This week Cypress spoke with Io Ascarium. The conversation covered their work as a member of ABO Comix Collective and their work in comics and print.
Io is “a maurading pillar of salt just doing their best to make what
could, in a sense, be described as ‘art'” (I love them dearly but could not bring myself to write this into the actual script).
ABO Comix Collective is a group of buds and comrades working to help LGBTQ and HIV + prisoners publish their art and stay connected to the outside world. They also provide direct material aid to those inside and spread the good word of prison abolition. Their 3rd volume was released for presale earlier this month. All proceeds go back to the contributors.
This week we are happy to feature a couple of audios we did NOT record ourselves.
Resisting Militarism and Occupation in Israel
First, German comrades attending the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair last year interviewed two Israeli anarchists about resistance against the settler-colonial nation they live under. Dana is from Tel Aviv (a member of the Coalition of Women for Peace) and Aaron is from, among other groups, an anti-militarist, de-enlistment group called New Profile. Info about the Coalition of Women for Peace can be found at CoalitionOfWomen.org and you can learn more about New Profile at NewProfile.org/english/ . My voice will show up in the main segment instead of one of the interviewers who preferred not to have their voice aired here. This is followed by a brief statement by one of the interviewers who conducted the interview about their views on the reasons it was difficult to publish the critique of Israel from within Germany.
The Last Act Of The Circus Animals
After this, we’ll hear Sean Swain talk about the book he co-wrote with Travis Washington, The Last Act of the Circus Animals with his friend, Adam Bomb. Last Act is available for free in 3 parts in zine format at seanswain.org, alongside Sean’s many other writings. You can also purchase a book version of Last Act from Sprout Distro. We won’t be airing the whole interview with Sean in the radio version of this, we simply don’t have the time. But if you want to hear the last 10 minutes or so of it, check out our podcast version available for free at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org, up on our youtube channel, spotify, etc etc. Keep an ear out in the next month for a conversation with Anthony Rayson and Mike of South Chicago ABC, the group that among many other things, first published The Last Act of the Circus Animals.
Announcements
Bad News
TFSR is a member of the A-Radio Network. Check our show notes for a link to the latest edition of our monthly podcast, BAD News: Angry Voices from Around The World, featuring anarchist perspectives from Greece, Germany, France and Chile.
Michael Kimble phone-zap
From Monday, December 23rd onward, there will be a phone zap for supporters of anarchist prisoner Michael Kimble to call and press his captors in the Alabama Department of Corrections to demand a transfer for Michael from Holman Correctional. Michael was recently placed in segregation for coming to the defense of a fellow prisoner being beaten by a guard. He is urgently asking for support in attaining that transfer to a new facility so as to not face retaliation in the shadows from guards for his solidarity. Supporters suggest calling the following officials:
Alabama DOC Commissioner’s Office (Ask for Commissioner Jeff Dunn) 334.353.3883
Holman Correctional (Ask for Warden Cynthia Stewart) 251.368.8173
To learn more about Michael and read some of his writings, check out AnarchyLive.noblogs.org or issues of FireAnt. You can hear our interviews with Michael on TFSR.
Anarchist Days, July 13-19, 2020
After various attempts to break with the endogamy of our collectives, of trying and failing to move beyond merely interpreting the works of the classical anarchists, we have decided to launch this call. Our objective is to meet others and exchange experiences, skills, ideas and dreams; to return anarchism to the streets and incorporate it into everyday life.
Now, more than ever, we want to see this society go up in flames. We need to get together, to advance from the lessons we have learned, to listen to each other without arrogance or submission. In this vein, this call for a week of “Anarchist Days” seeks to turn our focus and energy to the practices and resistances of everyday life; the spaces where subversive ideas and practices germinate.
We hope that wherever this call reaches, there will be a response because the fury and fire know no borders. We also want to be clear that homophobes, sexists, machos, racists, fascists, government affiliates, etc. are not welcome.
Important Dates:
December 20, 2019 to January 31, 2020 (Proposals for topics and themes)
December 20, 2019 to April 30, 2020 (Proposals for workshops, activities, discussions, presentations, actions, etc.)
This week on The Final Straw Radio, I’m happy to share a conversation with Rozalinda, Pura and Lynn from La Villita Red de Solidaridad or the Little Village Solidarity Network in so-called Chicago, IL. LVSN, in the English-language acronym, is an autonomous community organizing project based in La Villita or Little Village neighborhood and networks with other residents of the area. If you’re listening to the podcast or online version of this episode, just an fyi that there is cursing, but compared to putting babies in jails which offends more?
In the first hour, LVSN members talk about organizing on the ground against Heartland Alliance, a 501c3 non-profit running baby jails for federal funding (they call them shelters) around Chicago, in coalition with the Chicago Catholic Arch-Dioecese. Soon, at our website, on youtube, spotify and other sites we offer a 2 hour version of this conversation, including our Sean Swain segment and LVSN comrades’ words directed at people resisting detention facilities around the country.
LVSN also speaks about the case of Jose, a young father who was in these facilities and faces deportation currently from Texas where his family is. Information about Jose’s case and how to support him can be found, alongside more info about the work of LVSN, on their fedbook page and twitter account or at their website, lvsolidaridad.com.
In an update to Jose’s situation, he has gotten a stay of deportation. You can donate to his case via the lvsn venmo (@lavillitasolidaridad) or paypal to rborcila@yahoo.com. You can see and hear Jose in his own words in testimony on vimeo talking about what kids on the inside experience noise demos outside and the sense of desperation of the youth inside. And here is another of Jose describing the experience of staff attempting to extract information about his loved ones by Heartland Staff, in particular how it’s experienced by children in the jails.
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Keep an eye out in our podcast stream, website and social media for a link to the latest episode of BADNews, angry voices from around the world. BADNews is a 2 and a half year-running, collaborative, monthly anarchist news show in English with participation by anarchist radio and podcast projects from around Europe and all over the so-called Americas, North, South and Central. Find our back episodes up at a-radio-network.org.
This week we are super pleased to present an interview done with Sima Lee, who is a queer Afro-Indigenous hip hop artist and community organizer of long standing, about a recent raid that occurred at Maroon House in DC this March. We speak about Maroon House, its story and what it is in the process of becoming, the ask for support in helping this movement build and heal from the brutal police repression, her newest album Trap Liberation Army, and many more topics.
Sima Lee has given some interviews recently about her political trajectory, her life, and relationship to anarchism in detail. Rather than having a repeat of those words, we are going to link her past interviews below!
Link to Bandcamp where there was an ask for monetary donation to help support the Maroon Movement and the Food, Clothing & Resistance Collective.
This week we are pleased to present a paper given at the 2019 north american anarchist studies network that took place this year in Atlanta Georgia by e ornelas who presents a thoroughly de-colonial reading of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Word for World is Forest. The paper is entitled “If You Wait, It Is We That Will be Burned: Exploring Violence and Resistance in Ursula LeGuins The Word for World is Forest”. You can find the full text of this book up at the anarchist library. This book of LeGuin’s was written in the early 1970s and was first published as part of the anthology “Again, Dangerous Visions” and subsequently published as a separate novella as part of LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle, to be read in a loose trilogy with her other novels “The Dispossessed” and “Left Hand of Darkness”. As e ornelas states in their paper, this novella is not among LeGuin’s most popular but carries very strong anti-colonial and anti-militaristic overtones which was in part a reaction to the invasion of Vietnam by US imperialist forces, also called the Resistance War Against America, which occurred from 1955-1975 and whose traumas and repercussions can be felt and seen to this day.
This book was striking to me in the sense that it presents a world view that starkly challenges that of colonial “westernized” minds through themes of an intense sensitivity to and interconnectedness with the environment and of the relationships with language, dreaming, and culture. What was great to me about this aspect to the story is that it shows very plainly the extent to which colonizers find “illegibility” on the part of Indigenous people to be deeply threatening, but can also be a pivotal place of strength with potentials all their own, and we can see this aspect in real life all around us as well.
While I have my own problems with the book, and would love to hear listeners responses to it if they have them, it also gives me a sense of a thru line between past struggle and analysis all the way to now, an intergenerationality that we are sometimes lacking in as anarchists.
I’d like to read a short quote from the introduction to the book by LeGuin, and this gives a little bit of a sense of why she wrote it and what was happening for her at the time:
“All through the sixties, in my home city in the States, I had been helping organize and participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Viet Nam. I don’t know how many times I walked down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish, and obstinate, along with ten or twenty or a hundred other foolish and obstinate souls. There was always somebody taking pictures of us—not the press—odd-looking people with cheap cameras: John Birchers? FBI? CIA? Crackpots? No telling. I used to grin at them, or stick out my tongue. One of my fiercer friends brought a camera once and took pictures of the picture-takers. Anyhow, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate from my writing.
In England that year, a guest and a foreigner, I had no such outlet. And 1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The lies and hypocrisies redoubled: so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of noncombatants in the name of ‘peace’ was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of ‘man.’ The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous.
It was from such pressures, internalized, that this story resulted: forced out, in a sense, against my conscious resistance. I have said elsewhere that I never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely— and with less pleasure.”
After this talk, we are gonna play some music commemorating the the 20th anniversary of the WTO Protests in Seattle, which occurred from November 30 – December 1st 1999.
Both of these tracks were found on a 2003 compilation for attendees of the WTO protests in Cancun, Mexico. If you’re interested in learning more about the protests, check out writings up at crimethInc.com, there’s a video up there called “Breaking The Spell” with tons of original footage. It’s way more legit than the bs, liberal, star-studded movie called “The Battle Of Seattle.”
The two songs are:
“Eugene The Anarchist” by Desert Rat, a socialist songwriter, parodying the menacing media coverage of insurrectional anarchists from Eugene and other places in the pacific northwest in the run up to and following the 1999 WTO protests. Ooooh, property destruction…
“PSA #12” by The Infernal Noise Brigade. This doomy marching band was known to show at large demonstrations and percussively stoke the fires of revolt with their horns, drums and dark xylophones.
So there has recently been attempts by ICE and DHS to investigate radical groups in Asheville. This scrutiny is coming amid an escalating pattern of ICE and DHS presence and terrorism all across North Carolina, some of which we have covered on this show before and has been all over other media as well. Since its inception in 2002, ICE has continued a trend of targeted and racist oppression, and as it stands it is the largest investigative branch of DHS. This past month saw opposition to ICE in Raleigh where ICE Director Albence was being hosted along with Acting Homeland Secretary Wolf in a press conference given by the Republican Speaker. The group Never Again, which is a Jewish group formed to counter ICE violence with a specific aim to oppose the systematic dehumanization which is the cornerstone of how ICE operates, is holding a month of actions all around the country this December. More about that at neveragainaction.com.
And Asheville is no different, we have seen an increase in ICE and DHS all over this town. Here is a statement on behalf of the newly formed group Asheville Anti-Repression which was developed to deal with this situation:
“Asheville Anti Racism was recently alerted to the existence of an investigation being conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security on November 4, 2019. Riseup.net received a subpoena requesting any and all records/information related to names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, MAC addresses, payment information for the following email: ashevilleantiracism@riseup.net
Riseup responded to the request on October 21, 2019 indicating that they do not keep records of the information that was requested and that they planned on notifying the account by email after one week of the existence of the subpoena.
ICE is a threat to our communities, regardless of whether you are a citizen or not. We maintain the position that ICE should be abolished and will continue to push back against this investigation. There are no individuals named in this subpoena and we do not know the reason for this request. With the knowledge of the existence of the investigation we bring you a reminder to not talk to agents of law enforcement.
Please take care in the ways that you discuss this investigation as to not endanger yourselves or others: Speculation, gossip, and rumors can only harm yourself and you communities. We do want people to not feel afraid to continue to work together, to act, and to stand up for their ideals for a world without borders. Please take time to make sure you have access to an attorney, and to refresh yourselves on your legal rights, security culture and technological security practices.
If you need access to more resources to a lawyer or if you are approached by an agent, please send an email to AshevilleAntiRepression@riseup.net
Reminder that we are not lawyers, and cannot offer any legal advice. Additionally, please do not disclose sensitive information in an email to us. We will connect you with an attorney so you can confidentially discuss the details of your situation.”
