Anti Sugar Association + Alternative Research Center ASA ARC

https://www.youtube.com/watch

The Cowardice of Comfort and the Fall of US Empire I’ve said it many times, but it feels necessary to repeat given that we’re living in the calm before our day ...of reckoning. We’re going to have to fight. Soon. Abrahamic extremists with an apocalyptic story have only ever walked a bloody road, and we ought not fall into the folly of planning for miracles (though we may as always hope). We’re going to have to fight. And we’re ready. That’s not the problem. The problem as I see it is an all too familiar mode of cowardice that arises from spending too long in a perceived state of total dominion. This mode of cowardice is the stuff of the fall of empires. When an empire rules too powerfully for too long the leaders acquire a lukewarm strain of cowardice that arises from their sense of comfort. They are too comfortable to stand up and fight when the time comes. And empires fallor are shattered and saved, in no small part due to the folly of the enemy, as in WWII. This cowardice of comfort is our problem. The leaders of what would be the resistance to Trump and the White Christian Nationalist (WCN) rebellion against liberal democracy he’s ‘leading’ in the US are too comfortable to fight. They haven’t experienced blood in the streets like we are all too likely to see. Most North Americans who live North of the Mexican border don't It’s not just the leaders. It's also most of the folks who inhabit the privileged classes of the communities that would be the opposition to Trump and the WCNs. Our society is faced with a crisis of cowardice arising from comfort, and we are living through our last chance to get up and start fighting before the WCNs initiate massive bloodshed approaching or, more likely, following the November elections. Have we learned nothing from history? Movements rooted in extremist renditions of the Abrahamic tradition associated myths like deliverance through conquest and colonization of ‘the other’ and virtue through punishment and fear of punishment have always, when successful, established genocidal regimes that seek some perverse ‘divine’ deliverance through conquest and colonization of the ‘impure’ ‘other’. Its not complicated. What we have left is the question of whether we are going to fight before or after a Christian Caliphate is established in some of the more deprived parts of the US, and given the all to prevalent cowardice of comfort that pervades the hegemonic spheres of what should be the communities opposed to the WCNs I have the sinking suspicion that it will be the latter. We will have to wait for WCN violence to so disturb the comfort of hegemonic communities that the cowardice of comfort becomes impossible. Thus do such fallen empires fall, in the end. But we can still work to prepare the field, even if people are still too comfortable to get up and fightI take solace in that work.

https://www.academia.edu/43378794/When_the_Dam_Finally_Broke

The (Larry) Bell Urban Forum is on Thursday, March 5, 2020, 79 pm. We're organizing a protest (6pm) if they do not cancel the event given the recent revelations about Bell's saying 'no money for that Indigenous stuff' as a condition for giving the money that's being used to fund this event. Larry Bell said 'no money for that Indigenous stuff'--we're going to do our best make sure the event (a settler exclusive discussion concerning the planning future of Unceeded Indigenous ...Lands!) funded by this tainted money is 'about that Indigenous stuff'. "The Bell Urban Forum is made possible by a generous donation by Larry Bell to the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. A graduate of the Department of Geography and the Urban Studies Program at UBC, Larry Bell has made extraordinary contributions to Vancouver and British Columbia through a long and distinguished career. He has served as chair and CEO of BC Hydro, deputy minister of the Government of British Columbia, chair of the UBC Board of Governors, and as board member or chair for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Conference Board of Canada, the Vancouver Hospital Foundation, and the B.C. Transplant Society Board of Trustees. He received the Order of British Columbia in 2007."

Genocide at 1984 West Mall: Selling White Supremacists a Voice in Planning the Future of Stolen Lands Note*: Individuals involved in this situation have asserte...d that there are factual inconsistencies in what follows. There very well may be as this is second and third hand knowledge that I am recalling from memory of a conversation I had many moths ago. That being said: 1. There is absolutely no factual inconsistency as it pertains to Elvin saying that Bell said no money for that Indigenous stuff, and I’m 1/8th Indigenous so I can say thatthose words shattered my tranquility and I will never forget them. 2. The easiest way to avoid the dangers of factual inconsistency arising in second and third hand accounts (as it tends to) is for people with first hand knowledge of corrupt situations like the one outlined below to come forward and speak about the problem, not as a defensive tactic when the truth comes to light, but when the corrupt event occurs in the first place so that the situation can be rectified. 3. I encourage people with first hand knowledge of the situation to tell the story with all the facts in their rightful place so that we can know the details of the process that lead up to and ensued after Bell said ‘no money for that Indigenous stuff, and I’m 1/8th Indigenous so I can say that’. I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to deal with this and other such issues of colonial violence at 1984 West Mall, but as it seems that my attempts at direct action have finally been silenced the time has come to bring this story into the light of day. The story starts with a man called Larry Bell approaching the UBC Medical School to become a donor. The folks at the medical school followed proper procedure and sent Bell on to the university’s department for managing donor relationships (which, as will become apparent, was a very good idea). Universities have donor offices in no small part to avoid donors being able to wield undue/corrupt influence over the allocation of the funds they donate. Bell was unhappy with being sent to the official donor office because he wanted to be more involved in the process, and he thus sought another means of donating money to the university that would allow him to play his desired role. Bell completed his undergraduate degree at UBC Geography (aka 1984 West Mall), and so he approached the department. At this point my knowledge of the situation becomes a bit hazy. I believe that ‘the Reverend’ David Ley was involved with establishing the relationship with Bell, but in the end the relationship came to be managed by my ex-supervisor Elvin Wyly. In any case, as noted above, this relationship in effect cut out the university’s official donor office and allowed Bell to have direct contact with and influence over the allocation of the funds he donated to the department. This to say the least unorthodox donor relationship allows Bell to play an influential role in what has come to be known as the Larry Bell Urban Forum, which draws leading settler-colonial planning figures from across Vancouver’s Urban Planning elite (from prestigious faculty members to the chief planner for the city of Vancouver) to illegitimately plan the future of the stolen Salish lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. In effect, Bell used his seemingly inappropriate donor relationship with 1984 to buy a seat at the table in settler-colonial planning for the future of unceded Indigenous lands On August 1st, 2019 I learned the dire truth of this situation. Elvin called me in for a meeting to chasten me for angrily assailing (i.e. writing about) the rampant colonial assimilative-genocidal violence in the department’s curriculum and pedagogy, and for reasons that still evade me his means of trying to defend the violence of his colleagues was to tell me about an even more egregious colonial process that he is involved in. He began to speak about the complexities of maneuvering through the university, and in that context he raised the issue of Larry Bell. He told me that Bell, during one of his meetings with Elvin and the ex-Department Chari Marwan Hassan, had pronounced that ‘none of this money can be used for that Indigenous stuff, and I’m 1/8th Indigenous so I can say that.’ My eyes bulged. My heart started racing. The world turned red Elvin proceeded to explain that he was trying to keep this statement secret from the new Department Chair Gerry Pratt because he knew that she would, rightfully, loose her shit if she heard about such corruption in the department. His excuse for continuing to uphold this inappropriate relationship and keeping this relationship secret was that ‘so much great research is being funded by the award’ The reality, of course, is that settlers conduct all the research funded by the award. The reality, of course, is that the people supervising the research are settlers. The reality, of course, is that this award is being used to fund settlers who are doing settler colonial research (very often in relationship to unceded Indigenous lands). The other obvious reality is that the rest of the money, beyond the award, is being used to host an annual settler-colonial forum on continued colonization of unceded Indigenous lands through settler-colonial urban planning praxes. And, of course, the reality is that nothing else could be true when ‘no money can go to that Indigenous stuff.’ It’s ironic, really, because at the root of my rage at 1984 West Mall’s unrelenting colonial violence lies the abject lack of sensitivityparticularly in their curriculum and pedagogyto the realities of Indigenous sovereignty. Only western-modernist-scientistic worldview(s) have sovereignty in most of the classrooms at 1984 West Mall. Only settler colonial governments and the people they control have sovereignty in the future of these lands. The solution to the housing crisis in their utopian visions isn’t transition away from the crown’s illegitimate dominion over these lands towards resurgence of Indigenous sovereignty/governancethe solution, in their dystopian vision, is even more control over these lands by the crown. They provide readings that effectively reduce Indigenous cultures to the feudalist Roman-Christian culture of the European colonizers. They provide readings that reduce the potentials for human existence to the foul conceptions of evil/domineering human nature that dominate the history of western culture and thus deny the potential for giving gifts beyond the desire to exert power over the person to whom the gift is given. They angrily deny the right of Indigenous peoples to name the violence they face in these times as genocidal They rightly call their colleagues racist, but do nothing to bring their racism to light and run the racists out of town. Anyway, like I said, I still cannot begin to fathom why Elvin would try to defend the settler colonial violence of his colleagues and their denial of Indigenous Worldview(s)/Ways/Sovereignty/etc. by telling me about his own involvement in the colonial erasure of Indigenous peoples and the settler colonization of these lands, but that’s what happened. Later that day (August 1, 2019), dismayed that I had written publically about his angry denial of the reality that dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands is an act of genocide, Elvin sent me an email asking me to keep his corrupt relationship with lb (i.e. Larry Bell) confidential So, not only are you making me complicit in your colonial violence by making me aware of it (and thus placing the duty upon me to bring it to an end, one way or another), but you are also asking me to eschew my dutyas the descendent of settlers and as an uninvited-grateful guest on stolen Indigenous landsto fight against colonial violence wherever I encounter it? I was already as wracked with disillusionment as the faculty members in the department who have striven for years to push for decolonial change in the department and have at this point all but given up because their endless hours of work to develop workshops and the like to help the old white faculty members decolonize their educational praxes amount to all but nothing because the old white faculty members refuse to participate. I was already questioning whether I could degrade my sense of morality to the degree necessary to peacefully co-exist with such rampant colonial violence, but the step beyond ontological violence in the classroom to overtly engaging in the erasure of Indigenous peoples and selling influence in settler colonial urban planning praxes to white supremacists was a step too far. I love Elvin. I was a relatively young man when I moved to Vancouver for graduate school, and over the past 5 or so years he has been something of the emotionally available and supportive father I never had. Elvin, unlike most of his colleagues in this egomaniacal department, actually cares about the emotional wellbeing of his students. He isn’t so caught up in being famous and powerful that he has lost sight of his role as not only a researcher but also an educator. And so it has gnawed at me, endlessly, that a man who I so love and respect could be drawn into falling so far by the culture of complicity in colonial violence that pervades 1984 West Mall and much of the foul colonial institution that is UBC (whose dominant vision of reconciliation is all to similar to the genocidal-assimilative vision of reconciliation that is being enacted as we speak by the crown and the queen’s cowboys [aka the RCMP] on Wet’suwet’en lands and beyond). I love Elvin, and I know that in his heart he is trying to do the right thing, butas my dear friend Four Arrows reflectedthe unconscious, anti-Indigenous biases that typify settler colonial subjectivities are clearly leading Elvin down the proverbial path of good intentions I don't really know how to conclude, but perhaps the Orwellian insanity of this situation is a good place to conclude a discussion of 1984 West Mall. (Continues in attached document) https://www.academia.edu//Genocide_at_1984_West_Mall_Sell/