A quick round-up of repression-related news across a few different countries:
According to a statement from Scotland Against Criminalising Communities:
“It was said in court that Issam attended an alleged meeting of the New IRA in Omagh on 19 July. The meeting was bugged by MI5.
Issam’s lawyer claimed that his client had been “pestered” into attending the meeting – which he believed would be a public meeting with an “exclusively political purpose” – by an MI5 agent who has been named in court as Dennis McFadden.
Issam says he gave the meeting an update and political analysis of the situation in Palestine. He has had a political connection with Saoradh for several years and has spoken at the Saorah ard fheis.
View original post 1,316 more words
“Arrested in February 1937. Two years and eight months under interrogation. That covers the whole period of the “Great Terror” with its torture methods. This woman in her fifties evidently refused to confess to anything. Otherwise she would have received a death sentence. She managed to last till the “Beria thaw” and was rewarded with five years. Who can beat that?” – A. V. Dubovik
Read the biography by Sergei Ovsiannikov https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/kh19zs
Stuart Christie recounts the anti-Fascist resistance in post war Spain, including his own attempt to assassinate the dictator Francisco Franco.
Daphne Lawless, of the New Zealand/Aotearoa-based group Fightback, has recently published a kind of post-mortem or autopsy on left populism after the near-simultaneous collapse of the Sanders and Corbyn projects. As with some of her previous work, there’s a lot in her critique of the left to agree with, but also some troubling points: she rightly attacks the “anti-imperialists” who see Russia or China as a lesser evil to the US, or those who think Trump could be a lesser evil than the Democrats, but sometimes falls into a kind of “campist” mentality of her own, defending liberals, the EU and Joe Biden at the expense of trying to argue for a genuinely independent working-class alternative. By the way, this critique turned out to be pretty long, but the piece I’m replying to is longer.
One example comes early on, in her presentation of Sanders’ defeat in the…
View original post 5,623 more words
Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.
At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as…
View original post 1,897 more words
CW: suicide
Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. Just over a week ago, the Guardian reported that the male suicide rate in the UK was the highest it had been for two decades, with an overall increase in suicides across all genders.
Suicide is a uniquely complex tragedy, and the stigma, taboo and lack of understanding that surround the issue all contribute to an environment where those who need help most are often unable to get it. Suicidality is deeply personal, and yet there is a body of evidence that social factors and political intersections such as class, race, gender, sexuality and disability all contribute to a person’s suicidality.
Despite the silence, the taboos and the stigma, suicidality is clearly an issue for communities as much as it is an issue that affects individuals. We are interconnected beings, and our suicidality inhabits the spaces created in our relationships with those…
View original post 474 more words
And where’s Charlie Elphicke M.P.? Joined his fascist nonce chums in pokey.
Anti-Fascist Network members travelled to Dover on Saturday to support the Kent Anti-Racist Network demo in support of migrants and refugee rights and against a planned far-right anti-migrant demo.
The first we heard of this a few weeks ago was when Tony Burras, a white nationalist and associate of the Pie and Mash Squad (fascist hooligans), posted an advert for a demo in Dover on 5th September. Initially it was hard to know whether this was a real thing that would amount to anything or not and over the following weeks a confusing array of right-wing grifters and wannabes piled in, making it, if anything more confusing and hard to know what was going on.
The right wing media has been fomenting a panic over migrants crossing the channel in small dinghies, pitching it as an “invasion” of unprecedented size. Nigel Farage was partly the origin of this, but…
View original post 1,524 more words
Regents Park in London contains probably the richest street in the city. Many of the mansions here are said to be ‘worth’ £165 million. Many of these large properties are empty, while just a mile away people are left to sleep in doorways. This is the situation created by capitalism and perpetuated by conservatives and nationalists when they point their fingers at vulnerable refugees fleeing British made bombs. These properties at Regents Park should be seized and put to practical use – but you will never find conservatives or nationalists demanding or proposing that – because they are on the side of the ruling class parasites and their failing capitalist system.
The real enemy is not desperate refugees risking their lives to get to safety. The real enemy is people like the 7th Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, who the capitalist system is set up for. His Dad left him £10 billion! He managed, due to trickery, to avoid paying £4 billion of this money in inheritance tax. £4 billion is enough money to pay the entire unemployment budget for the year, or the wages of 120,000 fire fighters, nurses and police officers- not that we as anarchists think the money should go to the police, but it gives you an idea of the sort of money we’re talking about. What does Hugh Grosvenor like to spend this money on? He likes to spend it on parties. These are the real parasites whose side all nationalists and fascists are on. There’s a very good reason they want to distract you from the real problem.
Don’t believe the lies and propaganda of the bourgeois establishment media who scapegoat working class people – whether it’s refugees, immigrants, single mums, the unemployed, the disabled or whoever it is.
LabourStart News Wire Libcom latest
Wessex Solidarity 