Solidarity

        An appeal from comrades supporting those facing long prison sentences for resiting fascism, it may be happening in that part of the planet labelled Greece, but the fight against fascism has no borders, nor should our solidarity for comrades caught up in the state's judicial web of repression for carrying on the fight. Solidarity is our river that runs freely across the surface of the planet.

This from Act For Freedom Now:  

         

 

         The prosecutions for many people included felony-level charges. The judicial hearings have not finished yet for all the prosecuted people, as it’s still to take place the appeal court of some comrades who back then were over 18 years old, and they are judged with the relevant legal imposition. The amounts of money that need to be raised are nearly unaffordable, and the period of lock-down because of Covid-19 made even more difficult the procedure of collecting that money.

         This specific solidarity campaign is about collecting a relatively small mount of the total legal expenses for the appeal court, as the biggest part has already been collected. These legal expenses arise by the need for the legal defence of the prosecuted people in front of the trial chamber.
SOLIDARITY IS OUR WEAPON
STRUGGLE AGAINST STATE-CAPITAL-FASCISTS

—————————–
Solidarity campaign, appeal court for the anti-fascist demo at 17/9/2015 https://www.firefund.net/scafa<

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info   

Newspeak.

 

       I have always thought that George Orwell was much underestimated and not read by enough people. His words have predicted where we are now, and what the future holds if we don't stand up and protect our individual freedoms. As he points out in all his works, truth is truth no matter the ideological line handed out by the powers that be. A freethinker is the enemy of ideology and dogma, and is the road we should always try to walk.

     The following is a short extract from an article in Acorn on George Orwell, it is well worth reading the complete article HERE:

Extract:

 

       Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense… If both the past and external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” (24)
      Winston Smith’s struggle to keep a grip on objective reality, to know that two plus two makes four whatever the ideological demands of the Party, is a central theme of Orwell’s novel.
      The character tells himself: “Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre”. (25)
      The Big Brother system has invented a new language which controls people’s minds by making heretical ideas impossible to even formulate.
       One of the Party members developing Newspeak tells Smith: “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day”. (26)
        He explains: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it… By 2050 – earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed”. (27)
      In the face of this truth-denying dogmatism, Orwell insisted that any authentic radical should always remain free to reject the dominant official ideology: “He should never turn back from a train of thought because it may lead to a heresy, and he should not mind very much if his unorthodoxy is smelt out, as it probably will be”.
      While co-operating with others to some extent, a free-thinking radical had to fight the capitalist system “as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerilla on the flank of a regular army”. (28)
      In Woodcock’s words, Orwell was “a good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive”. (29)

Read the complete article HERE: 
      

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

Proto-Fascism.

 

      Well that's that over with. I have never been one for ritual, ceremony, tradition, I've always felt they got in the way of freedom of self expression. I'm not one for things should be done this way at this time of year, and if you don't conform you're some sort of oddity. I'll continue to wear my oddity as a badge of honour.

The goal of neo-liberalism ideology.

       And so for something completely different, not new, but it might help shock the party mood back to reality. Prophesy, or reflection of the present and possible future. 

The same can be said for most countries.

Extract from;

AGAINST THE NEW AUTHORITARIANISM 

by HENRY GIROUX 1-894037-23-5

PROTO-FASCISM.
Page 94/95;

        Neoliberalism is not only an economic policy designed to cut government spending, pursue free trade policies, and liberate market forces from government regulations. It is also a political philosophy and ideology that affects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical shift that defines the citizen as consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place.Within this discourse, as Jean and John Comaroff have argued, "the personal is the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence. It is in these privatized terms that action is organised, that the experience of inequity and antagonism takes meaningful shape." Unnder such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized. It provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled individualism as a central feature of proto-fascism, as Herbert Marcuse reminds us, it also destroys any vestige of democratic society by undercutting its "moral material and regulatory moorings," and in doing so, offers no language for understanding how the future might be grasped outside the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts our ability to understand how to translate privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare state. There is also the growing threat of displacing "political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own.'" As democracy becomes a burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears and the reign of unfetered social Darwnism, with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy, emerges as the template for a new form of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient resistance, nor is the increasing move toward proto-fascism inevitable, but the conditions exist for democracy to lose all semblance of meaning----

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

The Virus Persists.

      September, 27th. marks an anniversary of a fight back, and success, by ordinary people. It was on that date in 1936 that fascist Oswald Mosley lead a march of 1000 Blackshirt fascist in Leeds, however it didn't go unnoticed. They were met by around 30,000 locals who attacked them with all manner of missiles, some hitting Mosley. The locals continued their assault by singing the Red Flag and drowning out the fascist speeches. It is sad that today that the virus persists, we are still facing this fascist menace as it continues to raise it vile head from the sewers of society and spews out its divisive rhetoric. Our parliamentary pampered Oxbridge political ballerinas pay lip service to this fascist rise by their abhorrent derogatory language. Fascism will only be beaten and finally eradicated by the people, on the streets, not by the institutions of the state. Fascism and the state are very close relatives.

 

Working Class History

@wrkclasshistory

#OtD 27 Sep 1936 1000 uniformed fascist Blackshirts led by Oswald Mosley in Leeds were confronted by 30k locals who attacked them, pelted them with stones, hitting Mosley, and drowned out speeches by singing The Red Flag

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The State's Steel Boot Stamps On Freedom.

 

   

       What is happening today in Exarcheia, in Athens, which is at the present time, under police occupation, is the true face of our so called representative democracy. It has nothing to do with humanity, and all to do with dogmatic ideology. Logically the state should welcome what goes on in that district, locals help refugees to live with some dignity and freedom of movement without any state aid, surely to be applauded by financial pundits in the state apparatus. However. like I said, the state is not about humanity, dignity or freedom, it is all about control and the development of big corporate profits. Self organising people living with the ethos of mutual aid, is an anathema to the state. During the recent election in Greece, the rhetoric from the right-wing party that gained power was that the district was a nest of criminals and they promised to bring it back under the control of the state. What in fact they wish to do is to clear the district that survives more or less outside the state by means of self-help, mutual aid and co-operation, and hand it over to the corporate juggernaug who would start by clearing out the locals and building luxury hotels, expensive restaurants, opulent apartments and shops filled with over price trinkets for the wealthy Greeks and rich tourists.

       The method used by the state in this operation of control and suppression is to bring in an army of armed thugs in uniforms and beat up and intimidate the locals, arresting some of the locals, and all the refugees they can lay their hands on, men, women and children, hoarding them onto buses, taking them for a position of self help and some dignity and locking them up in over crowded concentration camps with appalling conditions. To date approximately 150 refugees have been arrested in the district, and rising. This operation will be carried out with brutality and out without any thought of humanity.

      What is happening in Exarcheia, is just anther step deeper into the fascist state of politics today, and demands our strongest opposition as across the globe states seek ever greater control over the population, all for the benefit of the corporate world of greed and profit. We must continually struggle for a society of mutual aid, self help and co-operation and support all those who walk that road.

 

      Yesterday in Glasgow a group of people took to the street to show their anger at what is brutally being executed in Exarcheia and their support for the people of that district. More of this is required across the globe.

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

Your Choice, inevivable Fascism, Or A Fight For Freedom.

     Today freedom, justice, equality and democracy are fast becoming a chimera, a distant illusion on a far horizon. There has been talk of America being a state governed by the secret police, the FBI, that answers only to itself, and allows the corporate world to function untrammeled by public interference. The UK is now a well developed Big Brother state, where the population is monitored in its every move and sorted out into who merits further surveillance who should be arrested on the assessment of what facial recognition and computer profiling suggest. Both systems being a draconian nightmare for the population, where the word freedom is regarded as a terrorist expression and a desire for privacy is seen as a cover for devious activity. Further to this, there is something rotten at the heart of Europe, here Fascism spreads like some poisonous deadly epidemic. Unchecked and backed by other states in Europe, states who see nothing wrong in Fascism as it keeps the population on tramlines that allow the capitalist system to flourish. The only resistance to this nightmare must be the people themselves, their is no messiah or knight in shining armour standing in the wings ready to lead us to the promised land. We the people will have to find our own way out of this nightmare of corporate and state bondage. We have to take on the whole rotten system head on, with no illusions the the powerful and wealthy who control this festering cancer will abandon their powerful and privileged positions without a bitter fight. That is the only way out of this road we are walking, a road to human bondage and destruction of humanity.

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

Our Quiet March To Fascism Continues.

         The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.   Benito Mussolini

         About six years ago I wrote a wee piece, "Inch By Inch We Lose Control", about how I believed we were taking a quiet march to fascism, the following is just a rehash of that article, as I believe we are still taking that quiet march in the same direction, though we are now much closer to that destination.

      Like a tape-loop message, I keep repeating, that we are marching quietly towards full blown fascism. It won't be recognised by the jackboots on the streets, nor by people being locked up for not living to the laid down norms. No, the state has moved on from from those days, though that method will still be held in reserve to be used if needed. It will be much more subtle than that, just slowly bit by bit, the state introducing ever stronger legislation to control every aspect of your life. The establishment making more and more arbitrary decision over our heads. They have already neutered the spontaneity of the trade unions by legislation, and tied protesters in legal loops. There other things that pass almost unnoticed, but show state power acting out what can only be called dictatorial acts, unchallenged. The ever creeping CCTV surveillance, advanced facial recognition, trolling through your phone and internet activity. The interweaving of state and corporate bodies in the interest of “growth” and to the detriment of the people. The introduction of the “minimum wage” gave the employers a low legal standard to adhere to and moved the struggle for improvement away from the employer to the state. Wars are and will continue to be waged, despite the will of the people saying otherwise, remember Iraq, millions on the streets in protest, but the war went ahead. Hardly the hallmark of democracy.
      Surreptitiously and brutally, the all knowing, all powerful, all for your own good, state, reaches in and controls every aspect of your life, for no other purpose than to safeguard its own power and privileges, and it can do it at will, through its various agents, backed up by its own biased judiciary. Who do you believe has the right, the benevolent character, and the humanity to take control of your life? No doubt your answer will be nobody, then why do we tolerate the faceless ones, behind closed doors in their marble corridors of power, to control all avenues of our life?

And another quote from one of the masters of fascism:

       It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

Benito Mussolini

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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 

The Crushing Of Democracy After WW2

       For an interesting look at the machinations of the western democracy farce and how it functions hand in glove with fascist groups, and pursues their agenda with callous brutality, the following article is well worth a read. Since the second world war the ideology of the meagerly disguised  Western Fascism has pillaged the freedom of the people across the whole of Europe with a ruthlessness that is only matched by its brutality and deception. Yet there are those who still accept that it waves the flag of freedom and democracy.

Worth reading in full, from The Transmetropolitan Review:

-------Like most North Americans, the anarchists of the US can be quite clueless. Living in the center of an empire has long been known to produce delusional thinking, entitlement, myopia, selfishness, and above all, ignorance. In this regard, North Americans are anything but exceptional. The crimes of the US empire are well cataloged, their details readily available online, and the atrocities archived in a thousand different libraries. Despite these facts, even the most radical US anarchists remain oblivious to the lasting impact of their country’s imperialism across the globe. To highlight this unfortunate pattern, and also reveal a way to reverse its effects, this essay will focus on the country that has influenced contemporary US anarchism more than any other: Greece.----

------- The fact that a nation-state of less than 11 million people came to shape US anarchism is certainly mind-boggling, especially if one tries to find direct links, but the explanation is very simple. On December 6, 2008, the Greek police executed a 16 year-old anarchist named Alexis Grigoropoulos in cold-blood, triggering a month-long insurrection that left the country scorched and smoldering. Unlike other global uprisings tied to the economy, this insurrection was fueled by a simple truth: the police think they can kill whoever they want and now we’ll punish them for it. There was no other reason for this revolt. Compared to the US, the Greek police kill relatively few people, making the ferocity of this insurrection nearly holy in its righteousness and justification. At the time, many US anarchists asked themselves, if our Greek comrades will do this over one murder, why can’t we do this for the hundreds murdered by police in the US every year.-------

      For details of how after the second world war, the US, Western Europe and NATO savagely went about trying to crush any attempt by the people to build democracy, read the full article HERE:

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Yellow Vests And False Flags.

        The "Yellow Vests" in France have been an inspiration to the underlying anger of the people against this elitist system that fits a yoke around the shoulders of the people. However, though you may walk under the banner of your true feelings, there are those who march under a false flag, we have to be ever vigilant. The cabal of xenophobic, fascist vermin, will never miss an opportunity to get their bile onto the streets. It seems that the racist scum in Dublin have commandeered the Yellow Vest movement in that city.

      This report from Ireland taken from 325:

The Yellow Vests call for unity, but how can there be unity?

       On Saturday, January 12th the Yellow Vests had another of their weekly marches in Dublin. Anti fascist and anti racist showed up to the march for the second week in a row.

      As soon as the banner and anti fascist flag was took out yellow vesters came out of the crowd looking angry. We received a torrent of abuse and shouts of, “house our own”, “we need more racists”, “Fuck refugees”, “refugees not welcome”, “you’se are paid by George Soros”, and “Ireland for white people”. They gave a very poor attempt to take our banner and flag but couldn’t manage to succeed. We were shouted at to leave, “fuck off”. Not one out of the crowd of about 60 to 70 yellow vests supported the banner for refugees or said anything about the racists shite being spouted. We stayed and followed them in their march and we left before they attempted their joke of a direct action where they attempted to block a road for an hour, the cops moved them on before the yellow vest protest reached their hour long goal to block traffic.

          The Yellow vests in Ireland are not a “leaderless movement”

The Yellow Vest march was led this week by Kevin Molloy, a self confessed debt collector. Kevin even announced this in his speech, not one yellow vester bat an eyelid including the anti refugee people who want to “house our own” and who preached on about “our homeless are sleeping on the streets”.

        His xenophobic, anti muslim mate Glen Miller was busy this week in Wexford organising the Wexford branch of the Yellow Vests. Any talk of a “leaderless movement” is bull shit. There is very much a leadership of key organisers within the yellow vests, the majority of them are either anti Muslim, xenophobes or conspiracy “free men” nut jobs.

      In the core group of leaders they decide what the march will do and where it’ll go. They talk with cops of what their plans are. They control the admin on the facebook pages.

I would imagine a lot of the people attending yellow vest march wouldn’t be racist or necessarily anti refugee/immigration. The dangerous thing is a lot of the leaders and key organizers are. On one hand they call for unity against the government on the other hand they are against refugees/migrants entering Ireland.

Homes for all:

       There is 250,000 of empty/boarded up buildings all over the south of Ireland. There are also 10,0000 people on the housing waiting list? So let’s do the math – if 10,000 of these empty place were turned into homes for the people on the waiting list it means there are still plenty left over.

        Yes there is need for struggle against the state but we also need to look at the Irish elite class, the banks, and further afield at the imperialist proxy wars being waged in the Middle east and the IMF purposely getting countries into severe debt. The struggle is against the whole system that creates poverty, wars and corruption which goes on to create homelessness and refugees.

     Whoever considers unity with this joke would really want to seriously reconsider their position.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Glasgow's Anti-Racism March.

        The UK, like most countries in recent years, have seen a rise in racism, acts of abuse and violence against immigrants and ethnic minorities. So now more than ever, we have to come together to stamp out this inhuman fascist trend.

      This Saturday gives all those in Glasgow and surrounding area the opportunity to show the true feeling of the ordinary people in our area. The Glasgow annual anti-racism march talks place this Saturday November 24th. Let's show where we stand on racism, it is vile, inhuman, and divides the people into opposing groups, rather than have them come together against the real enemy of the people, the capitalist system. Though organised by the STUC, you don't have to be in a union to be part of this, though you should think about joining one if you're not, the IWW for example, you just have to be a decent human being.

Sat 24 Nov - STUC St Andrew's Day Anti-Racism March & Rally

Assemble 10.30am, Glasgow Green. March off 11.00am. Rally at 12 noon at Adelaides, Bath Street

      The STUC St. Andrew's Day Anti-Racism March & Rally will take place on Saturday 24th November. This important annual event is organised by the STUC Black Workers Committee. Economic hardship continues to be blamed on migration. Hate crime has risen across the UK. We see atrocities committed in the name of governments across the world. And the UK government should hang its head in shame for its treatment of the Windrush generation and the residents of the Grenfell Tower in London.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Rampant Russian Fascism.

This from FREEDOM PRESS:

London: callout for solidarity with Russian Anti-Fascists

        We are an ad-hoc collective of anti-fascists in London who want to organise a solidarity event to support anti-fascists in Russia on 19th January.

        19th January is a significant day for anti-fascist and anarchists as each year demonstrations are held to remember Russian comrades, the journalist Anastasia Baburova and lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who were murdered by fascists in broad daylight 10 years ago, as well as other fallen comrades who were victims to fascist violence. Markelov, an experienced lawyer and social democrat, spent years fighting for justice in workers’ struggles, environmental protests and against the violence of the Russian state. Baburova, a young journalist with independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was a reporter and anarchist from Sevastopol, Crimea. They were murdered in Moscow by a nationalist terror group with links to the Kremlin.
      We also want to express our solidarity to the defendants in the “Network Case”, in which 11 Russian anti-fascists and anarchists have been detained and tortured as part of a security service investigation into alleged terrorism. These men, from St Petersburg and Penza, are due to go trial in the coming year.
       The Russian state’s repression against political dissents acts in tandem with fascist gangs, a collaboration that has long been known and experienced.
       With the turn to right and far-right fascist populist governments across the world from India to Brazil, USA to Italy, there is no more greater need that to share experiences and knowledge around this international moment which we are all facing whether in the UK or in Russia.
       Whilst our comrades are faced with unimaginable violence by both the state and street-level fascist gangs, we intend to send a message of solidarity and defiance with this event.
      What you can do:
We invite you to attend a meeting on Monday November 26th 6.30pm -9.00pm at Mayday Rooms, 88 Fleet St, London EC4Y 1DH. Please RSVP: london19jan(at)riseup.net
Discuss within your group to support this initiative
Save the date and republish this callout on your website

Resources:
Rupression website
The Russian Reader website
Open Democracy on the situation in Russia

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Rise Of European Fascism,--Shades of the 30's?

        The rise of fascism across the world is a reality, the latest of their numbers to grasp power in a large country, being the dictator loving, military worshiping, homophobic, racist, Brazilian, Balsonaro, who openly states that he is in favour of torture as it works. We in Europe are far from exempt from this growing divisive menace of fascism. We ignore, or even delay our  forceful response to this brutal reality at our peril. In this rise there are shades of the thirty's rise of fascism, which eventually lead the the various imperialist power blocs spreading the blood of ordinary people across the surface of the earth, in WW2, as they sorted out which of them controlled what slice of the planet. The various states will not sort out this danger, as their institutions will be controlled by the fascist, as in Brazil and elsewhere. It is up to the people themselves, of all shades and ethnicity, to come together and destroy this menace to our liberty and quality of life.

        The following is an extract from an interesting article from The New Republic. Though I don't embrace everything in the article it does come up with relevant information that shows that this rise of fascism is no fantasy. 

 

       European societies are, Fekete writes, “increasingly divided between citizens, demi-citizens and non-citizens,” some of whom are no longer guaranteed certain fundamental rights, depending on their race, class, religion, immigration status, incarceration, and political beliefs. These people include immigrants, Muslims, and the poor—in fact, anyone outside of the dominant ethnicity or the reigning political ideology. In Hungary for instance, human rights groups with international funding must register as “foreign agents.” Similarly, in Poland, the right wing Law and Justice Party has targeted human rights groups, feminists, and pro-immigration activists through media censorship, new laws around the teaching of holocaust history, and frequent raids on the offices of groups that criticize the government. The fallout from the Syrian Civil War intensified these trends. As millions fled, many into Europe, the right attacked the principle of freedom of movement within the Schengen Area of European Union; some countries started to impose passport checks at their borders with EU countries and many more sent police onto trains to detain brown and black passengers.
       For the most part, the center-left has gone along with these tactics. After terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, for instance, France’s socialist party president François Hollande declared a state of emergency that has been extended multiple times with no sign of ending. Many on the Left subscribed to the 1990s hope that the EU would enable a softer form of globalization that concentrated on regional integration. However, it may also have hardened the distinctions between Europe and the rest of the world, giving credence to the notion of a “fortress Europe” in need of defensive parapets and a well-patrolled moat. A cross-continental network of right-wing political parties—from Fidesz in Hungary to the Danish People’s Party—now preaches border defense at all costs, national purity, and religious intolerance.
       While the new right-wing movements participate in electoral politics, many of them have unofficial links with vigilante groups that patrol their country’s borders, shake down immigrant businesses, and harass women in hijabs, and small armies of thugs that wait to pick fights at rallies. These groups do not live in fear of prosecution for hate crimes: They maintain Facebook pages and websites. Groups like the Cologne-based Hooligans Against Salafists make their racial claims on the streets of German cities, taking over public space as in an attempt to shock multiculturalism out of city life. In Greece, Golden Dawn members beat up immigrant vendors in street markets. In France, the National Front has sponsored “pork festivals” in cities its members see as being in danger of losing their French-ness, because of changing demographics.
       Some of the most visible manifestations of New Right muscle-flexing have emerged in post-socialist Europe. In Hungary and Bulgaria vigilante border guards target migrants fleeing North. In the former East German city of Dresden, Pegida (an acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) took over the streets in 2014 to protest immigration turning Germany into “Eurorabia.” In Serbia, nativism merges with a desire to protect “traditional values” resulted in the cancellation or violent persecution of gay pride marches in Belgrade. Unlike in the past, when the Soviet Union commemorated the Great Patriotic War against fascism across Eastern Europe, Nazism is no longer something to hide. The extremist Hungarian Guard (Magyar Gárda) talks openly about following in the footsteps of the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s wartime fascist party that murdered thousands of Jews.

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Singing Rebels.

 

      It's November, just a wee reminder, to all you hairy rebels that have not been knighted, but want to wobble your dulcet vocal chords. This month sees the relaunch of the Red and Black Song Club.

     It is a libertarian left choir indulging themselves in songs of struggle, anti-fascism, and solidarity. No need to brush up your skills, just turn with skills or without experience in the the world of warbling.

     Tonight November is the first meet up, then it will be 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month, the venue will be the Glasgow Autonomous Space, (GAS).

    More info on Facebook @redandblacksongclub

 For directions to Glasgow Autonomous Space better to visit their site.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk