Settler Colonialism, Illiberal Memory, and German-Canadian Hate Networks in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton University (www.carleton.ca/populistpublics), it applies a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. We cull large datasets from social media platforms and run them through a variety of different programs to help visualize how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric about race, ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights are circulated by far-right groups across borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream as legitimate discourse. Our interest is in how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past so as to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present. We began with a basic question: To what extent is this actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it was obvious to us that we needed to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and individuals. By analyzing German-Canadian relations in particular, what follows is a first attempt to piece together some of these connections, with a focus on far-right hate groups—homegrown and imported—in the settler colonial project that is today's Canada.