Solidarity With Anarchist Prisoners.

         As the corporate world crumbles, various states across the globe, in an attempt to shore up the disintegrating façade, they are coming down heavy on those at the forefront of the struggle for that better world free from capitalism, anarchists are at that core. It is important that we show our support for and solidarity with, those at the receiving end of the repression.
         This coming week, August 23rd. to August 30th. is Week of International Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners. The following is a letter from one such prisoner, giving her support to this International event.

From Act For Freedom Now: 

Letter from Anarchist Prisoner, Emma Sheppard, in support of the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners. For more info on Emma’s case see: https://bristolabc.wordpress.com/support-emma/

“The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings for freedom”
– Maya Angelou

Our fearful trill is the combination of frustration, despair, indignation and defiance. The “Incentives and Earned Privileges” scheme that dominates prisons today goes a long way to silencing our songs through its passive coercion and pastoralism, but they always erupt sporadically.

“We count ourselves among those rebels who count storms, who hold that the only truth lies in perpetual seeking” – Madya Tulokonnivan (Pussy Riot)

Being in prison has made me feel humble. My fixed-term sentence is short, and unlike many, I have a release date. I am humbled by the fire and conviction which fuels long term anarchist prisoners, and the many rebels in prison who are “perpetually seeking” in their own ways, free from (and often unknown to) the anarchist subcultures. Quietly rejecting and challenging authority everyday in a way to keep sane inside. These rebels and actions give me hope.

“Tigers are more beautiful than sheep but we prefer them behind bars” – Bertrand Russel

I do not consider myself a tiger! But as Michael Gove said in his first speech as ‘Justice Minister’: “Civilisation depends on clear sanctions being imposed by the state on those who challenge the rules”. So they put us behind bars and try to drown us in petty regulations. But being here has just made me stronger and given a depth of my understanding of concepts such as privilege and solidarity. They labelled us ‘criminals’ and try to shame us into compliance, or rely on other prisoners to do their work – policing, pandering and grasping of imagined rewards and “earned privileges”. But knowing I am not alone in my struggle gives me strength and vigilance. Gove has begin to change the rhetoric surrounding prisoners: we are now potential assets, we are to quote him, “a literally captive population”. He is promising early release for those who ‘show their chained attitude that they wish to contribute to society’. We are led through our time by those benign dictators, our ‘Offender Managers’, who calmly construct our sentence plans and ‘therapeutic’ programmes (also known as prisons-within-prisons). The Prison “Service” is like an abusive partner: offering calming reassurances whilst deliberately alienating, excluding, and physically and mentally controlling us. This can never be a therapeutic environment. Martin Luther King said we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. What affects one directly affects all indirectly”. These networks bear down on us in biased and relentless ways. Prison is often the final step for those who have been excluded and controlled by the wider mechanisms of the state their whole lives. The numbers of deaths (at the hands of the screws, filth and suicides) in custody and on the streets continue to rise, discussed and minimized. Self harm is rife within women’s prisons. The Ministry of Justice plan to sell off many parts of the prison estate, its so called ‘dark corners’ (many of which happen to be in prime locations). Gove claims that it is this cleansing desire and economic, which is driving the developments. But whether its the Queen or rich landlords who will benefit, or the Ministry, is irrelevant… It’s all capitalist expansion. “Whoever has passed by the front of a court house or prison and his look didn’t darken at the thought that he could be there as a culprit, then he did not live his life with integrity and dignity” – Quote from Greece, unsure of author I hope that I can serve the rest of my time and license with integrity. I mourn the loss of my anonymity every day. Writing can be terrifying, especially with limited resources, but I will finish with a quote from Audre Lorde:

“When we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
or welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it’s better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”

Solidarity to all anarchist prisoners and everyone harmed by the prison system.

With love and rage,

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

Workers Know Your History, Nat Turners Rebellion.

     August, 21, 1831, workers in Southampton County Virginia rose up, they were a specific kind of worker, they were owned and fed by their "masters", they were slaves. Though we say slavery was abolished, slavery still goes on all over the world. In some cases it is the slavery of old, owned and fed by their owners, this is slavery in its most barbaric form. However the vast majority belong to that new regime of slavery, where the slave is handed a pittance and sent out to find shelter and feed themselves. That form of slavery goes under the name of wage slavery. Today the slaves are still rebelling against their conditions and it will continue until we finally overthrow the individual and corporate slave owners. 

From Wikipedia:

      Nat Turner's Rebellion (also known as the Southampton Insurrection) was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, during August 1831.^[1] Led by Nat Turner, rebel slaves killed anywhere from 55 to 65 people, the highest number of fatalities caused by any slave uprising in the Southern United States. The rebellion was put down within a few days, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterwards. The rebellion was effectively suppressed at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, 1831.^[2]

      There was widespread fear in the aftermath of the rebellion, and European-American militias organized in retaliation against the slaves. The state executed 56 slaves accused of being part of the rebellion. In the frenzy, many non-participant enslaved people were punished. At least 100 African Americans, and possibly up to 200, were murdered by militias and mobs in the area. Across the South, state legislatures passed new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free black people,^[3] restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free black people, and requiring white ministers to be present at all worship services.

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

Freedom Examined.

       Another exciting entry on Spirit of Revolt "Read of the Month". It is an 1907 pamphlet, Libre Examen, by the French anarchist Paraf Java. There is also an English translation along with the French. Certainly well worth a read, it is a well written 16 page pamphlet on, Evolution, God, The Father land, The Law, Politics, Universal Suffrage, Intolerance, Authority, Property, Marriage, Prejudices, Competition, Utopias, all from an anarchist stand point. Read it and start a debate about its content.

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

To Save Pollok Park, Time Is Of The Essence.

        Where is the wrath, where is the righteous anger, where are the angry crowds? At the end of July, I posted a short piece about the plans by Glasgow University and Glasgow City Council, backed by almost £100,000 of lottery funding, (money collected from you and I.) to dig up Pollok Park, and re-create WWI trenches. Not only is it a grotesque intention, but it is the most inappropriate place for such a monstrosity. The work is scheduled to start this August, is it too late to show our disgust, or can we get the message across, that Pollok Park is not  a area for war games. They claim that people will be able to see what it was like in the trenches during that totally unnecessary blood bath. Utter nonsense, it will be a sanitised misrepresentation, where will the rats be, where will the mud and the blood be, where will the stench be, where will the agony and the barbarity be? This is just another way of glorifying war, of tidying it up, it will not bring home the truth of the utter barbarity and agony of war.

No place for war games.

      For those who would like a nice refreshment, in pleasant surroundings, while voicing their anger at this destruction of a beautiful park that belongs to the people of Glasgow, they can take themselves down to the Scotia Bar, at the bottom of Stockwell Street, where they can sign a petition against this insanity.

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

A Society Built On Theft.

      Anyone who cares to take a look at the system under which we live, can see its glaring inequalities, and injustices. It is usually from this stand point of criticism that people get involved and try to "reform" the system, attempting to make it fair and just. What they fail to grasp is that it is not just an inequality and injustice of the present situation, it is the foundations on which the system was built. The inequalities arrived by coercion and plundering, theft of land, and state coercion to enforce and legitimise that theft. To reform the system we would have to return all that plundering and land theft to the people and remove the coercion of the state. There can never be equality and justice if we allow the thieves to hold onto their plunder, under the protection of the state. 

      A look at history tells us how we got here, and should make it glaringly obvious that we can't reform capitalism into something resembling equality and justice. It must be destroyed, we have to remove the plunderers and thieves and demolish the apparatus of the state that protects the wealth and power that stems from that plundering and theft.

A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of past state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the structural foundations of the present system. The extent to which present-day concentrations of wealth and corporate power are the legacy of past injustice, I call the subsidy of history.

The first and probably the most important subsidy of history is land theft, by which peasant majorities were deprived of their just property rights and turned into tenants forced to pay rent based on the artificial “property” titles of state-privileged elites.

Of course, all such artificial titles not founded on appropriation by individual labor are completely illegitimate.

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Socialism, the normal functioning of the market never results in a state of affairs in which most of the land of a country is “owned” by a tiny class of absentee landlords and the peasant majority pay rent for the land they work. Wherever it is found, it is the result of past coercion and robbery.

Read the full article HERE:

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

What Are We Waiting For?

       I wrote the following quotation down years ago, but can't remember where I read it. Though as I get older it seems more relevant than ever. Most of my adult life there has been talk of the coming crisis in capitalism, and most people on the "left" are still waiting for the crisis. I now believe it is obvious that we have to change that view point, the waiting is over, the crisis is here.

      It's useless to wait---- for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilisation. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.

     When will the many choose sides, how many will choose sides, which side will they choose, and how do we influence them in what side to choose? 

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

Prime Sites.

      Sunday, another beautiful day, I can see our minds playing tricks and come the winter we'll talk of the wonderful summer of 15. Stopped at another nice resting place, these sites seem to occupy prime sites for developers. I wonder how long it will be before the greed merchants work that one out, and do their wheeling and dealing? It's a nice piece of countryside, must build houses on it.

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

The Coming Insurrection.

     Once again we see the extent the state will go to in its attempt to stifle, repress, and tarnish, any idea that challenges the power structure of the wealthy, the worshippers of the profit motive, the power mongers.

      In 2008, nine people were arrested in the village of Tarnac in France, it was a high profile military style arrest, they were charged with various terrorist charges. Now seven years later, 2015, a judge throws out any terrorist connection. Seven years of questioning under the label of terrorist, only to have it revealed as police fabrication. This happened in France, but that state is no different from any of the others, they are the terrorists, they are the enemy of freedom, they are the purveyors of violence.

This from Undercover Info:

 Police raid in Tarnac.

 
     The dead hand of notorious UK spycop Mark Kennedy has reached out once again – this time in France, where a major trial involving a so-called ‘metaphysical anarchist’ cell saw the most serious charge – terrorism – dismissed. In a statement afterwards one of the defendants accused the prosecution of having based its case on false statements made by the police – in other words, fabricated (or exaggerated) evidence. Here is what happened…
     On 11 November 2008, twenty French men and women were arrested simultaneously in Paris, Rouen, and in the small village of Tarnac (located in the district of Corrèze, Massif Central). Those in Tarnac were living in a small farmhouse – and in the village they had reorganised the local grocery store as a cooperative and taken up a number of civic activities, from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly.
     The police operation was dramatic: it involved helicopters, one hundred and fifty balaclava-clad anti-terrorist police and massive media coverage. The arrests sparked huge protests in Paris and in other French cities and towns, as well as the village of Tarnac, which describes itself as communist and where those arrested were seen as highly-respected members of the community.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Lord, You Must Be Joking.

        You can tell from the names mentioned, I wrote this a few years ago, but the situation is just the same today.

Lord,  You Must Be Joking. 

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth,

Burundi, Rwanda,     nothing to date.

Ye shall love thy neighbour s thyself,

Cuban people,     don't appreciate.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,

San Salvador mothers,    patiently wait.

We thank thee for thy gracious mercy,

"Desert Storm"    Iraqi people's fate.

Is your church gratified when victory claimed

by young lives stolen, town ethnic cleansed?

Does a Christian God's eyes see a better world

when life brutally stolen from a Muslim child?

Does God of peace and compassion bless his flock,

bathed in the blood of Sarajevo, Vitez Glamoc?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth,

Ethiopia, Angola,    still struggling.

Ye shall love thy neighbour as thyself,

Third world resources,    West plundering.

Blessed are they that mourn, for thy shall be comforted,

Australian Aborigine,    rapidly disappearing.

We thank thee for thy gracious mercy,

Guatemala Natives,    mortally bleeding.

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

Nothing Is Forgotten.

A message from Act For Freedom Now:

The State and System have factually proven their role against anarchists, anti-authoritarians, fighting people, self-managed  spaces  and  various parts of  society.

Within the social war there are also losses. The times we are living now are tough. Disgusted by the social  relations and the models which they reproduce, against every form of exploitation and authority we aim at the destruction of this rotten system, whether it’s “prospering”, or it’s in “crisis”.

 We consider multiform action as an integral part of the revolutionary procedures. From the distribution of leaflets in the squares, the occupation of  spaces, the self-organization in workplaces and neighbourhoods, up to militant protests, night-time raids and re-appropriations.
 
The words of our brothers and sisters in captivity, give us the strength to continue.
 
Nothing is forgotten, nothing is left behind,
the war continues as long as the enemy is here.

And the journey continues with “losses”
but also joys, with hardships but also
pleasant surprises.
Therefore, ALL OR NOTHING…

Solidarity to those who fight for freedom
and dignity inside and outside the prisons.

The destruction of all prisons is a pebble in
the struggle for human dignity, and social
and individual freedom.

Rage and conscience until social
revolution. Revolutionary greetings to all
comrades EVERYWHERE AND ALWAYS!

S . FROM THE ANARCHIST PROJECT ACT FOR FREEDOM NOW!

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

It's Almost Like Summer.

        Yesterday, Thursday, what a beautiful day, another enjoyable session on the bike. Can't believe it, three good days this week, three times out on the bike, one could easily be fooled into think this was summer.

Time for a seat in the sun.

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

No Nations, No Borders.

      That babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, fed by xenophobic politicians, is raising to a crescendo the ant-migrant chorus. They talk of our cities being swamped, by swarms and dangerous hordes, all hell bent on stealing our jobs and destroying our "Britishness". They refuse to see human beings trying desperately to flee from death and destruction, their answer is to herd them into corrals like cattle and call for more controls, higher fences more police and troops. Nor will they face the fact that the migrant "problem" stems from the foreign policy of Western imperialism in the area from which the migrants come. Their mind set seems to be that they can bomb countries back to the stone age, bolster religious nutters and psychopathic warlords, turning the ruined cities into bloody battlefields, and then expect the ordinary people to stay there and suffer everything from deprivation to death. We all strive for a better life, but we the ordinary people will only find that through co-operation and solidarity with all those involved in that struggle. Our enemy is not those desperately fighting for that better life, our enemy is the state apparatus and its imperialism that creates all that which we are fighting against.

Note from Rabble: It seems barely a day goes by that we can avoid the fascistic anti-migrant bullshit in the press. The time is now. We have to start seriously preparing for rising xenophobia and more movement of people as multiple crises converge. This means: zero-tolerance for anti-migrant snatch squads, countering the propaganda on the streets, and building strong transnational solidarity.

       If you want to support the struggle in Calais but would like a better understanding of what’s really going on, get yourself down to one of these upcoming infonights.

       The latest news from Calais: More than 4000 people, stuck in a camp they didn’t choose to be in, desperately trying to find ways to cross to the UK, with 11 people dying so far since June. The government’s response: more controls. The media’s response: fear mongering at the ‘criminal gangs intimidating truck drivers’. Our response: solidarity.

      We are a bunch of people who have been involved in Calais Migrant Solidarity and have recently returned from Calais. During August we will be travelling around the UK talking about Calais and how to get involved there.

Confirmed dates so far:

LARC, London – Saturday 15th Aug @ 1:30pm

Cowley Club Brighton – Sunday 16th August @ 4pm

Next to Nowhere, Liverpool – 19th August at 7pm

1 in 12 Club Bradford – Thursday 20th August @ 6pm

Earth 1st Summer Gathering – Sunday 23rd August

Glasgow (TBC)

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

Teachers And Police.

      Anybody that looks at the structure of this society can see that is an extremely unfair, unequal arrangement. The question is how and why does it survive? It survives because the powers that be, the state, have several lines of defence to prevent any real change taking place. One of the first lines of defence is the standardised education system, teachers are the soft police of society. Where they fail to get acquiescences and acceptance of the system, the second line of defence comes in, the police, followed up by the judicial system and prison. When these lines of defence fail, the state will have no hesitation in bringing troops onto the streets to repress the people and any demands they make for real change to the structure of society.

        It is obvious that the first line of defence, the "education system" is failing, as we are seeing more brutal and militarised policing taking place in countries across the globe. The police's duty, first and foremost, is to protect the power and property of the wealthy and the status-quo.

     This is an extract from an article on the police, from the latest issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. 

      Anarchists know (or should know) that individuals who enter institutions usually come face to face with possible conflicts between institutional norms and their personal integrity. Those who remain end up perpetuating those norms regardless of any possible intention to alter them. But the observation that institutions change people is not the whole story. Power corrupts, but the already corrupt and the easily corruptible seek to join powerful institutions precisely so they will have professional opportunities to exercise their corruption.
     The laughable institutional excuse of supposed bad apples continues to be deployed at press conferences. These supposed bad apples are the ones who join the police in order to harass queers, beat up detainees, demand freebies from sex workers, steal from dealers, frame suspects, punitively deploy crowd control weapons, exercise disproportionate violence, and antagonize and terrorize non-compliant people — up to and including murder. .And who then have the bad taste to get caught. But no Field Training Officer has to teach them how to do these things. When there’s a too-big- to-be-ignored episode of alleged misconduct, all the good cops and their supporters line up with the bad apples, making every person standing with them complicit. Institutional self-preservation doesn’t dissipate even a little in the wake of embarrassing multi-million dollar settlements to survivors of police abuse.

Read the full article HERE:

Financial Imperialism.

        With the latest colonising of Greece by the financial Mafia, there is now no hope of any rise in the standard of living of the people of Greece. They will be mired in poverty and deprivation for as long as the Troika, (EC, European Commission, ECB, European Central Bank, IMF, International Mankind Fuckers) run the gambling casino that is the EU. The people of Greece have suffered it all, weighted down by a monarchy, they have been occupied militarily, suffered under the yoke of brutal right-wing government, been ruled by generals in a military junta, and had the illusion of democracy under so called "representative democracy", and now colonised by the financial Mafia where they live under the yoke of financial imperialism.

         Their only hope is to smash all aspects of the present system and take control of their own country and their own lives. They have had sessions of all the capitalist ideas of governing controls, all have brought disaster to the people. They could be closer to stepping out of the capitalist prison cell than any of the people of Europe, thanks to the greed and blind stupidity of the parasites running the financial Mafia and their desire to sustain the unsustainable.

This from Roar Mag:

      Third, the neo-colonial agreement Europeans leaders have just imposed upon Greece will eventually render the country ungovernable. Tsipras is the third prime minister to be forced into a kiss of death; centrist PASOK and right-wing New Democracy already obliterated themselves by signing up to the previous two bailout agreements. SYRIZA’s fate under the German austerity diktat is unlikely to be any different. Later this year, when draconian tax hikes start biting and Greece is inevitably tipped back into recession, Tsipras’ sky-high ratings will almost certainly start to fall. Even if new elections are to be held in the fall, it is unlikely that the new government will be able to serve out its full term.

       While Tsipras’ demise will be welcomed by the hardliners inside the creditor camp, the truth is that the Eurozone has shortsightedly set itself up for a fall. What makes the third bailout different is that, after Tsipras, there will be no one left inside Greece to credibly manage the memorandum. With the centrist and right-wing opposition in complete disarray, the leftists were quite literally the last hope for political stability and reform. Now, with SYRIZA on the verge of a split and Tsipras bound to suffer growing popular opposition and the withdrawal of grassroots support, it is not clear what pro-EU partner can step into the void and act as the creditors’ mouthpiece inside their newly acquired debt colony.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Sqatter Homeless Autonomy.

        A bit late with this, but better late than never. From Squatter Homeless Autonomy   for more details:--fb.com/squatterhomelessautonomy 

       If you are in or around the area, it might be worth a wee visit. Could be fun, could be interesting, could be informative, could be all three, why not pop in and see.

Squatters & Homeless Autonomy (SHA) are hosting five days of talks, workshops, skill-shares & socials this week in a central London squatted space. So far, events include:

Monday 10th, 6pm: Street Resistance
       In our age of state and fascist violence, self-defence is a necessity. Join Monday’s street resistance session, including muay thai and dirty boxing, to develop confidence, technique and composure. Communal vegan food and film afterwards!

Tuesday 11th, 7pm: Talk on Class Stigma, by Lisa Mckenzie
       Join Class War’s Lisa Mckenzie for a talk and discussion on ‘class stigma': the false identities, such as ‘chav’, ‘scrounger’ or ‘thief’, and the anti-working class beliefs they create.

Wednesday 12th, 4pm: Bike Clinic & Culturefuck Cinema
       Tired of bland, commodified, hyper-Westernised culture? Fuck that! Join our culturefuck cinema night, sure to melt your mind. Leave cultural assumptions at home! Also come along to the free bike clinic for all your carbon-free, bike-punx needs.

Thursday 13th, 7pm: Stop TTIP and ‘Infiltration in our Movements’
        On Day 4 of Regeneration, activists from StopTTIP UK will be talking on the looming future of corporate “free trade” agreements and how we can combat it, and Green and Black Cross will be speaking on the state of police infiltration in our movements.

Events will take place at 67 Guildford St., just off Russell Square Further events and location to be confirmed over at SHA’s Arsebook page.

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

The Financial Mafia Put The Boot In.

     It looks like the Greek "bailout" will go ahead, and the people of Greece will be in hawk to the financial Mafia to the tune of €86 billion. Not that the people will see much of this money, about 80% of it will find its way, very quickly, back to the bond holders behind the ECB, (European Central Bank), but what the people of Greece will see, is another massive drop in their standard of living, coming from increased taxes, lower pensions,  a higher retiring age, higher VAT, and a relaxing of health and safety conditions and other working conditions, plus a squeeze on wages. They are also expected to stand by and see €50 billion of their public assets sold off at rock bottom prices, to the corporate buddies of the financial Mafia, within the next couple of years. This is the Financial Mafia putting the boot in on the people of Greece, and the national government can go to hell in a hand cart.

     The bailout will not solve Greece's debt problem, most economic "experts" agree on this, most agree that it is unsustainable, no matter if there is another bailout after this one. What it will do, is syphon more public money up to the financial parasites who will bleed country after country dry, see the people of those countries descend into deprivation, with never a compassionate look in their direction. To them people are units to be used for profit and nothing else. 

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

Bike, Coffee And Cake.

         Another nice day out on the bike, enjoyed a plate of soup, coffee and cake at the tearoom in photo. A pleasant little place if you're in the Campsie Glen area. Along the block a bit is a famous bike shop, Big Al's, where all the fast guys hang out, I keep to the tearoom.

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