social revolution – Page 642

An Interview with the Anarchist Wikipedia Editor, Grnrchst (Part Two)

Apr 07 2022 By the Anarchist News collective/ From The Commoner

Once you get a personal Wikipedia page, you know you've made it in ANARCHY!

Grnrchst is an anarchist and prolific Wikipedia editor who has contributed to a number of the site’s articles on anarchism. In part one of the interview (which you can read here), Grnrchst shared their thoughts on Wikipedia’s principles and organisational structure, and speculates on where they might align with anarchist concepts and values. In part two, Grnrchst shares how the articles they contributed to for Wikipedia helped shaped their perspective on anarchism and global resistance.

Among the entries you’ve written, which one are you particularly proud of?

This may sound cheesy but it’s the one that hasn’t been written yet. Writing Wikipedia articles isn’t like writing a book or an essay for a journal, where there is some level of completeness to the final draft that ends up being published.

Wikipedia is a living and breathing encyclopaedia, meaning it’s never really done, but is constantly evolving, expanding and improving based on the additions of a collective. So while I’m proud of many of my entries, I’m far more proud when others help build them beyond the foundations I laid.

Of course, I appreciate that this may not be a particularly satisfying answer, so I’ll give a couple specific examples. These are works-in-progress that I am hoping will soon meet the criteria for being rated as ‘good’ articles. Maybe they could even be ‘featured articles’ some day.

Right now I am working on articles about the history of the Ukrainian anarchist movement, such as that of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, the Makhnovschina, and Nestor Makhno himself. This is a project that I am pumping a lot of hours of research and writing into and it is still far from done, but I’m very proud of what I have accomplished so far, and I am looking forward to making them even better.

Photo essay- Genocide Ignored: ‘Four Years of Turkish Occupation of Afrin’

By:Managing Editor – Syrian Democratic Times

Why aren’t there more news media reports about the situation in Afrin? Turkey does not allow reporters into the Afrin region, unless they are strictly managed and do not stray from their official Turkish handlers.

Ethnic cleansing was the goal of the Turkish invasion,. Turkey has waged a long-term war against ethnic Kurds, and the invasion of Afrin was part of that campaign. Prior to the invasion, the inhabitants of the region identifying as Kurdish was over 95 percent. Today, that number is less than 20 percent, according to the Human Rights Organization of Afrin. The Kurds who remain are subject to harassment and brutality at the hands of the Turkish authorities and the Turkish-backed militia members.

#TurkeyOutOfEfrîn

***Sinam Sherkany Mohamad is the Co-Chair of the US Mission of the Syrian Democratic Council. She is a Kurdish woman from Afrin, Syria.***

In early 2018, the Turkish military invaded Afrin. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) came to the defense of the people there in a fierce and bloody struggle, but the region fell to the advanced weaponry and air power of the Turkish military on March 18, 2018. The Turkish government now occupies the region, flying the Turkish flag and changing signs and placenames to the Turkish language, forcing schoolchildren to learn Turkish, and pasting Turkish President Erdogan’s picture in public places – patrolled by Turkish-backed militias calling themselves the “Syrian National Army.”

More than 300,000 people have fled the region of Afrin, Syria, since March 2018. Most are living as internally-displaced persons (IDPs) elsewhere in Syria. About 20 percent have been able to return to check on their homes. They have found that the homes have been looted of electronics, furniture, decorations, and anything of value. In many cases, the homes have been sold or otherwise appropriated by the occupying militia members.

One of the untold stories of Afrin is the resettlements efforts, led by the Turkish overseers and Turkish-backed militias. There have been about 400,000 people resettled into Afrin in the past four years who are not the original inhabitants. Many of these are the families of the militias who are patrolling the region, but they also include other people that Turkey didn’t want. It includes migrants from other parts of Syria who fled from Assad-government-controlled areas, such as Ghouta. It also includes 500 families of Palestinian origin who had been living in Syria.

The theft of anything of value continues in Afrin. More than 50 separate militias are operating in Afrin. Their income over the past four years has come from the theft and reselling of goods from abandoned stores, anything of value they can find in homes, the agricultural goods they can appropriate, the equipment from factories and places of business, and the abduction and ransom of the people themselves. Lately, a militia group was also found to be producing and selling the narcotic captagon in order to pay its members and fund its operations.

Caitlin Johnstone: Defending the Lies of Psychological War/ Are we Happy to be Conned?

April 7, 2022 By Caitlin Johnstone CaitlinJohnstone.com

This is the stage of narrative control where the public is trained to defend their government’s right to commit psychological warfare, even when it’s openly based on outright lies.

NBC News has a report out citing multiple anonymous U.S. officials, humorously titled “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.“

The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Moscow’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence” or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The report says that toward this end the U.S. government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisers misinforming him and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.

Psyops in the U.S. targeting the public used to be illegal, even though the way they got around it was to plant stories in the foreign press. But over the last five years beginning with Russiagate & now Ukraine, it is clear that U.S. public is fair game: https://t.co/gcEWoCZbkB
— Ajamu Baraka (@ajamubaraka) April 6, 2022