Anarchist News
Inside Sunday’s violent clash between ‘Black Bloc’ anarchists, cops
Several thousand protesters spent five hours peacefully chanting, singing and marching against war. At the end, nearly 40 young veterans dramatically took their military medals and hurled them toward McCormick Place, where world leaders met behind closed doors.
It was supposed to end there — at Michigan and Cermak.
But a “Black Bloc” of about 100 anarchists wanted something else. The group, which chanted “What do we want? Dead cops!” as it left Grant Park at 2 p.m., surged to the front of the protest crowd and tried to break through the imposing line of Chicago cops in riot gear blocking its path.
AFed statement on kneecapping of nuclear executive by Informal Anarchist Federation
On the 11th of May Roberto Adinolfi, CEO of an Italian state controlled nuclear engineering company, was shot and wounded. A cell of the insurrectionist Informal Anarchist Federation have claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement, saying that it was an act of vengeance for deaths and environmental damage caused by the nuclear industry. Previous acts claimed by Informal Anarchist Federation cells include sending a letter bomb to the Italian tax collection office, almost blinding a worker at the office and risking the lives of the postal and clerical workers who unwittingly carried the bomb.
Although it adopts the same initials as our affiliated Anarchist Federation in Italy, the Informal Anarchist Federation has no affiliation whatsoever with them or with us. It is an entirely separate entity, and we consider its adopting of the same initials as a pre-existing anarchist group to be, at best, confusing and ill-judged, and at worst malicious. Whether or not the Informal Anarchist Federation intended that their actions would be associated with the Italian Anarchist Federation and other members of the International of Anarchist Federations, these organisations have now been mentioned in press reports relating to the actions of the Informals, and so we now feel it necessary that we, the UK Anarchist Federation, make our position on their actions clear.
The Fight for a Life Worth Living: A Statement on Seattle’s 2012 May Day Events
We are organizers and participants involved in this year’s May Day events. Many of us also participate in Occupy/Decolonize Seattle. We conceived the events of the May Day General Strike as a celebration of life in solidarity with the global uprising against economic oppression and the 1%. May Day is a day of pride for migrants and workers everywhere. It is a day of remembrance for the anarchists executed in show trials after the world’s first May Day in 1886, fighting for the 8-hour work day. Most powerfully, it is a day of struggle—of celebrating freedom and striking out against what hurts us.
Solidarity Means Attack - Call For Support From Montréal!
- poster circulating around the strike
THE LAWS
On Friday, May 18, 2012, two new laws came into effect in montréal. Their purpose is to stifle the anti-capitalist revolt that has emerged from the student strike that began in this province fifteen weeks ago, to restore order and clear the way for the implementation of austerity measures in this territory.
The first is a municipal by-law. It aims to discourage people from wearing masks at demonstrations by threatening them with fines from $1000 to $5000. It comes as the federal government is contemplating a law, to be implemented across the whole territory of the canadian state, that would punish those who conceal their identities “while participating in a riot” with a maximum of ten years in prison.
The Floodgates
(translated from Italian)
To open the floodgates means “to unblock, remove the cap and let the liquid flow. In the figurative sense, it means to freely give vent to words, verses, insults…” This is the impression that one gets reading the many communiqués of condemnation and of taking a distance from the attacks that have taking place in the last several weeks against the people and structures of domination. That the floodgates have been opened. As if up to now the refusal to distinguish oneself in the eyes of repression, the contempt for those who want to make themselves pass for “good boys and girls,” maybe a bit unruly but over all pretty good, wasn’t at all a spontaneous and natural expression of one’s being, of one’s individuality, but merely an ideological imposition to one felt constrained to submit. A sort of abstract precept, a moral blackmail to bear, often with clenched teeth, with poorly concealed patience. And, as everyone knows, even patience has a limit.
Anarchists Must Attack What Only Anarchists Can Attack, or why we should support the Anarchy Bridge! 5
Anarchists around the world have been awake and restless.
Agent Provocateurs & Informants
excerpt from the audio which can be found by clicking here:
That the police have paranoia inducing methods of infiltrating activist organizations and inciting people to commit illegal activities should come as no surprise. Spying and creeping and slinking around in the shadows are simply par for the course when you're engaged reprehensible activities. Unfortunately, surveillance, or the threat of surveillance, is one unavoidable aspect of living in a police state, and since the advent of Homeland Security, many of us take it for granted that our phone conversations and electronic communications could be intercepted and monitored at any time. It's somewhat more disconcerting however to consider the following: we're sitting in a meeting planning our next political action with people we know and trust, and meanwhile, right next to us or across from us could be an agent or informant, someone contemplating how to undermine, negate, and frustrate our efforts to save the world and society from slipping into the abyss.
Anarchists Against The Wall: Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine
This week's show features an interview with Abrasha Blum and Ruth, who work with Anarchists Against The Wall. AATW is a coalition of Israeli Anarchists doing solidarity work alongside Palestinians who are struggling against the aparthied wall and system in and around the West Bank. As the 45th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War approaches (June 5th-10th), we talk about Zionism, the Settlers, solidarity and how folks can support the popular struggles for Palestinian autonomy and dignity. If you have the ability to help them cover legal fees, check out awalls.org and donate.
An archive of this show, as well as an extra segment on the Birthright Program and the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement can be found on www.archive.org by searching the show title.
We are Contagious: a gift to those who desire social revolt
London: March 26, 2011
Seattle: November 29 – December 2,1999
Paris: May, 1968
Cairo: January 28, 2011
Athens: December, 2008
Oakland: November 2, 2011
These are the days my dreams are made of.
After May Day, the internet was flooded with impassioned defenses of the black bloc. It was apparent that this all-too-brief rampage of destruction had reignited some previously dormant passion within the Puget Sound anarchist milieu. People who had glumly trudged through winter were more excited than I'd seen them in months. But what will happen now, after the “riot”?
On NATO Arrestee Mark Neiweem
Behind the Black Mask and Shattered Glass: Pre-sentencing interview with G20 arrestee Kelly Pflug-Back by Comrade Black
On May 28, Kelly Pflug-Back will stand in front of a Toronto courtroom to be sentenced.
I first met Kelly when she was a 16 yr old traveler kid who had just arrived in Victoria. We hung out on the streets, at drop in centers, and did Food not Bombs together which developed a lasting friendship. Over the years Kelly became quite the well known community organizer and activist. So it was a surprise when her picture went out across the internet, TV news, and newspapers last year following the G20 as police released pictures of their most wanted suspects in their sweep of 1100 activists who arrested, most of which would be released with no charges.
This interview was conducted by email.
PE: You have been active in community organizing for many years preceding this arrest? Can you tell us a bit about how you became involved in the struggle and what types of organizing or activism you have done?
KELLY: I’ve always been most interested in long-term, sustained efforts to build networks of social support so that people don’t have to rely on the state. I’ve done a lot of work with Food Not Bombs in a few cities, worked with needle exchange programs and anti-stigma AIDS resource centres, and facilitated workshops for queer youth and street-involved youth on self-esteem, safer drug use and sexual health. I’ve also participated in a couple of land occupations opposing developments on Indigenous territories, and I’ve recently been doing a lot of journalism for magazines.
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING ROCHESTER, NY
TONIGHT WE FARTED IN THE MOUTH OF OUR OPRESSORS. The stank breath of the bean counters shall waft above the midtown ruins.
We glued the doors of Chase Bank's main Rochester office shut to give them a whiff of the shit that we have to wade through every day. We have temporarily denied their functionaries access, and we hope it fucks up their day. We've attacked our class enemies, those who decimate our communities and take our homes away, who steal the land and charge us interest on it. The proletariat will have vengeance for the pain of every working mother, for every lifetime spent in a cage, for every homeless kid. This action is to inform the bourgeoisie that their days are numbered. Their coming fate is foretold by the revolutionary violence of the colonized.
Call out for a Queer Feminist Insurrectionary Anti-Civ Journal
POTENTIAL TOPICS MIGHT INCLUDE:
+ Magic as an anti-capitalist weapon
+ Support as attack/attack as support
+ Critiques of anti-civ theory (Derrick Jensen's understandings of feminism and gender as somewhat essentialist and how that might inform his relationship with Lierre Keith/ lack of analysis around her transphobia?)
+ Discussions around race/gender/ability pertaining to anti-civ theory and primitivism
+ Critiques of mainstream/liberal/2nd wave feminism: particularly how it seeks to continue to present a white, colonialist, transphobic, “rights” embedded framework
Far right arson against DIY bar in Yerevan, Armenia
8th of May, 5:30 AM two neo-Nazi brothers, Ambik and Arame attacked club "D.I.Y" in Yerevan. They broke window of the door and threw bottles filled with flammable mixture. At first, fire brigade which arrived in minutes claimed fire was due to a short circuit, but CCTV camera of a shop next door fixed how a bald young man in a bomber jacket and combat boots with white shoelaces committed the attack.
9th of May 4:30 PM two Nazis were arrested, but they were soon released with a bail of one million dram (around 80 000 euros). Money for bail was donated by deputies of nationalist ARF (Dashnaktsyutyun) party (ironically, co-formed by anarchists 121 years ago), Artsvik Minasyan and Grayr Karapetyan. Now police is ignorant towards the investigation.
Strategy Rambles: After Convention Organizing?
And then, once everyone's forgotten about you (except for the folks on your legal team, if you're lucky) the cops will drop most of the charges, or they'll go away or get downsized. (Except for the folks serving years for Toronto G20 and probably more that I don't know about.)
Montreal Bans Wearing Masks at Protests
Montreal city councillors have approved a bylaw that bans the wearing of masks at public protests.
The vote at Montreal City Hall on Friday afternoon passed 33-25.
"When a cause is just, why is it necessary to hide behind a mask?" Mayor Gérald Tremblay said during a news conference following the vote.
A woman protests against the proposed bylaw outside of Montreal City Hall Friday. (Shaun Malley/CBC) The bylaw will also force demonstrators to provide police with an itinerary for protests.
The bylaw will come into effect Saturday, Tremblay confirmed.
What does an anarchist look like?
I know what you’re thinking: Unwashed skinny guys wearing dirty black jeans, dirty black shirts and dirty black bandanas covering their dirty white faces.
And over the last few days, folks who meet that description have been marching all over Chicago. They typically don’t submit to interviews with “evil mass media” types, so finding out exactly what they’re protesting isn’t always easy.
Is it soap? Is it corporate greed? Bright colors? The politics of war?
Ironically enough, as it turns out, some anarchists also don’t conform to dress codes.
Give us peace. ordinary citizen tells protesters
It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos.
It is not robbery or murder. "It is not a war of each against all.
It is not a return to barbarism or the wild state of man.
- Alexander Berkman, early-20th-century anarchist
Late one night, during one of the scores of antituition-hike demonstrations that have paralyzed Montreal for 14 weeks, I looked around and wondered who all these angry young people were.
This was during the tranquil part of the protest, before drunken girls staggered into horseback police, daring them to charge; before masked hoodlums hurled rocks at storefronts; before that now-routine testosterone climax of firecrackers, smoke bombs, pepper spray and chemical gas.
Earth First! roadshow 2012: A Culture of Resistance
Ecological resistance is in the air this summer in Cascadia, and to spread the word, some Earth First!ers are hitting the road. To promote this summers (bio)regional rendezvous, set for june 20-25, the tour starts in the far north of Cascadia then heads down south.In solidarity with the Winnemem Wintu tribe, we'll be headed down south to Shasta Lake, colonized California where the Winnemem Wintu tribe has put out a call to action to directly confront the forest service in preserving their traditional Coming of Age Ceremony.
Earth First!ers coming to a town near you;
Earth First!- Creating a Culture of Resistance tour 2012:
Hundreds expected to attend Dublin Anarchist Bookfair
Hundreds of people from all over Ireland are expected to attend the 7th annual Dublin Anarchist Bookfair which takes place in Liberty Hall, Dublin on Saturday 26th May. The Bookfair, organised by the Workers Solidarity Movement, will consist of a day of meetings, debates, discussions and films and will also host bookstalls and information stands from a large number of political organisations and campaigning groups.
Workers Solidarity Movement spokesperson Gregor Kerr said he expects attendance at this year’s Bookfair to “reflect the fact that more and more people are beginning to search for an alternative to the chaotic political system that is capitalism.”
The last number of months has seen a new awakening of political awareness in Ireland,” Kerr continued. “Hundreds of thousands of people have refused to pay the household tax. Communities are organising to resist the water tax. People are beginning to realise that we don’t have to accept the inevitability of the boom-bust cycle of capitalism and that the extent to which the austerity agenda can be imposed on us is related to the extent to which we are prepared to resist it.
