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Afghanistan, Anarchist, Asia, Federation of Anarchism Era, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, repression, Transcribed, zine

Perspectives from Iranian Anarchists

Perspectives from Iranian Anarchists

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This week on The Final Straw we feature a chat with a translator of the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran to share perspectives from membership in Iran and abroad about resistance to the regime from within, solidarity from abroad, the impact of US Sabre-rattling.

[00:03:58 – 00:59:39]

An inspirational movement arose out of the Cold War period among anarchists who found themselves on either side of the international chess-board. In the US this was called Neither East Nor West. The movement published a journal called On Gogol Boulevard, which after 1990, lived as a column in Profane Existence (an anarcho-punk journal), Fifth Estate and other journals. This project seems to have existed for about 15 years, from 1980 to 1994. The Final Straw lost the opportunity a few years ago to interview a New Yorker deeply engaged throughout this project, Bob McGlynn, when he passed away. He was obviously not the only person involved, but sharing his experience and story is a missed opportunity on our part. A link to an article that McGlynn penned about the project will be linked in our show notes.

Today, we find ourselves as anarchists in the USA, 20 years into the so-called War On Terror. This war of destabilization has targeted criminalized populations in within the U.S. borders and has had massively violent and deadly consequences across the globe. What we call a War, for lack of a better word, serves to destroy, enslave, maim and kill animals, human and non-human, around the world. And throughout the whole of this 20 year period a constant boogey-man has been that of the Iranian state, whose people have lived under the varying pressure of US-led sanctions. The US war machine hovers close to shifting from it’s regional proxy wars and an active war with Iran as the Trump regime’s rhetoric and economic policy close around the throats of the Iranian people.

In the interest of international solidarity and understanding and the spirit of the Neither East Nor West, we are quite pleased to be having a conversation with people from the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran. In this conversation we’ll be learning about Iranian struggles and what solidarity from the West might look like. We hope that in the future we can talk more about the impact of the 20 years of war on the peoples of Afghanistan perpetrated by the US government and it’s allies and the work of anti-authoritarians on the ground.

More information from the Union can be found at https://asranarshism.com/ (posts are mostly in Persian), they can be followed on twitter at @asranarshism, @asranarshism on instagram, on Telegram (also mostly in Persian) and fedbook.

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Sean Swain’s segment [00:59:39 – 1:07:29]

Announcements

Tattoo Benefits for Chilean Arrestees

More than 2000 people have been arrested on charges related to the Chilean uprising. To raise funds for arrestees mounting legal fees, comrades in Santiago had the idea to organize an international tattoo party fundraiser to raise money for legal funds and increase the coordination across territories. The date will be February 15th. Currently, events in Santiago and Atlanta GA have signed on and we are waiting for confirmation from Valdivia and Punto Varas. A flyer announcing the international tattoo party is forthcoming with more details on how we can link up the different events. The idea is to cross promote the different events to build a broader network, showcase different tattoo artists, and take advantage of our our shared capacity across territories.
Deadline to sign on is February 1st, email tatuajessinfronteras@protonmail.com to get involved

Solidarity w Greek Antifascists

Comrades abroad are doing a campaign for the persecuted antifascists that are charged for the attacks of the offices of the greek fascist party, they will have to gather 30000 until 17/1. Show solidarity support/spread it!

https://www.firefund.net/persecutedantifa

Freedom for Chip Fitzgerald

Check out the support site for Chip Fitzgerald, Black Panther activist in the California prison system for 50 years now.  Chip is an elder who has suffered a stroke inside prison and is sometimes confined to a wheelchair, often uses a cane and is the longest held Black Panther prisoner.  He has served 3 times the usual sentence served for folks convicted of similar crimes and has been denied parole over a dozen times since he became eligible in 1976.  More on his case and how you can help to bring this aging revolutionary home is up at https://www.freedom4chip.org/

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both tracks are from Salome MC

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Transcription of the interview with a member of AUAI

Thanks to A-Radio Berlin for the transcription. German translation available soon via that project.

TFSR: Today, we find ourselves as anarchists in the USA, 20 years into the so-called ‘War on Terror’. This war of destabilization has targeted criminalized populations within the US borders and has had massive violent and deadly consequences across the globe. What we call a war, for lack of a better word, serves to destroy, enslave and maim animals, human and nonhuman, around the world. And throughout this whole 20 year period, one of the constant boogeymen has been that of the Iranian state, whose people have lived under varying pressure from US-led sanctions. The US war machine hovers close to shifting from its regional proxy wars to an active war with Iran, as the Trump regime’s rhetoric and economic policy close around the throats of the Iranian people. In the interest of international solidarity and understanding and the spirit of ‘Neither East Nor West’, we’re quite pleased to be having a conversation with a translator from the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran. In this conversation, we’ll be learning about Iranian struggles and what solidarity from the West might look like. We hope that in the future we can talk more about the impact of the 20 years of war on the peoples of Afghanistan, perpetrated by the US government at its allies, and the work of anti-authoritarians on the ground.
So, right now I’m speaking with a translator from the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak and do you want to introduce yourself further than that?

AUIA: Thank you for having me. And no, that’s adequate, thank you.

TFSR: Can you talk about the makeup generally of the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran and what its aims are? Like, why does it include both of those territories and not others and what are the unifying principles of the Union?

AUIA: The Union is composed of the ‘Anarchist Era Collective’, which is a community of anarchists from Afghanistan and Iran, operating both inside and outside of the respective countries, ‘Aleyh’, an anarchist group based out of Afghanistan and the ‘Revolutionary Radical Anarchist Front’ who is based in Iran. Our members are about two thirds in Afghanistan and Iran and one third outside of them. With many of those in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The vast majority of our new members are recruited from within Afghanistan and Iran. The reason why it is those two countries is because they share Persian as a lingua franca, referred to as Farsi in Iran, or Farsi and Dari in Afghanistan. Peoples in these territories as well share similar struggles and the states of the respective countries and the political elites share commonalities as well. We have many points of unity, though one thing to know is that we are open to all anarchists, except pacifists, sectarian religious anarchists and those who call themselves so-called ‘anarcho-capitalists’. Due to different situations on the ground in Afghanistan and Iran, we embrace a multitude of different strategies and except many different tendencies of anarchists, depending on the situations that they face.

TFSR: Can you give an explanation very briefly, of why – I can understand why an-caps, because they are not real, and partisan-religious anything wouldn’t be able to work with other people without those other people turning to their side, so that makes sense. What is it about the pacifist anarchists that puts them in with those other categories of groups that can’t be a part of the Union?

AUIA: Our reason for not accepting pacifists into the Anarchist Union is that pacifism does not effectively confront the state and in many ways reifies the legitimacy of the state. We also accept the necessity of armed struggle and armed self-defense, which pacifism does not encompass. But for people on the ground in the struggles and protests in Iran, it is necessary for us to use violence when necessary against the regime.

TFSR: That makes sense. So, as we’re speaking, tensions are ratcheting up between the US regime and the Irani regime. What does the Anarchist Union think about the assassination of major general Qasem Suleimani of the Quds Force, of the Irani Revolutionary Guard and how has the assassination affected living and resisting under the regime? How have people reacted to the states threatening one another?

AUIA: We are happy that Qasem Suleimani is dead and many found his death cathartic. He has been terrorizing the region in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, as well as in Afghanistan for quite some time and he was an important figure within the Revolutionary Guard, which unleashes domestic forces on protesters, demonstrators frequently, including the uprising in November. At the same time, we also condemn the reckless actions of Trump’s executive branch in Iraq and their self-interested strike, which served to stir up tensions in the region and bring more suffering on Iraqis and Syrians who are in the lines of fire. This recent international incident emerges from decades of conflict between opposing imperialist blocks, who are largely responsible for the wars, famines, and displacement of many people, that is so common now in the Middle East.

We believe that the death of Suleimani will not change Iran’s approach in regions that border it because his longtime deputy commander Esmail Ghaani is being appointed to replace him as commander of the Quds. As well the militia leader who was killed, al-Muhandis, his death will not end his militia or any other militia that Iran backs. On the opposite side, Iraq did request American forces leave, and many NATO operations were suspended during the last week, but there is no indication Western powers will dramatically change their policies or their presence in Iraq. So far there has been little effect on resistance under the regime. There was a day of state mourning, there were many state-mandated parades, and the regime banned any sort of protests or rallies against these.

There may be a lull due to a nationalist fervor, but it will not last long, because the economic conditions, the domestic conditions, the repression, that is forced on the Iranian people, will lead to riots and uprisings again. For this, we’re pretty certain. In Iran, the regime’s reaction has to be understood as well within the upcoming election. There is an election that is being held in Iran on February 21st 2020, and the strong condemnation and retaliation to the strike by the Americans was expected. So if Trump has an election, he’s currently in the cycle, he’s campaigning for, so too are Iranian politicians.

TFSR: What are the conditions of life in Iran under the regime? Many listeners in the West and in the US, in particular, will be curious to learn about the experience of day-to-day life. We understand that Iran is a large and heterogeneous territory, so whatever you can do to inform us, will be appreciated.

AUIA: The current situation should be seen as a part of the 40-year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the regime that was born in 1979, during the revolution. The current situation is a result of four decades of divisions and splits within the government and since the beginning the regime has been gradually eliminating one group after another that has supported the revolution, getting rid of parties and curtailing their prominence and stopping political participation and excluding voices from the political arena that don’t support the revolution that occurred in 1979. While there are elections, the people who may run for the elections are carefully chosen by the Guardian Committee. So they are not the same as elections that happen in the US or Canada, where the party apparatuses are responsible for electing their own representatives to run as leaders of the parties or as presidents.

In the economic arena as well, there is a large gap in income. A majority of Iranians are either in absolute poverty, or they’re in relative poverty. There is a large working class, as well as a large unemployed population. And this is because neoliberal policies are being imposed by the Iranian regime, to kind of pave the way for the seizure of public property by political elites, and the impoverishment of many. Money that could be redistributed to the people has been instead funneled towards proxy wars that Iran is fighting as well as being funneled into the hands of clerics and the Revolutionary Guard. Iranian state assets are owned by four organizations, including the ‘Holy Shrine of Imam Reza’, the ‘Foundation of the Oppressed’, and the ‘Seal of the Prophets’. These organizations own companies in vast amounts of wealth and assets, including various factories and companies, as well as property that was confiscated from the Shah Regime. And the policies that Iran pursues, by taking much of the economy for the elite and to fund proxy wars and their own repression, is having a negative effect on the country and the livelihoods of normal people who live there.

TFSR: For listeners that are in the US and are concerned around the sanctions that the US has been imposing, it sounds basically like it’s just being passed on to the population and not actually affecting the policies and choices of the regime directly in Iran. Does this seem like a correct assessment?

AUIA: Yes, that is a correct assessment. Though some businesses and some members of the Iranian regime do feel the pressures of the economic sanctions, much of the actual burden of these is held by regular people.

TFSR: Could you talk about the protests that rocked Iran in November? Their genesis, and what role, if any, anarchists played in them? And also what sort of political, social, religious or gender strata participated in the protests? Were there demands? And how successful was it? Sorry, that’s a very big question.

If you want to more generally, would you tell us about those protests? And who participated, what went on, and how they went?

AUIA: These protests emerged from the pressure of US economic sanctions because they’ve paralyzed the government, which means that the regime is facing a severe budget deficit. A first spark for these protests was the regime deciding to cut the subsidies for gasoline in order to pay for some of the other parts of their budget. This created an outcry from the vulnerable parts of society and those who were lower income. What is perhaps surprising is that many of those who form the base of pro-government support were out in the streets: the lower classes. And they have been driven onto the streets to protest because of the economic pressure and the organized corruption in the country.

There are also reports of young people from affluent classes as well as people from the middle class and many students who joined. However, we can suspect that it wasn’t necessarily economic reasons that made those protesters join in the demonstrations. As to anarchist presence, there was serious and widespread anarchist participation in the protest that happened in November of this year as well as December 2017/2018. In the aftermath of the 2017/2018 protests, we know of at least some anarchists who were arrested and tortured, though it is not clear to us that the government knew that they were anarchists. And the Union does not have links with all Iranian anarchists, so we don’t know how many were arrested or were killed. As for this November, as far as we know, there were no anarchists associated with the Union who were arrested or killed, but again, we can’t know of the fate of all anarchists. And anarchists have participated in the uprising in different ways, in each location, because it involved a variety of different events, different rallies, different marches, depending on the circumstances and the severity of state response. We can’t really get into that due to security reasons.

But during these protests, there were three key drivers that brought people to the streets, and those were domestic politics, the economic situation, as well as the international policies of Iran. People were in the streets protesting Iran’s involvement in Syria, in Iraq and in Lebanon. We also know that Afghan refugees participated in the demonstrations because nine were killed, and many more were arrested. So we know that there was widespread participation by all classes and people in society against the regime, and the economic situation, and the imperialism that Iran has been inflicting on the rest of the region.

TFSR: There was what appeared to be an inconsistency between those two answers and so I would like to just address that and get a clarification if that’s ok. Because in the prior question that I asked [you said that the economic sanctions do not affect the Iranian regime]. So the sanctions are in fact affecting the regime, but the elite as individuals don’t feel the burden as much as the majority of the population, is that a correct understanding? Because you said that subsidies had lead to…

AUIA: So, the regime as a whole and the political elite as a class, do not feel the burden of the economic sanctions. They don’t go without food, they have plenty of fuel, it hasn’t affected their electricity or their internet, it hasn’t affected their day-to-day life. It has affected the running of the Iranian state. And Instead of directing money to the people, who are feeling the burden of the sanctions, they’re instead hoarding the money for themselves or using the money to rage proxy wars.

TFSR: The Iranian government has shut off the internet in a reaction to protests at various times. Can you talk about the impact that this has had on the resistance in Iran and social and technical workarounds that people have constructed or found?

AUIA: Definitely. Shutting off the internet did a great deal of damage to internet businesses, but did not have too much of an effect on protests themselves. The protests had begun before the internet crash and while the shutdown did limit the amount of information we could receive from the streets, people instead just decided to speak face-to-face, and they didn’t really use internet access to create the protests, to begin with, and so they just continued not using the internet. Given the events that happened over that week, we don’t believe the internet had much of an effect of protests, people tend to be organizing these protests and getting involved in demonstrations against the state through face-to-face interactions. Considering that many common social media tools that activists use in the West and other places to organize clandestinely with encryption and security aren’t available in Iran. And some apps and platforms such as Twitter are not accessible in Iran without VPN services.

TFSR: We often hear in the West about the Iranian state repression for feminist stances, for queerness, unorthodox religious expression and practice. How much is day-to-day life policed around issues of gender, sexuality, and religion? How free are people to live their identities as they see fit, love and worship as they will, and how much room culturally is there for these expressions?

AUIA: Day-to-day life in Iran is heavily policed, and one of the main organs that polices the expression of sexuality and gender is the Gashte Ershad, which translates to the Guidance Patrol, they’re also known as the morality police. We can see the effects of repression of women especially through the symbolic videos that have been coming out of Iran of women taking off their hijab. That doesn’t mean they’re not Muslims, it doesn’t mean they’re anti-Islam, but it means that they are performing a symbolic protest to reject the type of the Islamic rules that are imposed by the state. In general, women, all religious minorities, oppressed genders, and minority nationalities are under constant police pressure and control, they’re subjected to constant repression. Women must usually travel with a father or a husband or some other male guardian, and there are many human rights issues that Iranian feminists attempt to address.

LGBTQ people are oppressed by the religious police and the Iranian state’s interpretation of Islamic law, meaning that if a homosexual is discovered and it’s proved that they have had gay sex, they can suffer a death sentence. Largely, relations between men and women in society are very limited and in public, there is always police supervision or Guidance Patrols, who are tasked with enforcing the coverage of women, and the separation between young men and women. There are instances that even at parties that people are having in their own homes, police and Guidance Patrols come to attack them and arrest those who are in attendance if they find that the party is in breach with any of the state’s laws. The Iranian state has used religion to create this prison for marginalized peoples.

TFSR: So the last question didn’t really touch on ethnic differences, and you mentioned ethnic minorities and repression from the Iranian regime. Can you talk about the struggles of non-Persian peoples within Iran, the forms that those struggles take and the relationship between the Anarchist Union and those struggles? You already mentioned that the union has a stance in support of armed struggle against the Iranian state.

AUIA: As you have said, we are supportive of armed struggle against the Iranian state, and we have made two communiqués calling for an armed united front to defend unarmed protesters from security forces during these demonstrations and further uprisings. Iran has different ethnic groups and they all have their own struggles. The territory of Iran is home to many different peoples who speak Iranic languages, such as Balochs, Kurds, Lari, Luri, Mazandarani, Bashkardis, just to name a few, as well as Arab speakers. There are speakers of Turkic languages, like Yazidi. As a nation-state, Iran has continued ‘Persianization’, to forcibly assimilate non-Persian nationalities. Many minorities are kept out of the decision making positions in their regions, by Tehran, many languages are also discriminated against and economic distribution is kept away from minority regions, like Baluchestan and Kurdistan. Tehran wants access to resources in these regions and strategic ports and roadways but wants to keep the local people suppressed. The Anarchist Union had run a Twitter poll, and although Twitter accounts for about 10% of Iranian internet users and there aren’t too many Iranian internet users, according to the poll, out of Irans 31 provinces there are 30 with anarchists. There are anarchists among all the non-Persian ethnicities. There are also anarchists in the only province that no anarchists selected for the poll, but they don’t use Twitter or the internet and they can’t participate in those polls.

We shouldn’t forget that in Iran, anarchists are largely disadvantaged and impoverished and don’t always have access to the internet or to an internet café, and rarely have access to smartphones with that capability. The Anarchist Union itself does not rely solely on its own members and has a multitude of anarchist audiences and groups who coordinate union activities without direct contact to keep it decentralized for security reasons. We don’t want everybody to be in direct contact with us or to be a member of the Union because that could leave the Union open to being targeted easier by the Iranian regime. Many of the anarchists are movement-oriented and involved in many different initiatives including ethnic minority struggles. Non-Persian anarchists mainly fall outside of ethnic parties, that are organized, and have their own independent activities as anarchists that we are either about in contact with or indirectly coordinate with, though the non-Persian peoples of Iran and their anarchists are definitely involved in union activities and we do respond to the need and the struggles of everyone who lives under the Iranian regime.

TFSR: A painful truth of ignorance is the inability to see the bounds of that ignorance. Would you please speak about Orientalist approaches of Western leftists and anarchists as you’ve experienced it as the Union, as least since you’ve participated in the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran? And insights that we in the West can act from to overcome some of these shortcomings?

AUIA: Western leftists are very quick to defend states opposed to the US. Western chauvinism prioritizes a worldview that centers the United States and therefore makes opposing American imperialism at the expense of other states a priority. This orientalism subordinates the struggles of Afghans and Iranians who have to confront both their own governments, as well as many competing international interests. Many Western leftists are ignorant of the complexity of situations in places like Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Instead of listening to authoritarians on the ground or in the diaspora, they are quick to make judgments that confirm their own biases about the United States and American imperialism. For example, we receive negative feedback from Western leftists, mostly Marxists, to our own statements to the death of Qasem Suleimani, because we condemned him and found catharsis in his death in addition to condemning reckless American actions. For the Union, it is paramount that we both oppose American sanctions and warmongering as well as the Iranian regime’s corruption and brutal oppression. The insight that Western leftists can take away is to focus on and raise up the voices of those who are suffering from oppression abroad and people of those diasporas who have rigorous analyses of all imperialisms, not merely reflexively falling back on American imperialism and its allies.

TFSR: I raise that question because there is a certain brand of authoritarian leftists. In the US, and in the West I guess, we have a brand of so-called leftism that often supports repressive states that are viewed to be oppositional to the US state. However, they are also standing on the throats of the people that they claim to rule over. So, often we call those people ‘Tankies’. That nickname came from a derisive nickname, an insult for British communists who supported the Stalinist repression of Hungarian workers’ democracy in 1956. So, that is kind of why I raise this question because we have also gotten some push-back for trying to help amplify the voices, to American audiences mostly, of people in resistance in Hong Kong or Rojava. And ‘Tankies’ come at us on Twitter and they’re like ‘actually, you’re just anti-Chinese’, or ‘Assad is actually a Socialist’. Can you talk a little more about ‘Tankies’?

AUIA: Of course. ‘Tankies’ represent a threat to internationalism, especially in the region of Afghanistan and Iran. They support the Iranian regime even though Iran represses and targets anarchists as well as Marxists. They support the Assad regime, which is opposed to leftist thought as well as liberty and egalitarianism and has waged a war to keep authoritarianism in that country. They go back, as you said, they support the People’s Republic of China, as well as supporting Russia and Putin. For us, it seems that these self-described leftists do not support any sort of leftism, they have merely taken up a different imperialist block in these struggles. And they’re again centering the United States and Western action and agency, rather than centering the resistance of people who live in the places where struggles are ongoing and where different imperialist blocs are attempting to influence the region to install governments that are amicable to them. This creates complications in their geopolitics, especially in the case of Afghanistan, where the Americans have been waging a decades-long occupation and the Afghan state has been fighting a civil war against the Taliban. However, the Taliban are being supported by Iran, Russia, and China, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and Pakistan. So, for the ‘tankie’ this raises a question: if Iran and China and Russia are always on the side of anti-imperialism, would that make the Taliban anti-imperialist? Would that make Pakistan, who also supports the Taliban, anti-imperialist? We also must look back.

‘Tankies’ often defend the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and present the Mujahedin as the precursors of al-Qaida, even though al-Qaida were Arabs and not Afghans. The Afghan Mujahedin was also supported by Iran and Suleimani himself participated in supporting the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban, which the Americans also supported. So we see how the pragmatic opportunism of Iran and other imperialist states sometimes coincides with American and other imperialist interests that these ‘Tankies’ definitely don’t support and these are problems with their worldview. It is based on some simple heuristics that they know about the world and that they apply to everything in order to make it simple. And perhaps in isolation, they can make sense but they can’t explain the global system unless they out and out become supporters of Russian imperialism or Iranian imperialism globally.

TFSR: That point is very well made. And I could see them – I mean if people relate the Mujahedin to the Taliban, there is the Osama bin Laden connection, right?…

AUIA: Following the fall of the PDPA (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) government, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, that was ruled by Najibullah, who was installed by the Soviets, there was a civil war among Mujahedin commanders. And out from the Pakistani refugee camps, where Afghans were kept, emerged the Taliban movement and it joined the civil war. So the Taliban were largely fighting against who we would think of as the Mujahedin. And the Northern Alliance and many of the political elite that formed a coalition government are from the Mujahedin but they are also from the PDPA. So, the narrative that the Mujahedin became the Taliban is not true. There are fighters from the Mujahedin who joined the Taliban but by and large, the majority of factions and commanders that fought in the Mujahedin opposed the Taliban.

And to the second point of bin Laden: bin Laden was responsible for Maktab al-Khidamat which was an organization that helped bring Arab fighters, Arab foreign fighters, to Afghanistan, and fight in the Mujahedin against the Soviets. They never brought very many, they may have been no more than 5.000 in Afghanistan at any point in time. Most of the money that was raised by bin Laden came from private investors in the Gulf states. Some of the money came from Saudi Arabia’s security apparatuses directly, in order to do things that they did not want the Americans or the Pakistanis to know about because the Americans and the Saudi government were funneling money through the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, the ISI, and the ISI controlled the distribution of funds to the major Mujahedin groups. So, there’s no evidence to suggest that the Americans had any ties to bin Laden. Most of the time that comes from orientalism and assuming that Afghans and Arabs are the same, and that bin Laden was a participant in the Afghan Mujahedin, which he was not.

TFSR: Thank you for the clarification.
Switching gears a little bit: Anarchists in other parts of the world may be interested to learn about how you all from the Anarchist Union learned about anarchism, what anarchism looks like in Iran, such as what tendencies or influences there are. Maybe if it has subcultural roots in Punk or Metal as can be seen in a lot of other parts of the world or if it comes more from labor roots? And does the praxis hold any particular religious, secular, or anti-religious sentiment?

AUIA: Our own praxis definitely holds secular sentiment, and there are some who hold anti-religious sentiments. Much like Bakunin who said, “no gods, no masters” when he was living under a time of Christian hierarchy and when Christian organizations represented an authoritarian presence in society, so too does anti-religious sentiment stem from the authoritarian usage of Islam by the Iranian regime. What we have found is that there are many anarcho-syndicalists in Iran. However, there are also anarchists of other tendencies as well, anarcho-feminists, green anarchists, anarcho-communists, and other anarchist tendencies. Many people do not emphasize a branch or tendency of anarchism that they hold, they merely say that they are anarchists. Since 1979 there have been translations of anarchist works that have made their way into Iran, normally in zines. There are European, Western thinkers like Bakunin or Kropotkin who were able to introduce anarchism into Iran. Though anarchism in the region goes back further. There were Armenian anarchists and other anarchists, who were located close to the Ottoman Empire and Iran, that wrote in Persian as well as other languages, like Armenian and Turkish. So there is anarchist literature that is from the region as well.

TFSR: Iran is one of the states that overlap with Kurdistan. We would be curious to hear what sort of impact the Rojava revolution has had within Iran, particularly since decentralization, agnosticism, and plurality, feminism, and anti-capitalism appear as they might be in conflict with the aims of the Iranian, and any, state.

AUIA: Yes, we take inspiration from Kurds in northern Syria who are part of the PYD and the other groups who are part of the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Autonomous Administration of North-Eastern Syria. They have shown us another political system that strives to achieve a society where there is respect for all citizens. In addition to that, they have opposed imperialism and reactionary politics by fighting against the Islamic State as well as Erdoğan’s fascist government in Turkey. In addition to this, there is an equivalent to the PYD and PKK operating in Iran, called PJAK, and they are present in the North-west and western provinces, such as Kurdistan, West-Azerbaijan, Kermanshah. And they have been waging a domestic armed struggle against the Iranian regime for quite some time with the support of their affiliated organizations. We also encourage everyone to participate in protest actions and rallies that support northern Syria and communities there.

TFSR: Iran is surrounded by nations destabilized by US wars over the last 20 years and beyond, and the borders are often just lines in the sand. The news hit the US media this year that much of the power vacuum left within Iraq by the US invasion and occupation has been filled by the Iranian government and its proxies. This comes as the US puppet state has failed to realize, unsurprisingly and thanks in part to the extremists and the extremism and ethic and religious feuds stoked by the US leading to the rise of Daesh and other groups… Unsurprisingly they haven’t been able to reach stability, this puppet government. Recent protest movements in the streets of Iraq have called for jobs, for security, for self-determination. This has been met with bloody consequences at the hands of security forces and para-state actors like those militias. Can you talk about the relationship between Iraq and Iran in this period and maybe give an assessment of the recent struggles in Iraq? Is there any chance of extending the Anarchist Union into Iraq as well?

AUIA: The situation in Iraq needs to take into account that Iraq and Iran have been in conflict since shortly after the Iranian revolution. There was a decade long war, the Iraq-Iran war, and following that and the invasion and occupation by the United States, Iran has been attempting to influence and control the Iraqi government. So recently Iran has played the role of regional imperialist by creating mercenary Muslim groups, they’re mostly Shia, to export their revolution throughout the Shiite Crescent, and they are injecting large amounts of money to support their own state intervention and support non-state proxy groups throughout the region. This is largely being done by the Quds force and was built by the late Suleimani. So far the amount of money that the Iranian government has pumped into militias and segments of the Iraqi government has been successful. And parts of the Iraqi government have begun affiliating with Iran. And we can see that from parts of the Iranian security apparatus opening fire on protesters in October who were protesting against Iranian imperialism, as well as instances of Iranian-backed militia members joining the police or the Iraqi military and firing on Americans. Much of the Iraqi resistance was suppressed and crushed by affiliated organizations of the Iranian regime including their militias and Qasem Suleimani played a large role in these events. Many of the activists in the Iraqi people’s movement were assassinated or tortured by Iran and Iranian-backed forces. And the struggles extent beyond Iraq to Lebanon, Iran itself, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria. All of these conflicts are intertwined because of the amount of money that Iran is spending and the organizing that they are doing to create militias in these areas or to infiltrate groups that already exist, like the Taliban which I mentioned previously. And if the Iranian regime falls, then the peoples in these countries will witness the collapse of the Iranian infiltrated parts of their own governments and the Iranian-backed militias would be defeated or disintegrated very easily without the constant funding from Tehran.
Speaking about anarchists, in Iraq, there are many anarchists in the Kurdish part and there are anarchists throughout Iraq as a whole but in order for our Anarchist Union to expand into the geographical area of Iraq, we would need more people in the Union to know Arabic, as that’s the language of the majority of the population in Iraq. And currently, we are focusing on Persian-language content and the struggles of people who speak Persian.

TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense. So in the West, we hear in our media and from the US government that the survival of Jews in West Asia is only possible by repression of the Iranian state through sanctions and military actions, in defense of Israel as a state. May people, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and of other faiths, or a lack of faiths, or various identities, suffer under the Israeli state. Has there been any show of solidarity between anarchists and anti-authoritarians living under these regimes and can you say some words about the role of religious regimes and stoking hatred among working peoples? Do you have any hope that international solidarity could surpass these limitations?

AUIA: We’ve seen demonstrations of solidarity from Palestinians and other people who are living under this regime and we have shown solidarity in return. We see the function of religion by oppressive regimes is similar to the functions of how fascist regimes operate. They create hatred among their people and fear and creating internal enemies through the use of propaganda. And this hatred is not only confined to religious differences, as it reinforces ethnic differences, racial differences, and the differences between nationalities. And it has produced, along with the colonial borders in the Middle East, much of the tension and ongoing conflicts that we see. We believe our international solidarity has already broken the barriers in many cases, we have developed very strong international relations with anarchists and resistance groups in other parts of the Middle East and are hoping to be better able to support and show solidarity with them in the future too.

TFSR: What should folks living in the United States or other Western states know about resistance in Iran? What can we do to support liberation struggles in Iran and against the State in Capital And how can we build stronger bonds across borders? Is there a way to avoid having our support being used by the Iranian regime as a reason for further repression?

AUIA: Resistance in Iran is very difficult. There is minimal access to secure communications technology in order for people to plan actions. It is also illegal and heavily policed to have demonstrations and have protests and rallies, where it is very easy in Western countries to either get permits or have spontaneous protests. This means that Iranians must operate clandestinely or wait for massive uprisings and demonstrations that the police can’t immediately respond to and must bring in the Revolutionary Guard or the military in order to suppress. Supporting Iranians fighting in Iran must at the minimum include criticism of the regime. Support that valorizes the regime as anti-imperialist in any way makes it difficult to create internationalist support for Iranian resistance. This is something that we see in Hong Kong as well as Iran and other parts of the world, where authoritarian self-described leftists are very quick to support the imperialist power, whether it would be the People’s Republic of China or Iran and this leads to conservatives, republicans, hawkish liberals, being opportunists and siding with, say Hong Kong or Iranian protesters merely because it suits their interests because they oppose Iran or China geopolitically. And as internationalist leftists, we should not allow that to happen and we should not cede that space to conservatives. Western leftists cannot hesitate to show solidarity with Iranian and Afghan struggles against their own states and all imperialist actors for that reason.
The Union has been approached by organizations around the world, in Belarus and Mexico, to exchange written interviews to learn more about the struggle happening in other places and this is a way to build stronger bonds between borders and share struggles and the ways that different anarchist groups approach those struggles and approach confronting their own states as well as the other international interests that have effects on their lives.

TFSR: Are there any topics that I failed to ask you about, that you would like to address?

AUIA: No, I think we covered them all.

TFSR: We covered a lot. Can you talk about how folks can learn more and keep up on the struggles of Iranian anarchists and anti-authoritarians? How can we keep up on the Union in particular?

AUIA: You can keep up with our work by following the Twitter of our media collective @asranarshism where we post translations of our communiqués and statements as well as news and prisoner letters that have been translated. You can also visit our website which you can find on our Twitter, though it is primarily made for Persian speakers. However, all of the translated content you can find by searching our Twitter handle. You can also access and join the Telegram group, though that is also largely written in Farsi.

TFSR: Well thank you so much for taking this time to chat and going through the effort personally of translating these words from Farsi on the spot, I really appreciate this. And also I realized a thing before we started chatting that after I sent you the questions and that little script about ‘Neither East Nor West’. I didn’t realize that that was actually one of the chants that were used within the Iranian revolution which was, of course, a lot of different tendencies pushing before Ayatollah Khomeini took over and his group took over. I really like the idea of sharing information and building solidarity through it, so thank you so much for participating in this.

 

activism, Anarchist, Colonization, community, gender, General, Indigenous, LGBTQ, Music, Police, Queer, Race, repression, Transcribed, zine

Sima Lee on Resistance, Repression, Hip Hop, and Creating New Worlds

Sima Lee on Resistance, Repression, Hip Hop, and Creating New Worlds

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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.

Ways to get and stay connected:

Further interviews:

Independent artists and labels:

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Music for this episode:

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Transcription

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.

Anarchist, Colonialism, Colonization, Education, General, media, Politics, Race, Racism, repression, zine

Guest Interview: Eli Meyerhoff on his book ‘Beyond Education’, Battling Recuperation, and Operating on the Margins

Download Episode Here

This week we are presenting a special guest interview, done by Scott who is an anarchist academic and regular listener, with Eli Meyerhoff about his book “Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World”. In this book, Meyerhoff “traces how key elements of education emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, he charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.” and this quote is from the University of Minnesota webpage, who also published his book.

I found this interview really thought provoking and well crafted, it brought up a lot of issues I hadn’t really thought of in such terms, specifically about the historical and colonial construction of what we think of today as education. In this interview, Scott and Eli talk about his book, the vast terrain that the book covers, experiences in academia when one is operating as politically radical, and some alternatives to education that we can see and experience in the world around us.

Eli Meyerhoff can be found at elimeyerhoff.com, the Abolition University at abolition.university, and the Abolition Journal at abolitionjournal.org for more info on the conference happening in may 2020.

To read the intro to Beyond Education for free, head on over to this UM link.

If you are a listener and want to submit an interview for broadcast, just get in touch with us by emailing thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net and we can walk you thru the process!

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Music for this episode by:

LSD – School’s For Fools

Suburban Studs – I Hate School

Anarchist, Chile, Colonialism, Colonization, community, Feminism, Indigenous, Neoliberalism, Police, Politics, Protest, repression, Rojava

The State of Resistance and the Struggle for Dignity in Chile: An interview with a Chilean anarchist about the current protests there

Download Episode Here

This week William had the chance to interview someone, a 20 year old anarchist from the territory of so called Chile, about the uprisings which have been occurring there. The protests began on Monday October 14th in Chile’s capital, Santiago, as a coordinated fare evasion campaign by high school students which led to spontaneous takeovers of the city’s main train stations and open confrontations with the Chilean Police. While the reason for these protests was a fare hike for public transportation by the government and the transit companies, this was only the tipping point in a much larger and diffuse situation of economic pracarity. We will post a great info graphic on social media about all that is tied up in this situation, but in short education and healthcare are private and so are very expensive, jobs pay very little (400 US dollars a month on average), and it is the only country in the world where water is privatized. According to Food and Water Watch, having a privatized water system increases the yearly cost of water by 59%, or over twice the amount as public water. Many of the systems that people are forced to live under, such as the current mechanisms of the State of Emergency and the pension system, were created under the Pinochet dictatorship and have not been updated to reflect the so called “democratic” rule.

 

Our guest outlines these situations, and also speaks about the violence that protestors are facing from the police and from the state. They also speak on the relationship of this current violence to the violences that Indigenous Mapuche people have been facing from the Chilean state all along.

According to the Wikipedia article on the 2019 Chilean Protests, as of yesterday October 26th “19 people have died, nearly 2,500 have been injured, and 2,840 have been arrested. Human rights organisations have received several reports of violations conducted against protesters, including torture.” Our guest outlines the peaceful nature at the outset of these protests, which were quickly escalated by hyper repressive tactics on the part of the police, and says that these actions are making it clear that the “democracy” – which was fought for by the generations above them – is a fake system.

To keep updated on this situation, and away from the tvs like our guest suggested, you can follow Radio Kurruf, an anarchist radio station in Chile, and read their analysis on the current wave of repression here. https://radiokurruf.org/2019/10/26/state-of-rebellion-in-chile/

You can also visit our blog at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org for a partial list of links and accounts to follow, including some on the ground reporting by crimethInc.

@RadioVillaFrancia

Here is the transcript of a brief exchange between TFS and other comrades in Rojava (podcast only):

Solidarity with Rojava

Here is an announcement on behalf of the IDOC Watch:

IDOC (Indiana Dept of Correction) Watch is an organization in Indiana, composed of people directly affected by the prison system and prison abolitionists, that is organizing to expose and stop the widespread abuses in the Indiana prison system, with the long-term objective of dismantling the prison system. (check out IDOC Watch at idocwatch.org)

This event will be a panel discussion on the base-building IDOC Watch is doing in prisons and communities affected by incarceration, prisoner struggles and counter-insurgency in Indiana, and the effects of the prison-industrial complex on individuals, families, and communities.

Featuring:

Zolo Agona Azania, former Black Liberation Army activist and long-term New Afrikan political prisoner from Gary, IN, who beat two death sentences after being falsely accused and convicted of murdering a Gary police officer during a bank robbery. Zolo was released from prison in 2017, after serving over 35 years. He is currently working to establish re-entry housing for people being released from prison in Gary, through the Gary Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated.

S.T. : A mother and grandmother from Gary who organizes with IDOC Watch and currently has a son incarcerated at Indiana State Prison, a maximum-security facility in Michigan City, IN.

An organizer with FOCUS Initiatives LTD, an abolitionist re-entry project in Indianapolis, IN: focusreentry.com.

Location
1845 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL 60208
217 Fisk Hall

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 at 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CDT

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Music for this episode in order:

Llueve – La Trova Pank

Somos Peligrosos – Los Crudos

General, Health, Political Prisoner, Prisons, Race, Racism, repression

Pepe on Preparing for Freedom

Preparing for Freedom

Download Episode Here

Today you’ll hear Bursts interview Pepe, an anarchist from so called Connecticut. As of September 4th 2019, Pepe has been sentenced to 5 years in prison on federal charges. In this interview he speaks on a range of topics related to the prison industrial complex, from detailing how prosecutors operate within the “criminal justice” system, to his personal experience in preparing with his family for his incarceration. Folks can support Pepe and his family by visiting his record label at diybandits.bandcamp.com.

He will be releasing his own podcast soon at preparingforfreedom.org. We will announce when these episodes drop so stay tuned!

To get in touch with The Final Straw, for feedback or suggestions, you can follow us on all social media, we are @thefinalstrawradio on Instagram, @StrawFinal on Twitter, and The Final Straw Radio on Facebook. You can also email us at thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net or @protonmail.com, and send us letters at

PO Box 6004

Asheville NC

28816

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Music for this episode by:

J Dilla – Y’all Ain’t Ready (instrumental)

Ramsey Lewis Trio – The ‘In’ Crowd

activism, Anarchist, Prisons, repression, Solitary Confinement

Jeremey Hammond Resists a Grand Jury + Shane McDonnell on Re-Claiming Nietzsche

Support Jeremy Hammond

Download Episode Here

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!

Shane McDonnell on Re-claiming Nietzsche

Second up, we have a talk by Shane McDonnell who is a vegan, political activist and supporter of the Workers Solidarity Movement from the Republic of Ireland. Shane gave this presentation, entitled “Friedrich Nietzsche: Emma Goldman’s Honorary Anarchist & My Desire to Reclaim Him from the Right” at the 2019 North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference in Atlanta, GA.

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>>> 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

To write to him, address letters to:

Jeremy Hammond

A0182888

William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center

2001 Mill Road

Alexandria VA, 22314

Anarchist, Antifa, Eric King, General, Political Prisoner, Prisons, repression

We Need To Keep That Spirit Alive: anarchist prisoner Eric King and partner speak

We Need To Keep That Spirit Alive: anarchist prisoner Eric King and partner speak

Download This Episode

***Update: Eric King started a 5 day trial on August 26th, 2019, in Denver, CO on the charges of assaulting Lieutenant Wilcox at FCI Florence. Here’s background on that here in Eric’s own words. Court and legal fund support is being requested and updates are up on his support site, as of now the latest update is here.***

This week on The Final Straw, we feature two main guests, anarchist prisoner Eric King and a member of his defense committee who is also Eric’s partner. This podcast is being released on the 3rd day of the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners from August 23-30th. The dates relate to the execution date of Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, August 23, 1927. More info on the week, including materials and ways to share your solidarity are up at Solidarity.International and you can donate to the International Anarchist Defense Fund at afund.antirep.net.

While the majority of the show will be filled by anarchist political prisoner, Eric King, we’ll be wrapping it in words from his partner, who also sits on his support committee. Eric was incarcerated in 2014 for an attempted night-time arson on the Kansas City office of Missouri U.S. Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver. Eric claimed this was in solidarity the community of Ferguson that was in revolt in response to the killing and desecration of young Mike Brown at the hands of the police, known as the Ferguson Uprising. Eric has been generally without phone access for 3 years.

Eric, who just had his 33rd birthday, recently suffered a stroke. He’s been at 9 facilities in the last year. He has visible anti-fascist tattoo’s and because of this and his anarchism and outspoken perspectives, he has been pitted against antagonistic correctional officers and nazi gang members and force to fight for survival. Eric frequently loses his commissary funds when he is moved. He hasn’t read a book in 6 months because he hasn’t been allowed any.

For the hour of our broadcast, Eric talks about his health, his political stance, dealing with nazi’s on the inside, his views on the anti-fascist struggle on the outside, the loss of Tom Manning and supporting political prisoners, counter-recruiting nazi’s and other topics. You can find his writings, art, and updates on his situation at SupportEricKing.org. The message that we are building off of can be found archived in video form here.

The other main voice you’ll hear is that of Eric’s partner, who’s a member of his support committee. What you’ll hear in the radio broadcast is only a tiny, iceberg tip, of this person’s words, what we could fit in an hour. If you’d like to hear more of what they have to say check out the podcast. We speak about changes in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system, specific things that BOP prisoners and their families and supporters have to deal with, the culture of shortcomings in how people engage family and loved ones of prisoners, increasing use of communication management units (also known as CMU’s) and in particular Administrative US Penitentiary Thomson, in Thomson, IL, which is used as a holding facility where prisoners awaiting CMU status decisions basically sit meanwhile in CMU status while they wait. This marks a continued growing in the logic of incarceration in our civilization towards more isolation, new sweetheart prison building contracts, more contol, more beds to fill, more punishment of what might be mental health distress and trauma responses among prisoners. The guest speaks about the potential impact on ICE detainees who are speculated to be put in this facility.

As Eric gets transferred from county facility to county facility of Federal overflow, his commissary doesn’t move with him. So, his support committee is handling purchases of communication access, medical funds, moneys for buying vegan foods and supplements and other needs on his behalf. A new fundraiser has gone up and can be found at: . Please consider donating.

Eric just got moved before this broadcast. As he moves around and things change, info on his case can be found at SupportEricKing.org. You can write him, for the time being, at:

The books that Eric mentions being excited to read are:

Announcements

Black Jewel Miners Blockade Solidarity

Blackjewel is the 6th largest coal operator in the United States, and on July 1st of this year, it declared bankruptcy. On July 29th, five miners set out to blockade a Blackjewel train carrying one million dollars of coal in protest of being denied their last three weeks of wages and retirement funds. The blockade has since bloomed into an active camp site made up of miners, their families, and supporters. The camp is committed to blocking the train until Blackjewel pays the miners.

To stay up to date with the camp, follow blackjewelminersblockade on Instagram, or @minerblockade on Twitter.. Listen next week to hear from folks on the ground in Harlan County.

Stay tuned for the latest member of TFSR, Cypress, bringing audio from the support efforts there.

Delbert Africa

The latest we’ve heard about one of the two remaining MOVE prisoners, Delbert Africa, who’s up for parole in September is that his health is on the mend. MOVE organization supporters are requesting solidarity in pushing the PA parole board and the governor to release this aging prisoner, the oldest of the MOVE 9 prisoners, to help him integrate and heal in the outside world. 41 years is far too much. More info at onamove.org or on the various social media sites.

Russell “Maroon” Shoatz

Former Black Panther and political prisoner Russell Shoatz, who goes by the name Maroon, has stage four colorectal cancer and his family and supporters are requesting funds be raised to help pay for his care. Maroons’ earthday was August 23rd, 2019. You can find out are at russellmaroonshoatz, with a ‘z’ dot wordpress dot com and searching for update 08 22 2019, of in our show notes. And you can donate to his care at by clicking the donate/ tab on his support site.

BADNews

Here’s a link to the latest episode of BADNews, the monthly, English-language podcast from the A-Radio Network of which we’re also a member.

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playlist pending

Anarchist, Canada, Hamilton, NAASN, Ontario, repression

Hamilton Pride Defenders + “The Spectre and The Sovereign”

Hamilton Pride Defenders + “The Spectre and The Sovereign”

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Were happy to bring you three segments in this weeks show. The first is Sean Swain, who hasn’t been heard on the airwaves for a few weeks. [2min 56sec]

Following this, we’ll hear from an anarchist from so-called Hamilton, Ontario, to talk about repression faced by queer folks and anarchists since Hamilton Pride and assess whats next. It should be noted that at the time of this recording, Cedar Hopperton was on hunger strike from their initial detention for 5 days. Were not sure where that stands. Also, three more people have been arrested. You can keep up on how to offer solidarity and whats happening by visiting North-Shore.Info. Also, support can be lobbed at The Tower social center. [9min 56sec]

Finally, well be airing Timothy Grieve-Carlson reading the paper “The Spectre and the Sovereign: The Problem of the Paranormal in Biopolitical Thought,” presented on the panel Liberatory Horizons at the 2019 NAASN Conference in Atlanta, GA. [41min 31sec]

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playlist

Anarchist, Antifa, Appalachia, Asheville, gender, General, LGBTQ, North Carolina, Queer, repression, South Carolina

Anti-Repression in SC and Trans Resiliency in Appalachia

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This week, we’ll be featuring two segments, one on state repression against anti-racist organizers in rural Upstate South Carolina [10min 21sec] and on an upcoming documentary series on access/non access to mental health infrastructure for transgender people living in Appalachia [41min 39sec]. Plus, words from Sean Swain [3min 22sec]!

Facing Down FBI & Nazi Pressure in SC

First, Bursts shares a conversation with activists from the Scuffletown Anti-Repression Committee and the Michigan Anti-Repression Committee, left legal defense groups from vastly geographically distant areas of the so-called U.S. They are talking about the case of repression in what’s called the Upstate, or northern part of the state of South Carolina in the south eastern U.S., where anti-racist and anti-fascist activists have been surveilled, intimidated, harassed, detained while naked at home and arrested by local and Federal Law Enforcement, including the FBI, apparently on behalf of the local white supremacists. The agent having made such disclosures is named FBI Special Agent Tanya Evanina. You can learn more, keep up on the situation and donate to their legal support at norepressionsc.home.blog. A longer version of this chat will appear in the podcast edition, alongside Sean’s segment for this week, cut due to time concerns from the broadcast, alongside a couple of announcements.

Resources pointed to by the guests include BARC and the EFF.

Just a heads up that when the activist from STARC references A12, it’s short hand for the fight against white supremacists in the streets of Charlottesville, VA, on August 12th, 2017.

Trans Resiliency and Mental Healthcare access in Appalachia

For the second segment, I (William) had the chance to talk with Basil Soper, who is a writer, filmmaker, and a man of trans experience from the Appalachian region. He is the founder of the education and advocacy group Transilient (@wearetransilient on Instagram), which seeks to uplift trans voices and trans experiences, and to also connect folks with resources from a place of relative safety and understanding. This group is seeking to undertake a documentary series focusing on mental health resource access for trans people in Appalachia. They are in their very last push of fundraising currently, and if you would like to see more about this project and get in touch with them, you can go to wearetransilient.com , and you can also email them at wearetransilient@gmail.com. You can also go right to their Kickstarter for the best way to donate! The deadline is June 23rd, so smoke em if you got em. Also stay tuned for less money oriented ways to support this project!

In this interview, we got to talk about many different things, about the social construct of Appalachia and where that might have originated, the people who actually live here, mental health concerns that trans people can face, plus many other topics. This interview was a really nice experience for me because I got to talk with another trans person from a working class, rural background about things we both personally understand.

So I had some technical difficulties which I was unaware of in the moment, the result of which some of my audio sounds a bit static-y. This is something I’m working on correcting for future episodes, thanks for your patience!

Announcements

ICE Activity in WNC

If you’re in the Asheville area, be aware that Immigration officers were responsible for kidnapping four individuals in Henderson County to our south last week. They are changing their tactics to blend in better, sometimes using vehicles that look like work trucks with ladders on top or mimicking the appearance of anti-ice activists at times. If you’d like to get involved and join community resistance to ICE tearing apart our families and communities, consider checking our show notes for a link to get involved or reach out to CIMA via their website and click the “get involved” tab.

Donations

If you care to kick some dollars to our podcast, check out our donate/merch page which also features t-shirts and other items up for sale to support the show.

 

 

Anarchist, Hunger Strike, Italy, Prisons, repression

“We of this bread will not eat any more”: Anarchist Prisoners in Italy on Hunger Strike

Hunger Striking Anarchist Prisoners in Italy

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In this minisode special, Bursts spoke with an anarchist comrade in Rome about the hunger strike initiated on May 29th by Anna and Silvia, two anarchists rounded up in police actions (Anna in Operazione Scripta Manent and Silvia in Operazione Scintilla) and still facing trial for accusations of participating in direct action against the state and its borders. The hunger strike is against the solitary nature of their incarceration and it’s impacts on other prisoners.

Silvia Ruggeri and Anna Beniamino are being held in a prison condition called AS2 (High Security 2) at L’Alquila prison in the center Italy, the only two women in this section of the prison. Here is a link to a translated letter from them. As if the high security level weren’t harsh enough, the AS2 in L’Alquila in reality matches the application of what’s known as 41bis, invented by the Italian state during the Years of Lead (Italian civil war during the mid 70’s) and housing mostly accused political radicals, mafia foot-soldiers and jihadists.

41bis was implemented as an emergency measure and kept on the books, the kind of State of Emergency that Agamben writes about, staying on as a torture regime that now houses nearly 750 prisoners, tightens every year. 41bis has provoked protest from human rights groups, the European Court of Human Rights, the California legal system (which refused to extradite the mafioso Rosario Gambino to Italy for fear of subjecting him to torture under 41bis) and soliciting protest and solidarity on the outside. The twitter account of the @YPJInternational put out a statement of solidarity with Silvia and Anna and protests have occurred around Italy and in other countries, and comrades in Italy hope to hear about more solidarity.

More direct info on the case can be found at https://www.inventati.org/rete_evasioni/, where you can also share your solidarity actions.

Besides the links above, Round Robin is another site that will likely carry updates translated into English on the case of Silvia and Anna moving forward.

The musics heard in this minisode are:

Passione nera by Nerorgasmo (requested by Anna to be played at a demonstration outside of L’Alquila)

Kill The Rich or Die Tryin’ Parte 3 by Serpe in Seno (dedicated to Anna and Silvia)