First up, we share an interview with Fauv, a radical who recently participated in the anti-coal occupation in the village of Lützerath / Lutzerath (aka the ZAD of Rhineland) in western Germany against the company RWE. We talk about RWE’s push to break resistance at Lutzerath and the currently-calm Hambach Forest, which activists fear will be attacked by RWE and their goons. More info at https://luetzerathlebt.info/en
We’ll also be sharing the September 2022 episode of Bad News from the anarchist and anti-authoritarian A-Radio Network. You’ll hear a short update from the 2022 anti-racist football (aka Soccer for you ignorant yankees out there) tournament by A-Radio Berlin, an update from Free Social Radio 1431 on labor strikes by the Malamatina Winery workers in Thessaloniki and the pre-trial release of three prisoners accused of participation in Anarchist Action Organization, which ramped up arsons this year. Finally, Frequenz-A shares an interview with Feral Crust collective in Manilla, Philippines! Check out more Bad News.
This week on the show we feature an interview with Panagioti, who is an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons. From their website:
“The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) is a collaboration with the Abolitionist Law Center. FTP’s mission is to conduct grassroots organizing, advocacy and direct action to challenge the prison system which is putting prisoners at risk of dangerous environmental conditions, as well as impacting surrounding communities and ecosystems by their construction and operation. At this time, FTP is focused on opposing the construction of a new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky.
FTP is inspired by the abolitionist movement against mass incarceration and the environmental justice movement, which have both been led by the communities of color who are hardest hit by prisons and pollution.Both these movements also have long histories of multi-racial alliances among those on the front lines of the struggle and those who can offer support and solidarity, which we aim to build on.
FTP has been informed by the ongoing research and analysis of the Human Rights Defense Center’s Prison Ecology Project, as well as the work of the Earth First! Prisoner Support Project and June11.org”
You can see much more about this project, learn about the convergence, and donate or register for the event at https://fighttoxicprisons.org
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Ben Turk on Sept 9th Nationwide Prison Strike
The second segment in today’s show is an interview with Ben Turk conducted by members of The Prison Radio Show collective at CKUT, on the campus of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada about the prison strikes across the U.S. and the buildup towards calls for a general prisoner strike on the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising on September 9th.
From the website, It’s Going Down dot org, the regular segment called Bloc Party is a great source for recent uprisings in the streets and in prisons around North America. We’d like to highlight a few of these items. First off, the article summarizes a number of the May Day
disturbances that took place last Sunday, including brief report-backs from May Day noise demos and street parties in NYC, Hamilton (Ontario) & Chicago, riots in Seattle and prison work strikes in Alabama at Holman, Elmore, and St Clair facilities. More details and photos from those prison strikes and solidarity protests, including ones in Minneapolis & Milwaukee plus arrestee support links can be found at http://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org
Also from that post are announcements of the June 12th birthday of Jay Chase of the NATO3 who’s been struggling with some health and legal hurdles of recently as well as information on the upcoming June parole dates for longstanding Black Liberation political prisoners Robert Seth Hayes and jalil Muntaqim with links to their support campaigns and also a new mailing address for Joseph Buddenburg, recently sentenced to 2 years for a non-cooperating plea for releasing thousands of minks from
fur farms. We spoke about his case alongside that of Nicole Kissane.
Finally, we’d like to share a part of the crowd sourcing request for the U.S.-based, English-language insurrectional anarchist journal, Fire To The Prisons which is asking for help in the publication of it’s 16th issue. In the request, FTTP describes the sorts of content it’s covered
and plans to cover, including wanting:
“to expand our coverage, scope, and the reach of the publication while remaining true to the spirit of Fire to the Prisons. We will continue with our long term commitment to counter-information, original writing and content, and the amplification of the anti-authoritarian/anti-prison/anti-repression struggle that you have come to expect from us.
We will have both a domestic and international voice this issue. While remaining true to reporting on repression and anti-prison resistance across the states, Canada, and Mexico, we have committed articles from abroad promising insight on struggles and happenings that will help to bridge and unify an array of social tensions through a mutual awareness and solidarity.
We truly want FTTP to become a global publication and one that links anarchists and other autonomous combatants together in a dialog about the commonalities that we all face, as well as a discussion on the actions and struggles that we can all engage in.
We will be covering the resurgence of fascism in mainstream American politics, as well as updates on communities resisting further eco-devastation across the states. We have committed articles from prisoners domestic and international. We have commitments from NYC Anarchist Black Cross to use the project as a resource for raising awareness on repression and prisoner status in North America. We will also focus on the pacification of favelas in Brazil, the current reality and history of anarchist struggle in Chile, and the refugee situation in Greece. We will have further reports on anti-police struggle across the
United States, and will be continuing a tradition of news on broader prisoner strikes across America since our last issue. We are also intent on original articles on indigenous resistance in western Canada. Plus accounts and updates of the struggle in Rojava and general Kurdistan. Also all our featured articles will be available in Spanish for free on our website.
We are a committed collective. We are prepared to invest a lot of time and energy into producing this project, but we ask any and all sympathetic readers to help us with printing and distribution. by donating to our funding page. To print 10,000 copies of this it will cost us $2,000 dollars. While in the past we have had to ask people to pay the postage to our distributor, we would like to be able to send out more copies for free, to encourage broader distribution. We are asking for another $2,000 dollars for this. With maximizing our distribution efforts through contacts and friends across the world, we can distribute and mail out almost all of the new issues to anyone interested in distributing it. This leads us to asking for $4,000 dollars. We know this is an ambitious amount, and most likely those supporting us aren’t very wealthy, but it will absolutely secure this project, and help with the expansion of our readership. We hope that reaching out this way will put a dent into that fiscal goal, as our collective members are all working people.”
This week, we’re excited to present a conversation with Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley, editors and authors of a new book out from AK Press entitled “Dixie Be Damned: 300 years of Insurrection in the American South”. The book is a study of Maroon, Indigenous, White, Black, worker, farmer, slave, indentured, women and men wrestling against institutions of power for autonomy and self-determination. All of this in a region stereotyped to be backwards, slow, lazy, victimized and brutal. The editors do a smash-bang job of re-framing narratives of revolt by drawing on complex and erased examples of cross-subjectivity struggles and what they can teach us today about current uprisings in which we participate.
Throughout the hour we explore some of the examples that became chapters in the book, critiques of narrative histories and academia and what new ways forward might be towards an anarchist historiography. Keep an ear out for Saralee and Neal’s book tour, coming to a bookspace near you.
This week’s episode is LITERALLY packed solid. We start off with an announcement about the case of Luke O’Donovan’s trial beginning on August 11th at 9AM at the Superior Court of Fulton County, 136 Pryor Street, S.W., Suite C-640, Atlanta, GA. Luke’s support is asking for folks who want to get his back to show up in court attire and be present for the court date. Luke is facing 5 attempted homicide charges stemming from injuring the 5 men attacking him as he was being queer bashed in Atlanta on New Years of 2013. More info and the callout can be found at http://LetLukeGo.wordpress.com
Next, a quick announcement about an upcoming benefit for and presentation about the 5E3, three anarchists (Amelie, Fallon and Carlos) accused of using molotov cocktails to damage a Nissan dealership and the Ministry of Communication and Transportation in Mexico City on the 5th of January. A supporter of the 5E3 will be speaking about their case on Sunday, August 10th at Rosetta’s Kitchen (Upstairs) at 8pm. August 10th is also known as Prisoner’s Justice Day and witnesses yearly hunger strikes across the convict race serving time across Canada in remembrance of all prisoners who’ve died of unnatural causes while incarcerated. More info at http://fuegoalascarceles.wordpress.com/in-english-information/
Our first segment (after Sean’s words of wisdom) is a conversation with D, an anarchist and prison abolitionist from West Virginia to update us about the Elk River chemical spill from January of this year. We talk about the West Virginia Clean Water Hub and the project it recently spawned, Voices From South Central WV. Voices from South Central is working to amplify the voices of prisoners at the main jail in Charleston, WV. The project began as a way of gauging and presenting (in prisoners own words) the effects of the water crisis on those incarcerated and how the administration dealt with health effects it caused and worked (or didn’t) to provide clean water to those they jailed. http://storiesfromsouthcentralwv.com/
For our past coverage of the spill, check out: http://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/?s=west+virginia
Finally, we air another great segment from Anarchistisches Radio Berlin. This time A-Radio speaks with members of the Greek political Hip Hop group Social Waste. The discussion ranges from chat about the development of Hip Hop in Greece, where it overlaps with politics, immigrant solidarity, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism as currently practiced in Greece.
The first will be the 2nd in our hopefully ongoing presentation of audio essays by anarchist prisoner Sean Swain, currently held in isolation at Ohio State Prison in Youngstown Ohio for alleged involvement in the Army of the 12 Monkeys, a nascent prisoner guerilla sabotage movement in Ohio prisons which is spreading every wider. Sean Swain denies involvement in the group and a self-identified member of that movement denies his involvement yet he’s been convicted of it despite any evidence and is now serving 23 hours a day in solitary, without human contact. We’ll be featuring mostly weekly segments by Sean from inside prison until the fascist running dogs at OSP shut off our communication. Here Sean gives his bid in hopes of being elected not the next governor of Ohio in 2014, but the last. Check out some of his writings at http://seanswain.org
Our second segment is a conversation with Nat and D, two anarchists in the South East of the U.S. doing mutual aid solidarity work with communities in West Virginia effected by the leaking of chemicals by the sarcastically named Freedom Industries, a company involved in providing chemicals for coal extraction. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/keeperofthemountains
For more info, if you have the fakebook account: https://www.facebook.com/pages/WV-Clean-Water-Hub
