2011 Post Games Riot

A few days after the post Canucks loss, 2011 Vancouver riot, information surfaced on what the homeless in the downtown suffered at the hands of out of town visitors who participated and did almost $5 million in damage and looting. We have stated why this happened and what is to be done in order to prevent this kind of activity, which is nothing short of the total end to capitalism and replaced with an egalitarian society geared for human need instead of profit. What we did not say, but now add in light of new information that displays a new and violent turn of the petty bourgeois and lower middle class in suburbia to a form of Canadian bred Nazism. We relate two cases where homeless people were brutalized, had their property and in one case, when a dog attempted to protect its master, was turned on by fascist leaning rioters and injured. In the other case, the homeless man who has cancer, had his guitar stolen, which he uses for busking to raise some cash in lieu of lack of support otherwise.

A young man, called Mark, who panhandles in the West End of Vancouver near Granville, Burrard and Davie Streets, was set upon by out of town rioters late in the evening of June 15^th, 2011. The looters were bent on and succeeded in stealing everything the man had, his boots, cloths, sleeping bag, and some cash he had acquired from panhandling in the hours preceding the riot. During the attack, his dog came to protective defence and attempted to drive off the rioters. The rioters turned on the dog, injuring it and then fled to do more damage, satisfied that they had bullied and stolen what they could from someone with little defence outside of the dog and no support from the police. Either animal control or the police picked up the injured dog and it has not been seen since. Instead of helping the victim of a vicious fascist attack by well to do out of towners, the police instead fined the victim $300 on various vagrancy charges. Mark produced two tickets issued to him by the police during or shortly after the event, which gave him 30 days to pay up or challenge the tickets in court. He is attempting to find work, but claims it is difficult given his circumstances, which include a bout of depression over the lose of a close meaningful relationship a few years ago, a condition that wound up putting him on the street.

Mark noted that welfare today only supports those who are chronic drug and substance abusers; people who use crack, heroin, or crystal meth, or even alcohol. Anyone who are on the street, less than 19 years old, healthy and not addicted, cannot by provincial law get any support despite there is a shrinking job base due to a worsening economy under austerity and a large influx of cross border workers under work visas to do substandard, low paying jobs and no rights to immigrate after the contract is over. The law also allows parents to eject children out of house and home at 16 years old, ready or not. Healthy, single males up to 64 have to find work or go on a work related program in order to get a tiny stipend. Not even health related and handicapped conditions are sufficient to grant a person a stay of execution on the streets. And so it is, frustrated people who are feeling the economic pinch, take it out on those more vulnerable than themselves.

The second homeless person is an elderly man who plays guitar to put some cash in his pocket. He is suffering from cancer and now misses his guitar as it was stolen by rioters on the 400 block Granville Street where he often plays near the Waterfront Canada Line station. He has manufactured signs pleading for help so he can buy another guitar and continue making a meagre living. There likely more incidents as there are at least two stores that had to barricade their staff in the work place for nearly three hours in order to save them from harm. We wonder how many other homeless and street people were attacked during the post Canuck loss free for all that looted from whatever source was available.

A milquetoast public relations campaign in support of helping the homeless falls well short of doing anything except in the most dire of weather circumstances. Thus, during weather that is not freezing, shelters are closed and the homeless have to make do with stairwells, parkades and whatever shelter they can find in parks. When frustrated youth from the suburbs explode in riot, those who cannot barricade themselves in some shelter are right in the line to be torn to pieces. Some people behaved heroically, albeit foolhardy, by attempting to stop rioters. In at least one case, the erstwhile hero was picked up and used as a battering ram to smash a window, sustaining life threatening injuries in the process..

During the post 1929 era under the austerity imposed by the Treaty of Versailles on the Wehrmacht Republic of post WWI Germany, the whole country became mired in ever escalating poverty. Workers lost jobs in the millions and the middle class lost their shirts in bankruptcies. The Nazis made a tremendous gain both during the depression and the worsening devaluation of the German currency. They chose victims to blame such as the Jews, the poor, the mentally and physically challenged, gay people, gypsies and others. These were subject to all kinds of abuse long before the first concentration camp was ever built. Experiments in assembly line murder were conducted on the mentally handicapped as early as 1933. The Nazis were made up of primarily disenfranchised lower middle class and chronically unemployed working people who lost everything in the rapidly souring economy, lost all hope and vision for the future until Adolph Hitler came along and offered some alternatives via the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche [German] Arbeiterpartei [Workers Party]). This was the forerunner to the Nazi party with the brown shirts (SA) and the later Schutzstaffel (SS). During the lead up to Nazi tyranny, many people who found themselves excluded from the new order, which included the poor, especially those who were anti-Nazi, were mercilessly brutalized on the streets. With recent events, we are now in danger of repeating history.