Why do anarchist men keep dying deaths of despair?

Remembering our comrade Matt, anarchist revolutionary and casualty of the woke era.

On the sixteenth of March, 2021, our comrade Matt Cicero made his journey to the spirit world.

I consider him a casualty of the woke era.

I had intended to post a tribute to our fallen comrade Matt Cicero on the anniversary of his death, but I must confess the exact date slipped my mind.

The fact that I forgot this date makes me wonder who out there is thinking of Matt, what his legacy is, and how he will be remembered.

Matt didn´t have a lot of close friends. He was a very serious person, slow to smile and slower still to laugh. It was evident that he was in pain, and I assumed that something very, very messed-up had happened to him, and that it had something to do with the government. He had been estranged from his family for years, and lived in poverty. At the time of his death, he was also estranged from the Ottawa activist scene, which is the closest thing that he had to a community.

From what Ive been able to put together, he was driven out of the Ottawa activist scene by the insufferable acolytes of woke ideology. No one can tell me what exactly he did wrong, leading me to believe it was the typical female complaint that men were taking up too much space or making women uncomfortable. I guess he gave up his apartment in Ottawa at some point in order to move to Montreal. Apparently he told some people he was planning to go off medication. I´m guessing that it didn´t work out for him in Montreal during COVID and he moved back to Ottawa, where he spent some time living in an over-crowded shithole of a homeless shelter before turning up dead down by the river.

As you will see from the obituary below, it is not at all clear how he died, but his death was ruled a suicide by the Ottawa police. The official story is an obvious lie, and many of his friends suspect foul play.

I always respected Matt, but I could definitely see how he could make people uncomfortable. The man obviously had some serious mental health issues, and it wasn’t easy to get on his level, even if one wished to energetically attune themselves to someone who was clearly profoundly miserable.

I always had compassion for him because I am also a SOPA (Survivor Of Psychiatric Abuse). It was hard to know how to support him, though, I can tell you that much.

At one point he came out as a ritual abuse survivor and started a blog accusing everyone from his childhood of being part of one big Satanic cult. Now, I know that I wasn`t alone in having my doubts about his story, but I never doubted that his pain was real. I, for one, wondered whether his subconscious mind had created the story in order to give himself permission to feel intense emotion, because everybody knows that the feelings of straight white cis-gendered males don´t matter. In the woke world, victimhood was a currency which determined ones place in an inverted dominance hierarchy. It was a very weird time.

I also empathize with Matt because I know how awful the Canadian activist scene can be to men. I could write multiple Kafkaesque novels about my experiences with insane feminists and woke zealots. Honestly, I’m traumatized from my experiences organizing in Canada, which is why I’ve started writing about this stuff. Maybe my words will strike a chord with someone out there and make their journey out of this demented cult easier. I know that a lot of other people have had similar experiences. I personally feel like I`m still processing my trauma of getting kicked out of the Montreal anarchist bookfair over five years ago. I think I went through something similiar to what people go through when they leave cults, and I still haven`t fully recovered. It`s harder for me to motivate myself as an activist because I just don`t have the same love for humanity as I did before.

The fact of the matter is that in recent years anarchist men have been dying in alarming numbers, and I’m not just talking about David Graeber and Aragorn. I personally have known quite a few, including Dave, Liam, Axtli, and Frank. There are others, as well, such as Nico Las and Hugo, but I didn´t know them.

I´ll also include Jean Leger and Derek Soberal, because although I don´t think they called themselves anarchist, they were definitely comrades. Honestly, whether someone calls themselves an anarchist or not really doesn´t mean much. COVID taught us that.

(PHOTOS OF NICO LAS, HUGO, AND LIAM HOPEFULLY COMING SOON.)

I consider the deaths of Aragorn and David Graeber suspicious as well, by the way, but that´s a topic for another day. I will post photos of them, though, because let´s face it - a lot of anarchist men have died suddenly in the past few years.

I have repeatedly pointed this out in my writing, but I haven’t seen many signs that real soul-searching is happening. My conclusion is that people don’t care that much. And that sucks. Matt did his best to confront the system in the best way that he knew how and didn’t let his mental illness interfere with his work. I wish that he would have found his way to ceremony, but according to woke ideology, people aren´t allowed to participate in indigenous ceremony unless they´re indigenous. It´s almost always people who aren´t ceremonial people who feel most strongly about this rule, for some reason, but that´s neither here nor there.

I pretty much kept my spirituality secret for years, because I didn`t want woke Pharisees to accuse me of cultural appropriation. I could have brought Matt to ceremony and I`m sure that he would have greatly benefited from it. He was definitely a believer in the Medicine Wheel. But I don`t think I ever invited him, and this is something that I now regret. It was obvious he was in pain, and I think that I could have helped him. But I didn`t.

Below is an obituary for Matt, which I wrote about a month after his death and posted on several anarchist websites, including North Shore Counter-Info, and Anarchist News, among others. Some of the comments on these two articles are quite telling as to the state of the anarchist scene in the dark days of the COVID psy op, and I suggest that interested people check them out.

If you have memories of Matt that you would like to share in the comments, please feel free. If people have photos or videos you would like to share with the world, please send them to me at crowquappelle@gmail.com and I will add them to this post.

Let`s learn the lesson from Matt`s tragic death and start being kinder to each other.

Also, let`s divorce woke ideology once and for all. It`s inhuman, cruel, and it`s killing people. It´s time that we put an end to this inane, insane bullshit of creating inverted dominance hierarchies which punish white men for being privileged. It doesn´t help anyone, and it definitely hurts people.

If we, as anarchists, believe in equality, that means that the feelings of white men are just as important as anyone else´s.

And if you´ve got a problem with me saying that, please do me a favour and go fuck yourself, okay? I´m all out of fucks to give, and in fact I suspect I now give negative fucks, because now I think the world owes me.

It´s all part of the mourning process, I know. Really, truly, I don´t want to be angry, bitter, and hateful, but I am, and I´d rather express my emotions than let them fester. We all need to heal from the horrible nightmare of the woke era, but first, we all need to wake the fuck up.

Rest In Power, Matt. You were one of the good ones.

“We pass the torch to all those who would resist the trampling of native rights, of the rights of us all, and resist the ongoing destruction of our planet.”

Ottawa: R.I.P. Matt Cicero – Anarchist Militant, Journalist, and Community Organizer

On March 16, 2020, our comrade Matt departed for the spirit world. We have lost one of the most committed anarchists in our part of the world, and the loss is felt intensely due to the tragic circumstances of his death.

Many people who did not know Matt well will probably remember him as the guy that bombed the bank back in 2010. At this time, there was a major mobilization of anarchists preparing for the G20 summit in Toronto. Several months prior to the summit, a group calling itself FFF (Fighting For Freedom) released footage of the firebombing of an RBC branch in Ottawa. The footage was dramatic – a black-clad figure runs out of the bank minutes before it explodes in flame.

Although he never confessed to the action, I think that Matt would have wanted to be remembered for this action. He was arrested for it, jailed, and put on trial, but charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. Six years after the bombing, he posted an article entitled “6 reasons I support arson (as a tool of social change)” on his blog. “I think it’s an example… of direct action, and I think that social movements in Canada are far too pacified, they are way too comfortable with the ideology, with non-violence as an ideology, not as a tactic, but as the only possible way forward,” he said. “I think social movements need to become more militant and I wanted to highlight that, which I think the action does.”

The communique released by FFF explained the reasons why RBC had been targeted. They had been a major sponsor of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, which had involved a massive crack-down on the street population of that city, and RBC was also a major financier of the Alberta Tar Sands.

It’s important to note here that Matt was one of the anarchists who was at the forefront of indigenous solidarity organizing. 2010 really was the year that anti-colonial politics came to the forefront of anarchist analysis in so-called Canada. It was through the relationships that anarchists formed with indigenous people around that time that began to significantly shift anarchist discourse. Matt was one of the pioneers of this, and he remained active with IPSMO (the Indigenous People’s Solidarity Movement – Ottawa) for the better part of a decade.

Matt was a committed activist. Serious, principled, and intense, he knew what he believed and had the courage of his convictions. His stubbornness often led to him butting heads with other activists, as for myself, I usually found myself agreeing with him and supporting his stance. He thought that radical politics should be about action. When it was time to throw down, you knew Matt was game.

It is difficult to grieve Matt, partly due to the tragic conditions of his death. I have not spoken to anyone who had really spoken to him in the past two years. Not only was he estranged from his family, it seems that he was also estranged from his friends. It would seem that his mental health deteriorated, and he was living in a tent by the Ottawa river, close to the War Museum, and not far from Asinabka, the Algonquin sacred site currently be desecrated by a huge condo development.

The circumstances of his death were mysterious. Apparently, the police told his mother that he had fallen out of a tree. I was a part of a group that visited the tree, and we all agreed that it just wasn’t possible that that had happened. Not only was the tree not very tall, it was a spruce tree, and it would have been impossible to climb without breaking branches, and no branches were broken. What is known is that he died of blunt force trauma and the police didn’t rule it a suicide.

We are still trying to put the pieces together, so if you do have information that would help us understand what happened in the last two years of his life, we would encourage you to write us. Even though we can’t change what happened, understanding what happened can be an important part of the grieving process.

We also have some soul-searching as a movement to do. There have been a significant numbers of deaths of despair among activist men in the past few years. To name a few: Derek, Dave, Hugo, Jean, and Charles. What is leading our comrades to such depths of emotional pain? Is it the state of the world, or it is something about the way that activists treat each other?

The reality is that, despite our best efforts to change the world for the world, things are not improving on planet Earth, and in fact, many of the gains made by previous generations of activists are now being undone. This can be deeply disheartening, especially for people who have based their whole lives around struggling to make the world a better place.

There is another question that is more disturbing, and that is whether it is something in the activist scene is killing us. Has the anarchist culture become deeply toxic? Both Dave and Matt were being excluded by their respective activist communities at the times of their deaths. In both cases, it seems likely that this was a factor in the deterioration of their mental health. Is a toxic activist culture partly to blame?

In any case, Matt’s body is gone, but his spirit has moved on. Perhaps the freedom that he desired so passionately was not possible in this world, but I hope that where he is now, his spirit will know true freedom.

Rest in peace, Matt, you were a good anarchist, and I will honour your memory. More importantly, I will honour your spirit by continuing the fight that you dedicated your life to – the fight for freedom, for autonomy, for Mother Earth, and in solidarity with the oppressed against the state.

It seems right to end by quoting the FFFC communique released after the bank bombing:

“We pass the torch to all those who would resist the trampling of native rights, of the rights of us all, and resist the ongoing destruction of our planet.”

A memorial is being organized by Matt’s friend Albert Dumont, an Algonquin spiritual leader. It will be held on May 16. By pure coincidence, a massive global day of action happens to be planned for that exact day. So, wherever you are, if you do want to honour Matt’s memory, consider torching or smashing something in his honour, or at least lighting off some fireworks.

For details regarding the memorial service, please write vertetnoire@riseup.net. If you have photos or videos of Matt, please share them with us. We would also encourage people to reach out to share their memories of Matt, which could be shared at his memorial.

A song-in-progress is being written by Matt’s friend. If you have memories of actions that Matt participated in, and want them to be part of a song that will be sung at his memorial, please check out this video: