THE IDEA OF SELF DEFENSE IN MINORITY COMMUNITIES

OF AFRO AMERICANS AND FIRST PEOPLES FOR INSTANCE

WAS SYMBOLIZED  BY THE REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHIST LEFT

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/poetry-written-in-gasoline-black-mask.html

WITH THIS PICTURE OF GERONIMO WHICH BY THE EARLY

SEVENTIES WAS ALSO ASSOCIATED WITH AIM,

THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, IT REMAINS ONE OF

THE ENDURING SYMBOLS OF RESISTANCE THEN AND NOW

AND IT IS STILL RELEVANT TODAY


Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on ... - scott crow
Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self Defense
An anthology by by scott crow.
This wide-ranging anthology uncovers the hidden histories of community armed self-defense, exploring how it has been used by marginalized and oppressed communities as well as anarchists and radicals within significant social movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Far from a call to arms, or a "how-to" manual for warfare, this volume offers histories, reflections, and questions about the role of firearms in small collective defense efforts and its place in larger efforts toward the creation of autonomy and liberation. Featuring diverse perspectives from movements across the globe, Setting Sights includes vivid histories and personal reflections from both researchers and those who participated in community armed self-defense. Contributors include Dennis Banks, Kathleen Cleaver, Mable Williams, Subcomandante Marcos, Kristian Williams, George Ciccariello-Maher, Ashanti Alston, and many more.

Center for a Stateless Society » Review: Setting Sights
May 7, 2019 - Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense. Edited by Scott Crow, with Foreword by Ward Churchill (Oakland: ..
On top of all that, US gun culture — as you might expect, given its overwhelming whiteness — is also associated with a lot of other toxic baggage. This culture is not informed by the history of legitimate armed resistance, but by American Exceptionalism, settler history, all the messianic weirdness coming out of the Second Great Awakening that makes America a travelling religious carnival freakshow, and the whole Scots-Irish “culture of honor” thing, as well as with the amazing level of violence in American society.
So fuck the so-called gun rights movement up, down, backwards, and sideways, every day of the week — and twice on Sunday.
Against this background, Setting Sights is an especially great achievement. Setting Sights, as editor Scott Crow writes, “covers people and communities who have resorted to armed self-defense as part of their struggles for liberation, justice, or basic human rights.” It’s an anthology of commentaries on the issue from representatives of the marginalized groups whose voices are usually drowned out by mainstream American gun culture: People of Color resisting police abuses, women, workers, and the LGBT community.
As American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill argues in his Foreword, the “founding fathers” who wrote the Second Amendment, and the white slavers and settlers who are so centered in the historic gun culture, were themselves the government tyranny against which armed self-defense was and is needed, right up to present-day Y’all Qaedists like Cliven Bundy:
It can be argued, and rightly so, that since the society on behalf these principles were set forth was composed all but exclusively of white settlers — this is to say, invaders — it was everywhere and always the aggressor, and consequently had no basis upon which claim [sic] a right to self-defense, armed or otherwise.
In every case, it was the other side — the Natives killed or driven off their land, the African-Americans hunted down by slave patrols or terrorized by white paramilitaries under Jim Crow — who had the right of self-defense, and the side celebrated in the mythology of America Westerns who deserved to be shot down like dogs.
Churchill also raises the question of how armed self-defense ties in with diversity of tactics in contemporary justice movements. These two themes — the historic legacy of armed resistance by marginalized groups, and their role in present-day resistance to structural oppression — are the themes of most of the writings collected in this book.
But armed resistance is only one half of the picture. The other half is building, here and now, the counter-institutions that will grow and coalesce into the successor society. Armed resistance exists only as a means to an end: protecting our right to engage in the act of building, and protecting our counter-institutions from the capitalist state’s attempts to destroy them. This process of construction is that end.  READ ON

FREE BOOK Speaking Desire: anarchism and free love as utopian performance in fin de siècle Britain

Anarchists and others debate free love in theory and practice. What is the relationship between social and sexual transformation? First published in Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna, (eds) 2009, Anarchism and Utopianism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.153-170. This version contains a minor update in note 27.

Key Words: anarchism, desire, feminism, fin de siècle, free love, love, marriage, performativity, queer theory, sexual politics, speech acts, utopianism

People: Edward Carpenter, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Edith Lanchester, Lillian Harman, Charlotte Wilson, Karl Pearson, Henry Seymour, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft

Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. However, Manchester University Press requires written permission from both them and me if you wish to republish it.

Download Speaking Desire as a Word document for personal use.

Speaking Desire: anarchism and free love as utopian performance in fin de siècle Britain


by Judy Greenway



The most beautiful thing around or above

Is Love, true Love:

The beautiful thing can more beautiful be

If its life be free.


Bind the most beautiful thing there is,

And the serpents hiss;

Free from its fetters the beautiful thing,

And the angels sing.


Louisa Bevington, 1895 1


Introduction


Free love, for many anarchists in late nineteenth century Britain, was integral to any vision of a transformed society. A better world was on the agenda, and how to bring it about was the subject of intense anarchist debate. Then as now, anarchism was often characterised negatively as utopian, meaning unrealistic, unachievable. Anarchists often responded by trying to dissociate anarchism from utopianism, insisting that it was not ‘an artificially concocted, fanciful theory of reconstructing the world’, but based on ‘truth and reality’. 2 Tolstoy and Kropotkin, whose ideas inspired several utopian communities in Britain, criticised such experimentation as a diversion from the wider struggle for change. 3


Others, however, saw things differently:





[P]ropaganda cannot be diversified enough if we want to touch all. We want it to pervade and penetrate all the utterances of life, social and political, domestic and artistic, educational and recreational. There should be propaganda by word and action, the platform and the press, the street corner, the workshop and the domestic circle, acts of revolt, and the example of our lives as freemen. 4


READ ON




C9

You Are Welcome Here

Favianna Rodriguez

No Ban. No Wall. No Hate.

Date

January 2020

Format

Offset Print

unsigned open edition

Subjects

ANTI-WARMIGRATION

Size

Medium

18" x 24"
46cm x 61cm

Price

$25

This is my new interpretation of my classic “Migration is Beautiful” poster. The monarch butterfly represents the natural aspect of migration. Human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time. We are a part of nature, and it’s in our human nature to move, just as all other species move. Borders were created by governments – but they are meant to keep people in or out, they are NOT a natural part of our environment. My art imagines a world without walls and borders.

This monarch butterfly symbolizes the right that ALL living beings have to freely move. Like the monarch butterfly, human beings cross borders in search of safer habitats. Like the monarch butterfly, human beings cross borders in order to survive. Each wing in this butterfly shows a human profile.

This design was originally created for the Oakland Unified School District, a sanctuary school district, in the Summer of 2017.

Australia's Ancient Forests Survived Planetary Extinction. Now, They're Burning

The Gondwanan rainforests are a living time capsule that survived a continental breakup and a planetary mass extinction event. Now, they’re being tested by humanity.

By Maddie Stone

Jan 24 2020

IMAGE: POSNOV VIA GETTY IMAGES

Amidst the remote and rugged mountains that trace Australia’s eastern coastline lies one of the ecological wonders of the world: A patchwork of temperate rainforests that trace their roots to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

The Gondwanan rainforests are a living time capsule; home to ancient conifers that sauropods likely grazed on during the Jurassic Period and flowering plants that offer a window into Earth’s botanical evolution during the Cretaceous. This primeval landscape hosts an astounding array of animals, too, including rare, endemic frogs and marsupials, and songbirds whose dawn choruses are an acoustic window into deep time.

The Gondwanan forests have survived a continental breakup and a planetary mass extinction event. Now, they’re being tested by humanity.

More than 80 percent of the Gondwana Rainforest World Heritage Area lies within New South Wales, the eastern Australian state that’s been hardest hitby this year’s devastating bushfires. Of it, some 54 percent—a little over 400,000 acres of land—has burned in recent months, in some cases quite severely, the New South Wales environmental department quietly reported last week. The Gondwana world heritage sites in Queensland haven’t fared much better: a little under half of their area has been affected by the fires, said Scott Buchanan, executive director of Queensland’s Wet Tropics Management Authority, which oversees tropical rainforests further north.

“These are the sort of things we just don’t expect,” Buchanan said.

Some of the most severe burning occurred within fire-adapted eucalyptus stands, said Mark Graham, an ecologist with the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales. But with Australia coming off its hottest and driest year on record, many areas of permanently wet rainforest dried out and caught fire too.

“We’re in historically unprecedented conditions,” Graham said. “And what that means is that areas of rainforest that are rarely if ever able to be burned have been burning extensively.”

Indeed, across all of New South Wales, including the Gondwana world heritage sites and elsewhere, fires have impacted over 700,000 acres of rainforest, or 35 percent of the state’s total rainforest land, according to the environment department.

Scientists won’t be able to fully assess the damage until after the flames are completely doused. While rain over the past week brought relief across much of eastern Australia, there are still some fires burning, and fire season isn’t over. But preliminary data released by the New South Wales Rural Fire Service suggests that parts of the Gondwana rainforest world heritage complex, including Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, and Gibraltar Range National Park experienced significant and widespread damage.

Graham has personally documented damage in the Gondwana rainforests of the Mount Hyland Nature Reserve and New England National Park, the latter of which has a border just a few miles from his house. Fires in New England National Park, he said, tore through one of the remaining strongholds of Antarctic beech, dropping charred leaves of the ancient temperate rainforest tree onto his front yard.

Further north, there’s been devastation within Nightcap National Park, including severe burning within the world’s last remaining stand of nightcap oak, a relic tree from the early evolution of flowering plants that has survived tens of millions of years. Unlike the Gondwana-era Wollemi pine trees, which made it through the fires thanks to a widely publicizedrescue effort, the fate of the nightcap oak has attracted little notice.

These forests contain more than ancient trees: They’re hubs of plant and animal biodiversity carried through from Gondwana. And it’s likely that diversity has taken a serious hit.

On Monday, Australia’s environment and energy department released an initial list of threatened plants and animals across the country whose habitat has been affected by the bushfires. The list, which covers 327 species, includes over a dozen animals native to the Gondwanan rainforests. Up to half of the habitat of the endangered giant barred frog—which dwells within the nightcap oak grove, among other places—has been impacted by fire. Ditto for the brush-tailed rock-wallaby and the long-nosed potoroo, two vulnerable marsupials. The endangered rufous scrub-bird and Hastings river mouse, meanwhile, might have lost up to 80 percent of their habitat.

Graham warned that there could be species that weren’t previously considered threatened but are now at risk. The Gondwana forests were designated world heritage sites, in part, because they support an astounding diversity of ancient songbird lineages. While many of these species were previously regarded as secure, some strongholds “have burnt out so extensively [they] may now actually be much less secure,” he said.

Part of the reason rainforest fires are so unnerving for ecologists is because these are ecosystems where plants and animals typically escape the flames. “For wildlife management, these are places normally seen as a refuge,” said Buchanan of Queensland’s Wet Tropics Management Authority. “The wildlife will run out of the drier forest into the rainforest.”

A key concern for Buchanan and others is that this rainy refuge will become more flammable as climate change pushes many parts of Australia into a hotter, drier state. Just as rising temperatures are forcing some tropical rainforest species, like the white lemuroid ringtail possum, to migrate uphill, ever-encroaching flames could shrink the safe havens available for plants and animals that are already highly restricted.

"Given what humanity is doing to the global climate, we may well be facing an ongoing degradation and reduction of these Gondwana reserves"

Scientists are also concerned about the ability of these ancient rainforests to regenerate in the wake of fires they’re not adapted to handle. As Graham put it, the Gondwana rainforests are already “islands in the sky,” peppering mountaintops and surrounded by flammable eucalyptus forests. If fire seasons continue to worsen, Buchanan said, the eucalyptus trees could gain a competitive advantage and start permanently edging out their neighbors.

“The real issue is, even places that have retained core areas [of untouched rainforest], the margins have been impacted, and the areas that buffered them from fire have taken such a massive hit that these core Gondwanan areas may continue to be eroded through fire and drought,” Graham said.

There are Gondwanan rainforests that, mercifully, seem to have escaped the flames. These include the core of Washpool National Park, the largestrainforest wilderness area in New South Wales, and several parks to the northeast near the Queensland border. These areas need to be protected at all costs, Graham said, as they represent refuge from which the severely burned areas might, perhaps, be repopulated.

At the same time, there may only be so much people can do to preserve and restore these forests if climate change continues to worsen.

“Given what humanity is doing to the global climate, we may well be facing an ongoing degradation and reduction of these Gondwana reserves,” Graham said.

January 27-31, 2020, is Holocaust Remembrance Week.

Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio is Elliott Naishtat. Naishtat -- a progressive Democrat who held the District 49 seat in the Texas House of Representatives from January 1991 to January 2017 -- is an Austin-based member of the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission.   The mission of the Holocaust Commission is "to bring awareness of the Holocaust and other genocides to Texas students, educators, and the general public by ensuring availability of resources, and in doing so imbue in individuals a sense of responsibility to uphold human value and inspire citizens in the prevention of future atrocities." January 27-31, 2020, is Holocaust Remembrance Week. The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 -- the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau -- as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides. During his work in the Texas State Legislature, Elliott Naishtat focused on health and human services issues, particularly the needs of low-and moderate-income people. He was a founding board member of the House Progressive Caucus. He was reelected 12 times and passed 330 bills during his 26-year career in the Texas House. NEXT WEEK ON RAG RADIO: January 31, 2020, 2-3 p.m. (CT): John A. Moretta, Author of "Political Hippies and Hip Politicos: Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism in 1960s Austin, Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January 2020.

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP-91.7 FM -- an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run, solar-powered community radio station in Austin, Texas -- in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project. Rag Radio can be heard on: KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Friday, 2-3 p.m. (CT) and streamed here, WFTE 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA & 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA, Sunday, 10-11 a.m. (ET) and streamed here, KPFT HD-3 90.1 (Pacifica Radio) in Houston, Wednesday, 1-2 p.m. (CT) and streamed here. KKRN 88.5-FM in Round Mountain, CA, Mondays, 5:30-6:30 a.m. (PT), and streamed here. WALHRadio.com in Wilmington, OH. Streamed Thursdays at 8 p.m. and midnight (ET) here. RADIO FREE AMERICA. Streamed live here. VETERANS TODAY website. Featured podcast. Listen here anytime after posting. INTERNET ARCHIVE. Listen to Rag Radio podcasts here. THE RAG BLOG. Find links to all Rag Radio podcasts at the Rag Radio page. AUDIOPORT.ORG. For Pacifica stations and Pacifica affiliates only: Here. RAG RADIO ARCHIVES   Rag Radio Podcast    Dr. Banafsheh Madaninejad & Dr. Roy Casagranda    'The U.S.' Bizarre Obsession with Iran' Featured on Rag Radio are Dr. Roy Casagranda and Dr. Banafsheh Madaninejad and the topic is "Scorned Love: The U.S.' Bizarre Obsession with Iran." Roy Casagranda is Professor of Government at Austin Community College and serves as a Middle East analyst for the Austin ABC affiliate KVUE, and FOX affiliate, Fox 7. Banafsheh Madaninejad is a scholar-activist of Islamic Studies, Feminist Studies and Critical Race Theory who has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere.  Listen to the podcast of this show. Photo by Alan Pogue Rag Radio Host and producer: Thorne Dreyer Co-producer and engineer: Tracey Schultz Contact us at ragradio@koop.org  Rag Radio features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about progressive politics, culture, and history. Guests include newsmakers, artists, leading thinkers, and public figures -- from Austin, Texas, and around the world. Host Thorne Dreyer was a founding editor of Austin's historic Sixties underground newspaper, The Rag, a founding editor of Space City! in Houston, an editor at LNS in New York, and a former station manager of KPFT-FM (Pacifica) in Houston. He now edits The Rag Blog and is on the board of directors of the New Journalism Project. The Rag Radio team: Thorne Dreyer, Tracey Schulz, Alice Embree, Roger Baker, Suzy Shelor, Glenn Smith, and Roy Casagranda. Celebrating The Rag: Austin's Iconic Underground Newspaper Edited by Thorne Dreyer,  Alice Embree & Richard Croxdale "A raucous, absorbing excursion back to the 1960s and '70s."  --Kirkus Reviews   Learn more about it here.  Buy it here.