Assassination?

          Did President Trump order the assassination of an American citizen on American soil? That's the question some people are asking after the killing of activist and antifascist Michael Reinoehl.

It's Going Down reports on the incident:

        A look at the evidence surrounding the State killing of Portland-area protester Michael Reinoehl – which begs the question, just who directed what seems to be – his execution?
By John Teufel
        That Michael Reinoehl was murdered is hardly in doubt. Whether he was assassinated remains an open question.
         We know the events of September 3rd with some certainty. Five days earlier, Reinoehl had killed a man named Aaron Danielson in downtown Portland. Local police had already publicly named him as a suspect – Reinoehl was a fugitive, and feared that his own death was imminent. Now, Reinoehl was trying to hide at an apartment in Lacey, Washington, a suburb of Olympia. At this, he was failing, as FBI agents watched silently outside.
Murder
       At approximately 6:45 PM, Reinoehl finished a phone call with a friend and left the apartment, walking toward his car parked outside. As he did so, a contingent of U.S. marshals and local police in SUVs approached him at rapid speed. Reinoehl had a cell phone against his ear, and popped a gummy worm into his mouth. He opened his car door and started to get inside. The SUVs reached Reinoehl and, before coming to a complete stop, federal agents and cops descended with weapons drawn. No commands were issued. Within seconds, law enforcement opened fire. Reinoehl tried to duck for cover behind his vehicle, but the barrage of shots – 37 rounds in total – was relentless.
       Medical aid was half-heartedly administered (chest compressions, with the officer still standing) eight minutes after Reinoehl had been pumped with bullets. It wouldn’t have made a difference even if done right. Reinoehl died fast – likely in seconds, according to the coroner.
        Of the 22 civilian witnesses present at Reinoehl’s death, 21 stated that police never issued any commands or announced themselves before opening fire. Five eyewitnesses stated that the gunfire began as soon as the vehicles arrived on the scene. None saw Reinoehl with a gun. One witness initially assumed he was watching a drug-related gang hit, until he noticed the bulletproof vests worn by the shooters.

Read the full article HERE

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Poison Tactics.

        One thing we should always remember about fascists is that they are opportunists, they will jump on any bandwagon that will give them publicity, and a hope of control in pushing their agenda, sadly so many people will jump on the fascist bandwagon, seeing it as a vent for their anger, without realising the true agenda of the various fascist groups.

The following is an extract from an article on Enough is Enough:

     ------This leads directly to the next serious problem. In light of the obvious far-right wing connections this march had, there was a much smaller, but dedicated counter-protest. Chanting anti-fascist and anti-capitalist slogans, the counter demonstration was accompanied by massive police presence. After speeches by various activists concerning the failure of this government to act in a humane way to this situation, and calling for a response to the pandemic that values human lives over profits – all while being continuously heckled by Covid deniers – a plan formed to blockade the Ringstraße in Vienna, along which the “sceptic march” intended to parade. What happened then was that within minutes there were hundreds of riot police with dogs at the meeting point who then chased the activists through a snowy park and eventually kettled a group of activists for multiple hours. The fact that this mean that it was made impossible to maintain a safe distance to each other during a pandemic, or that the temperature was below zero degrees seemed to be irrelevant to the officers that formed a tight circle around the activists. Every now and again you could see officers forcefully drag protesters from the kettle towards the vans. According to a statement issued by the police directory Vienna, everyone within the kettle was charged. All this happened in order to ensure the safe passage of a group of 10 000 people, who were actively breaking the law by not wearing facemasks to a demonstration. This very clearly goes to show that the state was more concerned with cracking down on any form of left-wing resistance than they were about a rise in prominence of fascism. On the Sunday following the protests, the government held a press conference to announce the next extension of a complete lockdown of the country. The minister for the interior did not attend.
          As much as it is portrayed as such, nobody is claiming that what we saw was a march of 10 000 right-wing activists on Saturday. What we saw was a mass event of thousands of people during a pandemic that had been co-opted by the fascist right. And that in itself is almost more worrying. Because it is important to remember that history has shown us that no matter where you look, the fascists were never the majority, but they do understand very well how to use anger. Fascists do not want to hold governmental power so much as they want to be able to wield governmental power to break down any resistance against them. So while the police may claim to have tried to “keep the peace” by making sure active fighting did not break out between anti-fascists and corona sceptics, the overwhelming disparity of numbers and force between the two demonstrations clearly showed that left-wing positions are not welcome in a neo-liberal state. Hardened fascists will never outnumber their resistance, but the events on January 16 have shown that there is a vast amount of people who do not mind backing fascists if they agree on a topic they are angry about, and those people in turn are happily backed by the executive arm of the law. Make no mistake, what we saw was not a demonstration of middle-class anger, what we saw was the largest fascist march in Austria in a long time, not because all of them were fascist, but because enough people don’t mind marching with fascists.

  Read the full article HERE: 

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

Guns & Laws.

        The Americans right to bear arms is a very one sided right according to the state. U$A does pass gun control laws, but they are usually in response to "non-whites" following that 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms.

The following from It's Going Down:

           On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with two members of the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), about the organization and more broadly, about what it means to create an anti-racist current both within (and against) the current mainstream gun culture which largely has been occupied by the far-Right. The SRA currently has about 10,000 members and is a pan-Left organization, made up of anarchists, Marxists, and socialists. For a history of the group and a look at where they are coming from, we encourage people to read this interview several members conducted with the Anti-Fascist Network in the so-called UK.

From the interview:

         It is important to understand that gun rights were enshrined in the US 2^nd Amendment partly because of a need for armed violence at the frontier to continue the genocide of Native peoples, as well as Southern fears of slave uprisings. Gun rights were largely reserved for white people for most of US history, and during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Black people who armed themselves for community defense were often massacred and disarmed by white mobs and police. Attempts by Black people and other marginalized groups to arm themselves have often led to increased gun control; the National Firearms Act of 1934 was partly justified by crime committed by Italian and Irish immigrants; the Gun Control Act of 1968 was partly put in place due to Civil Rights riots; the Mulford Act was passed in California and signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1967 in response to the Black Panthers; ‘Saturday Night Special’ laws banning inexpensive small caliber handguns were passed in the ‘70s in response to Black people in cities preferring those firearms. The history of gun control in America is the history of white people owning guns to oppress marginalized people; Black people and other marginalized folks acquiring guns to defend themselves; and white people then passing laws to disarm the marginalized.

Read the full article HERE: 

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

Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round At Last--

        Capitalism’s regular cycle of crises come round and round again, and each time a new crisis hits us the ugly body of the behemoth fascism, spawns its malignant twins, “Racism” and “Nationalism” who scurry forth in ever growing confidence, creating division among our people. Today, in capitalism’s latest crisis, we see their malevolent hands create hatred, between brother and sister, drown rationalism in dogma, shed blood in the name of ideology, drag humanity to the edge of the precipice. However, time and time again humanity, by solidarity, understanding and tolerance, has tamed the beast and hauled itself back to a brighter horizon. Today is such a time to muster these qualities, as the beast runs rampant across our world, fed by those captains of capitalism, who have most to lose, should capitalism stumble further into crisis. This time we should not aim to tame the beast, but to destroy it, obliterating it from humanity’s consciousness.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, 

 What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Bethlehem?
         In the darkening dawn of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Yeats' Second Coming glimpsed a nightmarish "rough beast, its hour come round at last" slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. As we move into the 21st century, my fear is that the "center" is getting too strong--there seems to be no limit to what technology and government can do.
       Computers can only get so fast, but quantum computing harnesses parallel timelines to do things that just aren't possible in a Newtonian universe. A fully-functioning quantum computer should break the barriers between relativity and quantum physics, and should also be able to bioengineer proteins from scratch. Given today's pace of progress, I expect decent quantum computers to be operational by 2025, yielding a whole new generation of technology by 2045.
       Technology isn't the only thing that changes. There's a pace of progress in human relationships, too. I'm not aware of any "Moore's Law" for human interconnectedness, but we've gone from writing to printing to telegraph to radio to television to internet to blogs to Facebook to Twitter over time. Communications move further and faster. The news cycle has gone from monthly magazines to weekly papers to the nightly newscast to 24/7 cable to a constant feed to the Blackberry.
       Yeats heard the winds of chaos scattering the ashes of Europe after World War I. Today an invisible web is twining its tentacles around a shrinking world. Who knows what the future holds?

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

Anti-Fascist Hamburg Harbour Event.

      Each year for the last four years, The Anti-fascist Harbour Event in Hamburg, has gone from strength to strength. This year, 2014, was no exception, a well organised, interesting and informative event.

  Summary of 4th. Anti-Fascist Harbour Event "Wolf Hoffmann" in Hamburg 2014

 "Anti-militarist struggle - then and now",

      was the motto of the 4th. Anti-Fascist Harbour Event in Hamburg. The resistance of the shipyard workers, the rebuttal of the thesis: fascism = socialism, the exemplary story of the brigader Erich "Vatti" Hoffmann , and his struggle for a socialist and therefore humanistic society, were among others the focus of this weekend.

      Friday evening was the friendship and solidarity event with our comrades from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Austria, France, Spain and Sweden. The evening had a musical theme with the appearance of our Pascal (ACER) from Paris and the music group Sokugayu (Hamburg) who performed a program commemorating the poet Erich Mühsam. He was murdered by the Nazis 1934.

     The event was opened with a reading of the-----

Read the full report HERE:

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