a developing media story (see, for example, the Halifax Examiner's three-part follow-up coverage from November 2021),Footnote 119 the activities of Popp, Herman, and Eckhardt offer a significant window into both logistical and imagined foundations for the transatlantic operation of the contemporary far right. Popp and Herman, in particular, have created hybrid schemes for sharing and manifesting their far-right worldview, in which their self-credentialized digital presence and critical media content encourages followers’ physical visits, seminars, and land purchases in Canada. In both the digital and physical components of these recruitment schemes, Popp and Herman are shown to emphasize colonial narratives of self-sufficiency alongside coopting Indigenous spirituality and culture into their notions of ideological Canadian belonging. While this movement of the German far right to Canada exists on a significant historical continuum, as shown in this study, Herman and Popp's imagining of Canada as a space for European colonial refuge is reinforced by cultural norms and popular narratives on both sides of the Atlantic. Alongside Karl May novels and other depictions of North America as an untamed “Wild West” perpetuated in Europe, the illiberal memory of the Canadian far right crafts its own understandings of “legitimate” residency and land use based on the Eurocentric tradition of Canadian immigration campaigns (Figure 6). Social media accounts share historical content that depicts and romanticizes white settlement and self-sustenance, and identifies these white descendants of European settlers as the only “true” modern curators of a distinct Canadian identity. This resonates with both the Canada imagined by Popp, Herman, and Eckhardt (a place for unquestioned European land ownership, escapism, and world building) and Canadian narratives such as the “Cape Breton dream.” The circulation of ideas across the Atlantic among these far-right adherents and the ways in which they can enable far-right mobility (both physically and digitally) thus warrant further examination in the specific contexts of the transatlantic sphere.
Examples of historical campaign posters promoting European immigration to Canada, reposted on far-right nationalist Canadian Instagram accounts.Footnote 120
Conclusion
We have argued that by exploring historic German-Canadian networks and entanglements, we discover transatlantic intersections long before the advent of the internet that help us understand the power, appeal, and resonance of far-right ideas in established democracies. Illiberal memory formations play an essential role in their effort to disseminate and normalize racist ideas within political, educational, social, media, and everyday spaces across the Atlantic. Already in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a variety of different players, including German officials and local groups such as Swastika clubs, connected and adhered to fascist ideas of exclusion and hate in order to promote antisemitism and call for anti-democratic societal change. Print media including newspapers, pamphlets, and books played a pivotal role in disseminating illiberal ideologies. The Second World War interrupted these connections, but only for a short time: transatlantic fascist networks and ideas remained vital after 1945 and were revitalized or even reinvented by individuals like Ernst Zündel. Homegrown racism gave them room to grow.
Far-right movements, as witnessed by the rise of right-wing parties today, aim to legitimize racist settler colonial narratives in order to create illiberal forms of memory and identity rooted in hate, violence, fear-mongering, and falsification of the historical register, as seen with the cases of Zündel and Herman. Their hybrid use of media, both analog and digital, is tailored to specific audiences and promotes polarized inside-outside thinking. Collective enemies are created, drawing on a broad spectrum of hateful ideologies and projections (antisemitism, anti-gender and transphobia, anti-Indigeneity, homophobia and Islamophobia, anti-government and anti-immigrant sentiment, and hate toward homeless persons, persons of color, feminists, as well as mainstream media and democratic institutions). The traffic in hate, including the focus on normalizing shifting attitudes, intentions, and behavioral expressions, does not obey national boundaries.
As a consequence, we cannot underestimate the temporal and spatial adaptability of the transatlantic far-right worldview and its strategies. Current examples like the Cape Breton–based German far-right communities draw on specific nationally or regionally perpetuated narratives (such as Canada as “untouched land,” Karl-May-esque North American romanticism, and histories of National Socialist colonialism and Lebensraum) while also speaking to ideas that resonate with the broader Canadian far-right movement, which constructs Canada as a white colonial space. These illiberal notions resonate easily with Canadian structures that already support the settler “Canadian dream” while reverberating with global audiences aspiring for “refuge” from cancel culture and corrupt Western governments. This offers a transnational toehold to far-right mobility and schemes of belonging whether financial, ideological, or otherwise. Although many of these ideas are rooted in similarly misleading historical narratives that perpetuate white supremacy and hate, they are not imposed from outside the social contract of liberal democracy; they reside within it. The question for us now becomes what do with the knowledge that liberal democratic norms and systems might also produce illiberal outcomes?
Jennifer Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. She has written books and articles on the history of sexuality, queer history, photography, and memory including The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke University Press 2023), Gender in Germany and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Jean Quataert with Shelley Rose (Berghahn Books, 2023), and a cowritten a monograph with Meghan Lundrigan and Erica Fagen titled Holocaust Memory and the Digital Mediascape (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Evans is overseeing Populist Publics, a multi-year, multi-platform big data project together with Sandra Robinson at Carleton University on social media and the weaponization of history. She is co-curator of the New Fascism Syllabus and a founding member of the German Studies Collaboratory.
Swen Steinberg is a historian, currently a lecturer at the Department of History at Queen's University in Kingston, and an affiliated scholar of the German Historical Institute in Washington with its Pacific Office at University of California, Berkeley. Previously he taught in the Migration & Diaspora Studies Program at Carleton University in Ottawa. He also serves as a research ambassador of the German Academic Exchange Service. Swen is the editor of the Blog “Migrant Knowledge” and organizer of the Migrant Knowledge Network (migrantknowledge.org); he also co-organizes the international standing working groups “In Global Transit: Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Global Migration” (ghi-dc.org/research/history-of-migration/in-global-transit) and “In Search for the Migrant Child: Global Histories of Youth and Migration between Knowledge, Experience, and Every-day Life” (migchild.hypotheses.org).
David Yuzva Clement is an interdisciplinary trained adjunct research professor and lecturer at Carleton University's School of Social Work, Ottawa, Canada. He is also an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT). He implemented the professional program on Preventing and Countering Hate and Violent Extremism at the School of Social Work, Akkon University, Berlin, Germany. He has published widely on the role of religion and culture in social work, adolescence, and radicalization, far-right extremism, incel radicalization, and the prevention of social polarization and violent extremism.
Danielle L. Carron (Hons. BA, MA) is a historical researcher with a focus on sexuality, nationalism, and media in contemporary Germany as well as Canadian histories of sexual health and rights. She has supported projects such as Populist Publics (Carleton University), “Children of the Enemy”: Narrative Constructions of Identity Following Wartime Rape (University of Ottawa), and London Calling: Embodied Mobility, Abortion Tourism and the Global City (University of Ottawa). She is a 2023 recipient of the International Parliamentary Stipend offer by the German Bundestag, as well as a 2021 SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship.
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