Today’s show features an interview with the Portland-based author and activist, Kristian Williams. Williams speaks on his first book, Our Enemies in Blue (a history of policing in America), on recent articles about community policing and the counterinsurgency training shared between the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement agencies and the growing movement calling for the abolition of police in the United States, and the Pacific Northwest in particular). The show will air at 1pm EST at www.ashevillefm.org and be archived for a week at www.ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw .
Check out www.kristianwilliams.com for more information on the interviewee
In November of 2008, 13 identified individuals entered a mega-church in Lansing, MI, known for it’s active anti-gay stance and organizing. These 13, deemed the Mount Hope Infinity as the number of Jane and John Does (20) kept growing in the civil law suit that followed, threw leaflets telling the congregation (particularly the youth) that it’s ok not to be straight, kissed at the pulpit and chanted slogans. A two and a half year civil suit was subsequently brought by the Alliance Defense Fund (a legal group devoted to the end of persecution to Christians) under the auspices of the “Freedom of Access to Clinical Entrances Act” (a law passed to stop people from blocking access to clinics that offer abortions). This week’s hour is a discussion with one defendant about the case, the events and the aftermath.
Bash Back! communique on Mount Hope:
http://www.myspace.com/bashbacklansing/blog/448202823
The Mount Hope Infinity website:
https://themounthopeinfinity.wordpress.com/
This show was based on what information I could garner concerning the Pelican Bay and Corcoran prisoners in CA who had promised hunger strikes concerning a number of concerns. This strike eventually spread to many outside prisons throughout the state and the United States.
This weeks show was a conversation my friend Loida. Loida lives in the Asheville area, works here, was up until recently a student here. Loida is undocumented. We spend the hour talking about some of the laws recently passed around the U.S. and NC (and on their way to passage) that target folks without documentation, we discuss racism, we explore belonging and exclusion and identity.
Tonight’s show (Monday, 1/24/11 from 8-10pm EST, thanks to The Invisible Worm) will focus on the struggle for justice in Northern Ireland from Fenians through the United Men, the IRB, IRA, INLA and the Civil Rights Marches. Recognizing that this is guilty pleasure for some of us Americans of Irish Descent (myself included), allow me these two hours to play some of my favorite Irish Republican songs.
Please also understand that I do not condone the actions of the paramilitary movements (Unionist or Republican) or governments (Irish, Northern Irish or British). My understanding is that the Irish situation is a terribly complicated product of centuries of colonization, genocide and divide-and-conquer tactics of the lower classes (mostly along religious and ethnic lines) by the elite and powerful. A free Ireland, in my opinion, would be one: free of class division; free of the managing elite; free of religious persecution and the persecution of religions; free of sectarian conflict; free of racism, sexism and homophobia. A free Ireland would be autonomous from European oversight and debt and yet one in which Irish identity does not take the form of jingoistic nationalism.
For more information on some interesting Irish projects, check out the following pages:
Worker’s Solidarity Movement
Black and Red Revolution
RAG (Revolutionary Anarchafeminist Group
This week’s show, during Dystopia, I presented my humble homage to the songs of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly to the Anarchist forces. These two hours feature many original recordings and beautiful readaptations, with little rants/snippets of history on the significance of songs.
I noted after the show ended that I left out the original of what is perhaps my favorite song ( “A Las Barricadas”, the CNT theme to the tune of Warszawianka 1905) from that period, available here for your enjoyment on youtube.
For some light reading on the subject, check out:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spaindx.html
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/scw/scw.htm
NC Rising 2 was a weekend of shows, workshops and panel discussions that brought folks from around the United States to Warren Wilson College, outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Below is the second half of the first panel discussion, on a Friday in 2010.
Repression and Counter-Repression brought together people from all over who had recently been coping with repression to discuss its current framework. Panelists spoke from a variety of perspectives from within “ecological,” “animal liberation,” and “anti-capitalist” struggles. The contributions of each will help broaden our understandings of how repression acts against revolutionary projects and how a practice of revolutionary solidarity can reduce some of the effects of repression and help us to construct an environment of counter-repression.
* What is the framework of repression under which we are operating?
* What is “Revolutionary Solidarity”? What is its function? What are its means?
* How, in such a paralyzing condition of surveillance and political condition of weakness, can we move towards a practice of revolutionary solidarity?
panelists included:
Hugh, who just survived a long legal battle over I-69-related charges;
Katherine, of the Friends and Family Of Daniel McGowan;
Neil, a member of Internationalist Prison Books Collective and a supporter of the Asheville 11, defendants recently accused of 112 misdemeanors and 34 felonies;
Talia, a survivor of Minnehaha Free State repression, member of the Coldsnap Legal collective, worker for the NLG, and member of the Conspiracy Tour.
This panel was moderated by an editor of Rolling Thunder magazine.
This week’s show features a conversation with Gail Stevens. Gail is the mother of imprisoned activist and anarchist, Connor Stevens, who is one of the four anarchists that the FBI is accusing of attempting to blow up a bridge outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Connor and two other defendants, Brandon Baxter and Doug Wright, have taken a non-cooperating plea deal in the case and face their sentencing hearing on November 5th & 6th of 2012. Joshua Stafford is currently undergoing psychiatric testing to see if he can stand trial. Anthony Hayne took a cooperating plea.
During the interview Gail talks about her son, Connor, and offers a different story than what the FBI and even Rolling Stone Magazine have proposed as to what happened leading up to the arrest of the 5 on April 30th of this year. Gail also rips into the poor journalism involved in “The Plot Against Occupy” and tells us what Sabrina R. Erdely got wrong.
This week’s show features a conversation with William Munger, co-editor and contributor to the upcoming AK Press book, Life During Wartime (2013). We talk about the application of Counterinsurgency praxis by law enforcement domestically in the U.S. and what that looks like in it’s varying forms.
What is COIN (Counterinsurgency)? How is it being applied to movements and communities in the United States? How do we resist it? These are among the topics covered during the conversation.
Among other things, Will’s research has focused on the case study of the relationship and dialogue developed between law enforcement in Salinas, California and the Monterey, California-based Naval Postgraduate School. This relationship has allowed NPS to conduct the beginnings of a proxy-war on the local Latino populations with a focus on eradicating gang networks. Will’s essay, “Social War in the Salad Bowl” won a grant from the Institute for Anarchist Studies this last year.
This week’s conversation features a discussion of the case of the Cleveland 4, anarchists arrested in Ohio on April 30th for allegedly attempting to blow up a bridge. But the case isn’t so simple as idealists independently taking direct and spectacular action against infrastructure. As members of Cleveland 4 Justice (the support group for the defendants) share with us information about the accused, what is known about the alleged infiltrator sent by the FBI to facilitate a terror case (Shaquille Azir), and the significance of the timing of the arrests to coincide with May Day celebrations worldwide and the reawakening of the Occupy Movement in the U.S., we see a widened scope of intrigue and entrapment that fits into a bigger picture of corrupt government and self-serving security services.
