#moonyiang — Public Fediverse posts

Résumé pour les francophones: je dis aux anglos et aux francos qui écrivent juste en anglais de guette leur chitte toguédeure. Pas parce qu'iels écrivent juste en anglais, mais parce que leurs interventions valent pas dla crisse de marde.

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(I have beef with intentional unilingual francophones too, I will settle the scores later.)

A kind reminder to my Anglo anarchist friends and also Francos who gave up translating their shit in French: lots of BIPOC people in Montréal can't read English, including First Nation members. They won't be aware of the drama you're feeding into in your long-ass articles, weird apologies on Instagram, etc.

Montréal has become hostile to people who come from the surrounding «régions» and suburbs - mostly poor and middle-class young French-speakers - due to high rent. It is no longer a living environment for them. Now that I'm back at school, I meet more and more people in their late twenties or early thirties who still live at their parent's place, out of town, and spend 1 hour, 2 hours on the road to get to UQAM. (Including racialized individuals: not only white suburbans).

Until maybe 2018, the suburban/regional undergrads and cégep young adults who had moved to Montréal to study were easy to mobilize and motivated to change things. They are now exhausted by incessant travel and their day-job or night-shift. Moreover, they lack or can't use gathering spaces and organize as easily as we could back in 2012.

I feel this is an important factor in some organizations and individuals giving up on French, especially in the Montréal queer community on social media. A part of the traditional foundation of Québec anarchism is simply no longer living here, and McGill & Concordia kids finally took the empty seats - which is the worst case scenario in my opinion.

People who got in Montréal during or after the first years of the pandemic are totally unaware of that - most of them don't know a lot about Québec recent history anyways and won't do the effort to check.

The proportion of posts that are clearly originally written in French declined a lot in the last two-three years, on my feed. It's not the first time I do mention it. Most of the French posts now come from orgs or collectives such as Alter Acadie, which is based outside Québec.

Globally, anarchism and radical leftism weakened enormously in Montréal. I'm not accusing you : I think you are a symptom of gentrification.

But in a way, I would not see you making a renewed genuine effort into translating your shit into French/Spanish/Arabic/Créole as an actual good thing for the future of radical leftism and anarchism in Montréal - this is the irony.

Because I think most of our debates have lately been absolutely fucking useless garbage and I'd prefer working-class mainly French-speakers (middle-class youth tend to have a better English) to not be exposed to this, and I even hope they never meet you in person, in the sad and delusional state you are right now. That is also the reason why I won't translate this post into French.

Are we really fucking having another totally ignorant debate on Tarot and identity politics, mainly based on... I don't know, your intuition and what the wind whispered into your ears? Is this what's become of us?

GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, FOLX. We can do better.

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