Well, here it is. We think that most will agree that this will be the best article posted on the blog, or at the very minimum the most informative and perhaps most useful.
The following is a living document. We will continue to add information as we continue our research and as new incidents occur. We encourage our readers to help us in this project. If you are aware of an incident that can be backed up with secondary sources, please share those incidents with us for inclusion in the timeline. These include any incidents that occurred before 1989 as well (we can, and have, change the title to fit the information). If you are unable to provide a secondary source for the incident you shared with us, we will try to do so ourselves.
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Forward by Nosferatu200
We have Mark Fournier of Free Dominion to thank for this article. On June 28, 2010, Mark Fournier posted a lengthy piece concerning his take on the G20 fiasco in Toronto. While we have the entire missive saved, here is the relevant section that concerns us:
To keep this in context, 20 years prior to Mark Fournier having written this claim concerning ARC being responsible for, "almost every incident of serious political violence in the past twenty years," in Canada, the then eldest member of the Collective was 13 years old and living in a relatively isolated farming community two hours from the nearest big city. The author of this timeline was 7 years old.
Since then Mark has continued to make this claim against ARC and the ARA, as well as continuing to claim that ARC and the ARA are the same organization:
We've gotten used to ARC and the ARA being claimed as being one and the same and while we have a good working relationship with ARA chapters, we are indeed different groups that have different methods. But even still, when Mark claims that ARC/ARA members are responsible for most of the political violence for the past 20 years, we began to wonder what that actually looked like.
If we exclude the histrionics (claims of forcible confinement, for example, which is laughable), Mark and the Free Dominion crowd have only three incidents that they keep talking about to prove that the ARA (and apparently ARC) are violent, organized, criminal terrorists:
1. An attack on Garry Schipper's rented home by some protesting the Heritage Front's propagandist. This is the one claim that at least has some basis in legitimacy.
2. The firebombing of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel's Toronto home. In fact, the only group that claimed responsibility was a small Jewish extremist group that had been linked to the Jewish Defence League.
3. A fight between young ARA members and a group of neo-Nazis that left one person fighting for his life. Even Mark admits that it was the ARA member who was stabbed and almost killed and the bonehead charged with attempted murder, though he and others then claim he had it coming.
That's it. In 20 years, Mark was able to come up with three incidents, one of which resulted in no serious injuries to the boneheads but left an ARA member in critical condition and one in which the only people still claiming an ARA link (the firebombing) are those associated with the boneheads. If they are trying to be a violent group of Canadian terrorists, the ARA are really, really bad at it.
Mark's statement did get us to thinking though while we sat around having a few beers. If we were to look back at the past 20 years, what would the level of bonehead violence look like? We figured that the numbers would be pretty high, but in all honesty most of us were too lazy to actually do the necessary research. Except for one of our members who did just that.
When "NomDeGuerre200" considered the question and suggested an article, the rest of the Collective had no idea how much research the author would engage in nor the level of information provided. 'NomDeGuerre200" made a point of only using information that could be verified by reliable secondary sources, mostly media based. We know there is more out there, but what has been created is, we believe, the most extensive timeline of neo-Nazi/racist violence in Canada covering more than 20 years (and as we will continue to add to the document, both before 1981 (we originally began at 1989) and after 2011, the list will no doubt become even more comprehensive).
And with that, we give you "History of Violence."
