In defence of Vancouver Anarchists

There has been a lot made over the past few days that it was Anarchists that caused the riots in Vancouver. This is only partially true. While the Anarchists would have been involved in a street rally for the sake of being involved in a street rally, they did not cause the more extreme acts at the rally.

Drunken Vancouver Canucks fans (and a lot of them bandwagoners) were the ones that resorted to violent actions; as well as the thugs and gangsters that were drunken and in downtown Vancouver for the Game 7 loss. Vancouver with thanks to CBC and Rogers Arena were able to create a situation downtown where a hundred thousand people from across the Greater Vancouver area and even around the world had come to watch the game on the big screen tv's set up in the spectator fan plazas. It was at these plaza's where the most extreme actions were carried out in the riots, such as window breaking and cars being flipped and then lit on fire.

While Vancouver does have a strong presence of anarchists that have made themselves known in the APEC Summit and the 2010 Olympic Protests, these people have always resorted to non-violent action. The Anarchists goals are to appropriate media attention on their goals by having enormous street rallies to get their points across to citizens. Even at the Vancouver street rallies that anarchists held to protests the olympics taking place on aboriginal land, violent people always showed up. These people were always not supported by the majority of the anarchists there, however the mainstream media was only able to focus on the violence.

In the case of the Vancouver hockey riots, there was no important message to be conveyed to the people via the media. Only that Canucks fans were disapointed that their team was unable to show up in the Stanley Cup Finals when they were needed to the most.

All in all, I think it is unfair that the Vancouver police has targeted anarchists as having caused the extreme violence. The anarchists would be the last to steal from the Bay and other giant merchandisers, because they do not support the capitalist system and would not be interested in acquiring material possessions for any reason, especially to sell them and make money.

It just seems to be the result of drunken Vancouverites and gangster thugs that made their way to Vancouver to watch game 7 of the playoffs because they couldn't miss an event like this. The police are blaming anarchists just because the last major protests that happened were by the anarchists at the olympics. But the extreme level of violence and the lack of meaning behind the protests, does not convince me that anarchists were the ones that caused the riot.



-hark