Activist Malpractice: the Celebrity Catch-and-Release Movement

Photo of actress Daryl Hannah by Ann Heisenfelt. [Never have “arrests” brought so much happiness to so many participants.]

Photo of Civil rights leader Julian Bond by Ann Heisenfelt. [More good cheer all around.]

Counterpunch | Weekend Edition February 15-17, 2013

Tweeting as the World Burns

by MICHAEL DONNELLY

Environmental Racism

Editor: “Since July of last year, Brant’s only daughter, 13-year-old Teyohate, has been in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, fighting acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a fast-moving cancer that Brant believes was triggered by the water on the reserve. Three other children on the reserve, all around the same age, have also being diagnosed with cancer. One of them, 13-year-old Paula Sero-Loft, Teyohate’s best friend and classmate at Quinte Mohawk School, located no more than 600 metres from the controversial landfill, was buried last September.” [Read more at Warrior Publications: Reserve despair hits home for outspoken Mohawk, Shawn Brant]

Intercontinental Cry

by Jay Taber

Feb 7, 2013

Listening to Mohawk activist Shawn Brant describe the apartheid design of indigenous poverty in Canada and elsewhere as a means of creating hopelessness and despair in order to continue colonial resource extraction, I was reminded that contrary to popular myths, there never were any good colonial intentions. Speaking at the Osgoode Law symposium, Brant argues the time is right to defend indigenous territories by denying the legitimacy of Canada and the corporations it represents. Taking it a step further, he says that if Canada and its corporations attempt to overwhelm indigenous nations by force, they should be met with the same.

Meanwhile, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, is seeking information on extractive and energy industries in or near indigenous territories. As part of the UN study of industrial impacts on human rights and indigenous peoples, Dr. Anaya has established an interactive website for comments and information about environmental racism practiced by corporations, as well as by the U.S. military.

 

[Jay Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, an author, and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as the administrative director of Public Good Project.]

Video: Shawn Brant speaks at the Community Movements Conference in Peterborough Ontario on March 3rd 2012. The conference was organized by SAID Trent Students.

http://youtu.be/mhqf2WhHeE0

Peaceful Protests Profit from History of Militant Resistance | Idle No More

 

Another excellent analysis of the Idle No More movement by Zig Zag …

 

January 12, 2013

by Zig Zag

Warrior Publications

Warrior at Oka, 1990, standing on top of abandoned & over turned police car.

“Unbelievable how chicken the police are to remove these people from blocking the railway. If it was anybody but natives they would have been arrested a week ago.”

Letter posted by Gerry, Jan 2, 2013, “First Nation blockade in Sarnia coming down,” Canadian Press, Jan 2, 2013

Any time there is a significant Native blockade or occupation, there are demands for its immediate removal by angry citizens. During Oka, 1990, and Six Nations 2006, for example, mobs of non-Natives rallied and sometimes rioted demanding that the military intervene to end the disputes. →

Indigenous Masculinity and Warriorism

Intercontinental Cry

By Jay Taber

Dec 29, 2012

The warrior spirit is a vastly misunderstood and misconstrued calling. As the voice of the protector, its authenticity is distorted by militarists and pacifists alike. Those who heed the call in today’s world of warped values and political illiteracy must be prepared to deal with both ignorance and ingratitude. →

Indigenous Resistance in Canada

Intercontinental Cry

By Jay Taber

Dec 24, 2012

While the non-violent direct action of First Nations currently has broad support across Canada, the history of indigenous resistance in Canada shows that the only time Ottawa has taken First Nations seriously is when faced with economic disruption, civil disobedience or armed self-defense. As First Nations organize in opposition to the Canadian government’s current agenda to terminate their human rights and the environmental protection of Canada’s land and waters, they would do well to reexamine their own history, and how they got where they are today. Aiding them in that effort is associate professor Glen Coulthard, a Yellowknives Dene instructor in the First Nations  Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. →

WATCH: This is What Activism Looks Like

This is What Courage Looks Like…

This is What Direct Action Looks Like…

This is What Civil Disobedience Looks like…

A short documentary portrait of Jonathan Paul, former Animal Liberation Front member who was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison for his part in the 1997 Cavel West arson.

A Dog Park Production.

For more information on Jonathan Paul read: “My brother is in prison. He is my hero…” at this link:

http://alexandrapaul.com/alexandras-corner/my-brother-is-in-prison-he-is-my-hero/

WATCH: The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders by John Potash

 

 

WATCH: Emergency All Nations Great Peace Gathering July 15-20, 2012 – Urgent memo to all Nations

PLEASE STOP ALL LAND CLAIM NEGOTIATIONS AND REFUSE TAXATION IMMEDIATELY

As in 1701, it is time for all Nations to put their personal feelings aside and to gather as “one voice” before it is too late. An Emergency — All Nations Great Peace Gathering is needed due to a very different and critical purpose than just a Great Peace Gathering which is to be held on July 15th to 20th, 2012 in Brantford Ontario. You may attend whatever day you wish during that period.

The Emergency All Nations Great Peace Gathering is to ensure the future of all Nations and can only be a success if the decision makers of all Nations gather to ensure your very existence as Nations since the Governments are finalizing your assimilation through manipulation, lies and deceit.

The assembly of First Nations Chiefs need to react once and for all and especially during their meeting in Toronto July 15th to 19th for their people in regards to “proper decolonization otherwise, all will be lost.

This urgent meeting is about the future of your generation and the final extinction of your rights and existence as they are being taken away from all Nations behind closed doors by those to blind to see what is happening on a grander scale. Even if the hearts of the chiefs are in the right place, they have no clue what they are doing to this generation and the next seven to come because they have not been aware of what is going on worldwide at this moment and within other nations.

For your own protection and your peoples, all land claims negotiations must stop immediately otherwise you will be giving away your rights to all of Turtle Island which is all of the Americas. For some reason, in Canada and in the US, many have forgotten that they are North American Indians and not Canadian or US citizens.

www.decolonizenorthamerica.com
decolonizenorthamerica@gmail.com

 

The Colonization of OccupyOakland

American anarchists haven’t experienced this much positive public attention since the euphoria and aftermath of N30 in Seattle. We also haven’t been this embattled since then; once again it’s open season on anarchists of all stripes, and from all directions, including attacks coming from other oppositional figures. These are among the more insidious obstacles to a world without cops ordering us around, bosses exploiting our labor, and bureaucrats managing our struggles.

May Day, International Workers’ Day, is a commemoration of the events surrounding the 1887 judicial murder of the Haymarket anarchists. For most liberals and leftists, these anarchists are considered nothing more than railroaded Labor Martyrs, casualties in the fight for the 8-hour day. The mutual flirtations of Labor Solidarity Committee activists with official Labor Councils and low-level union bureaucrats (up to and including contacts with people close to Mayor Quan’s husband) is only the latest manifestation of this colonization of the much more fundamental struggle against Capital and the State. If the radical anti-statist and anti-capitalist views of the Haymarket anarchists (or Sacco and Vanzetti, those other famous “labor agitators”) are acknowledged at all, it is only because they represent the only kind of anarchist that union hacks are able to tolerate: dead ones, who can’t cause them any more trouble by calling into question their self-appointed role as the specialists and mediators of other people’s discontent.

As if the non-violence fetishists were not bad enough on their own, the conjoined twins of Identity Politics and white (male) guilt had already injected the poison of nationalism and essentialism prior to the attempt to change the name of what we were doing in and around the Plaza to “Decolonize.” To be clear: it was not the proposed name change that we found obnoxious, but the all too familiar guilt-mongering with which the proposal was introduced and discussed. The remains from that attempted coup include a caucus who cry “racist!” and/or “sexist!” as soon as anyone dares to question their motives, their methods, or their goals. Such despicable and transparently authoritarian posturing that precludes good faith dialog should remain relegated to the sectarian Leninist rackets who pioneered it in the 60s, and who continue to promote it today. In addition, the privileged leftist intelligentsia (the most prominent being Marxist professors and grad students) continue to insinuate themselves into the mix by using currently fashionable anti-authoritarian terminology as a cover for their grandstanding and careerism.

In the next ring of the anti-anarchist circus we are treated to the campaign of the electoral clowns of MoveOn, who have lifted the anarchist term “direct action,” using it as (what they hope will be) an enticing replacement for the distinctly unappealing strategy of organizing a voting bloc inside the Democratic Party machine. But direct action is actually a refusal to beg for permission from anyone to implement our visions and desires. The organizers of OccupyOakland made it a principle even before we took the Plaza, refusing in advance all interactions with any part of the City of Oakland. To have the liberals expropriate such a fine term disgusts us as much as when the armed bullies of OPD invoke “mutual aid” to reinforce and multiply their brutality, or when the champions of the dictatorship of the marketplace call themselves “libertarians.” The same goes for the “solidarity” of leftists who condemn those anarchists they can’t control.

OccupyOakland has consistently been an important location of an inspiring and unique radicality among an otherwise mostly staid constellation of Occupys. The bureaucrats and bureaucrats-in-training (professional and amateur alike) who are constantly trying to rein in, harness, or merely squander the contagious energy of self-organization that we’ve created and extended in OO need to be exposed and treated with contempt. They need to be confronted for attempting to set up hierarchical and authoritarian structures to negotiate or plead with elected officials and their appointees.

This has already begun, if only in an exploratory manner. Now’s the time to publicly and loudly denounce these wannabe politicians, those who are uneasy as parts of OccupyOakland continue to move beyond their managerial capacity, even as they see their involvement in OO as their surest path to power. The attacks against anarchists in OO (and at plenty of other Occupy locations) began early, and continue, at least partly fueled by the silence of many anarchists — an acquiescence that only compounds the split that our enemies are trying to foment between the “good” anarchists (the ones who created much of the familiar and positive infrastructure of OO when it existed in the Plaza) and the “bad” anarchists (the ones who break shit).

But we need to remember that, in the eyes of all those parts of “The 99%” who find any explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-statist project objectionable, we are all bad anarchists. Let’s be bad anarchists together, finding ways to use our creativity and innovation to spread an anti-authoritarian sensibility, not just as a vital component of OO, but throughout our collective projects to abolish all forms of domination.

We will be worse anarchists when we will have lost the initiative, when we can be easily demoralized, divided, manipulated, marginalized, and dispensed with by our enemies on the left. It seems long overdue to celebrate, if not embrace, the defiance of the Haymarket anarchist Louis Lingg who, in response to being sentenced to death, replied, “…I despise you, I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!”

Oakland, May Day, 2012
Anarchist Anti-Defamation Caucus of the Anti-Bureaucratic Bloc
antibloc2012@gmail.com

The Anti-Bureaucratic Bloc is an ad hoc cluster of anarchist and anti-state communist individuals and affinity groups who have come together in an effort to counter the incipient growth of a self-selected cadre of professional activists and others with managerial aspirations.