#samudzi

[gael-garcia]

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. Drawing together writers, editors, and other culture workers, WAWOG hopes to provide ongoing infrastructure for cultural organizing in response to the war. This project is modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam, an organization founded in 1965.

Statement of Solidarity

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project. 

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, buttogether we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. 

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.  

Signed,

WAWOG Interim Organizing Committee

Hannah Black

Ari Brostoff (Senior Editor, Jewish Currents)

Elena Comay del Junco

Kyle Dacuyan (Executive Director, Poetry Project)

Kay Gabriel (Editorial Director, Poetry Project)

Kaleem Hawa

E. Tammy Kim

Shiv Kotecha

Wendy Lotterman (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Muna Mire

Perwana Nazif

Brendan O'Connor

Alex Press (Staff Writer, Jacobin)

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Dylan Saba

Zoé Samudzi (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Jasmine Sanders

Claire Schwartz (Culture Editor, Jewish Currents)

Janique Vigier

Harron Walker

Chloe Watlington

Gabriel Winant (Department of History, University of Chicago)

Audrey Wollen

Hannah Zeavin (Founding Editor, Parapraxis)

Signed, In Solidarity

Fatimah Warner (Noname)

Saul Williams

Susan Sarandon

Janeane Garofalo

Gael García Bernal

Danez Smith

Ocean Vuong

Aria Aber

Saidiya Hartman

China Miéville

+ full list here

[endlessandrea]

“If a nation-state defined by its monopoly on violence must be able to un-make life in order to sustain itself, could it follow, if we consider a more expansive framework, that the Westphalian form—the current international legal principle that upholds the exclusive sovereignty of nation-states over their territory—is always already genocidal?

The contradictions of genocide, and of human rights discourse generally, is the de facto global hierarchy of humanity: the demarcations of certain people and lands as mere capital and labor for the benefit of others, capitalism’s calculus of the necessary destructions of lifeworlds—whether targets or so-called “collateral damage”—so that others may live and flourish. If the world is organized around a necropolitical regime where the maintenance and elimination of certain populations are the governing logics of geopolitics, what, then, is the crime of genocide in a world where masses of people were never meant to survive?”

– Zoé Samudzi

[nerdyant]

"While museums have claimed an investment in “diversity and inclusion” as of late, this claim has really only translated into a fetishization of particular kinds of Black expression, falling painfully short of more far-reaching engagements of and with race. What lingered through the institutions’ inability to contend with simultaneous anti-Black and antisemitic terror vis-à-vis the KKK was a hackneyed deployment of platitudes that simply translated the urgent stakes of Guston’s mid-century challenges to whiteness and assimilability into palatable and inoffensive social justice museumspeak."

" (...) the report disturbingly notes that “the top five Black American artists at auction account for 83.5 percent of the total market for all Black American artists.” Just three of the top 20 artists are women: once again, Mehretu, Crosby, and Thomas. And if we excise the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the unsurprising and long-exploited Black bestseller, the market expenditure from 2008 to the first half of 2022 drops staggeringly from $3.6 billion to $1.04 billion."

"(...) One can’t help but grimace at the common descriptive language that Sotheby’s uses for [Kerry James Marshall 's] works, and how the artistic value of Marshall’s work is conservatively interpreted through a grammar of orthodox canonicity and mastery. Past Times is “an extraordinary visual feat that positions Marshall’s singular vision in dialogue with the masters of art history” and “confidently reclaims the presence of figures of African descent in the canon of Western art”; whereas Vignette 19 is “the supreme embodiment of the artist’s unparalleled renegotiation of the Western art historical canon” that “demonstrates the glaring absence of black figures from the history of Western painting”"

"There is a sordid intimacy between celebrated representational gains for Black artists and Black aesthetic assimilability as both canonical homage and correction as part of a not-so-subtle argument for the canon’s continued primacy and relevance (versus an investment in and appreciation for Black art in all its multiplicities)."

"Superficial racial representation and the celebration of a handful of market-dominating collectible superstars and younger up-and-comers supplants any meaningful engagement with the barriers for entry into art-making and the sustenance of a career in the arts."

[fuck-yeah-anarchy]

Just a reminder for my fellow white anarchists about how critical it is to explore the perspectives of people of color, both anarchist and non-anarchist alike as not only do experiences of common oppressions like the state and class rule differ depending on identity and conditions, but they also demonstrate how intersecting systems of oppression, such as white supremacy, permeate society as wide-reaching structures of oppression. It emphasizes the significance of dismantling these systems alongside the destruction of the state and the development of a free society.

Failure by white anarchists to comprehend white supremacy, its connection to other forms of oppression, and the experiences of people of color and their distinctive oppressions will not only significantly impede any endeavor towards building a freer society but also guarantee the perpetuation of these oppressions within the organizations/affinity groups they establish and the work they undertake. These groups typically fade away after alienating numerous potential nonwhite sympathizers to anarchism and its principles, all while merely paying lip service to Anti-Racist ideals and the movements led by people of color.

Only by actively listening to, reading, and reflecting upon the experiences of people of color, as well as engaging in introspection to comprehend the white supremacist mindset that persists even among white radicals like anarchists, can we initiate the dismantling of these oppressive systems and progress towards a genuinely free society.

Here is some content on the subject from some fantastic folks.

Videos:

Zoe Samudzi - On a Black Feminist Anarchism

Saint Andrewism - Landback

Saint Andrewism - What is Black Anarchism

Literature:

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin - Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - An indigenous peoples' history of the United States

Mariame Kaba, William C Anderson, Zoe Samudzi - As Black As Resistance

[decolonize-the-everything]

What is intersectionality?

Put simply, intersectionality is the concept that all oppression is linked. More explicitly, the Oxford Dictionary defines intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”. Intersectionality is the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression and we must consider everything and anything that can marginalise people – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc. First coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw back in 1989, intersectionality was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2015 with its importance increasingly being recognised in the world of women’s rights. So, what’s it got to do with women’s rights?

Without an intersectional lens, our efforts to tackle inequalities and injustice towards women are likely to just end up perpetuating systems of inequalities. Feminist writer Zoe Samudzi reminds us that “intersectionality is such a vital framework for understanding systems of power, because ‘woman’ is not a catchall category that alone defines all our relationships to power”. A black woman may experience misogyny and racism, but she will experience misogyny differently from a white woman and racism differently from a black man. The work towards women’s rights must be intersectional – any feminism that purely represents the experiences of white, middle class, able-bodied, heterosexual etc. women will fail to achieve equality for all. What’s intersectionality got to do with violence against women and girls?

To eliminate violence against all women and girls we have to address how violence differs between groups of women, because the violence women and girls experience isn’t just based on their gender. 44% of lesbian women experience intimate partner violence, compared to 35% of heterosexual women. Women and girls with disabilities are 2 to 4 times more likely to experience domestic violence than women without disabilities. For more information on women with disabilities’ experiences of violence in Nepal, check out ‘Invisible Realities’, a report from Womankind partner Nepal Disabled Women Association.

[dailyanarchistposts]

“Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.” – Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” – James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Aaron Bushnell, before self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., sent notice to a few radical platforms including CrimethInc. (henceforth: the Outlet) informing them of his decision to commit “an extreme act of protest” against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He asked simply that they preserve the footage of his action and report on it. Most complied, but in the face of such a humble request, the Outlet was confused: “All afternoon, while other journalists were breaking the news, we discussed how we should speak about this. Some subjects are too complex to address in a hasty social media post.” It’s telling that they self-identify as journalists.

Still, the white man’s burden of “anarchist” journalism demanded that they not ponder too long before releasing a statement , even if half-formed. Within hours, they hastily published their garbage take. Putting Aaron’s actions in the context of another self-immolation that occurred on December 1st by a woman in Atlanta, (who, despite the Outlet’s misinformation, is still alive) they said: “It is not easy for us to know how to speak about their deaths.” Such dis-ease surely disquieted the spin-doctors and self-appointed spokespeople of revolution. For a project which only contributes to struggle by knowing what to say, the imperative to speak is paramount. In light of what they wrote, it would have been better for them to contemplate a little longer, or just say nothing at all.

After grossly overestimating their importance as journalists “speaking to people of action,” they ultimately write:

“Just as we have a responsibility not to show cowardice, we also have a responsibility not to promote sacrifice casually. We must not speak carelessly about taking risks, even risks that we have taken ourselves. It is one thing to expose oneself to risk; it is another thing to invite others to run risks, not knowing what the consequences might be for them. And here, we are not speaking about a risk, but about the worst of all certainties. Let’s not glamorize the decision to end one’s life, nor celebrate anything with such permanent repercussions. Rather than exalting Aaron as a martyr and encouraging others to emulate him, we honor his memory, but we exhort you to take a different path.”

While it would be easy to dismiss this as the Outlet cautiously mitigating any potential liability if self-immolation generalizes, the rejection of the framework of martyrdom demands attention. The question is not whether Aaron qualifies as a shahid within the Palestinian context, although demonstrators in Yemen have proclaimed Aaron a “martyr of humanity” and an argument can be made for him having become an anarchist martyr in the lineage of Louis Lingg, Avalon, and Mikhail Vasilievich Zhlobitsky. The bigger issue: the Outlet’s assertion that an individual’s death, particularly in the context of the US, is the “worst of all possible certainties” reveals a deep disconnect with the context of this entire decolonial struggle. In the days following October 7th, anti-colonial anarchist thinkers such as Zoé Samudzi argued that the figure of the martyr marked a fundamental contradiction for the secular left’s ability to fully comprehend and act in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. The martyrs constitute a force in the present for all who live and continue to struggle. Aaron framed his self-immolation as “not that extreme” compared to the ascension to martyrdom of tens of thousands in Gaza. By implying that Aaron’s choice was too extreme, the Outlet dishonors the reality of the struggle within Palestine and undercuts the potential of Aaron’s sacrifice.

In denouncing any action taken with “such permanent repercussions,” the Outlet reproduces the anti-death paradigm of capitalism itself. The philosopher Byung Chul-Han, commenting on an exchange between the filmmaker Werner Schroeter and Michel Foucault, says:

“Schroeter describes the freedom unto death as an anarchist feeling: ‘I have no fear of death. It’s perhaps arrogant to say but it’s the truth… To look death in the face is an anarchist feeling dangerous to established society.’ Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production, that tries to increase human capital by biopolitical means. That utopia is anarchist insofar as it represents a radical break with a form of life that declares pure life, continued existence, sacred. Suicide is the most radical rejection imaginable of the society of production. It challenges the system of production. It represents the symbolic exchange with death which undoes the separation of death from life brought about by capitalist production.”

The fact that an anarchist media syndicate cannot recognize the anarchic nature of a sovereign death, or the symbolic exchange of a uniformed US airman’s self-immolation (which cannot be simply reduced to suicide) is in and of itself a disgrace. Even worse, this conforms to a long established pattern where every time a comrade’s actions pass a certain threshold of intensity, the Outlet is first in line to call for restraint. While Michael Reinoehl was still on the run after shooting a fascist, they wasted no time issuing a hasty social media post denouncing his action and urging their followers to “reject the logic of the guillotine.” The Outlet preferred to remain palatable for liberal eyes, ears, and politicians, rather than express solidarity with a comrade on the run for his life.

In his “Letter to Michael Reinoehl,” Idris Robinson exposes the logic at the heart of the contradiction of those who chose to parse Reinoehl’s actions as nonstrategic:

“What the double-standard with regards to your situation reveals is how violence in America will always necessarily have a profoundly racial dimension. And it is precisely this—the terrifying core of racialized violence—that they are trying to repress when they lie to both themselves and others that their issue with what you did is a question of strategy or tactics. I mean, give me a break: in a country that is literally saturated in violence, from blind mass shooters to murderous police, no one can honestly claim that the few shots that you let off could in some way be construed as an escalation. There is simply no way to avoid the spiral of violence that began at the very moment when the first wooden ships reached the shores of the Atlantic.”

While the Outlet has no problem sanctioning enlistment in the fascist-dominated Armed Forces of Ukraine or calling for the US to keep troops in northern Syria, it seems even a single white death in the United States is a red-line they refuse to cross. For them, the self-sacrifice of a white person in the US military (a fact they fail to ever mention in their response but that was, without question, important to Aaron’s action) in solidarity with colonized people might be even worse. Rather than a liberatory or truly life-affirming position, this timidity betrays a fundamental discomfort with anything that challenges the fragile unity of whiteness and the American racial order. Neoconarchists at it again!

The Outlet quotes Kropotkin (who broke with anarchist internationalism by supporting the Allied imperialists in World War I and is therefore a fitting predecessor to their brand of pro-NATO anarcho-liberalism) on the contagious nature of courage, yet their analysis downplays Aaron’s courage again and again. They call death “the worst of all certainties,” showing that they share Western civilization’s pathological fear of death, yet feel confident in making pronouncements about the impact and efficacy of Aaron’s offering mere hours after it happened. Those who are truly comfortable with uncertainty know that it remains to be seen what the full repercussions will be. The Outlet assumes the universality of a rationalist teleological perspective in the context of a gesture that is best understood deontologically: its essence, independent of outcome, is of distinct and ineffable value.

It’s clear that the Outlet fears any form of struggle that challenges the sanctity of liberal democracy that they feel comfortable operating within. Echoing a line they have often used in the past, they frame themselves as protestors and militant lobbyists, not insurgents or practitioners of direct action (which is not about influencing government policy, but rather creating direct results of destruction and ungovernability.) They say: “The kind of protest activity that has taken place thus far in the United States has not served to compel the US government to halt the genocide in Gaza.” While Aaron did call his self-immolation an “extreme act of protest [within U.S solidarity with Palestine],” the resulting question for anarchists should not be what more effective forms of protest might be, but rather how to honor Aaron’s act of personal refusal through our own deeds. His action was directed towards the rest of us. He looks us in the eye and asks: “What will you do?”

While the authors of the Outlet have called Aaron’s decision “self destruction” and “sacrifice,” we read little in their text of the long tradition of self-immolation as an ultimate form of self-expression against repression and war. They make only a diminishing reference to Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation to protest police bribery, which lead to the Sidi Bouzid Revolt and impelled the Arab Spring. In 1965, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to Rev. Martin Luther King:

“The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand. The Press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity…

The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire non-existence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. He does not think that he is destroying himself; he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the sake of others…”

The Outlet claims that Bushnell, in the rhetorical tradition of the notion of the selfishness of suicide, was “denying the rest of us a future with [him].” But the monks who self immolated in the sixties teach us that perhaps that is the pain we must bear as witness, just as those who chose fire bore the pain of their death or injury for the expression of their will.

“But why does he have to burn himself to death? The difference between burning oneself and burning oneself to death is only a difference in degree, not in nature. A man who burns himself too much must die. The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death.”

Pain can be a motivating factor towards life, just as the witnessing of an autonomous death can inspire us to live deeper into our convictions now.

The question remains: what is the “different path” the Outlet urges readers to take? They admit that no act of solidarity in the US, however massive or targetedly destructive, has been able to slow the war machine. And yet they claim what the ruling class fears most is “collective action.” They give no examples of what said action might be. It doesn’t take too much creativity to imagine how disenchanted members of the US military could strike against the war machine, especially if they’ve overcome the fear of death. We could list those actions of desertion, sabotage, and fragging (and their long history in the anti-war movements of generations past) and theorize on their efficacy. However, we have no desire to reduce ourselves to the indignity of the anarcho-commentariat, issuing self-serving hot-takes about the grave actions of someone more courageous. We can only imagine what they will say when (not if) the war is brought home in even more escalated ways. What are they to do when a revolution based on summering in squats in European social democracies and engaging in ritualized playfights with police is no longer intelligible? Their greatest fear is not of state or economy but of an epochal shift that will render them incoherent.

The Outlet’s pontification on the inappropriateness of Aaron’s action is beyond disrespectful. Faced with such acts of self-sacrifice, the appropriate responses are pause, prayer, contemplation, remembrance, and solidarity. Instead, the Outlet doesn’t fail to make the selfless about themselves: “Choosing to intentionally end your life means foreclosing years or decades of possibility, denying the rest of us a future with you.” Lacking any real other direction, this future seems to amount to years of patient readership and faithfully following the lead of well-platformed self-declared strategists. Their obnoxious tendency to quote their own past texts illustrates their narcissism and self-importance. This self-reference demonstrates a deepening dogmatism on their part, a commitment to stay the course on a sinking ideological ship.

The ill-timed call for recruitment is made explicit in the closing paragraphs: “Prepare to take risks as your conscience demands, but don’t hurry towards self-destruction. We desperately need you alive, at our side, for all that is to come.” Just as in recent weeks they celebrated those who fight side-by-side with the Azov Battalion in the Ukraine, they would prefer active US military personnel alive and well, ready to fight for Western interests at home and abroad.

The time has long passed to dispense with these bloggers who, through their appeals for restraint and moderation, stand in the way of the resistance movements they imagine themselves to lead. The Outlet’s inadequacy was already evident in the “both sides” narrative of their initial coverage of Al-Aqsa Flood. Instead, we choose to act out of affinity and solidarity with the resistance axis of the Palestinian struggle itself. Compare the milquetoast equivocations of the Outlet to the statement of unconditional solidarity with Aaron Bushnell and his loved ones issued immediately by the PFLP:

“The act of an American soldier sacrificing himself for Palestine is the highest sacrifice and a medal, and a poignant message to the American administration to stop its involvement in the aggression.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine affirms that the act of the American soldier Aaron Bushnell from the U.S. Air Force by setting himself on fire in front of the zionist embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest against the war on Gaza, which he called for the “liberation of Palestine,” confirms the state of anger among the American people due to the official American involvement in the zionist genocide war being waged on the Gaza Strip. It also indicates that the status of the Palestinian cause, especially in American circles, is becoming more deeply entrenched in the global conscience, and reveals the truth of the zionist entity as a cheap colonial tool in the hands of savage imperialism.

The Front expresses its full solidarity with the soldier’s family and all the American sympathizers who took a honorable stance and whose struggle and pressure to stop the genocide on the Strip have not ceased, confirming that the act of an American soldier sacrificing his life to draw the attention of the American people and the world to the plight of the Palestinian people, despite its tragic nature and the great pain it involves, is considered the highest sacrifice and medal, and the most important poignant message directed to the American administration, that it is involved in the war crime in Gaza and that the American people have awakened and are rejecting this American involvement, calling on the American administration to stop this support and bias for the zionist entity.

The Front sends a message to the Arab soldier to take this American soldier who sacrificed his life for a noble cause like the Palestinian cause as an example and role model, and to leave the trenches of waiting, incapacity, and move to the trench of confrontation in support of Palestine and its people who are being slaughtered, besieged, and starved in full view and hearing of the world and just a few kilometers from Arab lands and meters from the borders.

Palestine will be victorious as long as it has deeply engraved itself in the conscience and consciences of the world, and history will record in golden letters the names of all the sympathizers and free people of the world who stood with it and sacrificed their lives for its sake.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Central Media Department 26-2-2024″

Those golden letters of history will not record the name CrimethInc., whose version of anarchism cannot hold, comprehend, or move with the young militants taking increasingly bold and dire action. While the pro-Ukraine anarchists continue to stumble again and again over the question of militarism, Aaron’s act of self-negation resolved the contradiction. This is not to say his was the only way to resolve the contradiction, but it was a powerful way that threatens the worldview the Outlet desperately clings to: a view inextricably affixed to Western epistemological hegemony. The decline of the neoliberal consensus indicates the inevitable illegibility of their explanation of the world. The coming days and years will surely see a proliferation of increasingly drastic actions, marked by an intensity which surpasses what the Outlet can accept or condone, positioned as it is. For the Outlet, the death of this world conjures the existential anxiety of dissociation. For others, ourselves included, the end of this world is essential for the legibility of our perspective.

Aaron left us a will. That will, in the many senses of that term, is our inheritance. It reads: “I wish for my remains to be cremated. I do not wish for my ashes to be scattered or my remains to be buried as my body does not belong anywhere in this world. If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.”

Whatever Aaron was in the preceding years of his life, he died as an anarchist, and will be remembered as one. His action points to a new organic anarchism emerging out of the present moment, one disconnected from the scenes, subcultures, and cults-of-personality that constitute the anarcho-mainstream. This development threatens the hegemony of the anarchist talking heads as much as the rest. His death is already drawing unprecedented attention, at new levels, to the cause of Palestinian liberation, and likely to anarchism as well. Those who cannot adapt to the changing tides will be washed into historic oblivion, toward which they’re already careening. The rest of us must act within the unsayable. Deeds must speak where words fail.

[kummatty]

deeply appreciative of zoé samudzi's analysis and critique in this moment, im grateful that she remains critical and unimpressed w the hypocrisy of so many governments--from indonesia to namibia to south africa, even while acknowledging what these legal movements against israel can accomplish, and I'm grateful for her skill in parsing out and articulating these layers of politics, power and narrative,, I continue to learn and download all the articles she shares (screenshots from her instagram story today @/babywasu)

[oasis-nadrama]

Revolutionary literature and dictator literature

Oasis Nadrama, 20/07/2024 '

REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE

In 2019, the now-X-deactivated FeralCherub posted this reflection:

It is very true. There is an entire world of fundamental revolutionary literature out there, and we should all discover it and learn from it.

Read Zoé Samudzi, He Zhen, Abdullah Öcalan, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Rauna Kuokkanen, David Graeber, Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, Paulo Freire, Peter Gelderloos, Claude Cahun and Kanno Sugako! And so many others!

Dive into Queering Anarchism, Queer Ultra Violence, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarcho-Blackness, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto! Look into Anarchy Works and all of the Anarchist Library!

'

DICTATOR LITERATURE

The caveat is that the argument "Don't be afraid of revolutionary literature" is often used by tankies to pass the words of tyrants as revolutionary literature.

Tankies/"authoritarian left" will tell you to read Lenin, Trotsky, Mao and Stalin, disguising the legitimate refusal of dictatorships, purges, gulags, death penalty etc as capitalist/bourgeois/fed propaganda... That's part of THEIR propaganda.

Dictators do not deserve for anyone to listen to them.

Useful resources about this kind of ideology:

Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam

Always Against the Tanks

A Fresh Look at Lenin

So yeah, let's not be afraid to read revolutionary literature...

However, dictators, logically enough, do not write revolutionary literature. They write coup literature, state capitalism apologetics literature, dictatorship apologetics literature.

You wouldn't read Elon Musk's reflections on anticapitalism. Why would you read Pol Pot's reflections on government?

Let's be cautious of the words we read and the significant political figures we are invited to respect.

'

[roga-el-rojo]

As Black As Resistance - Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson

Hello friends,

For this next week’s Black August recommendation, I’m foregrounding conversations around revolutionary Black anarchy as a way of creating conditions for Black liberation: “As Black As Resistance” by Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson.

Zoé Samudzi is a writer and doctoral student in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on the scientific logics that produce race and gender, particularly focusing on transgender health and the ways Blackness is constructed.

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by the Guardian, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others. You can read many of his writings at Truthout or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he's a contributing editor covering race, class, and immigration.

“As Black As Resistance” is a powerful critique of the anti-Black U.S. settler capitalist project, advocating for radical action in order to help Black people become ungovernable under this regime of gratuitous violence. The authors emphasize the importance of grounding current movements in the Black radical tradition to achieve true liberation, and use personal acknowledgments and reflections as clarion calls for Black self-emancipation.

In particular, they ground themselves in a Black Anarchist tradition that also sees the anti-Black settler capitalist state as unable to be reformed, and one which revolutionaries can’t replace since it can’t guarantee Black safety. Instead, learning from various radical Black movements such as the Black Panthers they call for collective self-defense in the face of oppression, as well as building alternative institutions not based on domination, hierarchy, and control.

Their reflections on abolitionism and anarchism are a case in point. Instead of seeing these as negative critiques of the status quo, they’re opportunities to build alternative institutions that affirm Black humanity, Indigenous sovereignty, and liberate all of us from patriarchy, ableism, class society, and other oppressive systems. This is especially prescient during Black August given the reflection time we’re gifted during this time.

I highly recommend y’all read this book, even if you’re not an anarchist you can find some wonderful inspirations in their reflections and it helps sharpen our analysis on what freedom can look like and how to be cautious on not reproducing harm in our quests for change. I know I’ve certainly learned a lot!

[grupaok]

Paul Hankar, Musée du Congo, Tervuren, Belgium, n.d. (19th c.)

Via Zoé Samudzi

[noma-o]

VICE partnered with Fotografiska New York to present New Visions, an exhibition showcasing 14 emerging photographers from around the world. The awesome Zoé Samudzi writes about the work of Lagos, Nigeria-based photographer Noma Osula. 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7qw8v/a-contemporary-take-on-nigerian-family-portraits-from-the-70s?series=erqkqr

[endlessandrea]

"The contradictions of genocide, and of human rights discourse generally, is the de facto global hierarchy of humanity: the demarcations of certain people and lands as mere capital and labor for the benefit of others, capitalism’s calculus of the necessary destructions of lifeworlds—whether targets or so-called “collateral damage”—so that others may live and flourish. If the world is organized around a necropolitical regime where the maintenance and elimination of certain populations are the governing logics of geopolitics, what, then, is the crime of genocide in a world where masses of people were never meant to survive?"

[yasbxxgie]

[1308061063003475986]

[notangeletima]

“Aren’t certain white male longings also self-annihilatory to some extent, because some “self” must be destroyed in order for them to give and receive love as full human beings?”

“Getting Closer” by Zoé Samudzi

[toshootforthestars]

(source)

[antoine-roquentin]

On Tuesday, British newspaper The Guardian published an interview with Judith Butler—and then removed a section in which the renowned gender theorist made criticisms of the transphobic “gender critical” movement.

The paper said in an update that it made the redaction “to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place” but did not detail them. You can read the original here.

“I find it ridiculous that the Guardian would interview Judith Butler about womanhood and not expect very frank comments about TERFs [trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists]—the redaction is pathetic but unsurprising,” author Zoé Samudzi tweeted.

Responding to a question about protests around Los Angeles’s Wi Spa this summer that turned violent after an allegation of exhibitionism in the women’s locker room drew far right anti-trans demonstrators, Butler termed trans-exclusionary ideology as “one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.”

“So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people,” Butler said.

It’s still unclear why the comments were removed, but according to sources close to the situation, the company’s UK editors have used the offending section as a “pretext” to pull a Guardian US series focused on trans issues called Gender Now that Butler’s interview was meant to launch.

One Guardian [UK] lead opinion writer, Susanna Rustin, called Butler’s comments on gender identity “the ultimate luxury belief.”

“And it unsurprisingly emerged from an elite university in a superpower state,” she added.

background to this is, the guardian’s us staff is horrified by the uk staff’s transphobia and even wrote a letter about it