The Dublin Anarchist Bookfair takes place on Saturday 20 May 2023 at the Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.
The bookfair will be set up in a large room in which you can browse radical books and campaign stalls.
Additionally, we have two meeting rooms and throughout the day you can attend talks and workshops. Currently the line up is:
Organising from Below
Against Fortress Europe Gender & Anarchism Anti Imperialism Building for Anarchism Panel with Ruth Kinna and Nick Heath
My Anarchist Inspiration
Disability Panel Climate Action With: Save Our Sperrins – Save Leitrim – Slí Eile / Climate Camp Ireland – Not Here Not Anywhere Prisoner writing workshop
Last night I had the pleasure of attending the screening of a 90-minute documentary about the 2018-2019 Gilets Jaunes movement in France.
Shot in and around the city of Toulouse, La Vie de tempête (“life in the storm”) is a very moving account of this important popular uprising against the plutocracy.
It combines thoughtful interviews with a dozen GJ supporters with often-dramatic footage of events on the streets, as the state launched relentless military-style assaults against protesters, using tear gas, water cannon and grenades.
The courage of those who kept going, weekend after weekend, for more than a year – notably one determined woman in a wheelchair – is humbling to behold.
The film’s director, Marc Khanne, was present at the screening and I asked him afterwards whether he saw a certain continuity between the GJ movement and the current wave of protest against the Macron regime, which is also now being countered with draconian bans and ferocious police violence.
He said that he could certainly see the same élan behind the 2023 rebellion, but added that although some GJs were involved, many of the original rebels were not.
They had been drained of energy by their full-on revolt and the repression with which it was met.
Some were still in prison, or paying off massive fines, or in poor health because of injuries from police batons and grenades, or indeed weekly exposure to tear gas.
He mentioned one person who, as a result of the latter, was now intensely sensitive to any kind of chemical and could not even tolerate exposure to a whiff of car exhaust.
The original rebels have also long been identified and targeted by the state. I have spoken to GJs who have received automatic police fines just because their car registration number was recorded in the vicinity of a protest.
I think two fundamental insights shone through from the film.
The first is that the GJs were very ordinary French people, more often first-time protesters than long-term political activists, and their demands were simple ones for social justice and democracy.
It was perhaps this element that gave the movement such energy, such optimism and such outraged anger at the way it was treated by the state, in terms both of smears and police violence.
The second insight is that this violence was entirely disproportionate and very deliberately meted out in order to crush the people’s revolt.
Marc mentioned, when speaking after the film, a photo he had discovered of a massive protest in Toulouse in 2010, where a crowd of some 150,000 people was accompanied by one single police car, its occupants in caps and shirtsleeves.
What, he asked, had changed so dramatically in the intervening eight years?
The following news-article (along with all of its live-linked documentations so as to enable news-editors to see immediately what the documentation for any assertion in it is) was submitted on 5 May 2023 to 300 news media and published only by three, and is here being resubmitted (slightly expanded and updated) to them all, for reconsideration, because of the extreme importance of the solidly documented and under-reported facts that it contains:
On May 3rd, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told C-Span in an interview, that there will be no objection by the U.S. Government if Ukraine’s Government attempts to or does assassinate Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.
He said: “These are decisions for Ukraine to make, how it’s going to defend itself, how it’s going to get its territory back, how it’s going to restore its territorial integrity, and its sovereignty.”
America has supplied over a hundred billion dollars to Ukraine in order for it to defeat Russia, and now says that if Ukraine uses some of it to assassinate Putin, that’s okay. This is unprecedented. (Even Hitler wasn’t as bad as that.)
Also on May 3rd, Japan’s Nikkei Asia news service headlined “NATO to open Japan office” and reported that “NATO is planning to open a liaison office in Tokyo, Japan, the first of its kind in Asia.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization aims now to become not only America’s anti-Russian military alliance but also America’s anti-Chinese military alliance, which will support the breakaway of China’s province of Taiwan (which since 1972 the U.S. Government has formally recognized Taiwan to be) from China, just as it refuses to support the breakaway of Crimea and three other provinces of Ukraine from Ukraine.
(In other words: though the U.S. regime supports the breakaway of Taiwan from China, it rejects the breakaway of Donbass, Crimea, etc., from Ukraine.)
America and its NATO deny that they are either anti-Russian or anti-Chinese and insist that they instead seek merely regime-change in both countries so that both Russia and China will come to provide democracy and human rights like America’s Government (the one that perpetrates far more invasions and coups than all other Governments in the world collectively do) provides (which it actually does not provide).
If it happens, then almost certainly Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would either resign or be overthrown and replaced by a leader that America’s Government will approve of (actually appoint).
If it instead does not happen, then the U.S. Congress and President will already be obligated, by means of having passed this Resolution into law, to invade Russia in order to achieve by direct U.S. military force what Ukraine’s military had failed to achieve.
That invasion of Russia by the U.S. and its allies would constitute World War Three, WW III.
On 24 January 2023, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists issued their all-time highest ever “Doomsday Clock Announcement” that, even worse than during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when there was a Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw military Pact.
As election fraud shows, Erdoğan would never cede power – Analysis, May 17th
“We have been shown proof that election fraud by the Turkish authorities took place when the election results approved by local election committees were typed into the national database. The local campaigners gave us direct evidence of two cases – approved local election committee documents and the published final result.”Joint statement from the UK election delegation
The local election committee document in district 1234, Bismil, Diyarbakir shows 233 votes for the Green Left Party (YSP)
While the final result reported shows 0 for YSP and 233 for the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
Similarly, in district 1912 in Hakkari, the local election committee document shows 228 for YSP and 0 for MHP
While the officially published result shows 228 for MHP and 0 for YSP.
The YSP is trying to challenge these cases with the Supreme Electoral Board, and a representative of the party in Diyarbakır told the UK group that they are aware of hundreds of instances of this happening, and the number is continuously changing due to administrative complications at each point in the process.
The official deadline for complaints was Tuesday 16 May 3pm, but the state has been unresponsive to most of the cases raised by the YSP.
This, in combination with the tactics of the AKP members of local election committees asking for numerous recounts, means that these suspicious results were sent late to the national election system so that there has been limited time to challenge any fraud.
Cases of human rights violations in Turkey in April included 169 deaths and 339 incidents of torture or maltreatment, with 78 of them taking place in prisons, where five inmates also died, local media reported on Saturday, citing a report by a main opposition party lawmaker.Turkish Minute–
see also..How Turkey’s Erdoğan uses social media to cling onto power In his campaign to hold onto Turkey’s presidency, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a secret weapon: a social media crackdown partly inspired by Europe. “The passing of the so-called disinformation bill is expected to assist the governing alliance in silencing opposition parties and critical media coverage,” according to a report on Turkey by Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that tracks global human rights issues….
The UK Independent delegation confirmed what was also reported by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly (OSCEPA) that “the incumbent president and the ruling parties enjoyed an unjustified advantage, including through biased media coverage.
The continued restrictions on fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression hindered the participation of some opposition politicians and parties, civil society and independent media in the election process… there was a lack of transparency and communication, as well as concerns over its independence.”
The independent UK delegation saw several instances of electoral interference on the election day. This included, for instance, military officers intimidating local voters in Şemdinli and hundreds of military personnel arriving to vote in Büyükçiftlik, Yüksekova that were unknown to local people.
The delegation witnessed at least 30 of the soldiers attending a special booth that only military personnel were voting at.
Widespread repression and harassment by police of the Kurdish opposition party was witnessed over several weeks of their delegation like arrests of opposition politicians and party members, journalists and lawyers, and police suppression of rallies.
see also..State-run TRT provided 91 times more airtime to Erdoğan than to rival … Public broadcaster Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) dedicated 91 times more airtime to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan than to Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, his main rival in the May 14 presidential election…
This is, in fact, a long-term systematic interference of the electoral freedom. The repression of the Turkish state is ever-present. Several YSP officials told us that if Erdogan wins, they expect to be in prison.
Statement from UK election monitors in Southeast Turkey, on large-scale electoral fraud on 14th May
As election fraud shows, Erdoğan would never cede power – Analysis, May 17th
“We have been shown proof that election fraud by the Turkish authorities took place when the election results approved by local election committees were typed into the national database. The local campaigners gave us direct evidence of two cases – approved local election committee documents and the published final result.”Joint statement from the UK election delegation
The local election committee document (above) in district 1234, Bismil, Diyarbakir shows 233 votes for the Green Left Party (YSP)
While the final result reported shows 0 for YSP and 233 for the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
Similarly, in district 1912 in Hakkari, the local election committee document (above) shows 228 for YSP and 0 for MHP
While the officially published result shows 228 for MHP and 0 for YSP.
The YSP is trying to challenge these cases with the Supreme Electoral Board, and a representative of the party in Diyarbakır told the UK group that they are aware of hundreds of instances of this happening, and the number is continuously changing due to administrative complications at each point in the process.
Cases of human rights violations in Turkey in April included 169 deaths and 339 incidents of torture or maltreatment, with 78 of them taking place in prisons, where five inmates also died, local media reported on Saturday, citing a report by a main opposition party lawmaker.Turkish Minute–
The official deadline for complaints was Tuesday 16 May 3pm, but the state has been unresponsive to most of the cases raised by the YSP.
This, in combination with the tactics of the AKP members of local election committees asking for numerous recounts, means that these suspicious results were sent late to the national election system so that there has been limited time to challenge any fraud.
see also..How Turkey’s Erdoğan uses social media to cling onto power In his campaign to hold onto Turkey’s presidency, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a secret weapon: a social media crackdown partly inspired by Europe. “The passing of the so-called disinformation bill is expected to assist the governing alliance in silencing opposition parties and critical media coverage,” according to a report on Turkey by Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that tracks global human rights issues….
The UK Independent delegation confirmed what was also reported by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly (OSCEPA) that “the incumbent president and the ruling parties enjoyed an unjustified advantage, including through biased media coverage.
The continued restrictions on fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression hindered the participation of some opposition politicians and parties, civil society and independent media in the election process… there was a lack of transparency and communication, as well as concerns over its independence.”
The independent UK delegation saw several instances of electoral interference on the election day. This included, for instance, military officers intimidating local voters in Şemdinli and hundreds of military personnel arriving to vote in Büyükçiftlik, Yüksekova that were unknown to local people.
The delegation witnessed at least 30 of the soldiers attending a special booth that only military personnel were voting at.
Widespread repression and harassment by police of the Kurdish opposition party was witnessed over several weeks of their delegation like arrests of opposition politicians and party members, journalists and lawyers, and police suppression of rallies.
see also..State-run TRT provided 91 times more airtime to Erdoğan than to rival … Public broadcaster Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) dedicated 91 times more airtime to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan than to Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, his main rival in the May 14 presidential election…
This is, in fact, a long-term systematic interference of the electoral freedom. The repression of the Turkish state is ever-present. Several YSP officials told us that if Erdogan wins, they expect to be in prison.
Statement from UK election monitors in Southeast Turkey, on large-scale electoral fraud on 14th May
How can an elite of usurpers, aware of their mediocrity, establish their privileges? By one means only: debasing the colonised to exalt themselves, denying the title of humanity to the natives, and defining them simply as absences of qualities – animals, not humans. This does not prove hard to do, for the system deprives them […]
Irish Anarchist Network The Dublin Anarchist Bookfair takes place on Saturday 20 May 2023 at the Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. The bookfair will be set up in a large room in which you can browse radical books and campaign stalls. Additionally, we have two meeting rooms and throughout the day you can […]
The Free 