redFlags

The Activist Top Ten for 2007

Brought to you by History Is A Weapon:

1) There is no purchasing the revolution or surfing to it online. While this might seem like a no-brainer to most, the tendency to reduce social change to individual action penetrates even the sharpest minds. So while we might be too cool for the (red) scam, we can still get caught up in the American Apparel branding. Which brings us to...

2) A lifetime of purity is worth a good ten minutes of coalition. What's it worth if you believe all the right things but can't work with anyone who doesn't? People getting shot at in Iraq don't care if you're working with democrats, nationalists, liberal reform groups, or radical communists if it stops the war. Jerry Falwell and the Chamber of Commerce may not agree on banking regulation and sermon subjects (or they might...), but they rule because united they stand, divided we fall. We don't need to drink together, but we have to let bygones be bygones and keep our eyes on the prize.

3) Even a vigil a day won't keep the system at bay. A moral argument may convince regular people to join us, but the empire isn't rhetorical. Politicians and the various institutions of war, from Exxon to the Ivy Leagues, don't give a whit about our moral arguments: they know their goal and they've made calculations to achieve it. Getting them to change their actions means getting them to change those calculations: politicians want to stay in office and corporations want to maintain profits. Threaten their primary needs and they won't just listen, they'll respond.

Momentum Grows for March 20 Student Day of Action Against the War

By Brad Sigal

At colleges and high schools across the country, students are building for a day of protests on March 20 against the U.S. war in Iraq. Students at more than 60 schools have protests planned on that day, in the largest coordinated day of student anti-war protests in years. A press release for the March 20 actions says, "In the space of just three weeks, over sixty campuses have signed onto the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) call to action—from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Grand Rapids, Michigan; from high schools in central North Carolina to the west coast campus of UC Santa Barbara; from urban centers of Chicago, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles to rural campuses of Tennessee and Iowa—and in dozens of places in between."

The Beginnings of a New Democratic Nepal?

by John Mage and Bernard D'Mello

Over the last year, as the world watched Nepal making a significant and qualitative break with its past, the EPW too was planning a special issue.  For the two of us, having come of political age in the 1960s and 1970s, an aphorism of those times that still lingers, "no investigation, no right to speak," may have been behind our joint decision to visit Nepal in February, to put our fingers to the pulse of things.  A "people's war" that lasted 11 years led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the CPN(M), as well as the Jan Andolan in April last year, brought about profound shifts in the balance of power in national politics.  The 238-year old feudal monarchy has been marginalised, a preliminary step towards laying the foundations for a democratic republic.  The Nepali Maoists, for their part, are practising another one of those 20th-century aphorisms: "to rebel is justified."  They had waged a just war by raising an army -- the people's liberation army (PLA) -- ingrained with the democratic tradition of building close ties with the common people.  Their strategy required the establishment of "base areas" in rural Nepal, which have now been heralded as representative of a new Nepal in the making.  It was in this context that we decided to trek in Rolpa, located in mid-west Nepal, one of the first base areas in the people's war.

23 students arrested occupying military recruitment center

Received from the Slamista listserve: At noon, Monday, March 12, 2007, nearly 100 students from area universities marched to the armed forces recruiting station on 157 Chambers Street. Twenty-three members of Students for a Democratic Society entered and occupied the recruiting station shutting down recruitment activity for nearly two hours. 

From New Orleans to Caracas: The Mutual Aid & Intl. Solidarity Conference

Received from the National Hip Hop Political Convention:

After Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast and uprooted the lives of more than a million, predominantly Black and working class people, Venezuela, under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez, was one of the first nations to offer humanitarian aid to the United States government and all those displaced.

The US government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, rejected Venezuela’s offer and closed a venue of life saving support sorely needed by the Black and working class Survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Why? The answer lies with the racist and imperialist structure and worldview of the US government. It is this structure and worldview that left Black people to die in New Orleans after the great flood and deliberately attacked them, scattered them, and abandoned them without aid or humanitarian protection. It is this same system and worldview that has repeatedly sought to disrupt and undermine the democratic process in Venezuela and threatened to assassinate its President.

Carl Dix: 50 Reasons

Denmark riots: Youth House Vs. Father House

Riots and repression have rocked Copenhagen for three days and nights. In what's been billed as the "final conflict" of the Scandanavian autonomous scene, the Danish state has moved to sell off and shut down Youth House, the last remaining political squat outside of Cristiana, Copenhagen's famed semi-autonomous zone in the center of the city. Over 600 people have been brutally arrested attempting to block the transfer of Youth House to a Christian sect that has slated this vibrant social center for demolition. Supporters from around Scandanavia and Germany traveled to assist the Danes, with the government responding by raiding anti-authoritarian offices and movement centers in round-ups. UK Indymedia has an update page with timelines, pictures and tons of information.

David Rovics wrote a short report on some of the back story:

The 1980’s was the heyday of the autonomous movement in Denmark, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Thousands of mostly young people squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings in dozens of urban centers, creating alternative societies that embraced community, art, music, and a culture of resistance that rejected consumerism and empire. A community was formed that rejected the domination of the world by multinational corporations and the governments that supported them, whether they be outright militarist states like the US or more watered-down NATO members like Denmark. They defended their squats in pitched battles with police, and at the same time debated sexism within their movement and organized protests in support of refugees and against nuclear power. The movement existed in a near-constant state of siege. Many squats were ultimately taken by force by the police, and others were legalized.

With that in mind: Either we fight for the world, or fight for our own turf. They are not the same thing. There is no as autonomy in this world and there never will be. The retreat into socio-political ghettos in Europe was a surrender to the permanence of the capitalist (welfare) state while playing at war against it. It is people in their millions who will take down European capitalism. In the difference between the suburban riots in France last year and the subcultural resistance of the long-waned autonomous scene – we can see the outlines of new European left that no longer sees itself flowering in the cracks and margins – but which pushes to the very centers of power through the rebellion of working people and their allies, both native born and immigrant.

These social centers are exciting places, particularly for Americans with little experience in strong, radical institutions (as Rovics ably reports). Understood in context, the squats and social centers were a retreat by movements past, not simply something to defend. When radicals gave up on a better world, they settled for a better apartment.

What sees itself as autonomy could be seen through another lens as containment.

That said, they take their autonomy seriously – and they fight for it. You have to respect people who refuse to be governed. In Texas, the fetish of private property means you legally get shot for walking on somebody's lawn. In Copenhagen for these days, what people were willing to wage a violent defense of is their right to a social existence outside of capitalism, with mutual aid and solidarity outside of the exploitative hierarchies of capitalism.

In the ferocity of their battle is the measure of their hope.

Former Black Panthers/BLA under attack

For anyone not familiar, raids in several states have nabbed eight former Panthers on charges that date back 35 years. This terrorization of comrades from the Black liberation movement is intolerable and all support is due. Though there are no complete histories of the Black Liberation Army currently in print, quite likely because of the continuing government interest in hounding these comrades across the globe, brother Kaz recently wrote up a short history of the deceased freedom fighter Kuwasi Balagoon that gives some flavor of the movement and its rank-and-file militants. RedFlags is here reposting an announcement from the Jericho Movement, an organization dedicated to supporting and assisting political prisoners and prisoners of war.

To all Jericho chapters, members and allies:

It is with urgency that we call on you to be alert right now in light of this latest assault on our movement coming from California and New York. By now you have heard the news that fascism has called for the arrest of at least eight (8) former members of the Black Panther Party, two of whom are already serving life sentences in New York state prisons. The incident occurred back in August 29, 1971, when, if I remember correctly, a unit of the Black Liberation Army attacked a precinct in San Francisco in retaliation for the assassination of Field Marshall George Jackson the week prior.

As with many actions of the BLA, large-scale corralling measures were taken and numerous folks, community revolutionaries and unaffiliated community folks were arrested and charged with criminal bs. Torture and other illegal but totally characteristic measures were used by local, state and federal forces to coerce “confessions” and manufacture evidence where there was none. But that's war, aint it?

Iranian Women Call for International Women’s Day Actions

Received from A World to Win News Service: The Women’s Campaign for the Abolition of all Misogynist, Gender-Based Legislation and Islamic Punitive Laws in Iran is preparing for actions on March 3 and March 8, on the occasion of International Women’s Day.

The Campaign, known by its Farsi name Karzar, in 2006 organised a successful series of marches over five days from Frankfurt, Germany to The Hague in the Netherlands. Approximately 1,000 people took part on the last day, mostly Iranian women but also women and men from Europe and around the world, some travelling long distances to give their solemn support to women in Iran whose oppression is legitimised by the legal system set up by that country’s rulers.