Anarchists should hold their fire: Guelph Mercury op-ed

Anarchists should hold their fire

GREG MERCER

(Jul 6, 2006)

The anarchists have e-mail accounts, and they intend to use them.

Behold the rubberized logic of whoever signed a recent e-mail 'Anarchist Solidarity,' after claiming to have sabotaged equipment being used at the city hall expansion site.

Concerned about an alleged sexual assault by a city police officer, the e-mail sender says the equipment used by a contractor hired to build the expansion was struck because the building will eventually hold a provincial court.

That provincial court, they say, will be used to prosecute people like those arrested at the protest where they say the sexual assault took place.

The e-mail ends by saying city council is targeted because they "fund" the police and without that money, the police wouldn't have "the power and extensive weaponry they have."

Huh?

In the past year, fires have been lit at a Zellers department store, the Church of Our Lady, a golf course's pro shop, and at least two homes under construction in new suburbs.

They've inflicted an estimated $430,000 in damage, and changed nothing.

Everything these 'anarchists' touch reeks of children playing at radicalism, attacking easy targets with a vague sense of standing for something.

Their nighttime work is that of the small-minded, the cowardly, and the lazy. If the natural world really matters that much to you, send your money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Or if people matter to you, try doing something worthwhile, like the four skateboarders who passed through Guelph yesterday as part of a cross-country trip to raise money to fight breast cancer.

"There is no excuse for suburbs. Development must stop," was the message in an e-mail this week, this time from the 'The Anarchist Fire Brigade,' not to be confused with Anarchist Solidarity, or the United Anarchist Front or the Anarchists for Free Microsoft E-mail Accounts.

Anarchists need homes, too. So what right does anyone have to deny someone else from buying a home, albeit in a suburb where the houses look like they've fallen out of a box? If people didn't want to live like that, developers wouldn't build there.

But alas, I've missed the point. Anarchists are really here to help the poor, by burning down the pro shop at the Cutten Club. The lines at the soup kitchen have shrunk dramatically since that brave act, let me tell you.

At the scene of that blaze, someone spray-painted 'ELF in support of special diet campaign,' a reference to efforts to get more food money to those on welfare.

But ELF -- Earth Liberation Front? Because everyone knows if anything is harming what's left of the natural world, it's the golf pro shop in the middle of a city that's been settled by humans for centuries.

So are these anarchists for the poor, or the environment? Maybe they're just upset over that bad slice in their golf game.

"We are at war," declared the sender of an e-mail who claimed responsibility for a fire at an unfinished home on Dawn Avenue in January.

Oh, I see. You go out after dark on weekends with a book of matches, then send rambling e-mails through Hotmail accounts to the newspaper.

War asks that you make sacrifices. You're putting nothing on the line.

The sender said the Dawn Avenue fire was started in memory of William C. Rogers. That could mean a couple of things.

It could mean the dead environmental radical suspected in the firebombing of a ski resort in Vail, Colo., a fire that caused the destruction of more trees in the rebuilding than the original did. He was the man also charged with arson after a misdirected fire at the University of Washington destroyed endangered plants.

Or it could mean the William C. Rogers who captained the USS Vincennes, the American warship that shot down an Iranian commercial flight in 1988, killing 290 civilians. Brilliant mentors, either way.

Or, better still, maybe these local heroes simply meant Will Rogers, the humourist and actor who once memorably said, "We don't know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it."

Reporter Greg Mercer can be reached at gmercer@guelphmercury.com.