Concentration Camps, Detention Centres And Democracy.

        The Trump guy is flag waving America into raw fascism, his "America uber alles" comes with all the trappings and dangers of blind nationalism. There may be those who disagree with the label "fascism" in this case, but if we take the words of that well know fascist Benito Mussolini as a guide "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power", then there is no doubt that America is well and truly standing that vile dehumanising swap of fascism. Of course if we use Benito's quote as a guide, where does the UK or the EU stand? There is no doubt that the corporate juggernaut exerts considerable power over the states in both these cases. Have we sleep walked into fascism? America has already got its militarised police, its mass surveillance and its concentration camps, we in the UK have our mass surveillance and our "detention centres", places where those ever so nasty foreigners are locked up, before they can taint our purity. This in spite of the fact that we are all a form of mongrel human animal. Of course most people will agree that concentration camps and detention centres are an anathema to a free democratic society, but they are there.
        In my humble opinion, if we continually allow capitalism to exist it is inevitable that we would end up locked the tentacles of fascism. Capitalism is a system devoid of humanity, it does not in any way consider human well being. Its whole existence is for the purpose of amassing large amounts of wealth in the hands of the few. To do this it must conceal its true purpose from the public and control the legislation that allows it free rein to do so, certainly not the basis for a free and democratic society.  

        The following is an article  from "Birds Before The Storm" on America's concentration camps and the need to tackle these and other abominations head on. Of course it applies to our own particular patch of soil on this planet.

 

What Are We Going to do About These Concentration Camps?

magpie
        The first time I saw the Klan, I was ten years old. My brother and one of my sisters were in the car, and my dad was driving. We were stopped at a light and maybe five Klan members in full regalia were offering leaflets to white drivers. My father, a white man, rolled up the window, locked the doors, and grabbed the steering wheel in a death grip. When the light turned green, we drove away. “Those people carry guns,” he told us. He was excusing himself for not getting out of the car and physically confronting five large men, an action which could easily have put him in the hospital or worse. He probably did the right thing. He had three children in the car. There were five of those guys. The cost/benefit analysis of starting a fight was all wrong. But the Klan, wherever it shows its hideous face, should be confronted. Should be fought, through whatever means.
Sometimes we have to fight.

Which brings us to the concentration camps in America.
      My entire adult life, I’ve been politically active. I’ve gone to countless demonstrations. I’ve been in jail in two countries for fighting against things I consider deplorable. These past couple of years, I’ve been more of a cheerleader for antifascism than a street warrior, to be sure, but when Nazis come to my small town I’m out there with everyone else ready to tell them that it’s a shame their lungs are functioning. Yet this morning here I am, at home, just trying to live my life. I’m going to play a show later tonight, and I have to practice my harp.
       I have a lot of experience trying to just live my life while horrible shit is happening. Maybe you do too. Maybe you’re trying to drag yourself out of poverty while millions of people are in prison. Maybe you’re raising your kids while carbon pumps into the air and the US refuses to consider any agreement to limit the effects of climate change. Maybe you’re used to this.
       Every day, we make cost/benefit analyses and most of us decide not to do anything that would get us thrown in prison or gunned down by the armed forces of the state. We sit and think about that poem; you know the poem. “First they came for the communists and I didn’t say anything because I was not a communist…”
      That poem is derived from the post-war confessions of a pastor, Martin Niemöller. A conservative, he initially supported Hitler’s rise to power; he only decided to oppose the dictator when Hitler insisted the state was more important than religion. By the time Hitler came for him, of course, there was no one left to speak out.
        So what the fuck is wrong with our cost/benefit analyses? There are concentration camps on the border. By and large, they aren’t holding American citizens. So in the short term, it’s safer to do nothing. Maybe complain on Twitter. Maybe write articles like this. In the long term, though?

When is it time to act?
        It’s easy to feel like I have my hands full dealing with the local Nazi problem where I live. The paramilitaries that are crashing pride parades with guns and burning down community centers and doxxing antifascists eat up a lot of my brain space.
       It’s also easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of problems confronting us. The war on people with wombs. The war on trans people. The war on people of color. Climate catastrophe. The United States has always been a Bad Thing, from when slaving colonialists founded it all those years ago to when it became the police force of the world a hundred years back to when it declared a “war” on drugs to when the prison system—and its literal, legal slavery—became a for-profit industry. It’s always been a Bad Thing and we’re kind of numb to that. We suffer from a kind of disaster fatigue. Our ability to be outraged has already been heavily taxed, and sometimes climate change and concentration camps are simply Too Much Problem for us to wrap our heads around. Problems have this way of terrifying us into inaction, into numbness. Collectively, right now, we’re a deer in the headlights.

I, we, need to work our way through that. Fast. Now.
       They’re not coming for me today. I’m a trans woman, so yeah the right wing is working its base into a fervor blaming me for all our social ills and to be certain I’ve gotten a lot worse attention from strangers since Trump came into office. But no one is trying to put me in a camp. I could keep my head down. A short term cost/benefit analysis says that I should.

Fuck that.
        When mass action is called for at these camps, consider going. If you can’t go, support the actions. Support the people who take action who aren’t taking the kind of action you might take personally. Support pacifists who lock themselves to the gates of these places. Support rioters who break glass, cut fences, or physically fight the forces who are locking up children. Support the activists who target every aspect of this murderous machine. Support them all vocally and support them all financially. Do not let them play us off each other. Do not let them divide us.
       Any study of successful social movements in history is a study of how peaceful strategies and militant strategies, which seem opposed both tactically and ethically, complement each other very well. We need people who resist peacefully. We need people who resist less peacefully. And most importantly, we need to not get caught up fighting one another instead of our enemies.
       We need to take action. To be clear, voting is not action. Voting, very specifically, is a way of asking someone else to act for you. Engage in electoral politics however you would like. But never let the state strip you of your agency. You’re a human. You’re a person. You have the capacity to take action, to effect change. You have the capacity to work with others to do… well, pretty much anything.
It is completely possible for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of us, to surround these camps and force them to release the detainees. It could work with fewer people than that, too, though I have a feeling there’s an awful lot of anger, an awful lot of power, waiting to be unleashed against the machinery of oppression right now. Mass action is risky. It’s messy. It’s terrifying. It’s also the right thing to do, and it’s perhaps only way out of this mess. There are a million problems, but this is one of them. And to change everything, you pick one problem and start there.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Anarchists, Why Do We Do It?

 

         Taking an overall view of this world we live in gives us a frightening picture, so much deprivation, so many wars, such glaring inequality, so many actions driven by greed, so many actions driven by hatred, so much callous inhumanity. To see a world of equality, justice and peace seems an impossible dream, the present seems to belie that dream. However, there are those who will always strive for that dream, no matter how dark that road may appear. They will hold onto that dream with passion and conviction, they will shape their lives round that dream, they are the ones that keep that dream alive, and to them we must be grateful. No matter how daunting the task we must always believe in that dream and each little step that shines a light on it, increase the belief that we can create that dream.

          I found this article from Birds Before The Storm, by Margaret Killjoy, said a lot of what I believe myself, but said with much more eloquence than my voice. 

 Strategic Optimism.

         I want to die in bed, a hundred years old, having lived most of my life in a stateless, anticapitalist society. This is possible. Authoritarianism is not unconquerable. I don’t believe in utopia, per se, and I don’t think an anarchist society would be perfect, but I believe we could live a lot healthier, happier, and more freely than we do now. So I want to win. I believe it’s possible for us to win.
       On the other hand, I don’t expect to.
      I came to terms a long time ago with my investment in this hopeless cause. Even when I was an eager and innocent baby anarchist, I never believed that a beautiful, black-and-red dawn was about to break across the horizon. I cut my teeth getting my ass kicked by cops trying to stop a war and trying to stop corporate globalization, then moved on to the insurmountable task of trying to slowly shift culture towards anti-authoritarian values. I never expected to win. I try to fight like I’m going to, though.
       Fighting to win, and fighting for what I actually believe in instead of some watered down compromise, has proven to just outright be a better way to live. Furthermore, acting as though winning is a serious possibility is the only way for it to become even the barest possibility.
       My optimism is a cynical optimism, a strategic optimism, but it’s optimism nonetheless.
       When I was a teenager, I had an art teacher who instilled in me a respect for process-oriented thinking. “The point of painting is the act of painting,” he told me, “not the act of having painted.” This was true across mediums and applicable to life itself… after all, the final result of life is death. One ought not live for one’s legacy, but for one’s life. Yet, with painting and most everything else, the goal mattered too. The goal informs and enriches the process, and the goal is only achievable by staying focused on the process.
      We tell one another about the golden land that lies beyond the horizon not to convince ourselves that the place exists exactly as we imagine it, but because those stories give us a direction to walk and a reason to walk. The walking itself is what matters, of course. The process is what matters.
      This is hard for me to reconcile with my anarchism, sometimes. Some of my friends are in it for the fight, but I’m not a fighter by natural temperament. I’m too anxious, these days, to spend much of my time on the front lines of anything. I hope we win soon, so I can find ways to be socially useful and keep myself entertained without the threat of prison looming like death in the shadows.
        Still, absent of living in the society I desire to live in, I do find value and meaning in struggle, in walking, in imagining possibilities. I’ve probably never experienced this contrast between my cynicism and my hope more clearly than I have in terms of how I engage with activism. For years, I was engaged in direct action activism — in campaigns to save this or that forest or mountain, to keep this or that development or youth jail out of this or that neighborhood, to save some person or keep some draconian law from passing. Activism, even of the direct action variety, tends not to be revolutionary. It tends to stay on the defensive. It tends to burn people out, expose people to risk, and use up a ton of resources. It’s certainly not going to save the world.
       To any extent that I engage with activism today, I engage in activism without illusions. Though I know we’re not going to stem the tide of global catastrophe, direct action activism often accomplishes its immediate goals. I know people who still live on their farms because of activism. I know of community gardens that still exist. I know of stands of old growth forest that are still standing. Those trees will likely survive until human-driven climate change destroys them in a few years time — and that’s the problem with activism. It’s never enough.
     Still, without optimism — cynical or not — and its attendant courage, none of that would have been accomplished, and that’s not nothing. There’s an undeniable value there. There’s also a value in the unruly encampments we set up and a value in the connections we made with other communities. Direct action activism is one way to engage with passionate people, passionately, and to live life to its fullest. I have no illusions about it, but I don’t regret a moment of it.
      I believe that we can win. I believe another [end of the] world is possible. I don’t always know what to do with this optimism. How do we accomplish it? Anarchism is not heaven. We don’t get there by just being good people and accepting Bakunin as our personal lord and savior. We get there by thinking seriously about strategy and by making plans. We get there by working at it, in whatever ways suit us or are appropriate to our circumstances. Whatever chance we’ve got of getting there, it’s by each of us trying what we can and seeing what works, it’s by supporting those of us who are trying in ways we aren’t.
      When I die, not in bed, not a hundred years old, not in a society free of hierarchy, I’ll be able to say… well I probably won’t be able to say much of anything, because I’ll be busy dying, but let’s pretend I’ve got my wits about me… I can say I fought to win.