In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on May 21, 2010

At ~ 3:30 am (May 18th), the RBC branch at Bank and First in Ottawa was firebombed and, later that day, a group calling itself FFFC Ottawa posted a video of the attack and claimed responsibility.  The chief of Ottawa Police Services, Vern White, told CBC that he is “extremely confident” that they will shortly be making arrests in the case.  He is treating it as a case of domestic terrorism.

I was recently asked by an old friend what I thought about the attack and my initial response was that this was the work of a few wanna-be’s.  There are two reasons for this response.  First, posting the full video (available via here) so soon after the attack (8.5 hours), just doesn’t give them much time to strip out all of the identifying information contained in the video, as well as do all of the obvious manipulation they added in.

The second reason I called them wanna-be’s is the illiteracy and incoherence of their “message”.  This is worth looking at in some detail (source: Indymedia post, May 18, 2010)

Royal Bank Canada was a major sponsor of the recently concluded 2010 Olympics on stolen indigenous land. This land was never legally ceded to colonial British Columbia. This hasn’t stopped the government from assuming full ownership of the land and its resources for the benefit of its corporate masters and to the detriment of aboriginal peoples, workers and the poor of the province. The 2010 Winter Olympics increased the homelessness crisis in Vancouver, especially the Downtown Eastside, Kanada’s poorest urban area. Since the Olympics bid, homelessness in Vancouver has nearly tripled while condominium development in the Downtown Eastside is outpacing social housing by a rate of 3:1. The further criminalization and displacement of those living in extreme poverty continues apace.

“Royal Bank Canada is one of the planet’s greenest companies” according to one of its own brochures. Coporate Kanada saw fit to include RBC as one of the top 50 in a competition dubbed Canada’s Greenest Employers, which purports to recognize organizations that have created “a culture of environmental awareness.” Yet RBC is now the major financier of Alberta’s tar sands, one of the largest industrial projects in human history and perhaps the most destructive. The tar sands, now the cause of the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet, are slated to expand several times its current size.

The games in Vancouver are now over, but resistance continues. An RBC branch can be found in every corner of Kanada.

On June 25-27 2010, the G8/G20 ‘leaders’ and bankers are meeting in Huntsville and Toronto to make decisions that will further their policies of exploitation of people and the environment. We will be there.

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. We say: The Fire This Time.

FFFC – Ottawa
at the corner of Bank Street and First Avenue.

Outside of the obvious mis-spelling of Canada (and why would they use the German spelling or, possibly, refer to an Indian scholar?), their “message” is a mish-mash of denunciation, rather than a demand for anything.  It combines elements of Indigenous protest, anti-corporatism, anti-poverty, anti-globalization, pro-environmentalism, etc., etc. ad nauseum, but it never argues for anything.  As I said, amateur, wanna-be’s; they only stand against and not for something; even the Toronto 18 stood for something!  Saul Alinski is probably rolling in his grave.

One recent blog entry has argued that this firebombing was not done by a protest group but, rather, by “police” in an effort to manipulate the public into accepting more stringent security measures.  Is that possible?  Sure, it’s possible, but is it plausible?  Not really.  One of the problems with that lovely little conspiracy theory is the sheer fact that the information would probably get out.  Without getting into the details, I would argue that it is equally plausible that Martians firebombed the RBC.

The choice of target is, really, quite interesting.  By that, I don’t mean targeting the RBC – they have been hit with a number of different attacks over the past year, but, rather, that particular branch.  If you don’t know Ottawa, then you won’t know that the Bank and First branch is situated in an area called the Glebe which, amongst other things, is an extremely diverse, yet coherent, community.  In many ways, the Glebe is like a smallish village.  So, why hit the Glebe?

If it was an attack by an agent provocateur, then hitting the Glebe would make some sense since the general tenor of the politics is “multi-cultural, mildly left wing” (“Parlor Pink”, actually).  Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, it also makes sense to hit the Glebe if the group doing it is composed of wanna-be’s, since there is very little security in the area.  Not only that, it we postulate that the ID10T errors who carried out the firebombing are wanna-be’s in it for ego boosts, then showing the Parlor Pinks in the Glebe that they are “serious” is in perfect keeping with the choice of targets.

The same blog author who postulates that it was the “police” who conducted the attack, asks “How did these two men get inside the bank after hours?”.  Well, first off, it was three people involved in the attack (remember the videographer?), and second, you can get into the bank’s front area with any type of magnetic strip card since that’s where the ATM’s are located.  Hitting almost any target in the Glebe is not a problem; the Glebe is a “soft target”.

To my mind, all indicators point to the attack being conducted by a bunch of wanna-be’s.

Category: Social Theatre
Tags: Domestic Terrirism, Ottawa, RBC