This week on The Final Straw we’re featuring a chat with Elia J. Ayoub and Leila Al-Shami. In this conversation, Elia J. tells us of some of the history of Lebanon, since the civil war that ended in 1990 and up to the current demonstrations against the clientelist warlords in power in that country. Intertwined with this, Leila speaks about the sparking of the resistance to Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, the tumult of the civil war, and the state of anti-authoritarian and social justice organizing and media work in that country. Then the two talk about the experience of countering disinformation, conspiracy thinking and poor solidarity in the so-called Left in the West and ways to combat ignorance.
This is another long conversation, covering a lot of the last 30 years in these two neighboring nations. The guests proposed speaking about the interrelations across that border because of the similarities, differences, and shared experiences between the two places. Lebanon has Syrian refugees, it was occupied by Syria until 2005. Both spaces share Palestinian refugees, experienced war with Israel, are politically influenced from Hezbollah, mostly speak Arabic and even the flames of the recent wildfires that ignited anti-regime sentiment in Lebanon last fall crossed the border between Lebanon and Syria. We hope to have future chats that play with borders in this way to explore ways we can bridge these borders in our understanding in hopes of increased solidarity.
Lebanese Protests of 2015 & 2019 [00:21:35 – 00:31:40]
Syrian Revolution to Civil War [00:31:40 – 00:41:34]
Current Social Justice Struggle in Syria [00:41:46 – 00:45:56]
Daesh / ISIS and Syrian Civil War [00:45:56 – 00:49:56]
Solidarity with Syrians in Lebanese Protests [00:49:56 – 01:05:38]
Leila on Tahrir-ICN [01:05:50 – 01:09:18]
Educating Ourselves on Syria and Lebanon [01:09:18 – 01:23:07]
White Helmets and other Conspiracy Theories [01:23:07 – 01:32:59]
Syrian Diaspora and Western Left [01:32:59 – 01:37:19]
Rojava and the Syrian Revolution [01:37:19 – 01:41:56]
Better Practice in Solidarity with people in Syria and Lebanon [01:41:56 – 01:53:38]
Announcements
Michael Kimble Benefit
Last week we announced a fundraiser for Michael Kimble. Because of issues with the platforms, the fundraiser for Michael Kimble’s legal benefit to help raise money for his fight to get him released from prison has been moved. Now you can find it at ActionNetwork.org/Fundraising/Support-Michael-Kimble . Because the fundraiser had to be moved a couple of times, some of the initial push to get word out and initial donations may be irreplaceable. So, folks are asking for an extra push to help rasie this money to get our comrade out and organizing on the outside after 33 years behind bars.
BADNews February 2020 (#31)
This month, the A-Radio Network released it’s monthly, international English-language podcast featuring voices from anarchist and anti-authoritarian radio shows, pirate stations and podcasts from around the world. The episode is up at A-Radio-Network.org by clicking the B(A)DNews. If you’re interested in joining the network or learning more, info’s up on that site.
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.
TFSR: Sima Lee, thank you so much for coming on to The Final Straw Radio Show. It’s a huge honor to get to talk to you. Would you just introduce yourself for listeners? Name, pronouns, anything you want listeners to keep in mind as they like hear your words?
Sima Lee: Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. I’ve definitely checked out some of the other podcasts in the past and really enjoy them. It feels good to be up here to be able to talk about what’s going on.
I’m Sima Lee the RBG. I am a hip hop artist, radical hip hop artist, organizer, revolutionary, I founded Maroon Movement, Maroon House and Food Clothing Resistance Collective, which has been operating since 2015. We are mutual aid, direct action, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchist, autonomous maroon squad, basically just trying to show how we can cooperatively, collectively, communally have dual power as we build up to take down this empire.
Whether that’s us helping to feed the community, helping to give out free clothing and other items, or making radical music, or creating a space for people to be able to come together to organize, to have culture, to talk about alternative medicine and alternative herbs and other things of that nature. That’s the work that I’ve been deeply embedded in. In addition to helping to do anti-gentrification work, just building up in these urban centers as we try to take down the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex. It’s a full time job just trying to not be oppressed. To put it frank, that is what I do. I try full time to not be oppressed. I appreciate to be able to be on the program.
TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much. I really resonate with that as well. As the world is moving more and more and more towards… it’s always been chronically unstable for folks who are more marginalized by systems of power, but becoming more unstable as far as our climate goes, as far as our systems of infrastructure go. So I really appreciate projects like Maroon House, and the Maroon Collective for just taking power and taking care of themselves in the face of a lot of instability.
You’ve given a lot of really amazing interviews in the past, as far as your personal history and political development goes. You’ve talked about Maroon House a lot, but I’d love to hear a little bit about how that project got started and about the meaning behind the maroon part of Maroon House.
SL: Well, what came first in the process, to give a sped up version, I’m originally from Norfolk, Virginia. That is pretty much surrounded by the military industrial complex. The largest naval installation in the world is Norfolk, Virginia, and Hampton Roads area in general. So, from an early age, this is what I saw. I saw the military industrial complex, for what it’s worth. In addition to that, I saw everyone else suffering from low wages and oppression.
Virginia is where a large amount of liberated people who were once enslaved escaped into the swamps, and in particular the Great Dismal Swamp, and connected with other people who escaped harsh conditions. Sometimes they were deserters from war, sometimes it was other indigenous groups that were native to the land. They would build, what we would call today, dual power within those swamps, creating a community of resistance. So when other people would escape, they had an oasis, a place to go. They made their own rules and regulations and created their own law of the land, outside of the rule of the day, which still was legalized slavery.
So, much of how I developed my thought came from being from that area of Virginia, and the history from 1619 until, and the history of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser and other others who basically took it upon themselves to try and liberate themselves, and in conjunction with others and strong abolitionist movements that were built and upheld in Virginia. I took the concept of people working together and coming together. Of course, maroons are not just in Virginia. Maroons were everywhere Europeans dropped African bodies. There were maroons in Haiti, and maroons in Jamaica, and you have the Qilombo’s in Brazil and you have the Garifuna in Honduras. There’s just about everywhere that you go in Latin America and the Caribbean and other places that Africans created independent resistance and community.
When I came to Washington, DC, I attended quite a lot of other people’s events showing solidarity, just trying to learn the history and processes of what was going on locally. But I felt that there needed to be a place where people could come together from other organizations, from within the community, to be able to have a place to build and create and express themselves and have culture. Similar to many other spaces that have been like that in the past. It’s not a model that we invented. This is usually something that many people do in order to survive. Basically, a space where survival programs can be done, is what I felt that we should have.
So, after the Peace House split from the particular house that we were living in (which is another longtime mutual aid, direct action, anti-capitalist group) we continued, or I continued, in that same space in Washington, DC and named it the Maroon House. So Maroon House was intentionally Black, intentionally queer, and intentionally radical and all encompassing of what was going on at the time in Washington, DC. Which meant also cannabis advocacy and education. This will lead directly to why we got raided.
I don’t know if that’s the lead in questioning, but this is just giving a background of how we started and previewing to how the space ended, because we did have all these different radical elements within it, as well as entertainment, and as well as (as I said) cannabis education and advocacy after the passing of Initiative 71 that legalized cannabis in Washington DC.
Maroon House basically operated in the middle of a neighborhood and connected everyone. So that we could open up community gardens and have free stores and free schools. It was just a beautiful flourishing village. I wanted something that I didn’t see in other spaces. I think it’s very important for us as organizers to do that, because quite often we read books, and we see what others do. Outside of our imaginations, we blindly tried to imitate that, instead of creating new models that fit our reality. So I felt that it was important, whether it was successful or whether it failed, that it was important to hold down a space and operate it on our own terms, something that we felt reflected us.
The movement aspect of it, where we’re at transcends from a Maroon House to a movement is trying to get others to duplicate it and replicate that. To have their own houses and centers and co-ops and collectives and communes and farms, to be able to, again, have dual power and be free within this very, very oppressive system that is just pushing us all down. These are traditional, indigenous ways of resistance as well as anarchist. I can’t just say it’s all just anarchists models that I’m using. But it is a combination of a bit of both.
That’s how maroon House came about. It was very much needed. It was very successful. We got to a year before we were raided. It was actually not long after our one year anniversary that we were raided by the Metropolitan Police Department on the context of a neighbor’s complaint. Well, we knew that wasn’t true, because one of the things that we did not want to do was gentrify an already gentrified, Washington DC. So, we made sure that the core of what we were doing is building up the community. When I say building up the community, I mean the community within the community, meaning connecting everyone because there are always separate communities within community, but to have a hub where everyone could come together and we could talk to people about what’s going on within the neighborhood, within the larger Washington DC area… that’s what was important to me. There was no way we were going to set up there and just have events without having connections to our neighbors.
So, our neighbors would come to our free stores and the People’s Pantry. Our neighbors would come when we would have events. Our neighbors would even come when we would have classes or concerts or cannabis education events. It was a broad spectrum of people that would come through, because we made sure that everyone felt comfortable as long as you weren’t oppressive to others. We knew that the neighbors had not called because we actually knew our neighbors.
It was basically just intimidation. The actual sergeant who came in and this was a violent raid, mind you, they had AR-16’s and red beams on us. This was a violent raid. This was meant to terrorize the community and us. To set an example. But the police officers told us that they knew of our work, they were aware of our work, they respected our work, and then offered as they’re taking people out in cuffs (at the same time that they’re doing that) offered to donate to us for our free clothing giveaway. They actually did. The very next day, they dropped clothing off. As insult to injury, after they’ve terrorized our home and brought dogs and pointed guns at us. They offered us some of the clothing that they had and donated it.
What was important to me is that they told us that they knew the work that we were doing. Which means that they had been watching us. I don’t know how long they had been watching us, but they they definitely had. That is something that happened in March of this year. And as a consequence of it, we had to revamp the type of events that we had, because we knew that they were looking at events, anything of a cannabis nature, in particular.
TFSR: Yeah, that is a lot. I’m so sorry that y’all were forced to endure something so heinous. And to add insult to injury, the cops being like, ‘Yeah, we’ll donate to your thing.” I shouldn’t be surprised at the ridiculous, inhuman nature that cops move through the world in.
But I really connected to what you were saying about the flexibility of the organizing model that Maroon House had, where you said “that people read about stuff in books and they try to copy it verbatim or word for word.” I think that that kind of tends to perpetrate a lot of the problematic patterns that people have visa vie settler colonialism, or toxic whiteness, or what have you. They’re like, “Oh, we’ll just go back to the land and buy some land that we have no relationship to and that we have no idea who whose land it is actually.” So I really connected with that.
SL: It was very important that our space, even though it was ran by Black queer women and femmes, it was very important that it was brown and indigenous centered in addition to that, and it very much was. So the Black and Brown unity aspect was something that was always in effect, as well as bringing in white leftists. We felt that our job, to be quite frank, was to make sure white leftist left feeling a little less toxic, a little less settler-ish, a little less centered. Because you cannot be the center of an imperialist movement when your ancestors were the imperialist. When your current family members are the imperialist, there’s something has to give, when we are on stolen indigenous land and indigenous people are not at the forefront of what we’re doing. Or they are but you’re not listening to them.
So part of what we had to do within that Maroon House was to treat every white leftist who came into that space and white anti-racist as the potential next Marilyn Buck or John Brown. That’s how I looked at it. So when you leave, if you did not feel that way when you came in, I want you to feel that way when you when you go out. If you came here as an ally, I want you to leave as an accomplice.
The space was so important. It wasn’t just because of mutual aid, it was because of the living teaching. I am an early childhood educator, and I give lectures, and I teach adults as well but it’s the living model that people need to see. It’s the communication that they don’t always get. That was very much important about this space. So, I talk about that space a lot, because I want to see others, again, recreate spaces like this and for people to help do the work of building it up. It was extremely difficult to do that work, to open your doors and select strangers and is a lot. There are different models to do it. That was just the way that we chose to do it to open up our home, but there are different ways to do it. But because we lived there and we worked there and we taught there and we played there, when the police came they disrupted all of that.
So, right now there is is no Maroon House DC. It’s not because we were not able to sustain the events that we had that kept the space up. We had to revamp them, but we continued to have events, we continued to have people coming, because I refused to let them destroy what we’re doing. This is the anniversary, not long ago, of the killing of Fred Hampton and that was the raid that happened. We know how they raided the Los Angeles Panthers with the first use of SWAT. We know how they raided the Philadelphia Panthers. Infamous pictures were taking up them in their underwear to humiliate them. They do things of this nature to shake you and break you.
Because things had changed a bit within the demographics of the people who were in the collective, with some members having already left, new people being added who we really probably hadn’t vetted the best, and things that pretty much seemed like sabotage from within now not just coming from the state. So you have sabotage from within, from newer people, newer faces that we don’t really know as much. I made the tactical decision to retreat. So that I would not end up the next freedom fighter who has been murdered in their sleep by the police, or sabotaged from within by new members that we hadn’t vetted or hadn’t had a chance to vet as much. So now we’re in Baltimore, we’re no longer in Washington, DC, but the work continues. We do want to get another Maroon House. That is the goal.
TFSR: Absolutely. That’s amazing. That’s that’s really making me think of an interview that we did a couple of months ago with a rad space in LA called La Concha. They were having a lot of trouble being infiltrated by like authoritarian Maoist, state-communists, basically. They were talking about that as being something that they were really keeping eyes on infiltration from the State as well as infiltration from other ‘leftist groups.’ I feel like anti-authoritarian leftist resistance and energy is building on Turtle Island. And so resistance to that from bad actors is also building.
But I’d love to hear how people are holding up who were working in Maroon House? How are people doing and how can listeners help support y’all? How can listeners send you love if they are inclined to do so?
SL: Well, I’ll be honest, because I think about, again, in history we’ve learned from people who have gone through things and we look at it and try to relate to it. I think about how, so often a lot of the revolutionaries that we’ve studied, especially those from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, they would go through these horrible things of State repression or infiltration, or even sometimes… and I have to be careful when I say infiltration because I invited people to live within the perimeters of this space because they fit the model of what we were doing. But it’s not always some strange person walking in. It could be people that you know who end up doing a 180 of whatever they were doing when they originally met you, or said the right things to get into the door, and then change what they were doing afterwards. Or there is sabotage by way of not helping, not assisting. There is sabotage by the way of doing things to suck the morale out. There is sabotage by ways of leaving doors unlocked when you’re in the middle of military situations, or leaving windows open. Things that are odd. You find something might be in your food that originally wasn’t in your food or in your drink. There are different ways to sabotage that may or may not even be connected to the State.
For me, I don’t know if those things happen from the State 100%, or if it was just personal or other things. But all of these things are important when you’re thinking about having open memberships into into your space.
So for us, it has been rally our comrades get support to be able to get out of the space, which we totally absolutely did with a lot of people across the country supporting us so that we could get to another space in Baltimore. Originally our first space was in Baltimore and so we were returning back to Baltimore. Our first Maroon House was actually in West Baltimore. Right now what we’re doing is healing because, we feel that we got to just keep going and we don’t have time to heal from the everyday trauma. It is important to heal your body and your mind after you’ve been through something violent and we deserve that. I say we, meaning revolutionaries, we tend to think, “Oh shake it off, my ancestors had so much worse,” but we’ve got to take care of ourselves or we’re not going to be here, as the indigenous folks say (as myself, Afro indigenous) for the seventh generation. We’re not going to be here to leave a legacy for them if we burn out.
So what we’re doing now, first off trying to heal. We’ve just now talking about what we went through. This happened in March and it was so traumatic, we didn’t want to talk about it, because we had no idea if there was another raid coming. Was there more sabotage coming? We are also learning to trust again. I’m learning to be able to let my guard down a bit and still attend other events and speak with comrades and meet with them, even though one would be extremely paranoid after all the things that happened. I am extremely cautious right now.
But that’s what’s going on right now. We’re healing, revamping, rebuilding, and refocusing. We’re doing different things, basically, to be able to come up with a new space. However that that plays itself out, we’re trying to connect with more people on social media. We may set up a blog and start doing some art connected projects, some zines, just to be able to put out more information to tell our story. People can follow us on social media. Food Clothing Resistance Collective is on Facebook and it’s on Twitter and all the major social media sites. Maroon movement is also and myself, Sima Lee.
Some of our main core comrades are no longer within the vicinity of the space, but we still keep in good contact with each other. They’re treading on with what they’re doing as individuals. We’re looking right now for the first time to actually expand and recruit because we always kept it within the house, the members, because it was a little easier for me to feel that we could make sure that we knew everybody. That didn’t necessarily work, but at least for the first year it did. So right now we are actively looking for the first time to expand and recruit outside of the house. I’ll be working on that, probably for the next couple of months, what I want that to look like as far as the process, and what we want it to look like as far as the process of how we go about doing that and how we go about letting people know. But right now we’re just trying to add more people on social media and get people to reach out to us there and then we can connect in person.
TFSR: That’s awesome. And thank you so much for giving voice to something, this very complex and difficult to articulate phenomenon in leftist circles of sabotage by way of not helping out or sabotage by way of doing odd stuff. I feel like that’s not something that we have so much on our radars. So thank you for speaking on that, because I feel like it’s not spoken of enough.
SL: It should have been talked about really, really, really a lot after Occupy. We dropped the ball and went right into more pushing. We did not unpackage all of the things that we saw that was very weird, very sporadic, random types of acts that just didn’t make any rational sense towards the movement and we didn’t unpack that. I’m saying that as anarchists, we really should have talked about that and what it looks like to vet comrades and to find out more about each other. Still not wanting to invade on people and not to be authoritarian, but this is important. We’re doing radical work in major urban cities or in rural areas where definitely everybody knows everybody, and who are these people coming into this situation and we really need to be more careful. I know we get into this theory a lot, but the praxis is so important when you get into acting out what you’ve learned. You’ve got to be cautious with security. Our security culture is lacking across the board, not just anarchists. My revolutionary socialist comrades as well, our security culture really needs to be tightened up with everything that we know from COINTELPRO. We should know better by now.
TFSR: Absolutely. That resonates with me really hard. You mentioned COINTELPRO and learning about our own revolutionary history is the first step to understanding what kind of threats we face from the State and learning how to walk a line between not trying to be… Paranoia is a healthy thing sometimes, like there’s healthy paranoia, because sometimes there’s really bad actors out there. But there’s a sort of overblown paranoia that tends to be exclusive or exclusionary, or paranoia for paranoid sake, and learning to walk the line of being safe and getting yours and your comrades backs…
SL: There’s a thin line between healthy skepticism and then these rogue maoist units that are beating up comrades. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about when I say that we need to have a better security culture, in fact, those things raise red flags of provocateurism. It’s just a part of study, and it’s just a part of growth. This is what you have to deal with, when you’re organizing. We’re in the heart of the empire, what makes us think we’re not going to be scrutinized and watched every step of the way? What makes us think that they’re not watching our social medias? I just gave mine out @SimaLeeRGB on Twitter and on IG. Sima Lee on Facebook.
I know that they’re already watching those things, so even when we put out public information, watch what we put out. How much do we want to give face to face? How much do we want to give electronically? These are all things that we should constantly be thinking about, because they’re constantly after us. Whether we know it or not, they are. They’re not gonna make an announcement. They didn’t announce that they were coming to our house. They just came and then they went away. Incidentally, all charges were dropped from that raid. I didn’t say that part. So, no one has been charged. There are no charges. No one’s in jail. It was just a complete disruption. Just a violent act just for the sake of doing it.
TFSR: I’m glad no charges, but obviously, there’s enduring trauma as there would be naturally if you have that kind of shit happen in your house.
So, you are a musician and you are a hip hop artist of some long standing. There was a call for people to download your most recent album Trap Liberation Army and there was a call for donations via that platform. I’d love to hear about that album, your process in creating it and some themes that it focuses on.
SL: Trap Liberation Army is an homage to Black Liberation Army, which was an underground fighting unit that splintered off, some from the Black Panther Party, but there are members who are also members of Republican New Africa and other Black liberation units, who felt that the above ground fight could desperately use arm resistant units in the underground. They worked in conjunction with brown liberation movements and white liberation movements. I mentioned Marilyn Buck, and David Gilbert, and so many others, Laura Whitehorn, so many others were a part of actions taken with the Black Liberation Army.
I thought of the proliferation of trap music, that’s the sound of the time. So, I thought I could combine the two concepts. “Why don’t we have a trap Liberation Army?” That’s more of a modern type of a twist on the same thing. Trap being the hood, the ghetto, and in particular, drugs. As far as peoples using drugs to make an income in an oppressive, imperialist setting. The colonized people might have to take measures to make money by any means necessary. With Trap Liberation Army, it’s about “how about we don’t do that? How about we look for alternatives, by any means necessary not just for income, but for liberation.”
It’s just a twist on it. There are good and bad things within the hood. I’m from the hood. I’m from the trap. I’m from the concept of not necessarily drug dealing, but it was surrounding me it was completely engulfed in the community that I was in, it was in the middle of the crack era. I always wanted to be liberated from that paradigm of suffering and pain. This is not to shame people who use drugs by any stretch of the imagination, but there was much suffering and pain and it led to the mass incarceration of my people. We’re still dealing with it right now.
So, Trap Liberation Army is a project that talks about the community, talks about the hood, talks about liberation and what it looks like, gives homage to those who fought in the past, because Black Liberation Army definitely used to fight against the surge of drugs that was coming into the Black community. My elders were a part of some of those units that taught me as a youth when I was in the community of the Umma movement which was connected to political prisoner Jamil Abdullah al-Amin.
So it’s just a way of me like mixing the old with the new, and pro-cannabis, pro-sarcasm, but very anti-imperial. Something you can nod your head to, because sometimes anti-imperial music is kind of boring. I mean, it is. It can be. To make it more interesting to give it a little bit of funk, to reflect the background that I come from. I call myself a trap or ghetto intellectual, because I don’t run away from my poor background. I think we tend to look at poverty as something that reflects us as opposed to something that is done to us. So I’m celebrating the beauty and the ugliness that comes within the trap, and the ability to liberate ourselves and look for a better future. I guess a lot of people call that Afrofuturism. But that is what the album is about.
Through Bandcamp, we’ve been able to get a lot of new followers and people who want to support the project. Also Bandcamp will recommend other music to you. So it’s a way that you can find out “If I like this particular song, can you recommend me something else?” So it’s a way, I hope that they found new artists after they listen to my music that are similar to the vein of what they’re doing. But I feel like we need freedom music right now, we need a revolutionary background to what we’re doing. While we’re tagging and feeding people and doing everything that we’re doing. So, I’m looking forward to introducing my music to some more new people, but also creating hopefully some new music and 2020 to put out there. So people like Franklin Lopez can stop asking me where my next album is out. [laughs]
But I’m really proud of the fact that he’s digging my music and also that it was featured in the documentary on Sub.Media in the documentary “And You Don’t Stop” for Trouble. I got to get introduced to some comrades that I’ve liked their music for a while and I didn’t really know them, but I got to talk to them and stuff after that, like Lee Reed and Sole. So that was pretty cool. Music is a cultural weapon and I’ve been involved in hip hop for a very, very long time. It’s always been my favorite expression. So just using it like Dead Prez, Public Enemy, X Clan, other groups that inspired me to help and boost the morale of the people.
TFSR: Absolutely. I loved that episode of Trouble that focused on hip hop. It was so awesome and La Marea and I’m forgetting who else was in there.
SL: Mic Crenshaw…
TFSR: Are you listening to anything right now that is giving you strength or other artists that you want to plug?
SL: I always say the same thing: I want to plug independent artistry and labels and collectives that I know of, that I’ve been a part of, because they are the ones that inspire me. Three different entities, collectives, independent labels that I’m connected to are Soul Trust Records out of Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is who I released Trap Liberation Army out from. These are comrades that I’ve known for a very long time. They’re my friends, really good friends, but we decided to have a space for independent artistry together. We put out some really good work so Soul Trust Records is just one big mass of incredible artists that people should check out.
Beat Conductors is a local collective in DC, Maryland, Virginia area that has a lot of Beat contests as far as like producer displays and battles. I mean, some really incredible instrumentals are played at these events. A lot of artists from across the country are gathering, it’s a competition but it’s more a building up of a family of musicians and artists, traveling together and explaining and working together, how we create in our creative processes, tutorials and classes. It’s been pretty cool working with them as well.
Then also Guerrilla Republik, which is a clothing label as well as a massive collective of artists that the brother Rob and Iz have been doing this for quite some time now. The people have really resonated. It’s been really heavily focused on Black and brown resistance and inspired by the Haitian Revolution. That body of revolutionary clothing and revolutionary art and music combining has been a beautiful thing. The artists that people might most associate with Guerrilla Republik would be Immortal Technique. But there are many, many, many talented artists that are affiliated with Guerrilla Republik, and I’ve had a pleasure to work with some of the comrades in Washington DC. I would tell people, if you’re looking for radical music to inspire you to definitely check out Soul Trust, Guerrilla Republik, and Beat Conductors.
TFSR: Thank you for that. One of the last questions that I had scripted out is about any words that you had on like your relationship to queerness and the relationship that queerness has to Maroon Collective, and to the Food Clothing and Resistance Collective? You as somebody who’s moved through and navigated and worked in a lot of political and social spaces, what things have come up for you visa vie queerness? And how have things changed over the years that you can locate? If that makes any sense?
SL: Change has been dramatic from losing spaces. The culture of queer visibility is a bit different now. Queer people are taking it upon themselves, I mean, as they always have, to be able to represent themselves, but it’s connecting in a different way. Where I see, on the one hand, there is more of a social acceptance via visibility, it doesn’t necessarily reflect all the time within movement circles and what leadership looks like. But people are loud and out there and they’re doing it. I’m very proud of the development of the queer folks that are out there and really getting it. Queer, trans non binary, gender non conforming, such as myself, we’re really taking it upon ourselves to attack the hetero patriarchy that has been the foal of so many movements.
Something that really pushes people away is a lack of feeling like they can be themselves in far too many leftist circles. There is homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. The importance of me being myself, and being comfortable… I decided a long time ago, either I was going to just be myself or I was going to play a role to fit in, and the choice I made very early on was to just be myself. So, I’ve never had to deal with a lot of resistance to me, as far as anyone saying anything to me in a hurtful manner.
I know I’ve been excluded from certain things, though, because of my my sexual orientation, and probably even more so my gender nonconformity as a masculine woman. But I really don’t give a damn because they couldn’t have been my comrades if you’re going to make such superficial choices, not to judge me by… I’m not going to say morality… principles, and ideological realness, because a lot of us say that we have ideological followings, but we don’t act through with them. So my integrity, wouldn’t allow a lot of people to come up to me and say certain things and oppress me. But I know that I’ve been left out of certain things because of my queerness.
We’ve had incidents within white queer spaces where we did not feel comfortable as Black and brown queer bodies. I see how my trans sisters are treated, and I see how my trans brothers are quite often just ignored and forgotten. Across the board, I see how people are taking it upon themselves to create their own Houses, their own scenes, their own films, their own music, and this body of resistance is coming out from queer people. That is a continuation of what we’ve been doing for over 40 years. It’s passing from one generation to the other to keep it going.
It’s not easy in Pan African circles, to be openly queer. It’s not easy. I’ve navigated through Pan African socialist circles, Islamic circles, revolutionary socialist circles, and again, quite often queer people, trans people are not centered in the circles. So, I’ve always felt that I would be that lance that was strike in the middle of that, and you’re gonna have to deal with me, and you’re gonna have to deal with my comrades, and you’re gonna deal with us, not as us feeling like we’re waiting for your acceptance, but you’re just gonna have to get with our program.
That’s how I’ve always felt about it. I’m not begging for acceptance, I’m taking my stake in this world that is all interconnected. In that aspect, my visibility is my weapon. I want you to see this masculine body, who’s not toxic, and who’s not following by the gender norms that you profess so well every day and the hetero patriarchy were my visibility, the visibility of my comrades and a collective that was ran by Black queer women and femmes was very important. It is very important. So I will continue to do this work even though I know that I’m probably not wanted in certain spaces. I’m not going to ask.
I’m not going to ask, “Can I be liberated? Can I be free? Can I be treated like anyone else?” I’m going to take it. So that’s always been how I viewed it. I have been a victim of hate crimes. I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been brutalized. I’ve had a lot of things happen to me as far as sexual and physical and mental violence. I am a survivor. I would tell any other queer youth that are out there and who are organizers to make sure that you build an intentional family to protect you, and to buffer you, and to laugh and to cry with because it’s very, very important. We’re trying to make worlds within worlds within worlds. It’s okay to create that. It looks like nothing that has been done before. It’s alright. It’s okay. It’s okay to create something new, and to be relentless with that.
We met a lot of queer people that came to the space and I didn’t realize until after we were packing up just how many different people that we touched with this work. So, I’m so eager to get another space so that queer people can feel that way in Baltimore as well with a particular spot. Not saying that there aren’t spots already, but to add to it. Because Baltimore is an incredible resistance town, and I just want to add to it with another space and reach out to the queer, Black and brown people here and trans Black and brown people here and gender non conforming non-binary comrades.
We’re on the verge of changing the reality. No more, would you see our faces on the front of newspapers as some things to be objectified and laughed at. You will respect us and that’s just what it is. So that’s how I take my day to day life as a queer activist. Not an activist, really just I’m queer and you’re going to deal with me and you’re going to respect me. This is how it is and we have a right to live and exist. It’s not very easy, always, especially if you’re visible. But is this is the work that must be done so that we can be free, because nothing’s given to you, you kind of have to take it.
TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much for that. I really resonate with that as somebody who’s subjectivity is a mixed race trans man who either gets as near as I can figure coded as either white or Arab depending on who is doing the coding and what kind of situation is going on. So, I very much resonate with the taking space, carving out safe space. And also, I have seen queer spaces become a bit less toxic, a bit less white, a bit more taking queerness as history as something that was very much like spurred on given energy by and created by Black and brown queer people, as you know, and is something that has been tried to be co-opted into like HRC, gay rich white kind of circles. But we have a long way to go still.
SL: A lot of the reason that that gets co-opted is because of the economic situation that queer and trans bodies are put into, because of the oppression that we face. So oftentimes, we feel like we’re unemployable. Or we’re easily fireable outside of the nonprofit industrial complex. So, here comes the nonprofit industrial complex. Some of our greatest queer and trans minds right now are working at jobs at nonprofits and they hate them. But they have to eat, and sex work is criminalized, and and you can’t do this and you can’t do that. So it’s so many things that that you can’t do, you can’t have events and have a space in the middle of Washington, DC and just be self sustainable, apparently. So people end up in non-profit industrial complex and their ideas are stolen. They’re not respected, and they’re still underpaid. Still whiteness is centered at the end of the day. It’s still white supremacy. It’s still a platform for the othering of people while they’re using these people. They will bring in, it’s almost as if they have a checklist, “Okay, I need one queer Black woman, I need to trans man…”
Trans people are speaking up for themselves and people are starting to really, really, really, really resonate with what’s going on. So let’s get a bunch of trans people in and you don’t respect those trans people that you’ve got to come in. You’re not paying them what they’re due. You’re taking their ideas and you’re literally using queer and trans bodies. It’s a big problem. But I don’t know how we get around around that other than creating grassroots orgs of our own, and not giving all our great ideas to these nonprofits? Maybe? I don’t know.
But that’s a serious thing. I feel sorry for my comrades, I see you out there. I know you’re drained. I know you don’t want to be in these spaces. It could even be just a different type of nonprofit that isn’t queer, but you feel drained and you feel used, and you feel marginalized, with people that saying they’re doing social justice work. I know, that hurts. I hope that you can liberate yourself from that, because it’s not a good feeling.
TFSR: Yeah, it is not a good feeling. I think creating projects like La Concha, like Maroon House, like Maroon Collective, is a really viable step in the direction of real queer liberation from white supremacy. Real liberation period from white supremacy, because white supremacy gave us all of this shit that we’re dealing with.
SL: …and capitalism, and so it all has to be toppled. So while I’m educating the hetero patriarchy, I’m educating white queer and trans folks, as well. Because you’re not separate from that. You might not be embraced fully as you might want to be. Sometimes I think people just want to be embraced more by the Empire, like when we were fighting to have trans or queer people be in the military, that’s not an advancement for queer and trans bodies, to be in the military. But I understand why some people do it, because this is the only way that they can get medical and other things.
We’re often put into these situations, because again, we’re not free and we’re not liberated. While we’re organizing and losing spaces, more spaces are popping up. So we’re just gonna have to keep pushing for our independence and autonomy and to to be heard and to lead even as we’re talking about horizontal leadership or temporarily. It’s still important to have Black, brown, indigenous queer trans two spirit bodies in these spaces. And I don’t see that from a lot of white leftist groups. So people are organizing their own and a lot of the new groups that I see popping up are led by queer and trans people. I just say, “What’s up? Keep doing it. Power to the people.”
TFSR: Well, if you if you ever come through Asheville, it’s been noted before, both on air and off air that pretty much literally all of the anarchists here are queer or trans. Like it’s notable when you find a cis-het person who’s an anarchist, we’re like, “Oh, it’s the unicorn!!”
SL: That interesting, but that’s what I’m saying. Create your own reality. We can flip the reality around and that is wonderful. Now I need to go to Asheville.
TFSR: Yeah, come through, come through. Yeah, we’ll show you a good time. We have all the vegan barbecue you could ever eat… or any kind of barbecue, whatever, people should eat what they want.
Sima Lee, those are all the questions that I had scripted out, but is there anything that’s on your mind that you want to give voice to or any words that you’d leave listeners with as a parting words?
SL: Feed the people. Go out and feed people, go out and give people clothing, sabotage capitalism, like sabotage it. You see it cracking, you see it breaking, you see it lashing out across Latin America and the Caribbean, and here, and Asia, and the Middle East people are lashing out because capitalism is no good and we see it. Whether it’s Chile, or Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Paris, people are resisting. It’s time for Turtle Island, so called North Amerikkka to start sabotaging the wheels of the empire. Because other people need for us, within the belly of this beast to do that.
We need it for ourselves, first and foremost. I’m living in Baltimore, Maryland, which is segregated. It is very much segregated. It has a higher population of men in jail, Black men in jail in Maryland, more than in Mississippi. Again, I’m gonna say it again, it’s segregated. We’re living in segregated cities. We’re living in a place where food stamps are being cut from the masses. We’re living in a place where corporations we’ve known since children are closing. We’re living in a time where what it looks like to make money is changing. Hasten what work looks like, redefine what work is, redefine bartering, redefine what family looks like. We’re redefining everything, gender, everything. Redefine it, evaluate it. It’s good to learn from the past, but also learn from the mistakes.
I’m just anxious to see what 2020 looks like as we go into these ridiculous elections and all of this stuff that’s going on. Whether they impeach Trump or not, as long as we have imperialist capitalism ruling over us, it doesn’t matter what the figurehead is. So, I just want to see my comrades across the country, across the globe, to hasten the fall of imperialist capitalism, of racism, of sexism, of ableism, all of the things that have been impeding us and holding us back. Get your trans power, get your queer power, your Black, your brown, your indigenous power, and even Fred Hampton said, “you poor white people get your power too.” It cannot be on the back of your comrades and on the platform of white supremacy, we need you to be your European descended selves. Whiteness has to go, as far as a category of social political oppression.
So we would like to see the abolition of whiteness, and bring back the greenness of our land, and the blues of our water and our skies, and deal with this ecology that is just crying out for humans to just chill. This is where we are, we have so much work to do. I don’t know how to give any one thing other than to say, “Push it all.” If you think you’re pushing too much. I tell you, you’re not pushing enough. Push, push. Let’s see the end of this oppression and let’s create a new reality.
TFSR: I love that. I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much for your words and your energy and your heart and your mind. Like it’s been a beautiful experience for me getting to talk to you. And I hope that we get to like build and fight and work together in future.
SL: Absolutely. I plan on going as much as possible up and down the east coast, down south, and I’ve been invited a couple of times out west so maybe I might finally get to Cali and Seattle and Portland and other spots. I know the comrades are always doing their thing. I’m looking forward to meeting anybody and everybody who’s down to really push anti-capitalism as far as we can, in these colonized territories.
This week we bring you two different segments. First, Cypress spoke with Jenny from Project Fang, a project that financially supports visits to earth and animal liberation prisoners. Since 2016, Project Fang has worked to combat the isolation of incarceration these prisoners feel by providing a fund for financial assistance for visits. The prisoners and their loved ones can apply to the fund to help pay for prison visits, which is one of the most important ways of supporting prisoners. Project Fang is currently in the middle of a fundraising push as they look to double their annual budget to continue their work.
Much has been said about the vital importance that visits from friends, family, and loved ones can have for folks forced to undergo incarceration at the hands of the state. Jenny goes into detail about the work she and the project do to help turn isolation around, and about how this work fits into a broader whole of creating sustainable communities of rebellion.
Folks can support their campaign through December 4th at fundrazr.com/project_fang. Head to the Project Fang Twitter or to the New York City Anarchist Black Cross website at nycabc.wordpress.com/fang/ to learn more.
All funds go directly to supporting visits for incarcerated animal and ecological defenders who have committed to not cooperating with the state.
Our second segment is a talk by Tyler on the techno politics of Crypto-Anarchy. This talk was recorded at the 2019 North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
This week we are presenting two segments, first up is an interview done by Cypress – a new member of The Final Straw collective! – with Grace (they/them pronouns), who is doing support for anarchist prisoner Jeremy Hammond. From his support website, Hammond is “currently spending a decade in prison for allegedly disclosing information about the private intelligence firm (…) Stratfor, revealing that they had been spying on human rights defenders at the behest of corporations and governments. WikiLeaks published these files in partnership with 29 media organizations worldwide as the Global Intelligence Files.”
Grace talks about Hammond’s case and repressions he has been facing in prison, and also about resisting a summons for a grand jury and what support could look like for him given the uncertainties of his case at the moment, plus many more topics!
>>> Regarding this week’s segment from anarchist prisoner, Sean Swain: Sean’s commentary today discusses his claim to the Organization of American States, filed in 2012. Sean was unaware of the OAS’s response until he was moved to Virginia where the mailrooms no longer blocked this attempted correspondence. Sean’s recorded testimony is up at SeanSwain.org. Content warning, Sean discusses sexual violence he suffered at the hands of Ohio officials.
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To donate to Jeremy Hammond’s fund, you can do so on freejeremy.net
For the most recent updates you can follow the Twitter account @FreeJeremyNet
This week we have the opportunity to share a talk by Coco (they/them pronouns), who is a queer, Black, Puerto Rican anarchist about the recent 17 days of direct action against no-longer-governor Ricardo Rosselló and organizing as an anarchist after Hurricane Maria.
They talk about some of the lead up to these revolts – about the fascist campaign and term of office of Ricardo Rosselló -, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, decolonization and fighting US imperialism as it relates to PR, queer people and femmes on the front lines of the protests about Ricardo Rosselló, the active warping of this situation by media outlets, and many many more topics!
Coco originally presented this talk at the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair 2019 on Saturday August 24th.
I wanna give voice to something that came up in the Q&A after the talk, which was not recorded, in which Coco made space for an open conversation about revolt in Puerto Rico. They asked of the audience what we thought when #RickyRenuncia was trending on Twitter, and people were saying stuff like “we need to look to PR and learn from people there in order to figure out what to do where we’re at”. And a really good conversation wound out about disaster/riot tourism that has always been a problematic current on the far left, especially where the struggles of non-white folks are concerned. It was located in that conversation that the support of people interfacing with struggle that isn’t theirs is very conditional and fragile, and it was stated by participants of the conversation that there needs to be another way of looking at struggle that doesn’t involve an attitude of entertainment style consumption but rather comes from a place of real solidarity and real support.
As Coco stated, the media has really been messing with the narrative of what has been going on in PR, painting it either as super pacifist or like people are “out of control hooligans” or other such nonesense. For better sources of information, you can visit our blog at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org where we will post links to people and accounts you can follow who are on the ground or have a perspective that isn’t beholden to the larger capitalist media outlets.
Here is an announcement on behalf of the upcoming Queer Conference at UNC Asheville:
“Communities? Will a rainbow flag on a police car protect queer folks from a culture built around (trans)misogyny / misogynoir and sexual assault?
We are constantly reminded that our culture is still built on anti-black, anti-queer violence by the all too frequent murders of black transwomen, the further criminalization of queer sex workers, and the erasure of rural LGBTQ+ identities experiencing the pains of addiction, joblessness, and lack of resources. Today, we are at another fork in the road, where there is nominal acceptance of certain gay and lesbian identities (namely white, educated, middle-class families), while a wide range of experiences of people under the LGBTQ+ umbrella get forgotten. As queerness becomes hip and queer subcultural styles are being bought and sold, we must ask how the culture, lives, and sexuality behind the looks can survive and thrive. With the rise of global fascism, the impending doom of large-scale environmental collapse, and the inevitable next crash of capitalism, can we still envision a queerness that seeks liberation rather than admission to the status quo and benefits of a vastly unequal US society? How can we balance these visions with protecting the precarious lives most threatened by the current sociopolitical landscape?
On the show this week, Bursts spoke with Tom Tanuki, front man of the group Yelling At Racist Dogs (Y.A.R.D.), a performance anti-fascist group that directs insulting yells at far-right, xenophobic events and speakers. For the hour we talk some about Tom’s background, the landscape of far-right politics in Australia and the place of humor and public shaming in confronting racist public figures in the work that Tom and his comrades do. You can follow Tom on twitter at the handle @tom_tanuki, on instagram at the same handle minus the underscore (@tomtanuki), and on fedbook by finding Yelling At Racist Dogs. And you can find the shirts Tom talks about at their bigcartel page.
[Sean Swain at 2min 53sec, Tom Tanuki at 11min 23sec]
We stole this picture from Subversion1312’s interview with Tom. A couple of the resources that Tom references at the end of the interview are Blackfulla Revolution and Black Feminist Ranter by Celeste Liddle, both pages on fedbook, and the book on Australian history he suggests is called Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode where we share my interview with Andy Fleming, the maniac behind SlackBastard, an exhaustive commentary on the far right in Australia (as well as the tankie left and Andy’s thoughts about anarchism, antifa and more) up at slackbastard.anarchobase.com.
Announcements
May Day in Asheville
If you’re in Asheville this May 1st, Wednesday, there’re a few events we’re happy to share. At 10 am there’s a rad families meetup at Vermont Ave playground at the West Asheville Park. Buncombe County schools are closed due to call ins by teachers as a part of the organizing wave known as Red4Ed and there’ll be a large march and rally in Raleigh, the state capital. For those unable to make it, there’s an 11am rally by teachers at the Vance monument downtown. Festivities begin at 3pm at the park on Vermont Ave with a roving bike ride, with some bikes provided. This’ll be followed at 4:30pm by a game of kickball and at 6pm, a short parade will commence from 644 Haywood Rd complete with a marching band. At 7:30 there’ll be a potluck with free vegan and gluten-free options and, finally, a public showing of the working class-ic, “9-5”, featuring Dolly Parton. More info by visiting https://tfsr.wtf/avlmayday
This week, we feature two conversations that from two different settler-colonial states on Turtle Island. First up, organizers in so-called Quebec called Ni Frontiers Ni Prison talk about resisting Laval prison and the border regime of the Canadian state. Then, Robert Free, a long-term Tewa resident of Seattle, WA, talks about the struggle to wrest territory from the hands of the US military and found the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center.
Today we have a two part show! In the first part we are presenting a conversation with someone from Ni Frontiers Ni Prison, which is a group in so called Canada that is resisting the proposed construction of a new migrant prison in Laval, a town just outside of Montreal. This is a transcript of the original audio, read for the show by Grier, shout out to him! In this interview we talk about the prison and what it would mean for people who’d be most affected by it, the general rise of far right sentiment in so called Canada, and many more topics.
The interviewee names the place they are based as occupied Tio’tia:ke (jo-jahg’-eh), which is the original indigenous name for so called Montreal, the colonizer name. The naming of indigenous land will continue throughout the interview with various locations in the name of decolonization, though Tio’tia:ke is the one which will be the most prominent.
As an audio note to all those paying attention, a fridge turns on midway through the interview then turns back off nearing the end, we’ve tried to minimize the background noise but it’s still somewhat noticeable.
Music for the intro and outro by A Tribe Called Red with Stadium Pow Wow.
Some links to historical events mentioned by our guest relating to Canada’s’ treatment of immigrants and refugees:
“Chinese Head Tax“, a policy which “meant to discourage Chinese people from entering Canada after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway”, a government project which I conjecture used a bunch of precarious and immigrant labor in order to complete.
Komagata Maru Incident, the historic entry denial of a group of Indian refugees seeking entry into Canada on the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru in 1914, resulting in the death of 20 Sikh people at the hands of the then occupying British government.
“None Is Too Many” policy for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, an anti Semitic stance that put people who were fleeing Nazi terror in further danger and possible death.
Robert Free on the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center
(starts at 38min, 04sec)
Next we’ll hear an interview with Robert Free, a long-term Seattle, WA resident and Tewa (pronounced tay-oh-wa) Native American. We discuss the history of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, a cultural and resource center for urban Native Americans in Seattle and the surrounding communities. The Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center was established after a series of protests and occupations in 1970 of Fort Lawton, an army base that had previously occupied the park. Robert Free discusses the influencing factors of that time, some of the finer points of the occupations, as well as the implications of protesting and occupation on stolen native land.
Some of the names and events mentioned in this chat you may recognize from our February 17th, 2019, episode of The Final Straw when we had the pleasure to speak with Paulette D’auteuil, about the case of long-term American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier. More info on Peltier’s case can be found at whoisleonardpeltier.info
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Next week we hope to bring you a conversation with support crew for incarcerated former military whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is now imprisoned for refusing to testify before a Grand Jury. More on her case can be found at https://xychelsea.is including links for donating towards her fundraising goal for legal costs aiming at 150 thousand smackeroos.
On December 7, 2018, Columbus police murdered 16 year old Julius Ervin Tate Jr.. On December 13, they arrested his 16 year old girlfriend, Masonique Saunders, charging her with the murder they committed.
Masonique is being charged with aggravated robbery and felony murder, and is currently being held in juvenile detention. The police have alleged that Julius attempted to rob, and pulled a gun on a police officer, and that Masonique was involved in said robbery. Felony murder means that if you commit a felony and someone dies as a result of that crime you can be charged with their murder.
We believe that these charges are unjust, and demand the freedom of this 16 year old Black girl and justice for the family of Julius Tate!
To help Masonique and her family, donate to her GoFundMe.
A quick reminder, if you’re in the Asheville area this coming week, Blue Ridge Anarchist Black Cross is hosting two events. On Friday, April 4th from 6:30 to 8pm at Firestorm, (as we do every first Friday of the month) BRABC will show the latest episode of Trouble, by sub.Media. Episode 19 focuses on Technology and Social Control. After the ½ hour video we’ll turn chairs around and have a discussion of the film for those who’d like. Then, on Sunday, April 6th from 5-7pm as BRABC does every first Sunday of the month, we’ll be hosting a monthly letter writing event. We’ll provide names, addresses, backstories, postage and stationary.
Prisoners we’ll focus on are longterm political prisoners from Black liberation, to Earth and Animal Liberation, to anti-police violence activists caught up in prison whose birthdays are coming up or who are facing severe repression. Or, just come and write a letter you’ve been meaning to write to someone else. It’s a nice environ for that sort of thing.
Extinction Rebellion week of action
The movement to halt and roll back human driven climate change called Extinction Rebellion is planning some upcoming events in the so-called U.S. in line with a worldwide call for action over the week of April 15-22nd. Check out https://extinctionrebellion.us/rebellion-week for info and ways to plug in. If you’re in the L.A. area, see our shownotes for a fedbook link to some of their upcoming events. And remember, practice good security culture by not giving up as little info as possible. Keeping your info more secure today ensures your ability to fight with less hindrance tomorrow!
Marius Mason moved
Anarchist political prisoner Marius Mason has been moved to a prison in Connecticut, a change viewed as a success by his supporters as he’s closer to family by hundreds of miles. If you’d like to write him a letter to welcome him to his new place, consider writing him at the following site, but make sure to address it as follows:
Now, here’s a statement by the Highlander Research and Education Center outside of New Market, TN, about the fire early on March 29, 2019:
“Early this morning, officials responded to a serious fire on the grounds of the Highlander Research and Education Center, one of the nation’s oldest social justice institutions that provides training and education for emerging and existing movements throughout the South, Appalachia, and the world.
As of 6am, the main office building was completely engulfed and destroyed. One of ten structures on approximately 200 acres, the building housed the offices of the organization’s leadership and staff. Highlander’s staff released the following statement:
“Highlander has been a movement home for nearly 87 years and has weathered many storms. This is no different. Several people were on the grounds at the time of the fire, but thankfully no one was inside the structure and no one was injured.
“While we are physically unhurt, we are saddened about the loss of our main office. The fire destroyed decades of historic documents, speeches, artifacts and memorabilia from movements of all kinds, including the Civil Rights Movement. A fuller assessment of the damage will be forthcoming once we are cleared to enter the remains of the building.
“We are grateful for the support of the many movements who are now showing up for us in this critical time. This has been a space for training, strategy and respite for decades and it will continue to be for decades to come.
Fire officials are working to determine the cause as quickly as possible and we are monitoring the investigation closely.” –Ash-Lee Woodward Henderson and Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, Co-Executive Directors, Highlander Research and Education Center.
Highlander has played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement, training and supporting the work of a number of movement activists: Rosa Parks prior to her historic role in the Montgomery Bus Boycot, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Septima Clark, Anne Braden, Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Hollis Watkins, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis.”
On March 25, 2019, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Wende Kerl shot and killed Danquirs Franklin in the parking lot of the Burger King on Beatties Ford Rd in Charlotte. Police narratives posit that Mr Franklin was armed and posing a threat, while eye witnesses say that Danquirs Franklin interceded against an armed man bothering an employee and that the armed man ran away before the police arrived, who then shot the first black man they encountered. Friends at Charlotte Uprising have been holding vigil and fundraising for Danquirs Franklin’s family as the police’s actions leave his child fatherless. More can be found at the Charlotte Uprising twitter and fedbook pages. Rise In Power, Danquirs.
William Goodenuff: First of all, thank you so much for your time in coming onto this radio show! Could you first talk about what is attempting to be planned on the part of the Canadian state in terms of this migrant prison in Laval?
Ni Frontieres Ni Prisons: Yeah! So the proposed new migrant prison is actually one part of a plan that the Canadian government announced just over two years ago now. It’s called the National Immigration Detention Framework. And the plan came in response to a period of sustained resistance against the government’s practice of incarcerating migrants, many in provincial jails. Um, and for years, going back to 2011, migrants held by the CBSA (which is the Canada Border Services Agency), had been going on periodic hunger strikes in facilities across Ontario. And in the months before the governments announcement of this plan a new hunger strike was initiated, and there were mobilizations across the country in solidarity. There was a lot of pressure on the government to do something, especially because several migrants had died in CBSA custody over that same period.
And so the government responds to all this by announcing a new $138 million plan, but instead of ceding to the demands of the hunger strikers, most of the money ends up being dedicated to building two new migrant prisons, one in [Sur ABC] replacing the CBSA’s Vancouver Airport Facility, and one in Laval replacing the current one just across the street. So strengthening the detention system that the hunger strikers were fighting against. Many detained migrants in Ontario actually went back on hunger strike following the announcement but the government just ignored them.
W: Is there anything more to say about the sustained period of resistance on the part of people who were in custody and people who weren’t in custody?
NFNP: Because it’s been so long now I feel like I hesitate to talk more in depth about it because I’m worried I’ll get something wrong.
W: That’s totally fine. So you talked a little bit about how it got started, in what ways have people already been resisting the prison?
NFNP: Right, so in 2017 the government hired two architecture firms, one called Lamais one called Group A, to design the new prison. And Solidarity Across Borders, which is a migrant justice network that’s been based here in occupied Tio’tia:ke for over 15 years now, was one of the first groups to talk publicly about this, which brought the project to a lot of people’s attention including myself. And the resistance since then has been focused on the companies working on the project. Last year, an anonymous group released crickets into Lamais’ headquarters, that was great! A nice biblical flourish!
And last month the group I’m a part of, Ni frontiers ni prisons, organized a demonstration against Lamais that ended at their headquarters. Since then, a company that remediated the soil at the proposed construction site had their offices spray painted, and just a few weeks ago a group of about 30 people barricaded the road leading to what was called the “site visit” for companies who want to bid on the contract to build the prison. So that’s a bit of an overview of what’s been happening. Ni Frontiers Ni Prison which I’m a part of is focused more on organizing public actions and events which are just one part of the struggle against the construction of the prison which includes a diversity of tactics in multiple groups.
W: Does the group work in coalition with other groups that are fighting the prison or people that are detained in the prison?
NFNP: So there’s no formal coalition but there is dialogue and discussion between other groups who are also doing work against this specific prison but also against migrant detention more generally, working for status for all against the border. And so Solidarity Across Borders is a group that includes many people without status, many people who have been through the current migrant detention center and have been doing that work for a very long time.
W: So, I would really love to get a sense, and maybe listeners already know these things based on their own experiences, but what would this prison mean for those people who would be most directly affected by it?
NFNP: Right, so the first thing I should say is that migrant detention is central to Canada’s ability to deport people. And the CBSA has made a commitment recently to start increasing deportations by about 30%. So this prison represents an investment in both the continued violence of deportation as well as detention. But in practical terms, strengthening that threat of violence means that it’ll continue to be almost impossible to seek services here, or to resist exploitation. It maintains them as a source of precarious and exploitable labor.
But I mean, the violence of the migrant prison itself can’t be understated, people are often imprisoned in these facilities for years without charge. People die in these facilities, and I believe very strongly that prisons aren’t the answer to the challenges we face in our communities; locking people up, limiting people’s movement, deporting people to dangerous situations, or possible death, all of these things only cause more violence and harm.
Speaking for myself, I want to live in a world without prisons and without borders where people actually have the things they need to live their lives with dignity and respect.
W: Definitely, and it’s been my understanding too. In the US as well prisons are a huge source of capitaistic gain and a source of precarious and exploitable labor like you mentioned so that makes a lot of sense just for me coming from a US context.
So at the radio show we’ve been hearing about this prison couched in terms of humanity, like it would be a so called “more humane detention center”. And you mentioned that it was being built like right across the street or right next to a detention center that already exists. Would you talk about why the Canadian state is attempting this branding right now?
NFNP: Yeah, so the government has been marketing this entire project as creating a more humane approach to incarcerating migrants, but it’s just an attempt to change the subject from the question of why the government is putting migrants in prison to begin with, something a lot of people started asking following the hunger strikes. And if you look at the designs that the architects put together it makes it really clear whats actually going on, like the plans talk about how all the fencing around the prison needs to be covered by foliage to limit what it calls “the harshness of the look”, or that the iron bars over the windows have to be as inconspicuous as possible to the outside public, and that the children’s area needs to be bordered by what they call a 6 foot high visual barrier to make sure that no one outside can see the imprisoned children.
So essentially it’s just a new prison with a nicer looking face. And if you’re being separated from your family , your community, awaiting deportation to possible torture or death, I highly doubt you’re gonna be too concerned with how sustainable the concrete is or what color the ceilings are in the prison you’re being held in. But another element of this plan is something that the government is marketing as “alternatives to detention”. I mean, these programs only make up something like 3% of the total budget of the plan, but it’s been a central part of its marketing as a more humane approach than the previous government. These alternatives, they include forcing migrants to wear electronic ankle bracelets so their movements can be tracked. There’s this collaboration with the John Howard Society to force migrants into their halfway houses, they’ve also created this gps phone reporting system that forces migrants to make regular check in calls that test their voice prints. And so these are all ways that the government is actually expanding its capacity for surveillance and control of migrants outside of its prisons. Ya know, before the only option was detaining or releasing people but now they’re expanding their reach. And there was actually a renewed hunger strike by incarcerated migrants when these alternatives were launched last year, but again the government just ignored them.
W: And I’m assuming that the halfway house that you mentioned as well as the ankle bracelets, are those a for profit endeavor?
NFNP: So yeah, the halfway houses, the John Howard Society, got a multi million dollar contract to oversee that project. I’m not sure offhand what the company is that’s overseeing the ankle bracelets, but the technology was actually engineered as part of the post 9/11 national security certificate program here, which involved imprisoning non-citizens indefinitely without charge on secret evidence, mostly it was Arab and Muslim men. And some of those men who were caught up in the system in the early 2000’s, they actually requested to be transferred back to prison rather than continuing to live with those ankle monitors, because of how intense and repressive that system really was. But it’s really clear with these alternatives that all these carceral technologies that have been used in these post 9/11 sort of state of exception moments, but also through the federal prison system are leaking in and bleeding in to the system of how Canada relates to migrant populations.
W: It’s like bringing the prison into the home is kinda my experience of how ankle monitors generally work.
And I’m really bothered by this entire situation, but also this sort of softer, gentler prison where you can’t really see the kids and the harshness of the prison is dulled by some kind of fake foliage. The quality of the Canadian state is something that as a US resident I’m not really all that informed about but what I have been informed of, it’s just like extraordinarily toxic neoliberal cooptation of like “diversity” and “understanding” when it in fact is a genocidal machine.
NFNP: Yeah I think that was very well put!
W: I’ve been listening to a lot of From Embers (anarchist radio show at http://fromembers.libsyn.com/) so I’ve been like “this fucking Canadian state is a fucking hellscape!”
But yeah thank you for going into that, the ankle bracelets and the for profit nature of the John Howard Society.
So, speaking of the state, I think that people all over the world have been noting the increasingly frenetic attention that governments are paying to borders, with similarly increasingly racist rhetoric applied to many people seeking safety in places like so called Canada, so called US, and UK. Are there things to keep in mind about this proposed detention center in this current polarizing climate?
NFNP: Right. So over the past few years in Quebec we’ve seen the rise of far right anti-immigrant groups that have actually achieved a level of mass support here that I think is unique compared to the rest of the country. And this is for a lot of reasons, an important one is the turn of Quebec nationalism toward a very xenophobic form of state secularism. And that’s resulted in a huge increase of attacks on Muslim people, a formal ban on anyone wearing non Christian religious symbols from either working or receiving services from the Quebec government–
W: Wait, really??
NFNP: Yeah… And also of course there’s the mass murder at the Islamic Cultural Center in Quebec City. But it’s also resulted in a new far right government that ran on substantially reducing immigration to Quebec and also introducing values and language tests for new migrants, which they’ve begun to put in place. And so, this more I guess local far right upsurge in anti-immigrant sentiment is increasingly bolstering support here for the federal government’s deportation regime.
And I think this makes it an important moment to intervene, to help disrupt that. Because I think that fighting back against the rise of the sentiment needs to be more than a one pronged fight against the far right groups on the ground. I really think that the struggle also needs to be connected to sustained resistance toward the racist structures that pre-date these groups. These structures often share a vision with these newer far right groups, but I think there may be more fundamental parts of our colonial context here.
W: Yeah, definitely! I’m wondering if you would say more about fighting against the structures that pre-date the current governmental climate, or political climate that’s happening right now? What would you think would be involved in that?
NFNP: Oh! Well I think that migration policy is a great example of this, where so much of the focus of that conversation around the country and in Quebec right now is so focused around people crossing the border from the United States on foot into Canada. And talking about the influx of refugees who are crossing into Canada or applying for refugee status here, many of which are being denied.
But the entire apparatus of detention and deportation completely pre-dates this.
It’s in fact not linked to this upsurge in migration, it’s linked to the temporization of status for people here, which has been going back for decades. And if we’re only looking at what’s directly in front of us, we’re not gonna understand or be able to effectively confront these structures that are MUCH more deeply rooted in the fabric of the Canadian state and in Canadian history.
W: Thank you very much for bringing up that point! And I think that goes really well into the next questions which is, would you talk about how the concept of citizenship is being weaponized by the state in this case but also has always been weaponized by the state?
NFNP: Yeah, I mean the concept of citizenship has always been based on exclusion, and the Canadian context is no different! Things like the Chinese Head Tax, the Komagata Maru incident, the None is Too Many Policy toward Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, the Canadian state’s approach to immigration has always been shaped by its white supremacist foundations. And actually with the exception of the British Commonwealth countries, Canada had an official ‘whites only’ immigration policy until the ’60s. But since the 1960’s the government, like I was saying, it’s been increasingly temporizing the status of people coming here. It’s gotten to the point where now over 2/3rds of people who are granted status to live and work here each year are getting some form of temporary status.
And so the CBSA’s migrant detention and deportation apparatus was built to enforce this, it was a necessary by-product of these changes. And that system is part of maintaining the flow of wealth from the global South to the global North. Workers from the global South come here, have their labor exploited at extreme levels, put huge sums of money into the Canadian economy, and then they’re kicked out. And Canada doesn’t just benefit from this but it actively participates in impoverishing and displacing people in the global South who then end up their doorstep.
W: Definitely, I think there’s a lot to talk about there but I think you gave a really good summary. And I think that I would love to move on to some other questions which have to do with the more positive aspects of the resistance to this thing. So, we in the states are familiar with the concept of a sanctuary city, which indicates that a place limits their cooperation with the national government to follow through on deportations in many ways. But I came across the term “solidarity city” in articles on your website, would you talk about the distinction between the two, and what is meant by “solidarity city”?
NFNP: Oh sure! So this is actually a framing that comes out of the work of Solidarity Across Borders. Sanctuary city campaigns, they tend to be focused on asking the municipal government to protect people without status. But for years now, Solidarity Across Borders has put forward the analysis that we should be creating our own networks of mutual aid and solidarity. And a good example for this is the police, y’know at least here the police are one of the biggest problems that undocumented migrants face. And that problem doesn’t go away with city officials signing a sanctuary city declaration. The last mayor here actually announced that Montreal was a sanctuary city, but nothing changed. The police continued to collaborate with the CBSA to detain and deport people.
But a solidarity city is different because it’s something that’s built from the ground up, through building networks of resistance and non-cooperation with those agencies that enforce deportations and detentions, not by appealing to power.
W: Yeah, I think that building from the ground up while at the same time refusing cooperation is sparking something in my head. Thanks for talking about that!
W: So would you speak about this struggle in terms of decolonization? What are some parallels that you can locate between decolonization and a project that has a more anti-border ethic?
NFNP: Right! So the most influential border around us here in occupied Tio’tia:ke is the American border, which is very close by. And about two hours east of us here is Akwesasne (a-kwa-sas’-nay), which is Kanienkiahaka (kan-eh-ga-hag’-ay) territory, this territory additionally is recognized as a federal reserve. Tio’tia:ke is also Kanienkiahaka territory but isn’t federally recognized as such. Akwasasne itself is actually cut in two by that border, and there’s been conflict for decades there between the CBSA who attempt to enforce that border and indigenous people who refuse to acknowledge their authority on their territory.
So anyway, all this is to say that it’s very clear here the ways that the borders around us are fairly recent colonial constructions. But since we’re talking about prisons, in Canada incarceration as a practice was largely spread as part of the ongoing genocide against indigenous peoples, as a tool of assimilation. And today when you look at who’s inside Canadian prisons, indigenous people are dis-proportionally represented.
And so, the same colonial and capitalist forces that are creating war, poverty, destruction, throughout the global South are continuing to oversee the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples here in the global North. Many people being displaced and arriving to this territory are indigenous to different areas on this continent and many of them are ending up in these migrant prisons.
But over the last decade or so here, different migrant justice formations have gone through processes of dialogue and discussion with indigenous groups. Which has led to some changes in messaging and outlook over time and I mean, we’ve been influenced by this too, but as settlers we have a lot more work to do on this front I think.
W: Definitely, did I understand you correctly that indigenous folks are being incarcerated in these migrant jails?
NFNP: Well, not people who are indigenous to the territories governed by the Canadian state, but people who are indigenous to like other areas on the continent who are then displaced and would not be understood or classified by the Canadian state as their indigenous identity based on the country of origin.
W: Yeah for sure! The border is a colonial construct, and the indigenous territories obviously vastly predate that colonial construct.
So, how can people support the group that you are speaking from, Ni Frontiers Ni Prison, and could you also brainstorm modes of support that folks can enact who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to do confrontational or legally risky direct action?
NFNP: Oh yeah for sure! So this month we actually have a call in campaign, where we’re encouraging folks to either call, email, or fax the companies who are currently bidding for the contract to build this new prison. So we highly encourage anyone who would like to to do this, you can go on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/nifrontieresniprisons/, and you’ll see the information about the call in campaign there.
But in terms of non risky ways to participate in struggle like this, the group I’m a part of we do public actions, and the demonstrations we’ve organized so far have been very low risk, very family friendly to quote maybe an outdated activist parlance. We have been helping organize
information sessions in neighborhoods across the city in partnership with different groups, artists have contributed a series of posters which people have been helping put up across the city, people have made videos about the struggle against the prison, or written articles, there’s a lot of ways that people have contributed and continue to and to participate in this that isn’t particularly high risk. Particularly right now we could actually use some help spreading word about the struggle and why we’re in opposition to the prison.
W: I wonder if you have any words about the importance of the call in campaign, cause I think that many anarchists, at least many anarchists that I know are a little bit hesitant to do call in campaigns, would you talk about the importance of that tactic?
NFNP: Oh sure! I mean, I can talk about it in context to our strategy here, we decided to focus on the call in campaign after an action that happened disrupting a site visit that the CBSA organized to talk with the people interested in bidding on the contract to build the prison. And so people went there and disrupted it, and there were a lot of conversations with workers from the companies who had been sent there to talk with the CBSA about the contract. And some of those conversations went really well! What we’re trying to do in this phase before the general contractor is chosen to build the prison, is to let all the companies know who are considering doing this work that there will be resistance if they decide to take that contract. To let them know that it may be in their financial best interest to walk away from this project. And that strategy will continue depending on what company is chosen, but obviously the tactics will shift.
W: I’m also really interested in hearing any words that you have about like the nature of the tactic of a call in campaign. Maybe this is a bit of a circular or esoteric question but I’m wanting to like provide people with some sort of way to mentally grasp on to what is being achieved here and what is being proposed, and what the goals are generally of something like that?
Is it just annoyance or–
NFNP: Well there are multiple reasons for it, like on one side of it there is the effect of heightening the contradictions that actually already exist within some of these companies in relationship to projects like this. Of creating a sense of wariness on the part of these companies about embarking, but it also gives a way for organizations and for individuals to engage with the struggle at the faze that it’s at right now. So you don’t have to go if you can’t go to a public demonstration.
W: It makes sense cause it is a “safer” way to participate in showing dissent.
NFNP: Yeah! And also we can’t rely on mainstream corporate media to relay a message to these companies that there is widespread opposition to the practice of incarcerating migrants, like we need to do that ourselves! And what that looks like is actually going and disrupting their events and their meetings, and showing up at their workplaces. But it also means calling them incessantly and sending them endless faxes with lots of black ink. To let them know that this is the wrong move for them, and if they make it things like this will probably increase, and that’s generally the thinking behind it.
W: Excellent, thank you so much! So those are all the questions that I had! Is there anything you’d like to add or words you’d leave listeners with?
NFNP: The only thing I haven’t mentioned is that at the end of this month, the government is scheduled to make a decision about which company they’re gonna give the contract to to build the new prison. And depending on who that is I’m sure there will be actions coming up! So if you wanna keep up on what’s happening with the struggle you can go to stopponslaprison.info, it’s a clearing house for information about the construction of the prison as well as resistance against it. Or you can follow us on Facebook and you can send us an email at nifrontiersniprison@riseup.net if you wanna get involved.
W: Is there anything that we missed that you wanted to give more voice to or present here?
NFNP: No I think we covered it! Thanks so much for the time and for taking an interest in this struggle!
W: Yeah! I think that the world has always been moving toward something like this and shit like this has happened before, and thank you for the work that you do and your time in coming onto the radio.
“You may be nonviolent, but I’m not gonna let these white people kill you”. A presentation with Charles Cobb on This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed.
This week we are very pleased to present a presentation done some months ago at Firestorm Books with Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Charles Cobb is a journalist, writer, and current senior analyst at allAfrica.com, which is “is a voice of, by and about Africa – aggregating, producing and distributing news and information from over 140 African news organizations and our own reporters to an African and global public.” Cobb has had a long career full of landmark moments, for example being the first Africa correspondent for NPR and being the first Black staff writer for National Geographic Magazine, among many other achievements.
In this presentation, done on April 2nd 2018, Cobb talks about his 2014 book “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed”, which details his work from 1962 to 1967 for the SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the most influential youth and student organization during the Civil Rights Movement. He also fills in a much overlooked gap in the understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, that is, the lived experiences of Black people living in the rural South at this time, gives his insights on embedding in communities for social justice purposes, and draws lessons from those insights as they pertain to the current Movement for Black Lives. In this talk he is being interviewed by Carol, who is a long time comrade and friend.
Announcements
Week of International Support in Lead Up to Nationwide Prison Strike
A call from a variety of groups to make some noise for the upcoming prison strike, kicking off on August 21st, 2018. This is a challenge to every anarchist, abolitionist, rebel and determined fighter against prison society and white supremacy in Amerikkka:
‘Between Monday, July 16 and Saturday, July 21, we’re calling on you to help unleash a concerted and spectacular array of solidarity actions before the upcoming prison strikes! Prepare now, bring mayhem everywhere! As you likely know, prisoners will strike from August 21st to September 9th. They anticipate guards and administrators to respond with violent reprisals, media distortions, and extended lockdowns. Defending the strikes from the outside is an essential component of its success. Don’t wait; retaliation has already started and as August 21st approaches we expect to see transfers, preemptive lockdowns, and more. Outside support efforts, in collaboration with imprisoned rebels, have already begun. Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, IWOC, and other organizations are building phone trees, publishing call-outs, and mounting pressure campaigns. Another thing outside supporters can do is promote and set a stage for the strike. From July 16-21, we want to make an opening act that warms up the public consciousness and media landscape.
If we’re successful, it will also be a loudspeaker for the prisoners’ call, blaring it past the censors, the mailroom pigs, and the dense walls of isolation and silence that prevent prisoners from knowing what’s cooking in other states or facilities until it’s already served up cold. The challenge before us is to do things so spectacular, creative, and unexpected that the mainstream media cannot neglect them. Hashtag: #prisonstrike2018. Use any means necessary to break that media blockade: take the streets, paint the town, disrupt the status quo, hack a site, get things lit, or go ahead and chuck your anarchist purity, resort to wooing celebrity endorsements, buying clever ads, or schmoozing your way into the news. Remember, the radical and independent outlets most likely to cover our activities exist mainly online.
We need to leverage that coverage to force the big old media (the kind that gets into prisons: TV, radio, print editions of newspapers) to report this news due to fear-of-missing-out. The goal: get the phrase “Nationwide Prison Strike: 8/21-9/9” printed or spoken on the largest platform so prisoners can see it and no one outside can ignore it. So get out there and surprise us! Overwhelm amerikkka’s hostile media environment and get the word into prisons large and small across the nation. ‘
Groups endorsing the 2018 Nationwide Prison Strike:
Jailhouse Lawyers Speak
Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee
The Fire Inside Collective
Millions for Prisoners
The People’s Consortium
Asheville Prison Strike Info Session
If you’re in the asheville area, Tuesday the 17th from 5-7:30pm at Firestorm, Blue Ridge ABC is holding an info session about the prison strike. There’ll be an introduction workshop to writing to prisoners followed by news about the strike, propaganda to take home and brainstorming on outreach methods we can take to get word flowing on the outside and support those rumblings on the inside. This event is open to anyone who’s interested in uplifting prisoner voices.
Intl Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners
In other prison-related news, here’s an announcement about the August 23- 30th 6th Annual Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners. From https://solidarity.intenational/ :
We are coming back with global week of solidarity with anarchist prisoners. Since last year, a lot has changed in our countries, but the general tendency is going in the worse direction with more repressions applied against anarchists not only in Europe but worldwide. With this in mind, we are calling for sixth annual week of solidarity!
Last year lots of people sent us their reports from different parts of the world and we hope that this year the tradition will grow even bigger. We need to support our comrades! Use this week to spread the information about anarchists behind bars. Don’t have prisoners in your country? No worry, support prisoners from other countries in your region or use those days to raise awareness of repression mechanisms and how anarchist communities can fight against them!
Build up security culture, support your local anarchist prisoners and fight back.
In other anarchist prisoner related topics, the partner of Eric King has just suffered some major tragedies in her life and could use some help. She was recently in a car accident from which she’s recovering but now lacks a vehicle for her day to day work life, the childcare of Eric and her two kids, and her weekly visitations of him in prison. On top of that and her partner serving a sentence on which he has 5 more years, Eric’s partner was also just diagnosed with thyroid cancer. If you have any extra dough you can toss to her, there’s a go fund me page where she’s soliciting donations. This can be found at gofundme.com.
The Texas prison system is trying terrorist-jacket politicized prisoner Malik Washington!
Politicized prisoner Malik Washington was cleared for removal from Ad-Seg by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s state classification committee last month. He has spent the past two years in solitary confinement on a bogus riot charge, which TDCJ has since admitted was not for actual rioting, but for organizing fellow prisoners to engage in work stoppages during the 2016 nationwide prison strike.
But as soon as Malik got to his new unit, he was informed that his clearance had been revoked, and that he was heading back to Ad-Seg. He was given no explanation of why, but his support network did some digging, and found out that the classification committee is claiming to have “received additional information” from the Fusion Center in Texas, causing a determination that “it was in the best interest of the department that he not be released from Ad-Seg.”
Fusion Centersbad news; they are based in the Department of Homeland Security and deal with anti-terrorism intelligence gathering, which, as we know, means manufacturing evidence to label people associated with the anti-authoritarian left, and others, as terrorists.
Fusion Centers are shadowy, unaccountable arms of the repressive state apparatus, and are quickly becoming one of state’s new favorite tools. What just happened to Malik is a signal that TDCJ is upping its repression of anarchist-identified prisoners, Muslims, and those engaged in black liberation struggle.
Please share this info with any media contacts you have; urge them to investigate Fusion Centers, and to ask questions about what kind of information they collect, how it is fact-checked, and how this data collection contributes to political repression–and urge them to dig into Malik’s situation!
Write to Malik at:
Keith H. Washington
#1487958
McConnell Unit
3001 South Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78102
Sean Swain update
To check in about last week’s ask about Sean Swain’s condition, we have yet to hear anything back from Sean, the prisoner who has for the last 4 years been doing a weekly segment on our radio show. Sean had been missing from the ODRC database of prisoners and not showing up as a transfer to another prison but the day after last week’s episode of our show it was brought to our attention that Sean was now back in the Ohio database’s website. Anyone with clues about Sean’s condition and state of being, please drop us a line at thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net.
In May, Michael “Little Feather” Giron was sentenced to 36 months in federal prison for actions taken to defend pipeline resistance camps from police assault. Several other water protectors still face federal charges, with potential sentences of decades in prison, stemming from their participation in the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.Indigenous Water Protector Red Fawn Fallis, a political prisoner arrested during the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, was sentenced today in federal court by Judge Daniel Hovland. Fallis was sentenced to 57 months (4.75 years) in federal prison. She will receive a credit of 18 months ‘time served’ taken off of her sentence, from time spent in North Dakota jails before trial proceedings began. Fallis is expected to serve a total of 39 months in prison followed by 3 years probation.
In January 2018, Fallis entered a non-cooperating plea agreement in which prosecutors agreed to seek a sentence of less than seven years. In exchange, she pleaded guilty to charges of ‘Civil Disorder’ and ‘Possession of a Firearm and Ammunition by a Convicted Felon.’
Red Fawn and her supporters had previously maintained her innocence, and had stated that Fallis accepted the plea deal under the assumption that she would not receive a fair trial due to prosecutors withholding evidence.
Judge Hovland had forbidden Fallis’ defense team from mentioning treaty rights or other issues related to her arrest at anti-pipeline protests near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation border.
The case against Red Fawn had centered around allegations she fired a gun during her arrest on October 27, 2016, when a massive police and military raid seized indigenous treaty lands on behalf of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The gun allegedly fired by Fallis was later revealed to have belonged to Heath Harmon, an undercover FBI informant who was romantically involved with Red Fawn at the time of her arrest.
Before she was sentenced by Judge Hovland, Red Fawn Fallis told the court,
“No matter where I go from here I am going to continue going forward…I wanted to move forward in a positive way away from Heath Harmon and the things he tried to put on me while I was trying to push him away.” – Red Fawn Fallis
Sharing Is Caring
If you like the podcast, share it with someone. We want to spread these voices and their messages far and wide. Also, you can upvote us in the iTunes library to extend or reach.
This week, we present an interview that Bursts conducted with the sci-fi and picture book author, technologist and social critic Cory Doctorow. Cory is an editor of the blog BoingBoing, a fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and his most recent book is entitled Walkaway, out from Head of Zeus and TOR books. The novel plays with themes of open source technologies, class society, post-scarcity economics, ecological remediation, drop-out culture and liberatory social models. It was released a few days ago in paperback, along with matching re-issues of his other adult sci-fi novels.
For the hour, they chat about themes from the book, sharing, trans-humanism, imagination and monsters. To find more work by Cory, check out his blog craphound.com. You can also find him on twitter, free writings on Project Gutenberg, his content on archive.org, or his podcast.
Due to technical difficulties, we have no Sean Swain segment this week. We hope this will be remedied next episode.
For a slightly longer version of this episode, make sure to check out the podcast version.
Stay tuned mid-week for a podcast special interview with an anarchist from Indonesia about May Day in Yogyakarta and the repression that has followed. Also, if you haven’t been checking our podcast feed, you’re missing out. We have been regularly releasing extra content mid-week including our 8th Anniversary episode with interviews of hosts of two Channel Zero Network podcasts. You’ll also find two episodes of #Error451, our sometimes-weekly tech security podcast from an anarchist perspective.
Announcements
If you’re in Asheville this week, consider attending the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair benefit show at the Odditorium on Haywood Road on the West Side. The show starts at 9pm, it features the music of Kortriba, Mother Marrow, Lynathrope and a special battle set of the project Fatal Comfort versus the stylings of FUNK JAMz. If you visit the ACAB table, you could be one of the first one of your friends to grab an ACAB2018 poster hot off the presses or ACAB2018 tshirt, both designed by super awesome local artists. Proceeds from the entry, shirts and posters go to pay for the local anarchist bookfair taking place between June 21st and 24th. More info on the bookfair at acab2018.noblogs.org
Also, this Friday Blue Ridge Anarchist Black Cross will be hosting it’s monthly presentation of the short documentary series, TROUBLE, by sub.Media. This month we’ll watch the second episode of two on the topic of gentrification and resistance to it. The film will be 30 minutes and then followed by a discussion with prompt questions suited to the Asheville’s specific brand of problems. The show starts at 6:30 and will last roughly an hour. Invite your friends!
This week we spoke with Eleanor Goldfield, who is an activist on the far left and a proponent of creative activism, a stance that centers creative approaches to direct action with the aim of leading people to interrogate their own politics on an emotional and psychological level. From her website: “Creative Activism is outreach and change through the mediums that appeal to all people and all of people – their emotions, conscience and intellect, in that order. It places itself at the intersection of pop culture and politics, bringing the two together.”
We talk about different approaches to politics and direct action, as well as her new book Paradigm Lost; Radical Verse and Visuals for the Shift, which is a collection of her original spoken word poetry accompanied by mixed media artwork from around a dozen artists. We also talk about the book and her upcoming performance date in Asheville on December 9th at Firestorm Books and Coffee!
To see more of Eleanor Goldfield’s work, including links to the musical project Rooftop Revolutionaries, information about the media project Act Out! (available on occupy.com and Free Speech TV) and many more writings, you can visit artkillingapathy.com.
The radio version has some material cut due to length, though the podcast version has all those pieces included back in. To see that version, plus archives of this show, you can visit thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org.
Announces for Asheville
Next Sunday, December 3rd, Blue Ridge ABC does it’s monthly letter writing night at Firestorm Books & Coffee from 5:30 til 7:30pm. Paper, pens, stamps, envelopes and the addresses and info on political prisoners in the U.S., particularly those having upcoming birthdays, are all available for free! Come on by and send someone behind bars some kind words.
After that at 8pm you can join folks across town for a game of Radical Trivia. This event is 21 and up, happening at the Lazy Diamond bar at 98-A N. Lexington Ave, there’ll be some potluck food for sharing and a cash prize for the winning team or person. To form a team and get on the roster, you can drop an email to jtheophilos@gmail or sign up at the night of. This event will benefit the 2018 Asheville Anarchist Bookfair happing in the summer. Various levels of knowledge are welcome and topics will span a few categories.
