pdotb commented on The Great Right North by Stéphane Leman-Langlois
Content warning canpol, racism, violence
Not a review as such, because I don't really know how to give this a star rating. It was more academic than I was expecting, though I shouldn't have been surprised given it's a university press! Among the 'highlights' was chapter 2, with a classification and partial enumeration of far-right groups in Canada. Particularly notable was its explanation of the ideology behind Diagolon, which is much more sinister than I remember from news coverage around the time of the convoy. There's some good analysis through chapters 3, 4, and 5 of how people are attracted to far-right groups and the world-view they build up. The authors see group members as rational actors, even if the underlying facts they lean on are a very one-sided view of reality, often veering into conspiratorial thinking. Chapter 6 is particularly good on the failures of PSC and CSIS, who appear stuck in a post-9/11 focus on Islamist terror and almost willfully ignore the danger of the far-right. Also good to see the authors comment on the term 'lone wolf' -- as they point out, this commonly-used expression assigns far too much 'coolness' to these individuals and is practically only ever used for white attackers -- 'lone actor' is a more helpfully-neutral term.