Evil in our time: The West is living the “banality of evil” (Part 2/2)

Violent oppression produces resistance. Brutality provokes retaliation. Violence creates more violence—not because the oppressed desire it, but because it is the only remaining path to survival when all peaceful avenues are blocked.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In her writings about the “banality of evil” Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that when evil becomes normalized, when it is rendered ordinary, carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people, who see themselves as moral, and neutral executors of policy, that is when we have reached the peak of evil in a society. 

After almost three years of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, we must accept that this is what has happened in Israel, as well as in the Western nations that continue to support it and enable its genocidal crimes.

The cruelty visible in Israel’s actions in Gaza is not confined to the state or its military. It is reflected in the attitudes that have taken hold within significant parts of Israeli society. When a Haaretz poll in June 2025 reported that 47% of Israeli Jews supported exterminating all Palestinians in Gaza “down to the last child,” that is the normalization of evil. When 82% supported the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, that too is the normalization of evil. And when 56% supported expelling all Palestinians from territories under Israeli control, it reflected a society in which dehumanization of Palestinians has become routine. Each of these positions constitutes a violation of international law, yet they are expressed as ordinary political preferences.

 

This is what happens when cruelty becomes embedded in daily life. It is normalized, rationalized, and stripped of moral consequence. In such an environment, moral responsibility does not merely weaken — it dissolves.

Whatever one thinks about the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 the reality that followed exposed a deeper structural evil—not only in Israeli society but also in the West—where Palestinian dehumanization is accepted, and where Israel’s genocide has been enabled almost entirely by Western power. The United States under President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the United Kingdom under Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Germany under Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, France under Emmanuel Macron, and Canada under Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney all continued supplying weapons, ammunition, and military components to Israel throughout the most intense periods of Israel’s genocide— arming a state as it carried out what major human rights organizations, along with Holocaust and genocide scholars have described as the crime of genocide.

This is not a case of passive complicity. It is active participation in the crime of crimes.

The scale of destruction is staggering. According to a study by Ben Gurion University professor Yakov Garb, published through Harvard Dataverse, more than 377,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by May 2025. And in July 2025, Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya published a study in Arena concluding that Israel had killed more than 680,000 Palestinians in Gaza, directly and indirectly.

These numbers are not abstract. They represent human beings—families, children, elders, entire communities—obliterated.

Israel, supported by Western governments, tried to lable their actions as “self‑defence.”  But self‑defence does not typically include starving a besieged population, bombing hospitals, destroying universities, mosques and churches, killing journalists, and sustaining mass killing over extended periods. The repeated use of the term is an attempt to prevent moral scrutiny—language functioning as a shield for inhumane policy.

Consider what Western support has meant in practice. Western governments supplied the weapons used to level neighbourhoods and destroy civilian life. They offered diplomatic cover that neutralized international accountability. They obstructed ceasefire efforts. They ignored rulings and warnings when those rulings threatened the continued flow of arms or the maintenance of strategic alliances. They treated genocide allegations raised by scholars and human rights organizations as politically inconvenient noise.

Where evil is concerned silence is not neutral. Silence is a form of governance and action. When Western institutions refused to name what is happening in Gaza as genocide even when credible experts and major human rights organizations did—the West communicated to Israel that it would tolerate mass murder, mass destruction, minimize it and eventually normalize it—the result is that violence on this scale becomes easier the next time, not harder.

Evil thrives on normalization. Once cruelty becomes routine—embedded in procedures, justified through euphemisms, and stripped of historical context—it clears a path for even greater evils, including war.

The Nuremberg Tribunal understood this with chilling clarity. In its final judgment, it declared: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world... A war of aggression is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

War is horrific. Yet Western elites have increasingly treated war not as a moral failure but as a policy instrument—something to be managed, rationalized, and deployed when convenient. They speak of “precision,” “deterrence,” and “security imperatives,” as if technical language can erase the bodies floating in rivers of blood beneath it. This rhetorical distancing matters as it allows decision-makers, commentators, and bureaucrats to observe suffering from a safe distance while pretending that sanitized terminology absolves them of responsibility.

In this way, Arendt’s warning about the “banality of evil” becomes unmistakably relevant. When violence is normalized through language and procedure, when moral judgment is replaced by administrative habit, evil does not merely persist—it expands. And war becomes its most devastating expression.

Whether it’s in war or like what Israel has done in its decades-long occupation of the Palestinian people, oppressed people who resist are often condemned as “terrorists” or “extremists” without acknowledging what preceded them: occupation, dispossession, blockade, and systematic dehumanization. Meanwhile, the violence of those with state power is excused as strategic necessity.

Violence has a history. Oppression produces resistance. Brutality provokes retaliation. Violence generates more violence—not because the oppressed desire it, but because it becomes the only remaining path to survival when every peaceful avenue has been blocked and when their oppressor uses every legal, political, and military tool available to prevent justice. People cling to nonviolence as long as they can, but when survival itself is threatened, nonviolence becomes impossible as a practical matter. To ignore this context is not moral seriousness; it is moral evasion.

To confront evil properly, one must look at its genealogy. In the case of the Palestinian cause there is a history of betrayal stretching back over a century—British duplicity during World War 1, the Balfour Declaration, the suppression of uprisings, immigration policies the mass migration of Jews into Palestine, the UN partition granting Jews a majority of the land of historic Palestine despite being a minority of the population, and the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians.

After that came decades of apartheid-like practices, military occupation, land theft, settlement expansion, and systemic dehumanization. For generations, Palestinians have been treated not as human beings with rights but as demographic threats to be contained, controlled, displaced and ultimately exterminated. For people living under siege—whose homes are taken, whose movements are restricted, and whose lives are governed by violence—the ethical appeal to “use peaceful means” is not a legitimate moral argument. It is a refusal to acknowledge reality.

The Gaza genocide has shattered the illusion of Western moral superiority. It has exposed human rights discourse as selective—racialized, politicized, and contingent on geopolitical interests. It has revealed that Western empathy is not universal; it is filtered through alliances, strategic calculations, and narratives designed to protect power rather than people.

What has emerged is not merely hypocrisy but something more corrosive: a profound moral incapacity within Western institutions to see Palestinians as fully human. Their suffering is suppressed by major media outlets, minimized in elite discourse, and reframed or ignored by political leaders. Their voices are sidelined in academia and public life. Their persecution is met not with outrage by the elites but with diplomatic cover, continued arms shipments, and bureaucratic indifference.

This is why evil cannot be understood solely as the actions of one army or one government. It resides in the systems that enable those actions while shielding their architects from accountability. Genocide is never the work of a single individual. Hitler did not carry out the Holocaust alone; he set the direction, but thousands of bureaucrats, officers, industrialists, propagandists, and collaborators operated the machinery of death. Likewise, the Gaza genocide is not solely the responsibility of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet, his advisers, or his military commanders—though they bear immense culpability. It is also the responsibility of the Western leaders who armed them, the diplomats who protected them, the media figures who sanitized their actions, and the bureaucrats who processed the shipments, approved the transfers, and maintained the infrastructure of destruction.

Evil becomes most powerful when it is distributed across institutions—when it is normalized, rationalized, and made routine. Gaza has revealed that this machinery exists throughout Western societies and certainly in Israel and the US.  It is embedded in the political, military, and bureaucratic systems that make atrocity possible and then shield those responsible from accountability.

It must be noted that this pattern is not unique to the West. The same institutional logic underlies Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine and the U.S.–Israeli military operations against Iran. These are not the actions of lone individuals but of entire systems of power, ideology, and obedience. Evil on this scale requires thousands of hands—politicians, generals, analysts, media figures, and administrators—each performing their role, each contributing to a larger architecture of violence.

And when systems of power operate this way, oppressed peoples eventually reach a point where surviving on their knees is worse than resisting and possibly dying on their feet. After decades of brutal oppression Palestinians reached that point long ago. The West—through its weapons, its propaganda, its indifference, and its diplomatic obstruction—has ensured that they had no path toward safety and survival other than through violent resistance. When institutions normalize injustice, armed resistance becomes not a choice but a last remaining means of survival.

Evil exists in Moscow and Beijing, yes. It exists wherever power dehumanizes the vulnerable. But it also exists in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Tel Aviv—and wherever Western institutions decide that some lives are less deserving of protection, less deserving of rights, and less deserving of international enforcement of the law. Evil is not confined to adversaries; it flourishes wherever systems of power treat human beings as expendable.

Until the West confronts its own role in perpetuating global violence—until it dismantles the incentives, narratives, and institutional mechanisms that make atrocity easy—it cannot claim the moral high ground. Where evil exists, it must be named and called out, without exception or euphemism. And where it is in recent decades—too often—it has been Western. Refusing to confront this reality is not neutrality, it is complicity. A society that will not face the evil it enables inevitably slides back toward barbarism and anarchy, because unacknowledged evil does not disappear—it grows.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Evil in our time: The West is living the “banality of evil” (Part 1/2)

Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when ordinary people see themselves as just living normally and doing jobs they were given that promote evil or inflict evil. 

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt developed the idea of the “banality of evil” while observing the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the central administrators of the Holocaust. Her insight—that immense cruelty can be carried out by ordinary people performing routine tasks—has shaped how many of us understand evil today. From her writings, from the lessons of history, and from our own experiences, we have come to accept that evil is not abstract. It exists, and we recognize it long before we can explain it.

Most of us sensed this even as children. We learned about good and evil through stories—superhero cartoons, comic books, films. There was always a hero protecting the innocent and a villain bent on destruction, indifferent to the suffering they caused. Perhaps that is why hundreds of millions around the world have flocked to theatres to watch superhero films since the genre exploded in popularity in the early 2000s. People want to see good triumph over evil, because in the real world that victory feels increasingly rare.

The collapse of childhood morality

As we grew older, the simplicity of childhood morality gave way to a harsher truth. Evil was not an abstraction. It was not confined to fictional villains or imaginary worlds. It was a real force—systemic, organized, and embedded in institutions, policies, and individual acts that inflict pain and suffering on innocent people. Like many raised in the West, we were taught a comforting moral vocabulary, that democracy triumphs over tyranny, rule of law over brutality, human rights over barbarism. But the lessons of history tell a very different story.

History catalogued humanity’s depravity and the catastrophic capacity of states and individuals to degrade, dispossess, exterminate, with acts that are inherently evil. We learned about the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, the evils of European colonial empires, the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the many other atrocities of the previous two centuries. We were taught how Cold War geopolitics led both blocs to support ruthless dictators, how propaganda laundered cruelty into necessity, and how the language of morality became political camouflage—allowing governments and leaders to commit acts that, at the level of individual conscience, most of us would find abhorrent and unacceptable.

The myth of Western innocence

In Canada, these lessons were never distant abstractions. We learned about the treatment of Indigenous peoples by colonial authorities and later by the Canadian state—how government policies, disease, displacement, and deliberate neglect produced a demographic collapse so severe that roughly 95% of Indigenous people died from the time of first contact with Europeans to the end of the 19th century. We learned how these policies were not accidental or peripheral, but central to the project of building Canada.  They included land seizure, forced starvation, residential schools, the pass system, and the suppression of Indigenous governance, and were all instruments of a state determined to eliminate Indigenous presence as a political and cultural force.

And the brutality did not end with the 19th century. Explicitly genocidal policies—child removal, cultural destruction, coerced assimilation, and systemic land dispossession—remained in place well into the late 20th century, with some saying they continue today. The history we inherited made clear that evil was not confined to foreign regimes or distant eras. It was woven into the institutions, laws, and administrative practices that shaped Canada, and it operated within living memory. This country’s national story is often told as one of peace, order, and good government, but the record shows a state willing to inflict organized suffering on a massive scale when Indigenous lives stood in the way of its political goals.

Despite this history most of us likely assumed—naively—that Western societies contained less evil than their rivals. These were the nations that defeated Hitler and ended World War 2, championed civil liberties, enshrined human rights, and built institutions, like the International Court of Justice, dedicated to accountability (at least on paper). We came to believe that the West was less compromised, less willing to inflict mass suffering as policy. We believed its leaders lived by a higher morality and were constrained by law, ethics, and democratic norms.

We were very wrong.

How Western institutions normalize cruelty

In recent years, many in the West have begun to understand that evil is not something that only happens “over there.” It can take root within Western political classes, media ecosystems, academic institutions, and corporate boardrooms. We have learned—sometimes gradually, sometimes through shocking events—that these institutions seek to profit from aggression and injustice, both politically and economically. Whether we want to accept it or not evil can manifest itself in our society among elites who decide what counts as truth, whose suffering is acknowledged, and what forms of violence can be justified or ignored. And once embedded within these structures, once normalized and reinforced by power, it becomes remarkably resilient.

What changed things for many was a single event—the way Western political, media, and corporate elites responded to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel—and the uncritical support they offered for the Israeli campaign of retribution that followed in Gaza. Rage and grief after the attack were expected, even without acknowledging the context in which it occurred—decades of oppression and mass killing of Palestinians, and the Israeli blockade and siege imposed on Gaza since 2007 that had turned the territory into the world’s largest concentration camp.

What was not expected was the speed and certainty with which Western political and media elites transformed one terror attack into a sweeping license for Israel to wage a campaign of genocide against Palestinians. The world witnessed not simply support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but an almost reflexive embrace of a war of vengeance—a refusal to de-escalate, and a demand that everyone accept the fiction that the Israel-Palestine “conflict” began on October 7th, as if decades of Israeli occupation, dispossession, and brutality toward Palestinians could be erased without consequence.

Western framing—and the deliberate elimination of history and context—did real work. As it shut down moral inquiry. By stripping away the historical conditions that preceded the Hamas attack and erasing the political reality in which Palestinian suffering has been sustained for generations, Western leaders and media outlets created a narrative in which only one side’s pain mattered. This framing implied that Western audiences need not consider proportionality, civilian harm, international law, or the ethical distinction between legitimate self-defence and collective punishment. When history can be dismissed so casually and so completely, almost any atrocity in the present becomes permissible.

Bureaucratic violence and the banality of atrocity

This instinct—violent aggression as the default moral position when Western interests or alliances are implicated—is not new. A clear look at the post‑9/11 era shows a consistent pattern, one where Western powers, especially the United States, have been responsible for some of the worst violence committed globally in the last quarter century. The “War on Terror” did not merely fight terrorism, it built a global war machine. Invasions, occupations, drone assassination campaigns, proxy wars, and sanctions regimes devastated entire societies. The stated rationales were variations of the same idea—catastrophic harm to innocent people is justified when done in the name of security, stability, and self‑defence.

The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that post‑9/11 wars have killed more than 4.5 million people, directly and indirectly—more than 90% of them Muslim. This is not an accident of geography. It is the outcome of deliberate decisions, where bombers and fighter jets are dispatched, where troops occupy civilian populations, where sanctions choke societies, where proxies are funded, and where legal constraints on government are treated as obstacles rather than safeguards.

The war in Afghanistan, launched under the justification of hunting Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, evolved into a two-decade-long occupation that ultimately killed up to 360,000 civilians. The war in Iraq—sold to the world through the lie of weapons of mass destruction—became a destabilizing catastrophe where an estimated 600,000 people were killed according to the British medical journal The Lancet. Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries were pulled into the orbit of Western coercion through the language of counterterrorism and national security. American drone strikes killed thousands of innocent civilians with bureaucratic impunity, and US torture sites proliferated across the globe. International law was not shattered in one dramatic moment, but eroded through a steady stream of exceptions, reinterpretations, and executive decisions—the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

What stands out is not only the brutality but the moral gymnastics utilized to rationalize what can only be called acts of depravity. The violence was framed as defensive rather than predatory—an effort to protect the innocent rather than an attempt to impose geopolitical order through devastation. But if the West can call mass destruction, the destruction of entire societies, and mass murder “self‑defence” often enough, then self‑defence becomes a loophole with no ethical limits.

Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil has become disturbingly relevant in our time. What stands out in the post-9/11 era is not only the scale of violence, but the way Western governments, institutions and leaders normalized it through bureaucratic language, administrative habit, and moral disengagement. Evil did not announce itself with grand declarations. It seeped into policy recommendations, security memos, public speeches, and the quiet decisions of officials who believed they were simply doing their jobs in trying to defend “Western values.”

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American drone assassination campaigns across the Middle East and Africa, and the network of torture sites that spread across the globe were all justified through technical vocabulary—“precision strikes,” “enhanced interrogation,” “collateral damage,” “security imperatives.” These terms sanitized brutality, turning mass death into a matter of procedure. The machinery of state violence became so routine that killing innocent civilians, destroying entire societies, and shredding international law were treated as administrative necessities rather than the moral catastrophes they were.

This is precisely what Arendt warned about.  Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when acts of evil are carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people who see themselves as moral individuals just doing the job they were given. In this situation cruelty becomes a normal part of day to day tasks. Atrocity becomes a line item, and moral responsibility dissolves into the anonymity of institutional process where people are “just following orders.”

This is the true horror of the banality of evil. Not that monstrous acts are committed by monstrous people, but that they are committed calmly, without guilt and with little afterthought by people who see themselves as having a moral compass—the way an Israeli sniper shoots a Palestinian child in the head and then celebrates with his comrades over a meal afterwards at a job well done.  And unless we confront that fact directly—the normalization of evil—we risk living in a world where atrocity is not the exception, but the norm. 

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Bait and switch – Canadians voted for a Liberal “elbows up” PM in 2025 but got a conservative appeaser instead

Climate change policy rollback, deference to the US, tough on crime legislation, reduced social spending, are all hallmarks of a right wing Conservative government. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In the 2025 federal election campaign, Canadians were told they were choosing stability. They were told that Mark Carney, the newly minted Liberal leader, would be the steady, progressive hand needed to navigate Donald Trump’s tariff war. They were told that the Liberals remained the sensible alternative to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. They believed Liberal campaign messaging and gave Mark Carney a very strong minority mandate, which he turned into a majority with Conservative floor crossings and by-election wins.

Almost fifteen months later, Canadians must accept a stark and unsettling reality.  The man they elected to lead Canada is not governing as a Liberal at all. Instead, he is steering the country in a distinctly conservative direction—at times even more aggressively than former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. The bait and switch could not be clearer, and the evidence is everywhere.

Carney’s most dramatic right‑turn came with the cancellation of the consumer carbon tax—a key Liberal climate change policy. In March 2025, his government announced that the federal fuel charge would be set to zero as of April 1, 2025, and legislation would follow to permanently repeal the consumer carbon‑pricing framework. The Bank of Canada confirmed that the removal of the carbon tax would lower consumer prices and reduce inflation for a year—an admission that the move was more about inflation optics, rather than meaningful climate policy.

This was not a minor recalibration. It was the dismantling of the central pillar of Canada’s climate architecture, a policy the Liberals had defended all the way to the Supreme Court under the government of Justin Trudeau. In addition to removing the consumer carbon tax, industrial carbon pricing was weakened and stretched out, further reducing Canada’s already modest climate ambition. Progressive nations—Norway, Finland, Denmark—are accelerating climate action. Under Carney, Canada is accelerating emissions.

The same pattern of retreat appears in Carney’s handling of Donald Trump. In trade negotiations, where Canada has given concession after concession, receiving little in return.

The Digital Services Tax (DST), a 3% levy on tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Google, was rescinded in June 2025 specifically “to advance broader trade negotiations with the United States.” Analysts noted that the repeal came under intense US pressure, effectively subordinating Canadian tax sovereignty to American demands.

Then came the rollback of streaming levies. In 2026, Carney intervened to reverse a CRTC decision requiring foreign streaming platforms to devote 15% of Canadian revenues to Canadian and Indigenous content. His government ordered the regulator to retreat, framing the reversal as an affordability measure while signalling a new direction that sharply reduced obligations for US streaming giants.

Next, Carney eliminated almost all retaliatory counter‑tariffs on US goods, while US tariffs on Canadian exports remained firmly in place. This unilateral de‑escalation relieved pressure on American exporters without securing reciprocal relief for Canadians.  Additionally, instead of forcing a resolution on steel and aluminum tariffs, Carney’s government settled into a defensive posture, extending tariff‑rate quotas (TRQs) until the end of June 2027,and normalizing a regime shaped by US Section 232 tariffs of 50%.

The pattern is unmistakable.Trump threatens, Carney retreats and concedes. The “steady hand” has looked more like chronic concession.

Domestically, Carney has pushed the Liberals even further right. His criminal justice agenda looks like it was crafted by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who have made “tough on crime” a major plank in their election platforms for several elections. The Bail and Sentencing Reform Act (Bill C‑14) introduced over 80 changes to federal law, explicitly making bail stricter and sentencing tougher, in line with Conservative demands. The government proudly declared that “Canada’s new government promised stricter bail laws and tougher sentencing laws. That promise is now law.”

Reverse‑onus provisions, mandatory consecutive sentences, expanded aggravating factors—these are not progressive reforms. They are punitive escalations that mirror Harper‑era ideology. A progressive government would have focused on restorative justice and decarceration, but Carney chose the opposite.

On social policy, the Carney’s rightward drift continued. While the Canadian Dental Care Plan is expanding, with projected benefits funding rising to $3.4 billion in 2026‑27, pharmacare is being quietly starved. The Spring 2026 Economic Update announced bilateral health funding falling from $4.3 billion in 2025‑26 to $3.1 billion in 2027‑28, with no new money for additional pharmacare agreements. Analysts warn that Ottawa appears poised to let existing agreements expire without renewal—effectively halting national pharmacare.

This is textbook austerity where a popular flagship program is preserved while other deeper structural reforms are allowed to wither.

Carney’s rhetoric about “tough decisions” only reinforces the shift. Combined with the removal of the consumer carbon tax—which disproportionately benefits higher‑income households that consume more fossil fuels—the government’s affordability agenda skews toward those already better off.  Under his policies inequality is magnified, not reduced.

Internationally, Canada’s standing is slipping. The 2026 World Happiness Report places Canada 25th, down from 18th the previous year and far below its ranking a decade ago.  When countries like Kosovo, Mexico and Costa Rica (which ranked 4th) rank higher that is a signal that something very wrong. Nordic countries dominate the top of the index, reflecting strong social support, equality, and robust welfare states. Canada’s slide was not inevitable. It is the result of political choices that erode social protections and weaken progressive policy.

On corruption, democracy, and rule‑of‑law indices, Canada now sits in the middle of the advanced‑democracy pack rather than at its leading edge. Carney’s willingness to weaken climate policy, stall pharmacare, and harden criminal justice only accelerates the drift away from the Nordic model Canada once aspired to.

When Carney’s record is placed beside Stephen Harper’s, the similarities are striking. Climate rollback. Deference to Washington. Tough‑on‑crime legislation. Selective social spending. This is not a centrist Liberal government nudged slightly right by circumstance. It is a right‑of‑centre government wearing a red Liberal coat.

Under Carney the Liberal brand has become political misrepresentation—fine‑wine packaging around vinegar‑grade policy. Canadians voted for a progressive alternative to Poilievre. Instead, they got Harperism in red.

For Canadians who still believe in robust climate action, universal pharmacare, civil liberties, and a foreign policy grounded in human rights, the conclusion is unavoidable: the Liberals under Mark Carney are no longer a progressive vehicle. The only national party articulating a coherent left‑of‑centre program is the NDP under Avi Lewis, whose platform aligns far more closely with the Nordic benchmarks of social democracy than anything coming out of Carney’s PMO.

If Canadians truly wanted a Conservative government, they could have voted for Pierre Poilievre. Instead, they voted Liberal—and got a Conservative prime minister. That is the essence of the bait and switch. And unless progressive voters break with the Carney Liberals, Canada’s slide away from justice‑oriented, egalitarian politics will only deepen.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Hindu supremacist leader Mohan Bhagwat must be barred from entering Canada

The activities of the RSS reflect a consistent pattern of violence and persecution of Muslims and other Indian minorities . . . Canada cannot become a place where that violence is whitewashed.
 
By Fareed Khan  
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Canada is facing a critical test of its commitment to human rights and pluralism. Mohan Bhagwat, Chief of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu fascist movement, is expected to visit Toronto on August 31 and September 1, 2026—his first visit to Canada and the first by an RSS leader in more than two decades. His arrival is not a cultural exchange. It is a political operation aimed at sanitizing the global image of an organization whose fascist ideology and violent actions against India’s minorities have long been associated with exclusion, discrimination, and violence.

Canada must deny Mohan Bhagwat entry. Based on Bhagwat’s organization’s long record of racist violence and its ethno‑religious supremacist worldview Canada must deny him entry. His presence is incompatible with Canada’s commitments to diversity, equity and pluralism.

The RSS is not a conservative cultural association. It is an ethno‑religious nationalist movement whose ideology mirrors the logic of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan—except that its hierarchy is built on Hindu majoritarian supremacy rather than white racial dominance. At its core, the RSS advances a fascist vision of society in which Hindus are the rightful rulers of India, and non‑Hindu minorities—Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, and tribal communities—must either accept permanent subordination. This ideology, known as Hindutva, is not Hinduism. Like Zionism, it is a political project of exclusion, hierarchy, and domination.

The RSS’s foundations are based on supremacy not culture

Founded in 1925, the RSS has always been explicit about its goals. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar—one of the most prominent Hindu nationalists and ideologues who influenced the RSS—praised Nazi Germany’s racial nationalism in his writings and speeches where he argued that minorities in India should be treated the same way Nazi Germany treated Jews under Hitler: as outsiders with no claim to equal citizenship.

This is not a relic of the past. It is the ideological backbone of the RSS today.

The RSS is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu nationalist political, social, educational, charitable, and diaspora groups. Among them is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s ruling party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Canada’s own Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has described the BJP as implementing a Hindu‑nationalist policy agenda that targets India’s minority communities.

Under Modi’s BJP government, Hindutva ideology has moved from the margins to the center of state power, to the detriment of India’s non-Hindu communities.

Hindutva in practice: Discrimination, persecution, violence

The consequences of RSS‑BJP rule are well documented. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended targeted sanctions against the RSS, citing “severe violations of religious freedom.” Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented widespread abuses, including mob violence, lynchings, discriminatory laws, and politically motivated prosecutions.

Reporting by CNN has shown how Hindu extremist groups—many ideologically aligned with or inspired by the RSS—have grown more aggressive and violent. Al Jazeera documented a 2021 religious gathering in Haridwar where Hindu monk Yati Narsinghanand called for genocide against Muslims. Participants openly urged called for the mass murder of Indo Muslims. These events were not fringe but part of a broader ecosystem of hate emboldened by the BJP’s political dominance and the RSS’s ideological influence.

The BJP government has enacted discriminatory laws such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which fast‑tracks citizenship for non‑Muslim migrants while excluding Muslims. It revoked Kashmir’s autonomy, imposed military lockdowns, and detained thousands. Under the Modi government journalists, academics, civil society organizations, and human rights defenders have faced raids, arrests, and intimidation.

This is the political reality the RSS has built under Modi’s government, and this is the reality Bhagwat seeks to whitewash during his international tour.

Canada has already seen the consequences

Canada is not insulated from the RSS‑BJP network. The Foreign Interference Commission has reported that the BJP‑led Indian government engages in transnational repression in Canada, including monitoring diaspora communities, using proxies to intimidate critics, and attempting to suppress lawful advocacy. CSIS has obtained evidence linking Indian government agents to homicides, violent acts, organized crime, clandestine information gathering, and interference in Canadian democratic processes.

Allowing Bhagwat into Canada would legitimize an organization connected to a foreign government already implicated in interference and violence on Canadian soil.

A record of violence and exclusion

The RSS has been linked to major episodes of communal violence, including the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque by a Hindu nationalist mob that included RSS members. That event triggered nationwide riots that killed more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

The organization’s present‑day activities reflect a consistent pattern of violence and persecution of Muslims and other Indian minorities, including:

• Discriminatory laws and policies targeting religious minorities;
• Inflammatory rhetoric fuelling communal violence;
• Attacks and intimidation against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and tribal communities;
• Politically motivated prosecutions of journalists and human rights defenders who speak out against the RSS; and
• Concerted efforts to suppress critical voices domestically and internationally.

Their actions prove that they are not a cultural organization, but an extremist movement that promotes religious hierarchy in Indian society and undermines democratic norms.

Canada must not become a platform for extremism

Bhagwat’s visit is a calculated attempt to rehabilitate the RSS’s global reputation. His organizers have been explicit: the purpose of the tour is to reshape “international perceptions” of the RSS—a euphemism for damage control.

Canadian institutions must not become instruments in this whitewashing campaign. The effort is disturbingly reminiscent of how Nazi officials in the 1930s sought to reassure Western audiences that they were merely promoting German culture while concealing the violent supremacist ideology driving their movement.

Before any public official, charity, or community organization engages with Bhagwat or those hosting him, Canadians deserve full transparency. Who is financing his visit? Which groups are coordinating it? Are any registered Canadian charities linked to the RSS or the broader Sangh Parivar network, and are they operating in full compliance with Canadian law?

These questions must be answered before Canada allows itself to be used as a stage for extremist image‑management.  Canada has consistently acted against extremist organizations across ideological and religious spectrums. The same standards must apply universally.

This is not about Hindu Canadians

It is essential to state clearly: this is not an attack on Hindu Canadians or Hinduism. Those who follow the teachings of the Hindu faith in Canada enrich this country in countless ways. Hindu scholars and human rights defenders have been among the strongest voices opposing Hindutva majoritarianism.  The issue is not religion. It is extremism.

Supremacist ideologies do not become acceptable simply because they originate from a different cultural or religious context.

In light of the RSS’s ideology, its documented history of violence and fascism, its connection to discriminatory policies under the BJP government, and its involvement in transnational repression, Canada must take decisive action by:

• Barring Mohan Bhagwat from entering Canada;
• Launching a national security review of the RSS and affiliated organizations;
• Reviewing and, where appropriate, revoke charitable status for RSS‑linked groups;
• Assessing whether the RSS meets criteria for terrorist designation; and
• Ensuring full transparency under Canada’s foreign influence laws.

Canada’s diversity and pluralism are its strength, but it is not a loophole. It must never be exploited to advance ideologies that promote religious or ethnic supremacy, or undermine the equal dignity of all communities.

Bhagwat’s visit is not a cultural celebration, it is a test of Canada’s resolve to stand against political extremism and fascism, and Canada must say no.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

American democracy is now a facade, and Canadians should be worried

The gravitational pull of American politics—especially as the US drifts toward oligarchic authoritarianism—has begun reshaping Canada’s political landscape in profound ways. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

American democracy, as many scholars and observers argue, no longer functions as a genuine democracy. What remains is a symbolic shell — a façade masking a political infrastructure that has been hollowed out by decades of hyper‑partisanship, corporate capture, institutional decay, and authoritarian drift. The United States today resembles a late‑stage empire coasting on historical momentum, much like Rome after the Crisis of the Third Century, where imperial institutions still existed but meaningful governance of the Empire had collapsed under the combined pressures of political instability, extreme inflation, foreign wars and foreign invasions, and the plague.

The American decline did not begin with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. His rise was a symptom of a system already damaged and in freefall. But his open admiration for authoritarian rulers, his willingness to subvert democratic norms, and his consolidation of power among billionaire oligarchs and right wing extremist networks (the MAGA movement) accelerated a process that had been underway for years. And for Canadians, the implications are profound. When the largest democracy in the Western alliance collapses into full‑blown authoritarianism, Canada will not be insulated. It will be engulfed — politically, economically, and culturally.

The long decline of American democracy

Political scientists have documented the erosion of US democratic norms for decades, but particularly in the 21st century. A 2023 study by the Brookings Institution describes the United States as experiencing early‑stage democratic decline, marked by weakened judicial constraints, executive overreach, and partisan sabotage of accountability institutions. This is fuelled by the fact that since 2010, state legislatures instituted laws intended to reduce voters’ access to the ballot, politicize election administration, and foreclose electoral competition via extreme gerrymandering of electoral districts. The United States also saw substantial expansions of executive power and serious efforts to erode the independence of the civil service.

Added to this is the issue of political polarization, which is central to this decline. Pew Research Center reports that partisan animosity in the US has reached historic highs, with majorities in both parties viewing the other as immoral, dishonest, unpatriotic and a threat to the nation. This is not merely cultural hostility—it is structural. When political actors no longer value democracy for its own sake, institutions become weapons to hammer opponents.

The Republican Party’s radicalization is well‑documented. Numerous analyses and studies since the 2020 presidential election have warned that the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimate election and its abandonment of peaceful power transfer norms pose an “existential threat” to US democracy.

Democrats, meanwhile, have often failed to defend democratic norms with sufficient force. Their technocratic instincts—described in political‑science literature as “managerial liberalism”—have led them to prioritize bureaucratic stability over structural reform. They have not been the “adults in the room” they claim to be. They have been caretakers of a decaying system.

The American Empire’s unraveling: The Iraq War and beyond

The decline of American democracy is inseparable from the decline of American global hegemony.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq exposed the limits of US military power and shattered international trust. The 2008 financial crisis further undermined global confidence in the American economic model, revealing deep structural vulnerabilities and accelerating domestic polarization. Political economists have shown that when institutions fail to deliver shared prosperity, anti‑pluralist movements gain legitimacy. A 2026 review in the Journal of Economic Literature argues that institutional failure and identity‑driven polarization interact to erode democratic guardrails.

After 2010, the collapse accelerated with extreme partisan gerrymandering entrenching minority rule; Citizens United unleashing unlimited corporate spending in political campaigns; and Congressional gridlock becoming permanent.

Freedom House marks 2016 as the beginning of a measurable decline in US political rights and civil liberties.

The fascist drift: Symbols without substance

Today, the United States still displays the outward symbols of democracy — elections, courts, legislatures, and the ceremonial rituals of democratic governance — yet the substance beneath these institutions has been steadily hollowed out. The country increasingly resembles a political system where democratic forms persist but democratic norms have eroded. This erosion is visible in the conduct of its leadership, its security apparatus, its militaristic posture, and the overwhelming influence of corporate oligarchs—patterns that echo the situation in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The most visible and troubling example is the country’s political leadership—Donald Trump.  He has repeatedly expressed admiration for authoritarian rulers, praising figures such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, and others. This is not a trivial matter of rhetorical excess but a signal that Trump sees democratic constraints as weaknesses rather than safeguards. At the same time, American militarism has become a defining feature of national identity. Since 2001, the United States has engaged in continuous warfare across multiple regions, attacking eight countries in Asia and Africa, projecting force abroad while failing to maintain democratic resilience at home.

Domestically, the internal security apparatus has also drifted toward authoritarian practices. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) has been documented committing hundreds of abuses and human rights violations, including: engaging in abusive detention practices, wrongfully detaining US citizens, and deaths of civilians and detainees, including dozens who have died in ICE detention facilities. These are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a system where accountability has weakened and state power is increasingly exercised without restraint.

Overlaying all of this is the immense influence of corporate and billionaire oligarchs. Unlimited campaign spending — enabled by decisions such as Citizens United — has allowed billionaires and corporations to shape political outcomes, policy agendas, and legislative priorities in ways that serve elite interests rather than democratic ones. The result is a political system where wealth, not citizenship, determines access to power. These developments are hallmarks of a state drifting toward authoritarianism, even if the democratic façade remains intact.

Canada’s drift toward authoritarianism and its US roots

Canada is not immune to these trends. In fact, Canada’s democratic erosion is increasingly linked to US oligarchic and political influence. The gravitational pull of American politics—especially as the US drifts toward oligarchic authoritarianism—has begun reshaping Canada’s political landscape in profound ways.

The Canadian Conservative Party has adopted strategies and narratives that closely mirror those of the US Republican Party. Culture‑war rhetoric, attacks on independent media, hostility toward climate science, and alignment with US billionaire‑funded think tanks have become increasingly common. Research shows that Canadian conservative messaging now mirrors US Republican narratives, amplified by cross‑border political networks and shared donors. This is not simply ideological convergence, it is a structural importation of American political tactics into Canada’s political culture.

Yet the Liberals are not innocent in this drift. Under Mark Carney—a former global finance executive deeply embedded in elite economic networks—the party has moved toward a technocratic centrism aligned with corporate and billionaire interests. Canadian political scientists have documented the Liberals’ close ties to Bay Street finance, the influence of multinational corporations on policy formation, and a weakening commitment to climate action and human rights. They also note an increasing reliance on private‑sector advisory groups, which further entrenches elite influence over public policy. A campaign launched by Democracy Watch warns that both major parties are increasingly shaped by elite economic actors whose interests diverge from those of the general population.

This bipartisan drift toward elite capture is reinforced by US oligarchic networks that exert direct influence on Canadian politics. American tech billionaires have shaped Canadian digital policy debates; cross‑border fossil‑fuel lobbying has influenced Canadian climate legislation; American political consultants have advised Canadian political campaigns; and US dark‑money networks have funded Canadian advocacy groups. A 2023 investigation by The Narwhal documented US oil‑industry funding of Canadian political organizations opposing climate regulation. These developments are not accidental. They are structural consequences of Canada’s proximity to a superpower undergoing democratic collapse.

Why Canadians should be alarmed

Canada’s fate is tied to the United States in ways that make American democratic decline a direct threat to Canadian stability. Economically, Canada is deeply integrated with the US, and any authoritarian instability south of the border would produce immediate and severe economic shockwaves in Canada, as we have seen with Trump’s tariff war. Politically, US authoritarian narratives spread easily across the border, influencing Canadian discourse and reshaping partisan identities. Corporate capture is also a shared phenomenon, where US oligarchs influence Canadian policy through cross‑border investments and multinational corporate structures.

Security risks are equally significant. A destabilized United States—politically, socially, or institutionally—poses direct threats to Canadian sovereignty, border stability, and national security. And beyond bilateral concerns, the collapse of the United States would destabilize the entire Western democratic alliance. If the US falls, the democratic world loses its keystone.

Canada is drifting toward authoritarianism not only because of domestic political choices, but because it is tethered to a superpower undergoing democratic collapse. The erosion of democracy in the United States is not a distant problem. It is a direct and immediate threat to Canadian political stability, democratic norms, and national sovereignty.

American democracy is no longer a functioning system. It is a veneer—a symbolic shell covering a political infrastructure that has been rotting for decades. Hyper‑partisanship, corporate capture, institutional decay, and authoritarian drift have transformed the United States into a nation where democratic norms are optional.

Canada is drifting in the same direction albeit at a slower pace—not only because of domestic political failures, but because US oligarchic and political networks exert enormous influence over Canadian politics.

If the largest democratic domino falls, Canada will not remain standing. The veneer is cracking, and Canadians must pay attention and prepare before it shatters.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.