This week on the show we are pleased to present an interview with María Kamila, who is a teacher and a popular journalist who works with the anarchist Colombian journalism and counter-information collective in Bogotácalled Subversión. We originally reached out to talk about the current wave of protests and riots in Colombia, and this interview covers many topics, ranging from a historical contextualization of the current moment, who are on the front lines of the protests, Indigenous solidarity with anarchist accomplices via the Minga – which is a pre-colonial term for collaboration, meeting or communal action – , and many more topics.
Much thanks to our comrades at Radio Kurruf, doing anarchist media in the Biobío bio-region of so-called Chile in occupied Wallmapu, for putting us into touch with Subversión.
This week we are very happy to present an interview with Pranav Jeevan P, who is a student, a writer, an anti-caste activist, and an Indian anarchist living in the state of Kerala. You are listening to the full extended audio from this conversation, where you’ll hear Pranav explaining how he got into anarchism, how anarchistic praxis unfolds in India, some about the origins of and worldwide implications of the caste system, anti-caste organizing and how anarchism feeds it, and about how the BJP and Hindutva have real influence on people’s lives and destinies.
He further touches on the struggle of Dalit and Other Backwards Caste folks and how this tendency has always had solidarity with Black liberation here on Turtle Island, much more information about the anti CAA protest and the Farmer’s Protest, a little bit about the ongoing military occupation of the state of Kashmir, and many more topics. There is already a lot of really good anti-caste hip hop out there, mostly performed by those in oppressed castes, and I’ll be including a bunch of those tracks which have been recommended by our guest, plus providing links in the show notes.
There are a lot of terms in this episode which may be unfamiliar to all listeners, and we warmly invite folks to take a look at our show notes for this episode to see links for further reading and research. Please also look forward in the coming week to this show being transcribed in full, if you would like a copy to send to a friend or to read along while listening.
Also you may have heard that covid is spreading out of control in India right now, in no small part due to government mismanagement. Please also take a look at this ongoing list of donations compiled by the group Students Against Hidutva Ideology. You can follow this group on Twitter @Students_A_H to see their updates and events. You can also follow India Solidarity Network on Instagram for updates on COVID in India.
We will link to a form for mental healthcare workers to donate their time and services to Indian frontline healthcare workers, who are really struggling right now.
Please be aware that in this segment, sean speaks about the Derek Chauvin trial and the murder of people at the hands of police. If you would prefer to skip this subject matter, you can skip forward about 8 and a half minutes. This segment occurs at the end of the episode, [02:02:27-02:10:58]
This week on the show I’m speaking with three folks engaged in organizing in the rural Alamance County, North Carolina, and it’s capital of Graham. All three work with the 501c4 political non-profit, DownhomeNC which in Alamance has been working on a range of engagements including running local candidates for office, doing get-out-the-vote work, sparking conversations with rural residents of the county, running a bail fund and working on bail reform, rent relief and operating food distribution. Dreama Caldwell, one of our guests, ran on a platform of bail reform to be the first Black woman elected to the County Commission, though she was not elected, is a mother, and as an Abolitionist has been working to abolish cash bail and change the condition for people of Color and poor folks as relates to the Alamance courts and jail. Sugalema is an organizer, a mom, and the daughter of undocumented parents from Mexico who’s been living in Alamance for the last decade. Gwen is a mother from a white, working class background who has also worked to support Alamance organizers through Downhome on a number of campaigns. You can learn more about the organization at DownhomeNC.org and their various social media pages.
As a side note, the folks who produce The Final Straw do not endorse electoralism as a strategy for lasting change or community power. We are anarchists. There are plenty of places you can go to find anarchist critiques of engaging in electoral politics, sometimes with anarchists or anti-authoritarians advocating limited engagement in elections but usually calling for abstention. Even though DownhomeNC is not an anarchist organization, we do feel like the experiences of Sugalema, Dreama and Gwen are important to share because they talk about the work of changing minds and building relationships in the rural south where an autonomous left or anarchist movement doesn’t exist… like most of the world. They are intelligent and impassioned women doing hard work to grow community resistance and engagement. Abolition also includes the complicated work of decreasing the harm caused by systems of oppression like the police, courts, borders, white supremacy and capitalism while simultaneously building discourse against those institutions that impose harm. We really hope that listeners will get a lot from this conversation.
Announcements
Eric King updates
Anarchist and antifascist prisoner Eric King caught covid at FCI Englewood, alongside over a hundred other prisoners, thanks to the ineptitude of his captors at the BOP who have been moving staff between Englewood and FCI Florence where an outbreak had been ongoing. His trial for defending himself from an attack by a prison officer has been pushed back to April of 2021. In good news, his mail ban appears temprorarily lifted and his website hosts his book list again. He’s been able to receive letters, magazines and books for the first time in years. Check out the update at SupportEricKing.org and send Eric some love.
To hear our interview with Eric from last year, visit our website.
Xinachtli Parole Support
“Xinachtli,” as. many of you know, means literally in English, “Seed,” or, as Comrade “X” likes to phrase, it from a prisoner’s perspective, “Germinating Seed” and s/n Alvaro Luna Hernandez, is a Chicano/Mexicano-Anarchist Communist and Anti-Imperialist Internationally-recognized Political Prisoner, has suffered long enough from a (50-year) bogus Aggravated Assault conviction rife with racist civil rights abuse and judicial misconduct.
The contrived & trumped-up Aggravated Robbery charge brought by Sheriff McDaniel without the authority of a warrant, was thrown out later at trial, but through prosecutorial chicanery, allowed the assault charge to stick being a paroled felon.
The so-called Aggravated-Assault charge, which should’ve amounted to a ‘misdemeanor,’ occurred with his near-term pregnant wife nearby in their own front yard, as he, showing no demonstrative violent aggressive behavior, correctly disarmed the Sheriff as he drew his service revolver in anger as “Xinachtli” challenged his authority to attempt an arrest in a situation that could’ve proved lethal for all three, mother, baby, and most surely “Xinachtli” himself. The local authorities hated him and his family and his labor organizing in Brewster County, Alpine, Texas.
Many of you already are familiar with this abuse of authority yarn, but, does bear repeating, as he is still held captive for this injustice in ‘STG’ (Security Threat Group) status, studying law and assisting other prisoners with their appeals, while continuously sharing, and germinating his revolutionary thoughts and ideals in cocoon-like solitary confinement, at the repressive TDCJ-CID James V. Allred Unit, ‘Supermax’ Gulag, in Iowa Park, Texas, marooned in the North Texas’ Red River Valley. Texas prisons are now one of the nation’s COVID-19 virus’ ‘hotspots,’ and the courts are refusing to intervene, WHILE PRISONER DEAD BODIES PILE UP IN LOCAL MORGUES. “XINACHTLI” is an elderly person, with his life in danger.
Presently, “Xinachtli” is preparing for his (1st) upcoming ‘Parole Review Hearing,’ on July 18, 2021. We are in need of help with a groundswell of support from the Prison Abolitionists, Human Rights, Indigenous, and Prison Activist Movement communities. TBPP suggests that FEW, clear & concise letters are preferred, to place in his case-file for review; lazy eyes is a disguise with TBPP Parole Panels. So, let’s blast ’em with a barrage of letters to help us ensure that his ‘Review’ is an impartially-heard (Hearing?) by traditionally ‘parole-stingy’ Texas Board of Pardons & Parole Commissioners; and is a successful one.
Try to include in the letter, that”Xinachtli,” though, he has tested ‘COVID-19 – negative,’ and in recent months received a ‘flu shot,’ he has hypertension that’s medicated, and is ostensibly cured of Hep-C, he nonetheless will be 69 years old next May 12th, 2021; so the Corona Virus danger rages on!
Also include, a solid confirmation that there’s a solid support system waiting, available opportunities of employment, residence, and transportation, as well as psychological/coping support and a period of adjustment, are all important – he’s been in a solitary ‘time-capsule, the worldwide ‘spider’ web has exploded on the social scene since his conviction in June of 1997.
Please address all your Letters of Support for “Xinachtli” with his registered name, ALVARO LUNA HERNANDEZ, and prison number, TDCJ-CID#00255735
You can mail the letters to his lawyer:
Allen D. Place
Attorneys at Law
109 S. 7th Street
Gatesville, TX, 76528
To hear Xinachtli telling his story in his own voice, check out our website.
This week, I spoke with Dónal O’Driscoll, an animal rights activist and anarchist from the UK talking about the work of the Undercover Research Group to investigate possible SpyCops in the UK, share resources by those harmed by the lies of long term undercovers in activist communities and the current Inquiry that activists are using to unearth the legacy of police infiltration since the 1960’s.
A site related to the campaign for justice by activist women with whom undercovers had relationships under false pretenses: https://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/
The Monitoring Group has been working for nearly 3 decades in Southall in West London to challenge racism through family led empowerment and justice campaigns: http://www.tmg-uk.org/
Belarus is continuing to experience a revolt against the 26 year dictatorship of the post-Soviet dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. The situation came to a boil, fueled by yet another election rife with administration corruption, the creation of mutual aid infrastructure in the face of a government that abandoned public health measures in the face of the corona virus pandemic, decreased economic quality of life… people found each other and the state turned on them. In response to the police violence, regular folks came out into the streets to oppose the dictatorship and the system threatened collapse. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
For the hour, we speak with Ivan, a Belarusian anarchist living in Germany, about the uprising, doxing cops, the part that anarchists have played, the distinctions between pro-Democracy and anti-dictatorship activity, the upcoming week of solidarity with anarchist and anti-fascists of Belarus from November 23-30th, 2020 and how comrades from abroad can support not only those repressed but the activist efforts to sustain the resistance to the Belarusian dictatorship. You can learn more about the week of solidarity, including where to send solidarity funds and communiques at ABC-Belarus.Org. You can support wider protest infrastructure by donating at FireFund.Net/Belarus.
A great news source that Ivan mentions to keep up on anarchist perspectives from Belarus (sometimes in English) is: Pramen.io/EN/Main/
Ivan also mentions, when talking about international solidarity, US corporations that are supporting the Belarusian dictatorship during this repression. They include:
Apple has attempted to pressure Telegram to close the channels where protesters in Belarus have been sharing details on the police
Sandvine (founded in Canada, funded in part from the US) was providing equipment that Belarus used to block access to Twitter, Facebook and international news sites. The country has a pretty bad history ala likely use by the governments of Egypt, Turkey and Syria to repress the populations of those countries, but in this instance (and pressure from the US Gov and Human Rights Watch) they appear to have canceled their contract with Belarus in September.
Skype (owned by Microsoft) has been providing court infrastructure, as the trials of those arrested during the uprising is taking place over the video conferencing platform.
Announcements
Russell “Maroon” Shoatz
Black liberation fighter Russell “Maroon” Shoatz has tested positive for COVID-19. Maroon, a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, is a political prisoner/prisoner of war held by the state of Pennsylvania. Maroon has been imprisoned since 1972, when he was given a life sentence for an attack on a police station, He was held in solitary confinement from 1991 to 2014, when he was allowed to return to the general population.
Maroon is already being treated for stage-four cancer and is forced to live in inhumane prison conditions. Given his positive COVID-19 diagnosis and his already compromised health, we demand his immediate release and the release of all elderly prisoners.
From a Facebook post on the page of Russell Shoatz III: Maroon “is a political prisoner enslaved for his efforts to liberate our people. He is the father of my dear friend, Russell Shoatz III. In addition to Covid-19, Maroon is also suffering from stage 4 colon cancer. He is living in tremendous pain, in unhygienic conditions where 30 inmates are being held in one room sharing one toilet. It is a violation of their human rights and Maroon’s agreement with the state. Maroon is asking that all supporters call the office of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf and demand his immediate, unconditional release, as well as that of ALL elderly prisoners infected with COVID-19. Please call (717) 787-2500 beginning the morning of Monday, November 16, and keep the pressure on!”
Free Russell “Maroon” Shoatz and all political prisoners!”
Anarchist and Anonymous hacker, Jeremy Hammond has been released to a half-way house in his hometown of Chicago after over 10 years in prison, resisting a grand jury alongside Chelsae Manning and two bouts with Covid-19. Welcome home, Jeremy! Not sure when their next episode is due out, but Jeremy and his brother Jason both produce a podcast called “Twin Trouble”, a member of the Channel Zero Network and you can hear an interview that we did with Jeremy for June 11th this year.
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Featured tracks:
Gun (Instrumental Slow) by Chuck Berry from Have Mercy: His Complete Chess Recordings 1969 To 1974
Стены (“The Walls”) by Группа Аркадий Коц (Arkadiy Kots band) [rec 2012 original version L’Estaca, by Luis Llach (1968), translated into Russian by Kirill Medvedev, arranged by Arkady Kots band]
The following is a conversation between folks involved in anti-repression work in 5 parts of the so-called US. The goal was to present a zoomed out vision of scope and patterns of repression since the Floyd Uprising of this summer, particularly as the US sits in a period of heightened tensions around the elections and continued killings by police. Please consider sharing this chat around. We need to be ready to push back against repression and support the mostly BIPOC folks facing heavy charges for hitting the streets against white supremacy.
In the conversation, we hear about a few cases of folks attacked and/or killed by police in the communities our guests come from and whose memories contributed to the Uprising where they were. These include:
Rodney J. Freeman (killed by Dane County Police in Wisconsin);
Elliot T. Johnson (killed by Monona Police in Wisconsin);
Jacob Blake (brazenly injured by Kenosha Police);
John T Williams (killed by Seattle Police);
Charleena Lyles (killed by Seattle Police);
Kevin Peterson, Jr. (killed by Clark County Sheriff deputies in Washington State);
Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal (killed by Salt Lake City Police);
Atlanta: Rayshard Brooks (killed by Atlanta Police);
This week on The Final Straw, we present a conversation that I had with Lorax B. Horne, a non-binary writer and journalist from Canada, Ecuador and the United Kingdom who is currently the Editor-In-Chief of the data transparency collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDOSecrets. In June of this year, the collective released roughly 269 gigabytes of hacked information from 251 law enforcement agencies, dubbed BlueLeaks. The data comes from the shadowy hacker group, Anonymous, and was retrieved from Federal Fusion centers which facilitate information gathering and dissemination between high level agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the FBI with state and local law enforcement and are situated around the so-called United States.
For the hour, Lorax talks about the development of fusion centers, the contents of the #BlueLeaks trove, insights drawn by journalists who have used the data to cover things like far-right conspiracy theories entering law enforcement bulletins, their editing process, social media and governmental attempts to cover up the contents and the persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.
To check out a collection of the articles written about the BlueLeaks collected by Lorax, check out the article up on medium.com entitled “What is BlueLeaks”. For some useful links to their work, you can check out our show notes at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org. To dig into the data itself and see other collections released by Distributed Denial of Secrets and other groups like Unicorn Riot, you can visit ddosecrets.com, see the #AssangeLeaks at AssangeLeaks.org, their Project Whispers is a searchable database of fascist discord logs at Whispers.DDOSecrets.com, and you can support DDOS with recurring payments at their OpenCollective.com page. You can also keep up on their work by following them on Mastadon, fedbook, Telegram, InstaGram and SubStack NewsLetter, many of which links and more show up on their Linktr.ee.
You can find Lorax’s writing on MuckRack and follow them on twitter at @BBHorne.
Sean Swain
As a quick update on Sean Swain’s situation, he’s still stuck without phone or email access, but he appears to be getting his mail. This is a hard situation for a presidential candidate and surely some listeners have pull with the Federal Elections Commission to correct this injustice. A couple of ways to help out Sean from where you’re at include contributing to the fundraiser set up to help raise legal funds for him or you can contact the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections director Annette Chambers-Smith by calling: 614-387-0588
or writing to:
4545 Fisher Road, Suite D, Columbus, OH 43228
Sean’d probably appreciate you asking why Sean Swain (Ohio number A243205) is being denied access to jpay services, what happened to his hundreds of dollars of music and other items that didn’t transfer over to him in Virginia and why his phone services are currently shut down.
New Episodes of “Live Like The World Is Dying”
The Final Straw is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here’s a jingle from another member of CZN, Margaret Killjoy. We suggest listeners check out the recent practical episodes of ‘Live Like The World is Dying’, covering topics of how to treat gunshot wounds, good approaches to masking up against chemical agents, body armor, open source medical chemistry and a more…
This week we had the opportunity to connect with Delee Nikal, who is a Wet’su’weten community member, about updates from the Gidimt’en Camp that was created to block the TransCanada Coastal GasLink pipeline (or CGL) that Canada is trying to push through their un-ceded territory. In this interview Bursts and Delee speak about ways folks can get involved, both in so called BC and elsewhere, how the covid pandemic is affecting their work, and many other topics.
The Struggle for Likhtsamisyu Liberation Continues, Updates from Delee Nikal
Before the segment from Sean Swain, we would like to draw attention to a fundraiser in order to get Sean proper legal representation. As we all may know by now, there is nothing restorative about the prison system, its only reason for being is punitive and capitalist. Sean Swain has been in prison for the past 25 years, for a so called “crime” of self defense and radicalized to being an anarchist behind bars. He has been targeted by numerous prison officials for his political beliefs, so much so that years were added to his sentence. If you would like to support this fundraiser, you can either visit our show notes or go to gofundme.com and search Restorative Justice for Sean Swain.
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You can write to Sean Swain at his latest address:
Sean Swain #2015638
Buckingham Correctional
PO Box 430
Dillwyn, VA 23936
You can find his writings, past recordings of his audio segments, and updates on his case at seanswain.org, and follow him on Twitter @swainrocks.
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In Solidarity with Italian Anarchists Facing RepressionWe send you our solidarity call with anarchist in Italy and some introductory words, asking you to spread it in the way you prefer. Thanks!
“From 2019 to today the Italian State has carried out many repressive operations and inflicted a series of restrictive measures on anarchist comrades, limiting their freedom of movement and forcing them to remain within the limits of their city or to move away from the city or region where they reside.As recipients of these kind of minor measures, together we want to relaunch our solidarity with the more than 200 comrades involved in the various trials in Italy that are starting this September and that shall continue throughout the autumn.In particular, the appeal trial of the Scripta Manent Operation will resume at the beginning of September: this trial involves 5 comrades who have been in prison for 4 years (two of them for 8 years) and which has resulted in 20+ years of sentence in the first grade.During this trial the prosecutor Sparagna gibbered of an “acceptable” anarchism and of a “criminal” one, statements that contain the punitive strategy that the State wants to carry out, based on dividing the “good” from the “bad” within the anarchist movement and the ruling of exemplary sentences.”---------WHO ASPIRES TO FREEDOM CANNOT BE “MEASURED”We are anarchists subject to restrictive measures following a series of investigations that have crossed the Italian peninsula in the last year and a half.They would like to isolate us, but they cannot. They would like to prevent us from supporting our comrades in prison, but their repression can only strengthen our solidarity.With these various investigations, measures and prison detentions they want to wear us out and divide us, but we remain firm in our ideas and our relations, also thanks to the strong and sincere solidarity that has never failed us and that is increasingly under attack in the courtrooms.They want to divide us between “good” and “bad”, between an anarchism they call "acceptable" and one they call "criminal". We are aware that it is our ideas that have been put on the stand in the latest inquiries, all the more so when these ideas find the way of being translated into action, because as we’ve always believed, thought and action find their meaning only when tied together. And it’s not surprising that a hierarchical system of power such as the State is trying to knock out its enemies by playing dirty and reviewing history, precisely when social anger is growing everywhere.We don’t intend to bow down to their repressive strategies and we reaffirm our full solidarity and complicity with all the anarchists who will be on trial from September: we stand side by side with the comrades under investigation for the Scripta Manent, Panico, Prometeo, Bialystok and Lince Operations, with the anarchist comrades Juan and Davide and with those who will be tried for the Brennero demonstration; we assert our solidarity with Carla, an anarchist comrade arrested in August after living more than a year as a fugitive, following the Scintilla Operation.We know very well who are the enemies that imprison our comrades and against whom we are fighting and every anarchist knows in his/her heart how and where to act to demonstrate what solidarity is.Even if not all of us can be present in the courtrooms alongside our comrades on trial or where solidarity will be manifested, we want to express all our affinity, our love and our anger to them and to all anarchists in prison.Let’s continue to attack this world of cages. Solidarity is a weapon, and an opportunity.-Anarchists “with measures”, exiled and confined
We talk about how reform and so-called ‘more humane’ ‘alternatives’ to incarceration such as electronic monitoring, drug courts and probation in fact extend the carceral net. We also talk about alternatives to the ‘Punishment Paradigm’ in responding to harm, police and prison abolitionism and resisting recuperation in our struggles to imagine and birth a new world.
We got word that Sean Swain has had his email, phone and mail blocked, likely in response to his “An Open Letter to Annette Chambers-Smith,” available via DetroitABC, as well as his soon-to-be-published book, “Ohio” (parts 1-3 of the first half available here in zine form, soon via LBC). Pass it on…
This week, I speak with JN, an anarchist who works with the decolonial, leftist HongKonger platform, Lausan, talks about where the uprising against Chinese integration in Hong Kong stands, the National Security Law, tankie and rightwing narratives and international anti-authoritarian solidarity and resistance.
The interview about Belarus that I mentioned before was from a recent episode of Elephant In The Room, from Dresden, Germany, which is a member of the Channel Zero Network of Anarchist Podcasts.
I’d like to remind folks that the 2020 Republican National Convention is going to partially be held in Charlotte from August 20-24. One group that is doing anti-repression work in the area is CharlotteUprising, which can be found on twitter at @CLTUprising, where you can find info about the protests at the event as well as their jail support, including how to make donations. You can learn more by following the hashtags #CharlotteUprising and #ResistRNC2020
To all in solidarity with the Prisoners Human Rights Movement:
We are reaching out to those that have been amplifying our voices in these state, federal, or immigration jails and prisons, and to allies that uplifted the national prison strike demands in 2018. We call on you again to organize the communities from August 21st – September 9th, 2020, by hosting actions, events, and demonstrations that call for prisoner human rights and the end to prison slavery…
On August 21 – September 9, we call on everyone in solidarity with the prison class struggle to organize an action, a panel discussion, a rally, an art event, a film screening, or another kind of demonstration to promote prisoners’ human rights. Whatever is within your ability, we ask that you shake the nation out of any fog they may be in about prisoners’ human rights and the criminal legal system (legalized enslavement).
During these solidarity events, we request that organizers amplify immediate issues prisoners in your state face, the demands from the National Prison Strike of 2018, and uplift Jailhouse Lawyers Speak new International Law Project…
The prison strike demands were drafted as a path to alleviate the dehumanizing process and conditions people are subjected to while going through this nation’s judicial system. Following up on these demands communicates to the world that prisoners are heard and that prisoners’ human rights are a priority.
In the spirit of Attica, will you be in the fight to dismantle the prison industrial slave complex by pushing agendas that will shut down jails and prisons like Rikers Island or Attica? Read the Attica Rebellion demands and read the National Prison Strike 2018 demands. Ask yourself what can you do to see the 2018 National Prison Strike demands through.
SHARE THIS RELEASE FAR AND WIDE WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS!
We rage with George Jackson’s “Blood in my eyes” and move in the spirit of the Attica Rebellion!
