A special message from anarchist prisoner Jeremy Hammond
A raised fist to you all this June 11th! May this letter find you in revolutionary health and spirits. Although I am unable to be with you physically on this occasion due to being held in captivity by the BOP, I still feel connected with you on this day of solidarity. It was nice to run the 5K with you a few days ago for Running Down The Walls. I also sent out a few dozen origami models decorated with June 11th anarchist tattoos; you should be receiving those shortly.
Big ups to the other anarchist comrades behind bars. We have been through a lot of trials and tribulations over the years: harassment from abusive guards, solitary confinement, diesel therapy, the mind-numbing frustrations from battling the brutal bureaucracy for so many years. Never have we been alone, however. Continue reading “Jeremy Hammond: Anarchist Hero sends Message from Prison”
”World Oceans Day also offered us an opportunity to showcase new and emerging opportunities e.g. wave and tidal energy potential, international telecommunication (through submarine cables) and for making the sustainable use of coastal and marine resources an integral part of our development agenda and in so doing ensuring that measures are put in place to safeguard this resource for future generations.
Why do we celebrate World Oceans Day? To remind everyone of the major part the Ocean has in everyday life. They are the lungs of our planet, providing most of the oxygen we breathe. To inform the public on the impact of the human actions on the Ocean. .. To develop a worldwide movement of citizens, towards the Ocean. …To celebrate together the beauty, the wealth and the promise of the Ocean” …..
1.POLLUTION: We must prevent, reduce and control the level of pollution entering the Caribbean Sea from both land and marine based sources. These include pollution from untreated sewage, from garbage which eventually ends up as marine litter, from agrochemical run-off – pesticides and fertilisers, from the run-off of soil from poor land-use practices and from maritime transportation including oil spills and discharge of ballast water. Continue reading “Carribean climate chaos, dead zones, plastic dumps, coral collapse, predatory Capitalism ..”
Since the middle of December last year there has been an ongoing revolt in Sudan. This outbreak of rebellion a continuation of earlier struggles against the regime of Omar al-Bashir. In April, escalating protests led to a round the clock sit in occupation of the Military HQ demanding the fall of the regime.
Sudanese protesters mock al-Hadath TV’s coverage with fake cameras and joke interviews (MEE/Kaamil Ahmed)
The military – under the pretext of siding with the revolutionaries – used this unrest to stage a coup and oust al-Bashir and install themselves as the Transitional Military Council(TMC), many of the people on this council had ties to the old regime and to the notorious Janjaweed – an Arab ethno-nationalist militia (re-branded under al-Bashir as the Rapid Support Forces or RSF) involved in war crimes and genocide in Darfur.
Update.. Support General Strike
Many shops and businesses in Khartoum were closed on the second day Monday of the general strike and civil disobedience campaign, aimed at putting pressure on TMC to relinquish power. Opposition and protest groups called for the campaign after security forces stormed the protest camp on June 3, killing scores of people and dealing a blow to hopes of a peaceful transition. The US is supporting the military via its Saudi and UAE proxies. Several protest leaders have been deported and more protestors murdered.Sudan uprising: updates from Al Jazeera English
Janjaweed.. the notorious militia were set loose on the protestors
The TMC began to criminalize the protests and declared the sit-in a “security threat”. Only days after the declaration the RSF attacked and cleared out the sit in with live ammo and burned down the tents at the sit in while the army watched. The RSF continued on a rampage all over Khartoum with a confirmed count of over 100 dead and 650 wounded.
The RSF occupation of Khartoum is still ongoing and the TMC has had the internet shut off for over 72 hours making reports of what’s going on hard to come by, but calls have come from the movement for “total civil disobedience” and there is sporadic video and text of people resisting all over Sudan.
“current situation:
– resistance activities at peak, w/ most roads barricaded
– intermittent sound of gunfire heard across neighborhoods
– call to prayer made in most neighborhoods; in some, RSF prevented ppl from attending, in others people insisted on fasting”#SudanUprisinghttps://t.co/Jg7BChIbHw
— Munchkin (@BSonblast) June 4, 2019
Why Does This Matter
Let’s be clear, what’s at stake is the spreading of a rebellious energy across the Middle East and the African Continent that threatens the political order. That’s why regional powers and allies of the US – Saudi Arabia and the UAE – have supported the TMC and their repression of Sudanese rebels.
We find ourselves in a moment of international right wing reaction with fascistic, white supremacist, and other authoritarian movements and states seizing or consolidating power all around the world. Our enemies have spent many years networking and building internationally, capitalizing on both human and environmental crisis, but these crises don’t have a single road out that leads to authoritarian power that we try desperately to react to. These moments also give us opportunity to link and build power with others, who may or may not be or call themselves anarchists but who share the anarchic spirit for total freedom.
We think it is no accident that the height of the anarchist movement – to what ever degree we identify with that history – was precisely when it was an internationalistmovement. Just as capitalism and state power are global – and generate global crisis – so too must the fight against it be.
Call for Anarchist Solidarity
We are calling for immediate acts of solidarity with rebels in Sudan (and against the Sudanese & Saudi state) – whether that’s banner drops, graffiti and wheat-pasting, informational tabling, rowdy marches & demos, fundraisers to help Sudanese doctors get medical supplies, or other creative acts of intervention that make sense in your context.
Sudanese protesters burn tyres as they block Nile Street for the second consecutive day during continuing protests in Sudan’s capital Khartoum on 13 May 2019 (AFP)
Sudanese protesters burn tyres as they block Nile Street for the second consecutive day during continuing protests in Sudan’s capital Khartoum on 13 May 2019 (AFP)
While this call is for immediate reaction we should be taking time to look at our local terrain to find private or state run entities with economic ties to the Sudanese or Saudi state and act against them to move our solidarity from what is most likely symbolic actions to show the people of Sudan they are not alone to a combative solidarity that impedes the smooth functioning of the TMC, the states that support and supply it, and the logistical flows of the supplies used to repress the uprising.
Solidarity is never a one off action, but a constant process of building relationships with other anarchists and movements for liberation, of examining, acting, and learning to build a materially effective practice of attack. International solidarity is key because Capital, it’s defenders, and it’s reaction fights globally and so should we.
For anarcha-feminists, the struggle against patriarchy is an inherent part of the struggle to abolish the state and abolish capitalism, since the state itself is a patriarchal structure.
Although there is a rich, global history of people of color and/or feminist anarchist movements, within the U.S., it’s not uncommon for anarchist spaces to suffer major blind spots when it comes to race and gender.
Given that anarchism, even more than socialism and communism, explicitly denounces any form of hierarchy in political organizing, it is especially ironic when white male anarchists fail to recognize the ways in which they replicate hierarchy by participating in racist and patriarchal forms of domination against their comrades.
So here is a brief introduction to anarcha-feminism—loosely defined as a political philosophy and movement whose goal is not only to abolish the capitalist state, but also all forms of patriarchal domination as well.
Anarcha-feminists do not see the goals of feminism as distinct from anarchism—rather, they see feminism (in its true form) as a kind of anarchism, and vice versa. For anarcha-feminists, the struggle against patriarchy is an inherent part of the struggle to abolish the state and abolish capitalism, since the state itself is a patriarchal structure.
mujeres libres
In a manifesto titled “Anarcho-Feminism: Two Statements,” the authors note: “We believe that a Woman’s Revolutionary Movement must not mimic, but destroy, all vestiges of the male-dominated power structure, the State itself — with its whole ancient and dismal apparatus of jails, armies, and armed robbery (taxation); with all its murder; with all of its grotesque and repressive legislation and military attempts, internal and external, to interfere with people’s private lives and freely-chosen co-operative ventures.”
Below are a list of some anarcha-feminists and anarcha-feminist groups, both historic and present, to get you started:
#Chiapas: The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway is back and so is the resistance
Chiapas, Mexico:The highway is heating up conflicts in the region.Originally published by Chiapas Support.The San Cristobal-Palenque highway is key to an elaborate tourism development plan, the Palenque Integral Center (CIP, its initials in Spanish), which includes a lush green jungle area in the northern zone of Chiapas, the Agua Azul Cascades, the Misol Ha waterfall and the magnificent archaeological site of Palenque.Agua Azul Cascades. [1]The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway and the Palenque Integral Center are part of a regional development plan for Mesoamerica, originally known as the Plan Puebla-Panamá (PPP). [2]The PPP included numerous infrastructure projects that prompted strong opposition from social, environmental and human rights organizations, as well as academics and organized indigenous communities.That led governments and planners to silence the most controversial projects contained in the plan and to re-name it the Mesoamerica Project.In Chiapas, at least up to now, the most controversial projects within the Mesoamerica Project have been the San Cristobal-Palenque highway and the Palenque Integral Center. They go together; the CIP needs the highway to facilitate tourism.
Residents of the areas affected by these projects have had two general concerns: 1) dispossession of the lands of indigenous communities of subsistence farmers through which the highway would pass and the effects on those communities and 2) the massive amount of tourism envisioned in the Palenque Integral Center.
Perhaps the best articulation of why the Zapatista communities and other pro-Zapatista indigenous communities oppose and resist the superhighway and the Palenque Integral Center may be in the words of Miguel Vazquez Moreno, a Zapatista supporter from the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido, who was briefly a political prisoner as a result of resistance to the superhighway and the tourism megaproject.
“I am a native of the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido and I am part of the EZLN’s support base, an organization that defends its right to exercise autonomy and self-determination as indigenous peoples, its right to territory and to natural resources.
They [the federal and state governments] want to impose neoliberal economic projects on our autonomous territory. As indigenous people, the land is our life, we eat from it, we work, our children grow and it is something sacred, therefore we consider that the land is not for sale but to work and care for. Our territory is rich in water, animals and natural resources.
They want to make it into a ‘Chiapas Cancun’ by plundering the indigenous of our life, that is, the land, just so that foreign and national companies can become richer, as well as the government officials that benefit from these projects. They want to cross through our autonomous territory without respecting our rights.
They want to impose these projects on indigenous peoples without giving importance to our word, and with discrimination they want to remove us from our lands for tourist purposes and only to benefit rich developers and the federal and state government, putting us aside because to them we give a bad appearance to those eco-tourist centers, being that we are original peoples, descendants of the peoples that have lived on these lands since before anything like an official government existed.” [3]
The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway would pass through small rural indigenous communities, both Zapatista and non-Zapatista, thus dispossessing each community of some of its land and, possibly, dividing those lands in two.
It would also alter animal habitats, endanger animal species and cause air pollution from the giant tourist buses. This is not a highway to facilitate local traffic between one town and the next. It’s a superhighway (toll road) to facilitate international mega-tourism arriving by both airplane and cruise ship.
Cruise ships dock at Puerto Chiapas and from there passengers can then board giant tourist buses to visit the world-famous Palenque archaeological site and other sites, such as the Agua Azul Cascades, within the mega tourism project that the CIP envisions. Imagine the volume of tourism a completed San Cristóbal-Palenque superhighway and CIP would bring when combined with a completed Maya Train station in Palenque bringing tourists to Palenque from Cancun!
Stop the war against the Zapatistas
It would transform life and culture, as we now know it in that area of Chiapas. Like Miguel Vazquez Moreno above, some have dubbed the CIP “the new Cancun.” [4]
The CIP contains an elaborate plan to convert the area surrounding the Agua Azul Cascades into a “world-class resort destination.” The government plan includes a Boutique Hotel, a European 5-
Star Hotel, a Conference Center with golf course, and a Lodge overlooking the waterfall at Bolom Ajaw, a Zapatista community on land reclaimed in the 1994 uprising.
Luxury tourists would have to helicopter into the Lodge at Bolom Ajaw due to its remoteness, so plans for the lodge include a helipad!
The Agua Azul area has been a flashpoint of conflict between pro-government communities (in favor of luxury tourist development because the government has promised them a cut of the income) and pro-Zapatista communities (opposed to development based on luxury tourism).
The controversial project pAgua Azul, of roposed for which a superhighway is key to attracting large numbers of tourists, has already generated three pro-Zapatista deaths (one in Mitzitón and 2 in San Sebastián Bachajón), numerous violent conflicts, serious bodily injuries, political prisoners, death threats, torture and the death of at least one government supporter in Bolom Ajaw. The San Sebastián Bachajón ejido includes the entryway to the Agua Azul Cascades.
The government argues that these tourist projects will bring jobs and income into a very poor state, while Zapatista supporters, their sympathizers and allies argue that the volume of tourism envisioned will damage the environment, their food security, their autonomy and their way of life; that is, their culture.
Government planners envision converting autonomous subsistence farmers, who believe that the land is sacred, into busboys, maids and bellhops.
The Los Llanos court decision
The Los Llanos ejido is located on the current highway to Palenque, close to where the new highway was originally supposed to start. It is across the highway from the Mitzitón ejido, near the intersection where the current highway to Palenque forks off from the Pan American Highway.
In January 2014, the Los Llanos ejido filed for an injunction against the new superhighway crossing through their lands, based on their right to a prior, free and informed consultation (consulta) about the project. [5]
The government had not followed the United Nations protocol for consulting with Los Llanos before starting construction. A temporary injunction against highway construction was in place while the case was pending. Two years later, in January 2016, the court granted an amparo (permanent injunction) to Los Llanos, ruling that the government failed to conduct the required consultation with the affected communities. [6]
The court decision prevented construction of the superhighway, but only in the municipalities of San Cristóbal de las Casas and Huixtán, where Mitzitón and Los Llanos are located, leaving open the possibility of either re-routing the controversial superhighway or improving the existing highway.
Approximately 9 months after Los Llanos filed its court case, opposition to the San Cristóbal-Palenque superhighway emerged again and it was from La Candelaria ejido in the Chiapas municipality of San Juan Chamula. More than 2,000 representatives, including people of faith belonging to Pueblo Creyente, attended this meeting at La Candelaria’s sacred site of Laguna Suyul and vowed to resist the highway. [7]
The clear implication of this important meeting was that government planners intended to re-route the superhighway to begin in San Juan Chamula, a municipality bordering on San Cristóbal de las Casas, and pass close to the sacred Laguna Suyul site.
A map of the route is shown in the article. The recent news article about resistance in San Juan Cancuc means that the new route remains pretty much the same as that shown at the time of the La Candelaria meeting and would pass through San Juan Cancuc over the mountains in the direction of the Agua Azul Cascades.
Many of the municipalities and organizations represented in La Candelaria have joined San Juan Cancuc in resisting the new route for the superhighway. They issued a statement as members of the Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (Modevite). [8]
The list of municipalities signing the statement is a good indicator of the superhighway’s new route and the municipalities that would be affected.
Members of the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) during the celebration act of the New Year in the community of La Garrucha,PHOTO /BERNARDO DE NIZ
Chiapas: Frayba Denounces Intensification of Attacks against Indigenous Peoples since December 2018
On May 27th, the Fray Bartolome de Las Casas Center for Human Rights published a bulletin warning that, “aggressions against peoples, communities and organizations have intensified as part of a strategy to contain civil and peaceful resistance in defense of territory.” Two years after the Constituent Assembly of the Indigenous Council of Government (CIG in its Spanish acronym), of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI in its Spanish acronym).
It illustrated the statement by referring to the six indigenous defenders who have been murdered so far in 2019, as well as mentioning the CNI’s own denunciations since December 2018 with situations of “dispossession, forced displacement, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, threats, harassment, criminalization and attempts of executions.”
Frayba denounced that “this logic of war against the peoples that build autonomy, is reproduced in the increase of militarization of Zapatista territories, especially the incursions, flights and espionage of the Mexican Army to the headquarters of the Junta de Buen Government Toward Hope, in La Realidad Caracol (Official Municipality of Las Margaritas). This containment is deepened by the presence of the National Guard in the region, which increases risks to the integrity and security of the population.”
In this context, Frayba demanded that the Mexican State: “Cease the attacks against peoples, communities and organizations that make up the National Indigenous Congress; justice for the defenders and communicators murdered in the country; and high militarization in Chiapas and Mexico.”
After 200 days of incomparable historical resistance, the hunger strikes in Kurdistan, Turkey and Europe have been declared over today
We send our warmest revolutionary greetings to all comrades who took part in the hunger strike and the many resistance actions and congratulate the free peoples on this victory.
Ocalan in the past has declared long ceasefires with the Turkish State rejecting terrorism and separatism in favour of ‘municipal anarchist’ communal ideas and feminist emancipation which have swept through the over 15 million Kurdish population.
On November 8, 2018 the Kurdish politician Leyla Güven had started her hunger strike to lift the total isolation against Abdullah Öcalan, the representative of the Kurdish people and philosophical thought leader of the revolution in Northeast Syria. Continue reading “Mass Hunger Strikes end in Victory over Fascist Terror.. 8 dead”
Some, to their credit, have spoken out against the relentless persecution of the white-haired Australian truth-teller.
But it’s nothing compared to the outrage that could and should be stirred. Most journalists in the west have stayed as silent as Trappist monks with sore throats, or actually taken the side of the authorities acting against Assange.
Just imagine, as I discussed here if Julian was a Russian dissident, being treated in the same way by the Russian authorities. Then we’d be seeing column after column in ‘serious newspapers’ urging people to join the ‘Free Assange’ campaign. Celebrities would be falling over themselves to show their support. There’d be calls for yet more sanctions to be imposed on Russia, and to be maintained until the ‘political prisoner’ was released. But who so far has come out in defense of Assange, save for Pamela Anderson and Roger Waters? Where are the great ‘human rights defenders’?
Assange’s fears about being extradited to the US – the real reason he took refuge in the Embassy – were laughed at.
In 2010 Assange stated: “The big risk, the risk we have always been concerned about, is onwards extradition to the United States. And that seems to be increasingly likely.”
Now that the indictments from the US have come, will those who rubbished Julian’s concerns have the good grace to admit they were wrong, and that his flight to the Ecuadorian Embassy was justified?
Among those who owe Assange an apology is Emma Arbuthnot, the senior district judge, who in February 2018 said she did not find Assange’s fears of extradition to the US were “reasonable.”
But they were, as yesterday’s events prove.
Regarding the Swedish angle, we know from leaked emails the pressure put on the Swedes by the British authorities not to drop the investigation into Assange. “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!” the Swedes were told.
It’s hard to believe that similar exhortations weren’t made again following Assange’s removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy and lo and behold on Monday it was announced that prosecutors in Sweden have asked the courts to detain Assange in absentia as part of an investigation into rape allegations.
Of course rape allegations are serious. Yet how many ‘liberal’ commentators have been talking or writing of Assange being “charged with rape” or “fleeing rape charges” or even call him “a rapist”- when it wasn’t factually correct? The old legal principle ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is thrown out of the window when Assange is concerned. It’s not just a case of ‘guilty as charged’, with Assange it’s ‘guilty even though there has been no charge’.
The great ‘crime’ of Julian – and the reason he’ll probably never be at liberty again, was to pull back the curtain to show us what was behind it.
To reveal what our governments, which we pay for, were doing in our name. He exposed Western war crimes. He showed us what was really going on. He published information which we, as taxpayers, had every right to know. He was Tobermory, the talking cat, in Saki’s classic short-story.
Yet while Assange languishes in jail, and faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars, those who planned the most heinous of war crimes, such as the illegal invasion of Iraq which led to the deaths of one million people and the rise of the genocidal death cult Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), go free.
Even if you think the founder of WikiLeaks should face some form of punishment or penalty for publishing leaked documents, you cannot honestly maintain that sentences of up to 175 years in jail are proportionate.
Assange is being destroyed to deter others from following in his path.
If journalists and politically-minded ‘celebrities’ stay silent on this great injustice, this crime against the profession they claim to represent, this crime against the truth and against common humanity, then they should kindly spare us their ‘outrage’ on other issues.
by Neil Clark @NeilClark66 Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries . He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at https://neilclark66.blogspot.com
Continue reading “Jeremy Hammond: Anarchist Hero sends Message from Prison”
Agua Azul Cascades. [1]The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway and the Palenque Integral Center are part of a regional development plan for Mesoamerica, originally known as the Plan Puebla-Panamá (PPP). [2]The PPP included numerous infrastructure projects that prompted strong opposition from social, environmental and human rights organizations, as well as academics and organized indigenous communities.
The Free 