An excerpt from the transcript of the UK’s Undercover Policing Inquiry in which anarchism is explained to its Chair, Sir John Mitting.
Taken from the transcript of the hearing on 11th May 2022.
On Monday, you, as the Chair of the Inquiry, indicated you had welcomed Tariq Ali when he gave evidence in 2020 in helpfully explaining Trotskyist ideas to you.
In the light of police misconceptions about anarchists in various disclosed documents, including annual reports, I will try to explain the predominant motivations, aims and activities of anarchists and the anarchist movement as I see it.
Standing up for the public interest against the rich and powerful.
As already outlined in my previous statements, I have been involved since 1974 in a range of groups and campaigns trying to encourage the public to support one another and empower themselves where they live and work to challenge injustice, oppression and damage to the environment, and to make the world a better place for everyone.
The various groups I have been involved in over the decades have been open and collectively run, and engaged in the kind of public activities which the public are invited to join in or to replicate for themselves, and which are essential if humanity is to progress and survive in the future.
Such groups, as we all should, question and challenge those institutions which wield power over people’s lives and control the world’s resources and decision-making.
These include governments, transnational corporations, military organisations and financial institutions.
Such powerful institutions are generally tightly controlled by a small, self-serving elite, continually obsessed with power and profit, and are ruthless and unaccountable.
We have a serious debt problem, but solutions such as the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” are not the future we want. It’s time to think outside the box for some new solutions.
In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors’ prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land.
This could be done because the king was the representative of the gods who were said to own the land, and thus was the creditor to whom the debts were owed. The same policy was advocated in the Book of Leviticus, though it is unclear to what extent this biblical Jubilee was implemented.
That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can’t be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out. But we do have a serious debt problem, and it is largely structural.
Governments have delegated the power to create money to private banks, which create most of the circulating money supply as debt at interest.
They create the principal but not the interest, so more money must be repaid than was created in the original loan. Debt thus grows faster than the money supply, as seen in the chart from Workable Economics.com below.
Debt grows until it cannot be repaid, when the board is cleared by some form of market crash such as the 2008 financial crisis, typically widening the wealth gap on the way down.
Global climate engineering operations have been pushed and propagated on the premise of cooling the planet by saturating Earth’s skies with sun-blocking aerosols.
The jet sprayed aerosols are intended to mimic the effect of extended volcanic eruptions.
A new NASA science study has now confirmed that extended volcanic eruptions caused long-term warming, not cooling. Worse, the ozone layer was decimated in the process.
This 5+ minute video exposes the flawed foundations of the climate engineering narrative and the grave dangers geoengineering operations pose to all life on Earth.
While NATO and the West express horror at Russia invading Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians there is still silence at Turkey, a NATO member, invading, occupying and ethnically cleansing Afrin and other parts of North Syria for years on end.
Turkey has also invaded Iraq where it has illegal bases and constantly bombs Kurdish and Yezidi minorities there , even with US made jets from the NATO base at Incirlik
Now Turkey openly tries to blackmail NATO itself to force a further crackdown on Kurdish exiles in Europe who protest attempted physical and cultural genocide by the ruling neo fascist regime.
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Chain of Kurdish resistance attacks within Turkey and Europe … English/Catalan
Denys Prokopenko is the commander of the “Azov Regiment” – the freshly but only partially rebranded neo-Nazi militia formerly known as the Azov Battalion with its badge that still proudly sports the Nazi wolfsangel insignia (a variation of the swastika) formerly worn by divisions of the Waffen-SS during World War II. The Azov Battalion also […]
The busy and anarchist social center L’Horta celebrates its tenth anniversary with a show of strength and the ever-latent threat of the Integrated Action Program (PAI) of Benimaclet
In the neighborhood of Benimaclet, in the north of the city of Valencia, caressing the edge of the orchard despite the presence of the Ronda Nord – the metropolitan road structure that surrounds this side of the city – grows every day a historic farmhouse of high ethnological and architectural value dating from the late eighteenth century.
At the end of Carrer Diógenes López Mecho, next to Plaça de les Tretze Roses – named after the Feminist Assembly of Benimaclet – we find, always with open arms and doors, the Center Social Okupat i Anarquista (CSOA). Horta.
The estate, known since its inception as the Tello Farmhouse, dedicated to the cultivation and sale of flowers (Flores Amanda, formed by a farmhouse, courtyards and nursery on the Camí del Farinós 16–, was included in 1989 –in of the General Plan of Urban Planning (PGOU) – in an urban program that, until 1999, would be developed through expropriation and, from then until now, through a process – legitimized under the “general interest” by the municipal administration – which grants the disposition and urban exploitation of the lands to a construction company, under the name of Integrated Action Program (PAI) of Benimaclet-Est.
The Alqueria Tello was abandoned by companies and institutions, beginning a process of degradation, aggravated from 2003. In 2005 there was a first occupation
The farmhouse, which has two buildings, took on the dual function of housing project and Occupied Anarchist Social Center (CSOA). In this first stage – from 2005 to 2007 – conflicts arose between a family that lived there and the youth of the CSOA, to which was added the harassment of police and thugs paid by the ex-owner – thus assuming the end of the project of ‘occupation, both social and housing.
At the end of March 2012, during the general strike, around thirty people again occupied the estate with a clearly political aim, giving birth to what is now known as the Anarchist Occupied Social Center (CSOA) l’Horta.
Thus began the process of restoring, recovering, and cleaning the space; the buildings were rehabilitated and the land re-plowed.
‘Mafalda’ performance during the musical night of the birthday | Jaume Ferrando
According to Irene, a member of the CSOA l’Horta Political Assembly, ”. But – as they recall – the permanent alert was not the only feeling that was lived in those first months, also the illusion, for a space so full of opportunities.
“We received support from other occupied spaces, such as the now defunct CSO El Nido and CSO Proyecto Mayhem,” says Irene. And he added: “We are certainly the heirs of other spaces, of other struggles.”
Since then, the CSOA l’Horta has forged numerous links with other political spaces and projects, especially in the neighborhood where it grows, Benimaclet, such as the Feminist Assembly, the Social Center Bar (CSB) Terra or the Cuidem Benimaclet neighborhood assembly. .
At the same time he has participated in city-wide projects such as Juntes sin por, Valencia is not for sale or EntreBarris, and always with an internationalist look – in colleagues from other parts of the world, as has been evident with the visit of International Brigades over the years, such as in 2021 with the visit of the Zapatistas of La Gira Per La Vida – members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI).
Thus, for 10 years, “it has become a physical space where to carry out the different struggles –such as the struggle for housing and for the territory–, to orient a social transformation, a new world, for self-management, the occupation and transfeminism ”.
“The CSOA l’Horta has not stopped expanding beyond the green fence of the old Alqueria Tello, and weaving a revolutionary social network strengthened with dynamics based on solidarity, mutual support and, ultimately, of anarchy, ” they say.
The best strategy is to “have us”
During the first months of activity, many self-managed orchards sprang up around the farmhouse, which currently form a total of 84 plots in an area of 8,000 square meters. This is how one of the first groups in the space exploded like a new flower: Hortets. (mini gardens)
Along with Hortets, and with the passage of spring, the groups and projects multiplied. Today we find, in addition to Hortets, the Assembly of Solidarity in Mexico, the Defined Management Group, the Liberated Musical Space, the Casita de la Huerta, Muai Tai, the Anarchist Library of l’Horta, the Horta Political Assembly, Legerin Azadi, Arada, GRAMA, Teatre Mariner, the Feminist Assembly of Benimaclet and the Valencia Employment Office.
“The CSOA l’Horta is everyone’s home, if there are anyone’s homes.” This is how Adrià, a member of the CSOA l’Horta, sums it up in several of its assemblies. Who doesn’t hesitate to point out that “the best strategy is to have us.”
As we are told by the legal team, L’Horta is in constant legal danger. “It is a time of post-offensive by the SAREB, through a fund manager and toxic assets for various companies: NOW ASSET MANAGEMENT SL”, explains one of the lawyers. (note: SAREB is a state funded bank set up to manage toxic assets of other banks after the 2008 crisis.)
NATO’s northward expansion risks turning Europe into a new powder keg “Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay,” Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin jointly announced on Thursday.
A similar announcement will come from Sweden on Sunday. After its eastward expansion, NATO is moving northward, which might […] […]
