Rapists.

           I have often visited Greece and love Athens, having stayed there for months at a time, though I see those who live there, on the whole, as very friendly and welcoming, but patriarchy is a problem. I remember asking a very friendly elderly gent who lived near Athens if he had any family, his answer was "Yes, three --- and a daughter".
       The following report is welcome news as the women of that patch of land known as Greece are now standing up and claiming their right to equality. 

The following From Enough is Enough: 

        It was in response to an incident in which a woman hired to clean a house was imprisoned and repeatedly sexually assaulted by her “employer.” The neighbors called the police but the police declined to intervene. They are always ready to raid a squat or attack people in a public square, but cringe away from breaching the door of a middle-class home, so the rapist was able to escape and remains at large.
       This horror also unfolded in the shadow of an ongoing headline-grabbing case in which a “respectable” Greek man, an airline pilot, murdered his (much younger) wife and then said she was killed by immigrants, a calculated racist ploy which Greek police not only agreed with, blaming “hardened immigrant criminals” on national TV, but acted on by kidnapping an undocumented guy from the country of Georgia and beating him for days in an effort to make him confess.
      It seems almost too obvious to state, but the above is an example of the intersectional ways gender is interlocked with class, race and nationalism, as well as the key role the police play in maintaining these brutal hierarchies.
       As with so many incidents of gendered violence, fatal or otherwise, the perpetrator was that most deadly thing: “the man of the house.” Graffiti spotted in the neighborhood summed him up: “Good kid. Pilot. Orthodox Christian. Femicide.”
        The police responded to the revelation of the husband’s guilt by going back on TV and giving other men who might want to kill their wives advice on how they could get away with it better than he did. This is not a joke or hyperbole.
       While mainstream news coverage of both these cases focused on what might be called a “carceral” angle — why weren’t these men ARRESTED and LOCKED UP? — the women of Athens have gathered in tremendous numbers multiple nights in a row to express not only their outrage but more direct, systemic solutions to the campaign of violence waged daily against women.
       The march on Tuesday night began with speakers and chants. Prior actions had already heavily coated the surrounding blocks with militant feminist graffiti in both Greek and English. Once the march got moving, the amount of graffiti became so intense that artists towards the back of the march had trouble finding any wall space! There were lots of feminist, anarcha-feminist, anti-police and queer slogans and symbols. A few that I noticed were DEAD MEN DON’T RAPE, KILL RAPISTS, ABORT PATRIARCHY, ABORT CAPITALISM, THE POLICE DON’T KEEP ME SAFE – MY FRIENDS DO, and the immortal line INSTEAD OF “I LOVE YOU,” SAY “FUCK THE POLICE.”
      I was also moved by the graffiti reading LET’S ALL BECOME INSURGENTS, ROBBERS, SABOTEURS.
      There were countless stickers and flyers as well as ferocious chants (in Greek). Following are translations of some of these superb chants:

       “Patriarchy rapes and kills, on the street and at home. We will burn the state and patriarchy.”
         “Glorious Greek man, on your grave we’ll hold the biggest festival.”
        “The rapist will not come from the East, he will come from Ekali and Koponi.” (Greek neighborhoods)

“This, this, this is right: kicks with 12cm heels to smarten you up.”
“Die, Greece, so we can live. To hell with the family! To hell with the homeland!”
“Two meters, two meters underground, there is a home for every rapist.”
“Gay, trans, lesbians, priestesses of disgrace. We are proudly the shame of the nation.”
“In the streets, in the squares, in all the neighborhoods: immigrant women, you are not alone!”

        MAT, the riot police, nipped at the heels of the march, but there were no direct clashes, though a few participants practiced the quintessentially Greek multitask of jogging away from police while hand-rolling a cigarette.

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Local Kids.

          The latest issue of The Local Kids, Autumn 2020, No. 6, is just released well worth downloading the PDF and having a wee read.

 

        The last months we saw different shades of curfew being imposed throughout the world. Apparently in this highly developed society (in the sense of the multiplication of institutions and technologies that penetrate every aspect of life) a pandemic can only be dealt with through the most blunt weapon of repression. To come together, to see eye-to-eye, is branded irresponsible and forcibly disbanded, with a glaring exception for profit-making, exploitative relations.
          Physical intimacy and tenderness suddenly become something threatening with deadly consequences. Meetings and physical contact are declared to be something abnormal and forbidden. Don’t kiss, don’t hug, don’t touch. Yes but touch the screens. The physical is banned from our real world and replaced by the virtual. The situation serves as an ideal opportunity to push ahead the total digitalization of all aspects of life. This is the definition of this society of a human life; work and consume, preferably without leaving the confinements of the home and permanently accompanied by a fear of potential infection which puts one in a constant state of anxiety.
          Levels of fear went through the roof not only because of the unknown risks of a potentially deadly virus, but also because of the violence unleashed against perceived potential transmitters. Everyone who doesn’t display the good behaviour of the responsible citizen, is deemed suspect. The understanding of solidarity and responsibility was deformed and equated with obedience and trust in the state. Though not everyone went along with this narrative, the streets and squares did empty. Interaction moved to the internet, a space inherently linked to
surveillance (data gathering) and shaped by unknown or misunderstood parameters (algorithms). Some might accept this (self-)imposed separation and isolation, others are starting to doubt if they want to live a life devoid of encounters that are not ruled by capitalist logic.
          The flow of goods will continue, the economy will be kept alive, the transfer of all aspects of life to the digital will be guaranteed. Thus creating an unstable construct of infrastructure where mobile phone antennas, fibre optic cables and the supply by trucks, trains etc. are more and more important. Could this mean possibilities to sabotage their apparent security at their sensitive points? By experimenting with these possibilities, can we perhaps feel, sense and touch life a little more?

PDFs on thelocalkids.noblogs.org

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Savagry Of Patriarchy.

         In Mexico city, on Friday February 14th. 2020, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, while inside the National Palace, giving his morning press conference, probably thought all would be quiet. What he didn’t expect was a group of brave and very angry women attacking the palace doors. This attack was in response to the brutal killing of 25 year old Ingrid Escamilla, who was murdered in the north of Mexico. Suffering the brutal death didn’t seem to be enough for the media, the Mexican newspaper La Prensa published photos of Ingrid’s mutilated body.
      In Mexico around ten women are are killed every day, over the last four decades, femicide has increased exponentially, patriarchy is very much alive in Mexico. However patriarchy’s tentacles slither through the fissures in every country in the world, its distorted value structure, quietly accepting the dominance of one section of our species over another. The deep ingrained protocols continuing the dominance of male over female. and all the injustices that follow from this irrational man made value structure.
      The attacks by these brave women on the national palace were just a part of the much larger day of protests, showing their solidarity with Ingrid and all other women who have suffered the brutality and death of a male dominated society.
     In Mexico city, women from all over took to the streets and filled metro stations to display their rage at a society that looks the other way when it comes to the brutal treatment and death of women. Part of the women’s anger was seen widely when they set fire to a La Prensa truck outside the newspaper's offices. These protests are not an isolated incident but part of series of ongoing strikes and protest at several university campuses across the city. The women's anger is at the macho violence and against the state and universities ignoring this endemic savagery.
       It is suggested that you watch Mexico City as International Women’s Day, March 8th. nears, and support these women who are taking direct action in the face of brutal state repression, to carry on this fight for justice, and against the rampant patriarchy and savage state violence. They deserve our full solidarity and support. 

 

 

 

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Distorted History.

      Anarchism means freedom, liberty, co-operation, of course these come with responsibility for your actions and respect for others. In today's society none of these bricks of a civilised society exist to any real extent. nor can they as long as we have a patriarchal foundation to the society. In this society power and wealth brings privileges and most of that power and wealth is in the hands of the males of society. And so it has been for countless centuries, anarchism is the only system that will remedy this inherent flaw in our society.

     Despite the shackles that have bound women for centuries there have been women who have stood tall and defied the norms of this distorted system, sadly history tends to bury their deeds and efforts. We should do our best to resurrect their history and put it in its rightful place along side all those who who struggled to make the world a better place. Men alone will not change the world, people will.

     This from crimethinc:

 The younger Bakunin daughters, Aleksandra and Tatiana.

    To observe the 204th anniversary of her birth, we remember Tatiana Bakunin, sister of the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. On the basis of all the available information, Tatiana and her sisters were as courageous and creative as Mikhail. Tatiana repeatedly played a pivotal role behind the scenes in her brother’s life and in the intellectual development of several other important thinkers. The fact that her name and ideas are not widely known today attests to the barriers she faced and the deficiencies of the “great man” model of history.
       Nearly all of what we know about Tatiana appears in the margins of stories written about men. She is one of the countless people who remain invisible through the lens of patriarchal memory, which conceals both her contributions and the things she could have accomplished if the institutions and conventions of her time had not denied her personhood. Her correspondence and writings have yet to be translated.
       Tatiana and her sisters grew up in the Russian countryside studying literature, music, and history. Their father raised them to speak several languages, bringing in tutors from Western Europe; he had picked up liberal ideas during his youth working in Italy as a diplomat, though his politics shifted to the reactionary end of the spectrum as he aged. In this environment, Tatiana Bakunin distinguished herself for her love of reading and writing and her reflective spirit.
        While her brother Mikhail left home at the age of fourteen to attend military academy, Tatiana and her sisters continued their studies into adulthood. They developed a private mysticism based in poetry, powerful feeling, and asceticism, which they referred to among themselves as la religion. The sisters were the first ones in the family to rebel, revolting against the role prescribed for women in 19th-century Russia as wives and mothers. When their parents pressured the eldest daughter, Lyubov, to marry a military officer, the sisters opposed this choice and eventually forced their parents to let her break off the engagement. Tatiana herself never married.
        In 1835, Mikhail was serving as an artillery officer in the Russian occupation of Poland. Likely inspired by his sisters’ rejection of their socially ordained role, Mikhail went AWOL and left the military. When he arrived home, Tatiana and Lyubov took him to Moscow to introduce him to their friends, including Nikolai Stankevich, a student of philosophy and the organizer of an independent reading group. Together, Nikolai, Mikhail, Tatiana, and the other Bakunin sisters studied, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and began to develop the ideals for which Mikhail later became famous.
      Tatiana also maintained passionate intellectual relations with Vissarion Belinski, one of the most influential critics in the history of Russian literature, and later, Ivan Turgenev, the author who popularized the concept of nihilism with his novel Fathers and Sons.

      “My love does not fit in any of your categories. Call it folly or what you will. I was simply in love; and before I had realized it, I spent days which it is even now joy to remember… I lived with my whole heart and soul, every vein in me throbbed with life, everything around me was transfigured. Why must I now renounce all this?”
-Tatiana Bakunin, reflecting on her relationship with Turgenev in correspondence with her brother in the 1850s 

The elder Bakunin daughters, Varvara and Lyubov.

     After the repression of the revolutions of 1848, Mikhail Bakunin was captured and sentenced to death in three countries, then condemned to life imprisonment in Russia. Defying the hostility of the Russian government, Tatiana repeatedly visited him and smuggled secret messages out of the prison at great risk to herself. Petitioning the authorities, she and her mother and siblings eventually managed to effect Mikhail’s transfer to Siberia, from which he was ultimately to escape and resume his revolutionary activities. If not for Tatiana, Mikhail Bakunin’s name might also be unknown to us today.
       In his contributions to the development of contemporary anarchism, Mikhail always emphasized the importance of women’s liberation. The credit for this is due to Tatiana and her sisters, who set an example by advocating for themselves and teaching him much of what he knew about self-emancipation. The best way we can honor Tatiana is by recognizing the important roles that all those whose names are unknown to us—the majority of them women—have played in history.

       “Women almost everywhere are slaves, and we ourselves are the slaves of their bondage; without their liberation, without their complete, unlimited freedom, our freedom is impossible; and without freedom, there is no beauty, no dignity, no true love. We love only to the extent to which we desire and call for the freedom and independence of the other—total independence in relation to everything and even and especially in relation to ourselves. Love is the union of free beings and only this love uplifts, ennobles us. All other love disgraces the oppressed and the oppressor and is a source of depravity.”
-Mikhail Bakunin, letter to his siblings, May Day, 1845

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Sexism In Anarchist Circles!

         Yes, sexism does exists in anarchist circles, and should be constantly challenged, it is encouraging to see it challenged in such an open and powerful manner. This from Mpalothia:

Mexico: 

Communique from the Informal Insurrectionist Anarcha-Feminist Coven.

       Public response to a misdiagnosis that circulates on the internet. To the anarchists of Mexico and the world, to all the witches fighting in the universe.

 «My Mother, go to your room and take care of your work, the loom and the spinning wheel (…) The word must be a thing of men, of all, and above all of me, of whom is the power of this palace». – Telemachus, The Odyssey

---------Thus, the Bolshevik libertarians try and prevent our participation in the anarchic war and ask us to return to the school, to the metate, to the molcajete, to caring for our daughters and darning socks. Like Telemachus to Penelopes, they send us to the knitting room. Once again, the cry of patriarchal power disguises itself as ‘libertarian’ and condemns us to shut us up and keep us from ‘the things of men’.
       Before continuing we want to clarify that we are not Rodriguistas, and not because we don’t share the theory of compañero Rodriguez but because we are not Bakunistas, nor are we Malatestas, we are not Magonistas, nor are we Goldmanistas. We follow ideas not people.
       We are anarchists and we believe that there is only one way to confront power and authority, and that is the anarchic insurrection, that is why we conceive anarchic organization in an informal way through collective affinities and permanent conflict against the patriarchal civilization as a whole. That is why we reject the misogynist authoritarianism of the these Bolshevik libertarians, and why we do it publicly. To fight against sexism and misogyny is to fight against gender, and to fight to destroy gender is to also fight to destroy the whole patriarchal civilization.
        We do not represent all the insurrectionist anarchist comrades, we only represent a collective of affinity based in the central region of Mexico. We recognize the struggle of all the other anarcha-feminist insurrectionist compañeras, from those who individually confront the patriarchal civilization, to the compañeras who do it in anonymous collectives and those who have decided to group themselves under new acronyms and claim their actions.

Our fight is the same.
Neither God, nor State, nor Master!
Against the patriarchal civilization!
For the control of our bodies and our lives!
For the destruction of gender!
For the anarchic insurrectional tension!
For Anarchy!

Informal Insurrectionist Anarcha-Feminist Coven

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No War But Class War.

       Under capitalism, the festering cancer that dominates our lives, the ordinary people fight a multitude of battles, there are plenty of injustices to pick from. There is racism, sexism, patriarchy, gender problems, inequality, injustice, militarism, and so the list goes on. All of these struggles are important, but winning one or all of them, will not bring this corrupt exploitative system crumbling down. There is the core battle that has to be fought, and that one struggle is the only struggle that will free us from the crushing power of the capitalist system. We have to realise that it is a class based system, that is its foundation, it ability to function. We are its serfs, its peasants, its slaves, and no matter how many injustices we manage to right, the same class system will still be in place. There is an "elite" of privileged parasites who control every aspect of our lives, and we feed them generously. Until we eradicate that class bases of our society, we will never be free, we will always have injustices and exploitation as the norm of our lives. Class war is the only road to demolish this needless burden on the shoulders of humanity.

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Do We Know What's Happening In Kobane?

       Is the reason for the West's reluctance to stop the onslaught against Kobane, the fact that the people seem to be in control, ideas that the West and its various "friendly" authoritarian regimes, don't want to take hold in the region.

This interesting article from Anarchist News:

 Kobane Under Intense ISIS Attack, Excluded from UN Humanitarian Aid. "

Revolution will win in Kobanê!

Submitted by worker on Fri, 10/10/2014 - 06:25

Revolution will win in Kobanê!
Our Comrades in Boydê Village Reports:
      It’s the 24th day of ISIS attacks on Kobanê. While people’s defending forces in all border villages are on human shield sentry for Kobanê against attacks, everyone, everywhere in the region we live, rised up not to let Kobanê fall.
We have been on human shield sentry for around three weeks in Boydê village west of Kobanê. In the last two days, explosions and sounds of clashes got intense in Kobanê’s outer districts and town center. During this period of intense clashes, military forces increased their attacks on human shield sentries at border villages. Soldiers of Turkish State has been attacking with gas bombs to those who approach the border from both sides, including the village that we are in, which was attacked on Tuesday. Soldiers also used live ammunition from time to time in their attacks and wounded people.
     These attacks on border villages especially mean that ISIS forces are allowed passage through the border. Republic of Turkey’s support to ISIS is clearly visible here as it is there. Of course that’s not the only thing that is clear. We have learned that one of the ISIS leaders commanding the attack on Kobanê got killed by YPJ/YPG forces. Meanwhile clashes today are as intense as before and continued all day long. Sounds of clashes almost never stopped today. However now we know that explosions are made by YPJ/YPG forces. It’s reported that YPJ/YPG forces tactically emptied the streets of Kobanê at town center and ambushed ISIS, neutralizing them with successful tactics.
      Everyone’s excited by what’s told at village meetings; one of them is ISIS’ fear of women guerillas. ISIS represents the state, the terror, the massacre and also the patriarchy of course. Because of their belief that they cannot be so-called “martyrs” when they get killed by a women guerilla, a YPJ fighter, they are scared of encountering YPJ forces. Because when they encounter them, the women who “fight” against them show no mercy to the ISIS lot. This is the freedom against patriarchy created by YPJ fighting.
      The rebellion that rises in all of Kurdistan and all cities of Anatolia in the last two days, makes us feel the invincibility of organized people. These rebellions increase the confidence in revolution for everyone in Kobanê, in villages at Kobanê border, and in all of Rojava. Whenever a sister or brother falls, although we feel the sorrow, it intensifies everyone’s anger and power here. Requiems that start with hitting on knees turn into halay dance with feet kicking fast and strong enough to crack the earth. Thus our sorrow bursts into anger, fast and strong.
This is just what everyone needs here. For the freedom and revolution that’s craved, despite everything.
Long live the People’s Kobanê Resistance!
Long live the People’s Rojava Revolution!
Long live our Revolutionary Anarchist Action!

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