The neo-nazi group that has been organized in Calgary since 2006 announced that it is disbanding.

Obituary: The Aryan Guard 2006-2009

It is with great joy that today we announce the passing of the Aryan Guard.

Although the Guard only lasted three years, in that short time they managed to rack up an impressive list of failures and acts of epic cowardice and gross incompetence.

In just three years we have seen the Guard exemplify the 'virtues' of the 'White Nationalist' movement by attacking a diminuitive japanese woman from behind; organizing poorly-attended rallies easily shut down by anti-racist Calgarians; beating an unarmed homeless man nearly to death; getting arrested, time and again, for drug offenses; fraudulently advertising a non-existant reloctation subsidy programme; and even failing to keep up with the payments on their post-office boxes. It has been a legacy of incompetence mixed with violence as yet unparalleled in this city.

Most notable, however, was the Aryan Guards' unwavering commitment to hypocrisy.

While they preached 'family values', the Guard itself was rife with teen pregnancies and abandoned mothers -- most notably expemlified by Guard co-founder Kyle McKee who made an amateur pornographic video of himself and a married woman while his teen girlfriend was at home, pregnant with his child. Despite their alleged committment to 'unity' amongst 'white nationalists', the Guard revelled in in-fighting and bickering. They fostered a near gang-war rift between themselves and the Volksfront and came to blows with each other over the most trite subjects: the theft of a coin collection, the borrowing of a car, and, of course, girls. The passing of the Guard, in fact, can be directly attributed to Kyle McKee's attempted murder of a former Aryan Guard member over an amarous misadventure.

Certainly, there are many in Calgary who love to be able to take the credit for the demise of the Aryan Guard. The sad fact, however, is that there is only one organization that can rightfully stake the claim as the group that ran the Guard out of town: the Guard itself. Yes, many of us in the anti-racist movement put a lot of effort into monitoring, confronting and containing the Guard -- you know who you are -- and that work has been valuable. The pressure applied to the Guard on multiple levels, overt and covert, stymied many of their recruiting efforts, refocused their actions on more hardened targets and served, often, to fan the flames of internal dissent in the Guard that led, ultimately, to it's implosion. The lesson we take from the death of the Guard is that Fascism is an unstable ideology and that, as anti-fascists, it is our job to contain, restrict and apply pressure to groups like the Guard until they do, eventually, crack.

And so, to the Guard: good riddance. With the anchor of that organization gone, we can only hope that the angry and hateful and spiteful people it attracted will drift away and maybe, even, grow up. But if for some reason they don't, the racists of this city would do well to remember one thing.

We're still watching.