#transnational solidarities

[luthienne]

Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle

…we will have to do something quite extraordinary: We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.

[opencommunion]

"The story of  'John Doe 1' of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is tucked in a lawsuit filed five years ago against several U.S. tech companies, including Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle producer. In a country where the earth hides its treasures beneath its surface, those who chip away at its bounty pay an unfair price. As a pre-teen, his family could no longer afford to pay his $6 monthly school fee, leaving him with one option: a life working underground in a tunnel, digging for cobalt rocks.  But soon after he began working for roughly two U.S. dollars per day, the child was buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed mine tunnel. His body was never recovered. 

The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles humming down American streets. In 2022, the U.S., the world’s third-largest importer of cobalt, spent nearly $525 million on the mineral, much of which came from the Congo.

As America’s dependence on the Congo has grown, Black-led labor and environmental organizers here in the U.S. have worked to build a transnational solidarity movement. Activists also say that the inequities faced in the Congo relate to those that Black Americans experience. And thanks in part to social media, the desire to better understand what’s happening in the Congo has grown in the past 10 years. In some ways, the Black Lives Matter movement first took root in the Congo after the uprising in Ferguson in 2014, advocates say. And since the murder of George Floyd and the outrage over the Gaza war, there has been an uptick in Congolese and Black American groups working on solidarity campaigns.

Throughout it all, the inequities faced by Congolese people and Black Americans show how the supply chain highlights similar patterns of exploitation and disenfranchisement. ... While the American South has picked up about two-thirds of the electric vehicle production jobs, Black workers there are more likely to work in non-unionized warehouses, receiving less pay and protections. The White House has also failed to share data that definitively proves whether Black workers are receiving these jobs, rather than them just being placed near Black communities. 'Automakers are moving their EV manufacturing and operations to the South in hopes of exploiting low labor costs and making higher profits,' explained Yterenickia Bell, an at-large council member in Clarkston, Georgia, last year. While Georgia has been targeted for investment by the Biden administration, workers are 'refusing to stand idly by and let them repeat a cycle that harms Black communities and working families.'

... Of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children. They are not only exposed to physical threats but environmental ones. Cobalt mining pollutes critical water sources, plus the air and land. It is linked to respiratory illnesses, food insecurity, and violence. Still, in March, a U.S. court ruled on the case, finding that American companies could not be held liable for child labor in the Congo, even as they helped intensify the prevalence. ... Recently, the push for mining in the Congo has reached new heights because of a rift in China-U.S. relations regarding EV production. Earlier this month, the Biden administration issued a 100% tariff on Chinese-produced EVs to deter their purchase in the U.S. Currently, China owns about 80% of the legal mines in the Congo, but tens of thousands of Congolese work in 'artisanal' mines outside these facilities, where there are no rules or regulations, and where the U.S. gets much of its cobalt imports.  'Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected,' wrote Siddharth Kara last year in the award-winning investigative book Cobalt Red: How The Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. 'It is a system of absolute exploitation for absolute profit.' While it is the world’s richest country in terms of wealth from natural resources, Congo is among the poorest in terms of life outcomes. Of the 201 countries recognized by the World Bank Group, it has the 191st lowest life expectancy."

[homonationalist]

The point that I’m making is that while racist police violence, particularly against Black people, has a very long history, going back to the era of slavery, the current context is absolutely decisive. And when one examines the ways in which racism has been further reproduced and complicated by the theories and practices of terrorism and counterterrorism, one begins to perhaps envision the possibility of political alliances that will move us in the direction of transnational solidarities. What was interesting during the protests in Ferguson last summer was that Palestinian activists noticed from the images they saw on social media and on television that tear-gas canisters that were being used in Ferguson were exactly the same tear-gas canisters that were used against them in occupied Palestine. As a matter of fact, a US company, which is called Combined Systems, Incorporated, stamps “CTS” (Combined Tactical Systems) on their tear-gas canisters. When Palestinian activists noticed these canisters in Ferguson, what they did was to tweet advice to Ferguson protesters on how to deal with the tear gas. They suggested, among other things: “Don’t keep much distance from the police. If you’re close to them, they can’t tear gas,” because they would be teargassing themselves. There was a whole series of really interesting comments for the young activists in Ferguson, who were probably confronting tear gas for the first time in their lives. They didn’t necessarily have the experience that some of us older activists have with tear gas. I’m trying to suggest that there are connections between the militarization of the police in the US, which provides a different context for us to analyze the continuing, ongoing proliferation of racist police violence, and the continuous assault on people in occupied Palestine, the West Bank, and especially in Gaza, given the military violence inflicted on people in Gaza this past summer.

Angela Davis from "Transnational Solidarities" in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016)

[mariacallous]

For 75 years, America’s NATO allies have relied on the U.S. nuclear arsenal to provide for the defense of Europe. This was never a terribly logical policy. As Lawrence Freedman, the doyen of British strategic historians, put it in these pages back in 1981, “The United States would be irrational to commit suicide on behalf of Western Europe, but NATO has not found this fact a decisive flaw it its strategy.”

The linchpin of the policy was a firm European belief in the steadfast commitment of Washington to the security of Europe. Today, that no longer holds: As two nuclear experts recently wrote in Foreign Policy, “The credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella has now been shattered by Trump.” America First leaves no room for alliance solidarity.

Europe must act in accordance with this reality. Luckily, plans for a European nuclear deterrent exist in the archives, and the European Union would do well to dust them off. The Kennedy administration’s proposal for a Multilateral Force (MLF) offers a workable blueprint for a pan-European nuclear deterrent.

Minus America, Europe finds itself unarmed in a dangerous, nuclear world. The arms control regimes developed during the Cold War have been abrogated by both the United States and Russia. China, never a signatory to the bilateral U.S.-Russia agreements of the Cold War, now seeks to expand and upgrade its own nuclear deterrent. Achieving a trilateral nuclear arms agreement would always have been tough, but without the Cold War agreements in place, the task is nigh impossible. To make matters worse, nuclear proliferation means that there are now nine nuclear powers, and Iran is on the brink of becoming the 10th.

These are powerful incentives for the EU to develop a pan-European nuclear deterrent. Relying on Washington to provide extended nuclear deterrence for Brussels is an increasingly dubious proposition. And in this nuclear world, the actors with seats at the negotiating table to forge new nuclear arms control agreements will need to be nuclear powers themselves. If Europe wants to promote nuclear arms control, it paradoxically needs to go nuclear first.

The French and British nuclear deterrents can offer a stopgap capability, especially if France joins NATO’s nuclear planning group, which it should, but over the long term, a transnational European solution is necessary as neither Paris nor London have enough nuclear weapons to secure all of Europe and neither has tactical nuclear capability, which is a critical component in escalation management. And while the Franco-British deterrent may provide short-term cover, it won’t overcome the reality that has kept NATO alive for 75 years—that a U.S. security guarantee was better than one from France or Britain.

With the credibility of the U.S. guarantee in tatters, European states may wish to revisit their own nuclear capability: As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in March, “We would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal.” But the pursuit of a new nuclear capability by any one state in Europe is likely to trigger a security dilemma for the others—if Germany were to go nuclear, would this reassure Poland, or would it incentivize Warsaw to develop its own capability? Just as the United States used nuclear sharing to manage proliferation in early Cold War Europe, Brussels would do well to manage this situation proactively via a shared European nuclear project. Moreover, the development of a nuclear arsenal is extremely costly and difficult. Coordinating a pan-European deterrent would be more economical, focusing efforts against external threats rather than internal competition.

The solution to these myriad challenges is a collective European finger on a collective European nuclear launch button. The best way to do this would be to dust off early Cold War plans for the MLF.

The MLF was a proposal to create a fleet of surface ships and submarines, crewed by European NATO allies, with the intent of giving those allies multilateral ownership and control in the nuclear defense of Western Europe.

A 1957 Belgian-Dutch report noted concerns in Europe that “the continental members of NATO do not feel adequately protected by strategic nuclear weapons which are not available either to these individual members or to the NATO community.” The Kennedy White House was particularly worried about West German nuclear ambitions and potential Franco-German nuclear cooperation. The nascent Italian nuclear program was also under close U.S. observation. The State Department’s Policy Planning Staff concluded in 1965 that the MLF “could do more to avert the spread of nuclear weapons than a non-proliferation agreement.”

The MLF was to put around 200 missiles under European control, giving the force the capability to destroy between 25 and 100 Soviet cities in countervalue strikes, designed to deter any Soviet first use. The project got so far as deploying a guided missile destroyer, the USS Claude V. Ricketts, with 174 U.S. officers and crew, integrated with crew from NATO allies, including West Germany, Turkey, and Italy. U.S. Navy Secretary Paul Nitze praised the deployment as a success.

But the NATO MLF was hampered by disagreements between Washington and the allies over basing and financing the cost of the program, as well as staunch British opposition to the idea. London preferred instead to maintain its special nuclear relationship with Washington, rather than lose it to some pan-European enterprise. In a world only two decades removed from the end of the war, the idea of a German finger on the button also attracted satirical derision. But although the MLF never fully materialized, the idea at the center of it—shared command and control—is well suited for 21st-century Europe.

Ideally, a European MLF would have at its core an Anglo-French component, as both countries currently field continuous at sea deterrents based on wholly different technologies. Whereas the French deterrent is entirely independent, the British one is not, as it is highly reliant on U.S. technology.

The first step toward a strategic deterrent manifested in a European MLF would be to begin training and integrating European officers and crew into the existing French and British platforms to develop an understanding of nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered submarines. This has the additional benefit of reassuring other European powers as to the Anglo-French commitment to European nuclear deterrence. At the same time, the EU should field special tenders for the development of a European nuclear submarine fleet. France has extensive experience with nuclear submarines, and Germany and Sweden are preeminent producers of conventional submarines. A European consortium with collective funding could develop a new nuclear-powered attack submarine for Europe—one that might eventually be shared with countries such as Australia.

Another, much quicker option is to expand the current British Dreadnought submarine program to Europe (and Australia). The reliance of these submarines on U.S. Trident missiles would require at the very least a redesign of the current “common missile compartment” scheme so that the European boats could perhaps carry French M51 missiles or the design of a new pan-European system so that the European system is completely independent of the United States. For London, there is a real threat of U.S. pushback against U.K. cooperation with the continent—but perhaps that alone should be incentive for Britain to make such a move.

The second order of business would be for the new European Nuclear Weapons Agency to create a tactical nuclear capability. The easiest way to do this would be to adapt the Storm Shadow/SCALP EG and Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missiles to accept a nuclear payload, which would provide Brussels with the necessary incremental, escalatory capability for a convincing deterrent.

For 75 years, nuclear sharing in NATO has provided the United States an ability to manage proliferation and served as a strong tool of alliance management. But the only thing certain with the Trump administration is uncertainty, and Europe must plan accordingly. Although U.S. extended deterrence theoretically still covers NATO allies, European countries would be foolish not to develop a pan-European nuclear alternative.

Doing so manages the security dilemma in Europe, will deter aggression, and will put the EU in a stronger position to push for nuclear arms control agreements. In a best-case scenario, a European nuclear deterrent will strengthen NATO, and in the worst-case scenario, if the United States abandons Europe, the continent will not be defenseless.

[ethanswgstblog]

Blog Post #7

What role does community play in Spier’s transformation?

Community plays a crucial role in Zeke Spier’s transformation by providing both support and a framework for action. As he becomes more involved in activism, the people around him reinforce his beliefs and help him channel his frustrations into organized resistance. The author notes that "Spier found solidarity among activists who shared his convictions, offering him both emotional reassurance and tactical knowledge" (Elin). This suggests that radicalization is not an isolated journey but one deeply embedded in collective struggle, where individuals draw strength from their peers to challenge existing power structures.

For the software mavis beacon, do you think it was ethical for the software developers to take pictures of the woman and put them later for much time

I believe it was unethical for the developers of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to use the woman’s image for so long without ensuring her continued consent. While she may have initially agreed to the photoshoot, she likely didn’t anticipate her likeness being used for decades. If she wasn’t fairly compensated or given the option to revoke permission, that raises serious ethical concerns about exploitation and informed consent.

From my perspective, people should have control over how their image is used, especially in commercial products. If the software developers had been more transparent and allowed her to renegotiate her involvement, it would have been a much fairer situation. This case makes me think about how digital rights and image usage should be handled more ethically in today’s world.

How does the internet contribute to the globalization of white supremacist movements

The internet plays a crucial role in the globalization of white supremacist movements by allowing individuals across different countries to connect, share ideologies, and organize. Unlike previous eras, where white supremacist movements were often confined to specific regions, the digital age has facilitated a transnational network of extremists. The text highlights this by noting that "Stormfront’s tagline from the beginning has been ‘white pride worldwide,’ a motto that speaks to the global vision of the site’s creators as well as to the current reach of the site" (Daniels, p. 41). This demonstrates how online platforms serve as hubs for uniting white supremacists beyond national borders, strengthening their collective identity and influence. As a result, these digital spaces not only spread racist ideologies but also provide tools for recruitment, organization, and mobilization, making white supremacy an increasingly globalized phenomenon.

In what ways does the framing of white supremacy as a response to globalization limit our understanding of its impact on society?

Framing white supremacy primarily as a response to globalization rather than as a racial ideology limits our understanding of its deeper societal impact. By emphasizing economic anxieties and cultural displacement, such interpretations risk downplaying the role of systemic racism and historical white privilege. The reading critiques Castells’s analysis, stating that he "mistakenly takes the patriot movement as the ideal type for all other white supremacist organizations" and in doing so, "misses the extent to which the Internet figures in the formation of a global white identity that transcends local and regional ties" (Daniels, p. 45). This suggests that reducing white supremacy to a reaction against globalization ignores its roots in deeply ingrained racial hierarchies. Understanding white supremacy as a structured and historically persistent racial ideology allows for a more comprehensive analysis of its continued presence in society and the ways it adapts in the digital age.

Elin, L. (n.d.-b). The Radicalization of Zeke Spier. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. 

Seeking Mavis Beacon Documentary

White Supremacist Social Movement Online And In A Global Context by J. Daniels

[tzifron]

The ideas that motivated the syllabus have been expanded into a book, Pirate Care. Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press 2025), providing a glimpse into a broad range of pirate care initiatives, exploring pirate care’s political significance and carrying its questions further into the world. For those who feel called to explore, the book awaits here: Pluto Press.

Pirate Care, a syllabus

We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.

Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.

These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.

The Pirate Care Syllabus we present here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices. We encourage everyone to freely use this syllabus to learn and organise processes of learning and to freely adapt, rewrite and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Jonah Fried

MONTREAL – B’nai Brith Canada is greatly disturbed by the prospect of a “Youth Summer Program” planned by participants in the illegal anti-Israel encampment on McGill University’s property.

Flyers promoting the “revolutionary summer program,” which organizers are framing as their answer to a “transnational student callout to #Revolt4Rafah,” feature images of keffiyeh-clad fighters brandishing submachine guns. Activities would be held from June 17 to July 12, 2024, on the lower field of McGill’s downtown campus, which has been unlawfully occupied by a coalition of radical anti-Israel groups since April 27.

“This is appalling,” said Henry Topas, Quebec Regional Director for B’nai Brith Canada. “Look at how they have moved the goalposts. First, they started holding demonstrations every week, despite their tendency to spout violent and antisemitic slogans. Then, they illegally occupied the campus, bullied Jewish students, harassed McGill administrators at their homes, and broke into university buildings.

“Now, we have a ‘summer camp’ openly being advertised with images of masked men holding weapons. Is McGill going to allow its campus to be used to brainwash youths into thinking that terrorism is acceptable?”

The announcement of the planned summer program comes only days after McGill offered amnesty to all students involved in the encampment and offered to accept some of the protesters’ “demands” – even as the university continues to seek a court order authorizing police to remove the illegal occupants.

In a social-media post, the McGill chapter of Students in Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) promised to “redefine McGill’s ‘elite’ instutional [sic] legacy by transformining [sic] its space into one of revolutionary education.”

SPHR says in its literature that “physical activity” as well as “revolutionary lessons” will be included in the so-called “program.”

The signup sheet:

The sheet lists options such as classes on “Islamic Resistance,” “pan-Arabism,” and the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – an apparent reference to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s network of proxies dedicated to destroying Israel and the United States.

The launch of this alarming “youth program” follows a violent incident on June 6, when a group of radicals broke into and vandalized the James McGill administration building, occupying it for two hours. This marked the most extreme escalation on campus since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. Police in riot gear used necessary force to disperse the crowd and access the building, which protesters had barricaded with construction fencing and other materials.

At least 15 people were ultimately arrested in connection with the clashes, some for throwing rocks at police officers.

“The situation at McGill is well out of control and has been for some time,” said Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s Director of Research and Advocacy. “We call on McGill and the local authorities to ensure that the university’s property is not used as a forum to incite violence against Israel and Jews.

“The plan for this so-called program further disproves the myth that these illegal encampments are about democracy and peaceful protest. They are, in fact, a hypocritical assault on Canadian values and Western norms as a whole.”

[maaarine]

The revolt against liberalism: what's driving Poland and Hungary's nativist turn? (Nicholas Mulder, The Guardian, June 21 2021)

"Yet it would be wrong to ascribe this conversion to global capitalism entirely to westernisation.

In their book, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, James Mark, Bogdan Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht and Ljubica Spaskovska leave no doubt that eastern European elites’ interest in capitalism preceded their embrace of democracy.

Reformist bureaucrats under late socialism looked above all to east Asia.

The successes of Deng Xiaoping’s China were an example for Gorbachev’s later economic reforms.

In the 1980s, Polish and Hungarian market-oriented reforms were modelled partly on South Korea, whose authoritarian capitalism had achieved high levels of economic growth.

Eastern Europe didn’t just take other regions as its end goal.

Its transition in the 1990s became “a new global script” for African, Latin American and Asian countries to follow.

Ruling elites and oppositionists from Mexico to South Africa took eastern Europe’s political democratisation and economic liberalisation as a guiding light. (…)

The fact that eastern Europeans eventually acted as ambassadors of the west solidified the belief that 1989 was a long overdue return to a natural cultural home.

But that turn had been initiated long before the end of communism.

In the 1970s and 80s Czechoslovak, Polish and Hungarian elites and dissidents steadily abandoned anti-imperialism and socialist solidarity with the Third World, and emphasised their “common European heritage” instead.

This focus on high European culture had clear anti-African as well as anti-Islamic overtones.

In 1985 the Hungarian minister of culture declared that “Europe possessed a cultural heritage … a specific intellectual quality – the European character”.

On a visit to Budapest two years later, the Spanish king Juan Carlos was shown the ramparts that Habsburg troops had seized from the Ottomans in the 1686 – a Communist celebration of Christian Europe’s fight against Islam.

Observing the ferocity of the Afghan mujahideen, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu warned that the Islamic world was “a billion-strong and they are fanatics. A long-term war can be the result.”

Meanwhile, Romanian exiles attacked Ceaușescu himself as a foreign ruler who had foisted a “tropical despotism” on their country.

The dissident Ion Vianu wrote in 1987 that “Romania today resembles an African country more than a European one”. (…)

Before communism ended, a new sense of cultural belonging had taken hold among many eastern Europeans.

This growing identification of their countries as European and Christian explains why during the last decade, anti-immigrant rhetoric about a “Fortress Europe” to keep out African and Middle Eastern migrants has found fertile soil in the region.

In the long run, the year 1989 therefore marked a moment when eastern Europe both closed itself off from old influences and opened itself up to new ideas.

Socialist planning and international solidarity with the developing world were abandoned, while identification with a narrower European civilisation went hand in hand with integration into the liberalised world economy.

Eastern European countries still display this combination of open and closed characteristics today.

Hungary is the prime example of this hybrid approach: under Orbán it has repudiated the liberal idea of an open society, but has nonetheless remained firmly connected to the transnational European car industry as well as the military networks of Atlanticism through EU and Nato membership."

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Ribu's anti-imperialist feminist discourse would later manifest in its solidarity protests against kisaeng tourism. This sex tourism involved Japanese businessmen traveling to South Korea to partake in the sexual services of young South Korean women who worked at clubs called kisaengs. Ribu's protests against kisaeng tourism represented how the liberation of sex combined with ribu's anti-imperialism and enabled new kinds of transnational feminist solidarity based on a concept of women's sexual exploitation and sexual oppression. From ribu's perspective, this form of tourism represented the reformation of Japanese economic imperialism in Asia. They were not against sex work by Japanese women, but opposed to the continued sexual exploitation of Korean women as a resurgence of the gendered violence of imperialism: Ribu activists hence connected imperialism and sexual oppression of colonized women to the continuing sexual exploitation of Korean women in the 1970s. In this way, they were able to expand the leftist critique of imperialism and, at the same time, point to the fault lines and inadequacies of the left.

In her critique of the left, Tanaka points to its failure to have a theory of the sexes.

Even in movements that are aiming towards human liberation, by not having a theory of struggle that includes the relation between the sexes. the struggle becomes thoroughly masculinist and male-centered (dansei-chushin shugi].

According to ribu activists, this male-centered condition infected not only the theory of the revolution and delimited its horizon, but it created a gendered concept of revolution that privileged masculinist hierarchies within the culture of the left. Ribu activists decried the hypocrisy of the left and what it deemed to be the all-too-frequent egotistical posturing of the "radical men" who "eloquently talked about solidarity, the inter national proletariat and unified will," but did not really consider women part of human liberation. Ribu activists rebelled against Marxist dogma and rejected these gendered hierarchies that valued knowledge of the proper revolutionary theory over lived experience and relationships. Moreover, ribu activists criticized what they experienced as masculinist forms of militancy that privileged participation in street battles with the riot police as the ultimate sign of an authentic revolutionary. While being trained to use weapons, activists like Mori Setsuko questioned whether engaging in such bodily violence was the way to make revolution. Ribu's rejection and criticism of a hierarchy that privileged violent confrontation forewarned of the impending self-destruction within the New Left.

...

News of URA [United Red Army] lynchings, released in 1972, devastated the reputation of the New Left in Japan, and many across the left condemned these actions. This case of internalized violence within the left marked its demise. Although ribu activists were likewise horrified by such violence expressed against comrades, many ribu activists responded in a profoundly radical manner that I have theorized elsewhere as "critical solidarity." Ribu activists had already refused to lionize the tactics of violence; hence, they in no way supported the violent internal actions of the URA. However, rather than simply condemning the URA leaders and comrades as monsters and nonhumans [hi-ningen), they sought to comprehend the root of the problem. They recognized that every person possesses a capacity for violence, but that society prohibits women from expressing their violent potential. In response to the state's gendered criminalization of Nagata as an insurgent and violent woman, ribu activists practiced what I describe as feminist critical solidarity specifically for the women of the URA. Ribu activists went in support to the court hearings and wrote about their experience and critical observations of how URA members were being treated. By visiting the URA women at the detention centers, consequently, ribu activists came under police surveillance. Ribu activists enacted solidarity in ways that were tot politically pragmatic but instead philosophically motivated. Their response involved a capacity for radical self-recognition in the loathsome actions of the other. Activists wrote extensively about Nagata - for example, Tanaka described Nagata in her book Inochi no onna-tachi e [To Women with Spirit] as a kind of "ordinary" woman whom she could have admired, except for the tragedy of the lynching incidents. In 1973, Tanaka wrote a pamphlet titled "Your Short Cut Suits You, Nagata!" in response to the state's gendered criminalization of the URA's female leader, the deliberate publication of such humanizing discourse evinces ribu's efforts to express solidarity with the women who were arguably the most vilified females of their time. Hence, ribu engaged in actions that supported these criminalized others even when the URA'S misguided pursuit of revolution resulted in the unnecessary deaths of their own comrades. Through ribu's critical solidarity with the URA, they modeled the imperative of imperfect radical alliances, opening up a philosophically motivated relationality with abject subjects and a new horizon of counter-hegemonic alliances against the dominant logic of heteropatriarchal capitalist imperialism.

While the harsh criticism of the left was warranted and urgently needed given the deep sedimentation of pervasive forms of sexist practice, it should be noted that, at the outset of the movement, there were various ways in which ribu's intimate relationship with other leftist formations characterized its emergence. At ribu's first public protest, which was part of the October 21 anti-war day, some women carried bamboo poles and wooden staves as they marched in the street, jostling with the police." Ribu did not advocate pacifism; its newspapers regularly printed articles on topics such as "How to Punch a Man." During ribu protests from 1970-2, some ribu activists-as noted, with Yonezu and Mori - still wore helmets that were markers of one's political sect and a common student movement practice."

- Setsu Shigematsu, “'68 and the Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement,” in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68. London and New York: Verso, 2020. p. 89-90, 91-92

[fatehbaz]

Had to organize some more of my notes.

Some recently published books on inter/transnationalism (especially Black) in the Americas (focus on disability/health and knowledge/art appropriation).

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Art, music, knowledge (and commodification):

Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (Larisa Kingston Mann, 2022)

West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism (Raphael Chijikoe Njoku, 2020)

At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Rachel Anne Gillett, 2021)

La Raza Cosmetica: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Natasha Varner, 2020)

Maps of Sorrow: Migration and Music in the Construction of Precolonial AfroAsia (Sumangala Damodaran and Ari Sitas, 2023)

Queer African Cinemas (Lindsey Green-Simms, 2022)

Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (K.E. Goldschmitt, 2020)

The Geographies of African American Short Fiction (Kenton Rambsy, 2022)

Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500-1850 (Kalle Kananjoa, 2021)

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General internationalism:

Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Edited by Jacob and Kebler, University of Liverpool Press, 2021)

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Edited by Paulina L. Alberto, et al., 2022)

The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, 2010)

In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Vanessa Mongey, 2020)

Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion (Kirwin R. Shaffer, Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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Caribbean:

Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, 2020)

The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Chirstopher A. Loperena, 2022.)

Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Kaysha Corinealdi, 2022)

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements (Karen Kampwirth, 2022)

Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory and History in the Circum-Caribbean (Njoroje M. Njoroje, 2016)

Fugitive Movements: Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World (Edited by James O'Neill Spady, 2022)

The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Tessa Murphy, 2021)

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Yesenia Barragan, 2021)

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United States:

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Julio Capo Jr., 2017)

The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States (Edited by Teizeira da Silva, et al., 2023)

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Da'Shaun L. Harrison, 2021)

Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil (Alan Marcus, 2021)

Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (Paul Barba, 2021)

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Kirwin R. Shaffer, 2021)

Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Kathryn Olivarius, 2022)

West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (Kevin Waite, 2021)

---

More:

Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940 (Jose D. Najar, 2023)

South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left (Jessica Stites Mor, 2022)

Reimagining the Gran Chaco: Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America (Edited by Silvia Hirsch, Paola Canova, Mercedes Biocca, 2021)

Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945 (Rafael Cardoso, 2020)

Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968 (Courtney Campbell, 2022)

Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (Anadelia Romo, 2022)

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Erika Denise Edwards, 2020)

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raul Necochea Lopez, 2020)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Today’s unending “War on Terror” flows directly out of imperial policies promulgated in the wake of the energy crisis of the 1970s. For example, in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, famously mild-mannered President Jimmy Carter declared the Persian Gulf to be an area of “vital interest” to US “national security” and stated that the United States would use military force to defend those interests. This imperial ideology has unleashed decades of violent mayhem against people in the oil-producing regions of the world while dealing a devastating blow to efforts to build transnational solidarity against exploitation.

Ashley Dawson, People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons

[figpuddingprincess]

Blog #3 (2/13)

Historically and presently, how have Africans belonging to various countries of origin subverted colonialism and white supremacy in the New World?

The African diasporic consciousness of African Americans, African Caribbeans, black Britons developed as a result of being sought out by Europeans for the purpose of powering the imminent industrial revolution. In the article “The Revolution will be Digitized” by Everett, the author explains that in order to subvert rampant dehumanization and power structures opposed to their very existence, diverse Africans created independent communications through “paralinguistic and transnational communicative systems and networks” based on tradition, art, culture, and history against the atrocious circumstances of the context in which they were brought into. By developing these communities, diverse Africans were able to allay dislocation and fragmentation through art and solidarity in the context of Western slavocracies.

How does invisibility, in regards to whiteness, offer a sense of immunity and protection?

The invisibility, which is spoken about in the article “Race After Technology,” is the power of plainness that many privileged or majority groups experience, rendering them the “center” in which everything else is compared. For example, many white people assume a sense of normality in regards to their names in the United States, whereas people with “interesting” names (or rather, People of Color with “uncommon” or traditional names amongst their communities) are considered abnormal. 

How does the information within the article “Race After Technology” further illustrate the notion that technology and digital culture reflect the ideals and power structures present within our physical reality?

The Princeton study is only one example of this phenomenon. A group of students tested if certain technologies, in this case algorithms, hold and act upon the partialties on the basis of race that humans have expressed. Conclusively, the algorithm demonstrated the same biases found within our culture, associating white-sounding names with favorable adjectives and Black-sounding names with unfavorable ones. This phenomenon has been coined “the New Jim Code,” which is “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequalities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”  

How do “codes” function to reinforce existing power structures and stunt social and political progress?

Codes function with power systems and hierarchies, determining the norms and standards of the physical reality we exist within. Historically and presently, these codes have played an integral role in the preservation of white supremacy and our own implicit and explicit biases. An example of coding in the twenty-first century is how the term “criminal” has come to be associated and used as a shorthand for folks from marginalized communities, such as poor people, immigrants, and Black people.

How is the concept of intersectionality relevant in digital culture, specifically?

The concept of intersectionality, which describes overlapping marginalized identities, such as Blackness, queerness, disabilities, or gender. Many issues as they apply to intersectionality get overlooked in the mainstream, as is the phenomenon where the public is significantly more educated on Black male victims of fatal police brutality than their female counterparts, who have been murdered in identical manners. The convergence of Blackness and womanhood means that in addition to the initial hatred that resulted in the murder in the first place, these cases are additionally not even accounted for in our collective imagination and public media.   

EVERETT, ANNA. “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Reimaging Africanity in Cyberspace.” Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 147–82. 

Benjamin, R. (2020). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. 

TED. (2016, December 7). The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw. Youtube.

[gravedangerahead]

On Palestine, G4S, and the Prison-Industrial Complex Speech at SOAS in London

(Angela Davis, December 13, 2013)

Transcript from the book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

When this event highlighting the importance of boycotting the transnational security corporation G4S was organized, we could not have known that it would coincide with the death and memorialization of Nelson Mandela.

As I reflect on the legacies of struggle we associate with Mandela, I cannot help but recall the struggles that helped to forge the victory of his freedom and thus the arena on which South African apartheid was dismantled. Therefore I remember Ruth First and Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, and so many others who are no longer with us. In keeping with Mandela’s insistence of always locating himself within a context of collective struggle, it is fitting to evoke the names of a few of his comrades who played pivotal roles in the elimination of apartheid.

While it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, it is important to question the meaning of this sanctification. I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism.

I therefore want to take the opportunity to thank the countless numbers of people here in the UK, including the many then-exiled members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, who built a powerful and exemplary antiapartheid movement in this country. Having traveled here on numerous occasions during the 1970s and the 1980s to participate in antiapartheid events, I thank the women and men who were as unwavering in their commitment to freedom as was Nelson Mandela. Participation in such solidarity movements here in the UK was as central to my own political formation as were the movements that saved my life.

As I mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela I offer my deep gratitude to all of those who kept the antiapartheid struggle alive for so many decades, for all the decades that it took to finally rid the world of the racism and repression associated with the system of apartheid. And I evoke the spirit of the South African Constitution and its opposition to racism and anti-Semitism as well as to sexism and homophobia.

This is the context within which I join with you once more to intensify campaigns against another regime of apartheid and in solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people. As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela’s political emergence occurred within the context of an internationalism that always urged us to make connections among freedom struggles, between the Black struggle in the southern United States and the African liberation movements—conducted by the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and PAIGC in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. These international solidarities were not only among people of African descent but with Asian and Latin American struggles as well, including ongoing solidarity with the Cuban revolution and solidarity with the people struggling against US military aggression in Vietnam.

A half-century later we have inherited the legacies of those solidarities—however well or however badly specific struggles may have concluded—as what produced hope and inspiration and helped to create real conditions to move forward.

We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid today. Their struggles have many similarities with those against South African apartheid, one of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism. I understand that there is evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government—in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment.

Moreover, it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch list, when George W. Bush signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list. In other words when Mandela visited the US after his release in 1990, and when he later visited as South Africa’s president, he was still on the terrorist list and the requirement that he be banned from the US had to be expressly waived.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

It is an honor to participate in this meeting, especially as one of the members of the International Political Prisoners Committee calling for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners, recently formed in Cape Town, and also as a member of the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I would like to thank War on Want for sponsoring this meeting and progressive students, faculty, and workers at SOAS, for making it possible for us to be here this evening.

This evening’s gathering specifically focuses on the importance of expanding the BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement called for by Palestinian civil society—which has been crafted along the lines of the powerful model of the antiapartheid movement with respect to South Africa. While there numerous transnational corporations have been identified as targets of the boycott, Veolia for example, as well as Sodastream, Ahava, Caterpillar, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, and others, we are focusing our attention this evening on G4S.

G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples.

G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.

G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel. Through Addameer, directed by Sahar Francis, we have learned about the terrifying universe of torture and imprisonment which is faced by so many Palestinians but also about their hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.

G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.

On the G4S website, one discovers that the company represents itself as capable of providing protection for a broad range of “people and property,” from rock stars and sports stars to “ensuring that travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country.”

“In more ways than you might realize,” the website reads, “G4S is securing your world.” We might add that in more ways that we realize, G4S has insinuated itself into our lives under the guise of security and the security state—from the Palestinian experience of political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid; from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools in the US and the wall along the US-Mexico border. G4S-Israel has brought sophisticated technologies of control to HaSharon prison, which includes children among its detainees, and Damun prison, which incarcerates women.

Against this backdrop, let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. I kid you not.

But G4S, whose major proficiencies are related to security, is actually involved in the operation of schools. A website entitled “Great Schools” includes information on Central Pasco Girls Academy in Florida, which is represented as a small alternative public school. If you look at the facilities page of the G4S website you will discover this entry: “Central Pasco Girls Academy serves moderate-risk females, ages 13-18, who have been assessed as needing intensive mental health services.” G4S indicates that they use “gender-responsive services” and that they address sexual abuse and substance abuse, et cetera. While this may sound relatively innocuous, it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

This company that provides “security” for numerous agencies as well as rehabilitation services for young girls “at risk” in the United States, while operating private prisons in Europe, Africa, and Australia, also provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank along the route of Israel’s apartheid wall as well as to the terminals from which Gaza is kept under continuous siege. G4S also provides goods and services to the Israeli police in the West Bank, while it offers security to private businesses and homes in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation. In the US, G4S provides transportation for deportees who are being ushered out of the US into Mexico, thus colluding with the increasingly repressive immigration practices inside the US. But it was here in the UK where one of the most egregious acts of repression took place in the course of the transportation of an undocumented person.

When I was in London during the month of October, speaking at Birkbeck School of Law, I spoke to Deborah Coles, codirector of the organization Inquest, about the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who died at the hands of G4S guards in the course of a deportation from the UK to Angola. On a British Airways plane, handcuffed behind his back, Mubenga was forcibly pushed by G4S agents against the seat in front of him in the prohibited “carpet karaoke” hold in order to prevent him from vocalizing his resistance. The use of such a term for a law enforcement hold, albeit illegal, is quite astonishing. It indicates that the person subject to the hold is compelled to “sing into the carpet”—or in the case of Mubenga—into the upholstered seat in front, thus rendering his protests muffled and incomprehensible. As Jimmy Mubenga was held for forty minutes, no one intervened. By the time there was finally an attempt to offer him first aid, he was dead.

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

As we know, G4S is involved in the operation of private prisons all over the world. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (CO-SATU) recently spoke out against G4S, which runs the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the Free State. The occasion for their protest was the firing of approximately three hundred members of the police union for staging a strike. According to the COSATU statement:

G4S’s modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid: the ideology of “security” and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state run sectors. Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is “Securing your World,” as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.

When I traveled to Palestine two years ago with a delegation of indigenous and women-of-color scholar/activists, it was the first time the members of the delegation had actually visited Palestine. Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.

G4S clearly represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine but that also increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the US and the world.

On any given day there are almost 2.5 million people in our country’s jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as in jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers. It is a daily census, so it doesn’t reflect the numbers of people who go through the system every week or every month or every year. The majority are people of color. The fastest-growing sector consists of women —women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!

In the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America—and especially before Black audiences—the response often is: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron—not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

Boycott G4S! Support BDS!

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Palestine will be free!

Thank you.

[balrogballs]

This is not really a coherent question and I doubt it was your source of inspiration, but the school/police/press/social response to Arwen's activism and death in Prayers To Broken Stone is reminding me very much of the reaction to the Kent State Massacre during the Vietnam War over on this side of the pond, and particularly of the subsequent Hard Hat Riots in NYC (an incident where a bunch of pro-war construction workers and office workers attacked a crowd of anti-war students who were protesting in response to the killings at Kent State, injuring many of them while the police stood by rather than intervening. The leaders of the hard hat contingent were later invited to the White House by Nixon.)

Obviously the actual issues Arwen was protesting were completely different, but it just strikes me as a similarly shitty and morally bankrupt response to student activism as was common in the 60s and 70s.

Yes absolutely!

You’re right on re the worldwide movements across the long 60s and 70s being exactly what I wanted to focus on thematically with the story - essentially showcase transnational activism through the events in these two countries, India and Britain, and connect what Arwen was trying to do in the 1970s to what Maedhros and Maglor were trying to do in the 1930s-40s, essentially the legacy of those final and bloody 20 years of the Raj and the ripple effect it had into Britain itself…

And yup in general it was an extremely turbulent period but one that built a lot of really interesting transnational solidarity links. So yes definitely the Kent State Massacre, Gwangju Massacre in SK, ‘P*kibashing’ in the UK after the Rivers of Blood speech, the complete clusterfuck happening in West Germany, the Emergency in India, the Bangladesh liberation struggle, and tons more etc.

So with Arwen, what I did was essentially mirror the Rhodes Must Fall movement — which has now been extended to more than Rhodes — but fictionalised and pushed forward a couple of decades — where “toppling” the statue doesn’t mean destroying it (as I think many people like to pretend that’s what it means to justify their discomfort towards the movement) but rather bringing the statues down from their pedestals atop buildings/crowning cities, and at the very least contextualising them with plinths that don’t just go “omg DILF 😍”.

I basically selected the most pathetic imperial statue (aka Buller, who genuinely was just shite at his job) to put up in the place of Rhodes to avoid the narrative being drawn into the Rhodes debate itself because it doesn’t really matter whom the statue depicts, as Gil-galad says, there’s no statue that should take precedence over a person (love my bedazzled king)…

And also — 100% on the press response! I wanted to compare how Arwen was portrayed - leather jacket, sunglasses, revolutionary-chic being the frightening image of the 70s, while Maedhros was pictured as being part of a ‘barbaric’ culture due to the folk art he performed etc. Essentially, how an “antinational” citizen is created via image politics etc, with Elrond serving as a palatable buffer between the two.

[argyrocratie]

(...)

"To describe this situation we, the Permanent Assembly Against the War, have spoken of a Third World War. We repeat it. This means not only that the war is spreading, but also that its effects and logics go beyond the spaces where it is fought, affecting also social struggles. Even admitting that a new multipolar world is emerging from this scenario, we do not believe that more and new political managers of the capitalist social order will be favourable for social justice, or that they will renounce the logic of war. On the contrary, an even greater expansion of the logic of war could result.

Even in a multipolar world, we don’t believe that an autonomous antiwar position could emerge when workers struggles and social movements are buried under the weight of geopolitics, or reduced to supporters of authoritarian regimes, confessional political projects, or national politics. As long as we remain passive or take positions in favour of one or the other belligerent side, we are digging our graves with our own hands. It is more urgent than ever to form some clear positions and work collectively for the practice of a transnational politics of peace, finding our resources in the ongoing struggles and manifold acts of refusal which today fuel an expanding and long-lasting opposition to the war.

From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have witnessed the lack of a strong, transnational movement against the war. We have been galvanized, in the first weeks of the Israeli blind revenge and politics of death and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, by the people who protested massively on the streets of the world demanding a ceasefire. This massive and spontaneous opposition to militarist horror is crucial, and, beyond humanitarian sentiments, it expresses a claim for justice voiced by a multitude of subjects, workers, migrants, women and lgbtqi+ people, who do not want to be oppressed and exploited any longer.

Yet, denouncing massacres is not enough if we want to fight against the war and its reproduction. This is why we need to support the claim for freedom for Palestine and the call for an immediate ceasefire by strengthening our transnational connections. We shouldn’t perceive the atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza as a mere continuation of the 75 years of occupation, nor the ones committed during the Hamas’ attacks as an inevitable continuation of the Palestinian Resistance. The Third world war scenario connects Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, and is more than the mere sum of many local wars: it is reshaping what is happening in Palestine beyond the history of a long-lasting experience of colonial oppression.

It is up to us to reshape also our solidarity with Israeli war resisters and the Palestinians who are killed, exploited and oppressed, as part of a stronger, transnational opposition to the war, fuelled by the force of collective struggles against racism, exploitation, and patriarchy which could not be reduced to nationalist claims, State politics or authoritarian religious projects.

(...)

A shift towards the right is also happening at the other end of the political spectrum: ”democratic”’ forces embrace militarism as an unavoidable choice while pushing for racist policies in the name of national security; as authoritarian and oppressive regimes present themselves as leaders of an emerging “multipolar” world, sections of the left advocate that tyrannical, authoritarian, and reactionary forces and regimes represent a progressive resistance to “Western imperialism”. Many of those who one year ago supported Iranian women shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom” are now supporting the so-called Axis of Resistance, thus legitimising a political Islam which is not a rival of capitalism and makes patriarchy a foundation of its projects.

Nationalism ends up being the language of those who fight for the end of oppression, whether this oppression is represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, by the West, or by the unbearable ethnic cleansing of the Israeli State against Palestinians. We take a firm stand against people being exploited and oppressed because of their nationality, since we know that all nationalisms are exclusionary and oppressive. For building a transnational politics of peace, we must confront all these contradictions: as Iranian feminists clearly stated, we will not pursue a collective liberation by choosing between national fronts, we refuse that our only chance is that to choose between the “bad and the worse”. A transnational politics of peace begins by refusing the imposition of belligerent fronts as part of the war logic, and to organize our side: together with workers, women and queer people, migrants who are challenging that logic beyond the war fronts.

As we clearly stated right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war is limiting our possibilities of struggle, deploying its consequences beyond the horror of the battlefields. Movements for climate justice are increasingly repressed; war and militarism reinforce patriarchy and patriarchal societies reinforce a culture where violence against women and Lgbtq* persons are normalised. The ordinary disagreements of the European Union disappear when the war on migrants is to be fought. To practice a transnational politics of peace, we need to recognize that the war on workers, the war on women, the war on migrants are not side-effects but rather the everyday reality of the ongoing world war, which we must fight back.

This is why on February 24th, we will organise an on-line public meeting where voices from the different fronts of war can speak against the war, but also voices of those who, aware of its consequences, have taken a stance against the war. Together with class struggle organisations and social movements, together with war resisters and deserters from the various war fronts, together with feminists, migrants, precarious workers and environmental activists we aim to create an autonomous anti-war movement against the capitalist machine of death and despair. This event will hopefully also serve as a bridge towards the mobilization of March 8th, when we need to support the speaking out against the war in all the initiatives that are going to take place. We express our solidarity with our comrades in Kazakhstan, where the protests for March 8 have been prohibited."

[teachingrounds]

Take a seat and let Vilissa Thompson school you from her positionality as a Black Woman Radical.