Don’t Just Do Nothing

Nov

24

2024

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From It's Going Down

Original title: "Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism"

Jewish anarchists weigh-in on how people can organize and act in the changing terrain. For a zine PDF, go here.

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. —Pirkei Avot (2:21)

As Christofascism takes the reins of US power, thereby impacting the whole of this continent and the globe, it should be abundantly clear at this point that appealing to the state—any state—is a losing strategy. The world had already lost when the “choice” this November was between two versions of fascism.

We offer up this sampler of ideas, encouraging you to think and act for yourselves, with each other, as precisely the only winning strategy. If each idea here seems not enough on its own—well, it isn’t.

The Pirkei Avot quote, perhaps the most widely known and cited teaching from Jewish text, was penned some two thousand years ago. So many forms of despotism—empires, monarchies, and states—have risen and fallen in that time. We are not alone, as anarchists and Jews, in our ethical imperative to wrestle with every type of authority.

Ancestors throughout human history—people of all colors, genders, and cultures of this earth—have struggled together to resist the imposition of coercive, hierarchical violence. Crucially, people have autonomously organized, defended, and practiced myriad forms of mutual aid, collective care, and self-governance for millennia—what is often called “prefigurative politics.” They haven’t put off the worlds they want to see but instead have directly acted as if they were already free.

As diasporic rebels, our Jewishness teaches us to rely on solidarity beyond all borders. Our teachings compel us to lean on the community of others to live lives worth living, whether we are mourning or celebrating, or grappling time and again with what liberation should and could look like. When we start Shabbat each week—twenty-five hours of practicing “the world to come”—and end it with Havdalah—when we ease ourselves back into this brutal “world as it is”—we do so with braided offerings (bread and a candle, respectively). Such braids, in these times, underscore the imperative for interwovenness, for interrelationality, between each and every one of us, from all walks of life, who want to destroy fascism and bring about liberatory social transformations.

May all freedom-seeking peoples journey side by side toward those aspirations by better loving and caring for each other.

Here are twenty things you can do to counter fascism—yes, you! yes, now! Dream up and put into motion many, many more things too. This is only a beginning.

1. Do doikayt (hereness) within your one-on-one relationships. What would it look like to check in with each of your beloveds based on your current conditions and communicate with love to each other what you envision for the world you want to build? Identify the soil amendments necessary in thought, word, and deed for those seeds to flourish.

2. Make people soup and do not stop inviting them over for soup! Be a reason for living.

3. Build a support network. Join with like-minded people and organize for quality over quantity; a few devoted comrades can go further than a large and dispassionate group. Make art about it. Your support network, the love of your friends and family, can always be broader; build it bigger, with care and intentionality. Make more art about it. Try out new actions: talk to people and ask how they’re feeling, distribute literature, organize a study group, or put up stickers or disperse seed bombs together. With every loving bond we forge, and all the new art we make, we divorce ourselves a little more from the demons that haunt us — hopelessness, irony, and complacency — and find sparks of possibility. Try, fail, and try again and again.

4. Buy, accumulate, or otherwise procure Plan B, and save it for yourself and others in case it’s needed later. Set up a Plan B distro in your community. Do the same with other, potentially soon-hard-to-access supplies related to bodily autonomy.

5. Write letters to people in prison and detention, send them books, and/or do jail support and solidarity for those facing state repression in your communities. Act in ways that thwart carceral logics in your responses to conflict and harm as well as your day-to-day relations with others. Remember, there are no prisons or cops in olam ha-ba (the world to come).

6. Make art and display it in public. Draw, paint, or write a colorful sign about your dreams, your hopes for a better world, or to celebrate something that you love about this one. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think of yourself as an artsy type. If you can, get together with others to do this; share art materials, space, and ideas. Wheat paste (or wallpaper paste or glue) your finished work in public—somewhere you and others will see it when going about your daily lives. You’ve now made a material change to your surroundings. It will make people smile. It will make people feel less alone. It will make visible your resistance as well as visions. It also won’t last forever. Nothing does. You can always make more.

7. Take concrete steps to build relationships beyond borders and strengthen global solidarity with those who share your values. Here are a few starting points. Learn a new language and schedule mutual practice sessions with others studying your language; such skills will likely also prove useful to aid those at increased threat of being targeted. Reach out to other people (or collectives, projects, etc.) in other parts of the world who you share affinity with—Jews and Muslims, dispossessed and displaced people, anarchists and queers, and so on—and see if there’s anything you can collaborate on. Seek out the stories of people who fought or fled authoritarian regimes in the past and present; learn from their experiences, and engage in discussions about our current challenges and a diversity of tactics to address them.

8. Learn new skills, share them, and help others learn new skills toward everything we need and desire — everything for everyone, and what’s more for free. Learn to be a medic, facilitator, birth and death doula, electrician, filmmaker, mediator, writer, researcher to dig up information for your local antifascist crews, and on and on. Learn how to stop bleeds, plant gardens, squat and/or build houses, purify water, craft zines, sew clothing, repair cars, use a chain saw, make composting toilets, or cook for crowds. Learn how to aid folks in finding refuge, calming their nervous systems, setting up digital security, getting hormones, and so much more.

9. Feel your emotions. Do not sublimate them. Feel them and remember that this connects us to everyone who has ever despaired. Feel them with others. Set up peer support networks, a weekend-long emotional care clinic or daylong emotional aid skills share, or something as simple as social spaces where you can find others, sip herbal tea, and reciprocally warm each others’ hearts, even if temporarily.

10. Learn about and begin to practice alternative decision-making structures and group processes that have served those who got shit done in the past. Practice good processes that are cut from the cloth that the Zapatistas refer to as buen gobierno (good governance, or self-governance). Learn about Zapatista autonomous communities, Chéran, Rojava, and many other examples of self-governance, past and present, as inspiration as well as horizons to work toward.

Download Zine PDF

11. Gather and distribute free N95/KN95 masks and COVID tests as a baseline toward building a more generalized harm reduction crew that can gather and distribute, for example, Naloxone, fentanyl test strips, clean needles, condoms, and lube. Normalize COVID, other health protections, and additional ways of taking reciprocal care of each other. Go to outdoor events (or mask up for indoor ones) to table and share pamphlets on collective COVID safety and harm reduction.

12. We have a long history of fighting fascism, states, and policing, including as embodied in a rich tradition of anti-authoritarian Jewish songs. Sing “Daloy Politsey/Polizei” (down with the police) at your next prison noise demo or Palestinian solidarity action. Start a study group and find inspiration in those stories—and then act on them. Join in fascist watches and cop watches, or start them in your neighborhood or city. Prepare forward for community self-defense, which can come in many shapes and sizes.

13. If you care for a child or children, work with one or many other caregivers to create a mutual aid group if there isn’t one already! Distribute multilingual flyers at pickup and drop-off spots for school, day care, or local playgrounds in order to find other caregivers to involve. Plan weekly or biweekly meetups at whatever space kids usually hang out (such as a park), and share needs and resources.

14. Revive the concept and practice of kassi, the mutual aid funds/networks that used to keep neighbors afloat and supported in eastern European shtetls. Borrow from your own ancestral traditions/histories of mutual aid to build real-life community by strengthening relations with your neighbors and comrades for the days and years to come.

15. Take time to mourn your losses and grieve your dead—as inseparable from fighting and organizing for the living; as part and parcel of mending the world and ourselves. Set up temporary and ongoing public altars. Paint murals to honor lost friends and comrades. Lean on the deep wisdom of grief rituals that have sustained life for millennia, such as saying Kaddish for the dead or doing shiva after a loss. Make rituals part of your resistance, queering and self-organizing them in collectivity with others. Take those rituals out into your community—by a river, on a street corner, at a DIY space or radical bookfair, during a forest defense or as a direct action.

16. Feed people for free. Look for a Food Not Bombs or Coffee Not Cops chapter or similar non-hierarchical mutual aid project near you, get in touch, and join in collecting ingredients for, cooking, and/or serving a meal. If there’s nothing in your area, organize a free picnic; put up posters and encourage everybody to come—and optionally, bring a dish. Talking to the people you share the food with is important; do this if you can. Notice the moment when someone comes to understand that food can be good and free and shared without restrictions, obligations, eligibility criteria, or expectations; this means that things don’t have to be the way they are.

17. If a friend or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts and reaches out to you, offer to drop everything and be present with them. Small acts of peer support can make an enormous difference; think of yourself as a “tourniquet” for them when they most need it. You can hold space for them, for instance; don’t make it about you or act scared but instead simply allow them to share feelings, especially without fear of the cops being called. Or keep them company and help look after their basic needs that day. Or let friends and other people you trust know in advance that they can call you in these kinds of situations, and that you’ll take a weapon away from them for as long as needed if they ask.

18. Organize a stoop or porch sale with a few other households, or even a regular stoop or porch sale, and use the funds to cover material needs for solidarity efforts, such as abortion or bail funds, or for gender-affirming surgery or aiding folks during a rent strike. Ask yourself: What time and materials could I easily donate that would have an exponential effect and allow me to meet and organize with friends and neighbors in my community? Rather than a personal responsibility or charity, fundraising becomes a way of building deeper networks of care and connection.

19. Engage in play with others as a gateway to imagining other worlds and experimenting with getting there while cultivating camaraderie and goodwill. Hold game nights. Invent your own versions of group “sports” such as capture the flag, tag, and soccer, and gather folks in a park to make riotously merry. Self-organize a queer Purim spiel or other DIY theatrics, and simply be silly (and/or use your performances to make fun of the social order and dream up ways it might tumble). Add playfulness to your banners, events, organizing, and actions.

20. Slow down. Heed Jewish wisdom: days and hours of rest are sacred. Heed disabled wisdom: your work is completely irrelevant to your worth! Your ancestors began weaving unfucked social fabrics and burning down fucked-up ones before you were a glimmer in their eye. Descendants to come will be weaving and unfucking and burning still. What can we even weave with only weak threads connecting us? Trust takes years. Any faster, and conflict rends our fabric like kri’ah, the Jewish ritual act of tearing cloth in mourning. So come fascism or liberation: weave slow, take sabbaticals, feast on kugel, and sing with your comrades down by the river.

This zine is a communal effort, with advice gleaned from the following Jewish anarchists: alice, asher, cat, chanaleh, cindy, cindy barukh, hannah, jhaavo, lilli, mazel, scarab, simcha, and vicky.

 

The Anarchism of Intellectuals

Nov

24

2024

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From Books & Ideas / La Vie des Idées, by Cyril Legrand , 21 November, translated by Arianne Dorval

About: Catherine Malabou, Au voleur ! Anarchisme et philosophie, Puf

Whether conceived as advocacy of disorder or as “the highest expression of order,” as the abolition of the state or as state-led deregulation, anarchy feeds on every ambiguity. This is the case even in contemporary philosophy.

Catherine Malabou’s latest book can be read as the story of a misunderstanding: the conceptual and political misunderstanding surrounding anarchy and anarchism.

The terms “anarchy” and “anarchism” are admittedly confusing. Long synonymous with chaos and disorder, they have been used since the nineteenth century to also designate an organized political movement—which has taken on a variety of forms—and a social ideal—described by contrast as “the highest expression of order” by Élisée Reclus. [1] As if this ambiguity were not enough, anarchism, which is by definition anti-state, is now sometimes associated with forms of state deregulation and withdrawal. Malabou herself strangely adds to this confusion when she uses the term “de facto anarchism” (in contrast to “dawning anarchism”) to designate the anomie of a social world “condemned to a horizontality of desertion,” or when she evokes “the anarchist turn in capitalism,” Donald Trump’s anarchism, “cyber-anarchism,” or “market anarchism.” This is all very perplexing.

What Malabou euphemistically calls the “polymorphism of anarchism”—where one might be tempted to see a certain conceptual disorder—is aggravated by the specific subject of the book: namely, the way in which a number of contemporary philosophers have recently taken up the concept of “anarchy” without declaring themselves anarchist and have thereby engaged in a “paradoxical form of anarchy without anarchism.”

Anarchy Without Anarchism

Indeed, none of the concepts eruditely discussed by Malabou in the central chapters of the book—Reiner Schürmann’s “principle of anarchy,” [2] Emmanuel Levinas’s “anarchic responsibility,” Jacques Derrida’s “responsible anarchism,” Michel Foucault’s “anarcheology,” Giorgio Agamben’s “profanatory anarchism,” and Jacques Rancière’s “staging anarchy”—refers directly to Proudhon, to Bakunin, or to the movements for which these two nineteenth-century thinkers provided the inspiration and theoretical groundwork. On the contrary, the philosophers under study generally make a point of explicitly distancing themselves from anarchist thinkers and movements, and sometimes even adopt political positions far removed from theirs: Levinas clearly defends the necessity of a state, Rancière argues for a kind of police force, and Foucault remains fundamentally attached to the principle of government. At no point does any of them go so far as to call into question what Proudhon termed “the governmental prejudice.” As Malabou observes:

Let me repeat my point: Not for a moment do philosophers consider the possibility that we might live without being governed. Self-management and self-determination are not serious political possibilities for any one of them. In the final analysis, government is always safe, even if it takes the form of self-government.

Malabou emphasizes that while none of these philosophers is strictly anarchist, all of them have inevitably been influenced by anarchism: Whether they like it or not, whether they acknowledge it or not, the philosophers of anarchy are indebted in one way or another to anarchist thinkers and movements. This is primarily evident at the terminological and conceptual level. For as Malabou recalls, it was Proudhon who first gave a positive meaning to the concept of “anarchy”: “Without this revolution in meaning, none of the philosophical concepts of anarchy developed in the twentieth century could have seen the light of day.”

More fundamentally, one could hypothesize that all of these philosophers have been influenced by the radicalness attributed to anarchism (rightly so, though at times in a rather folkloric manner): Beyond the word itself, it is the gesture of anarchism that fascinates and inspires. The imaginary that has developed around anarchism, and more specifically around the anarchist bomber of the late nineteenth century, is no doubt largely unfounded (very few attacks were actually carried out), but it has nevertheless left a profound impact on the intellectual world, on literature, and on legislation. [3] Philosophy—in particular that which presents itself as “deconstruction” (a translation of Heidegger’s Destruktion)—may well be haunted by this imaginary of radicalness and destruction.

Yet, while the philosophers under study have clearly drawn inspiration from anarchism and have even “stolen” the concept, they have also partially betrayed and diluted its meaning. As Malabou observes, none of them has taken this inspiration to its limit; all have remained “at the edge of the radicalness they advocate.” And this not only because they have not dared to declare themselves anarchist, but also because their attachment to the governmental prejudice has prevented them from deepening their own deconstructionist approaches. As if through symmetry, their lack of political radicalness has been accompanied by a lack of philosophical radicalness. This is what the central chapters of the book attempt to demonstrate.

The Anti-intellectualism of Anarchists

According to Malabou, not only is the philosophy of anarchy influenced by anarchism, but the anarchist movement would in turn benefit from the influence of this philosophy: “Philosophy makes it possible for anarchy to undertake the work that anarchism did not do.” One should therefore engage in the deepening, radicalization, and “rejuvenation of classic anarchism,” in line with what has come to be known as “post-anarchism.” Specifically, one should: deconstruct the rationalism, positivism, and naturalism of classic anarchism along with Schürmann, Derrida, and Levinas; desubstantialize the concept of power along with Foucault; renounce the fetishization of excess and the celebration of transgression in favor of desacralization and profanation along with Agamben [4]; and engage in a broader rethinking of social and political emancipation along with Rancière. Since the late 1990s, a number of authors and activists described as “post-anarchists” have claimed to pursue one or the other of these endeavors.

However, there seem to be some fundamental limits to this rapprochement. Anarchists’ reluctance to engage with philosophy, which Malabou deplores and deems “paradoxical,” does have its reasons.

The works of Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, and Agamben—and to a lesser extent those of Foucault and Rancière—are undeniably highly theoretical and speculative and sometimes even completely abstruse. Moreover, reading and understanding these works require mastery of specialized academic knowledge, or at least of a set of philosophical landmarks and references that are far from being widely shared. Anarchism, which is oriented more towards practice and revolutionary organizing than towards speculative elaboration, remains for its part profoundly anti-intellectual [5] and wary of excessive theoretical detours. Malabou acknowledges this “hostility to philosophical reflection” and finds it regrettable: “Anarchism must open itself up to philosophical dialogue.” It should be noted, however, that this hostility concerns a certain kind of philosophical reflection, namely that which involves too many mediations and is only accessible to an elite. To be suspicious of intellectuals—of their sophistications and of the power they sometimes arrogate to themselves—is obviously not to reject intelligence and reflection as such. Anarchists are not so much against philosophy—or even metaphysics—as they are against its academic capture and speculative inflation, which sometimes veer into Byzantine complexity, as is the case in the philosophical works discussed by Malabou.

In fact, one wonders to whom the book is addressed: Given that the central chapters are devoted to erudite commentaries on difficult authors who themselves tend to use sophisticated references, it is difficult to see how these various reflections—which might be said to constitute an “anarchism of intellectuals” [6]—could directly feed into the practices of anarchist activists as Malabou seems to expect. As Renaud Garcia writes in Le désert de la critique. Déconstruction et politique (L’Échappée, 2015, pp. 25 and 44): “The adoption of the deconstructionist ‘tool-box of ideas’ by the most radical currents of social critique actually contributes to making [this critique] unintelligible to most of the people who might be interested in it.” And Garcia later asks: “Who are the deconstructionists writing for?”

An Anarchist Ontology?

However, the fact that anarchism is on principle hostile to philosophical flights of fancy does not prevent philosophers from interrogating the philosophical or ontological foundations of anarchism—even if this leads them to the conclusion that there are no foundations. In reality, Malabou conducts precisely this sort of—properly philosophical—interrogation in her book: Is there a philosophy, or even an ontology, of anarchism? And if so, should one view philosophical an-archy as the philosophy of political anarchism? Does the lack of a principle of command ultimately rest on the lack of a metaphysical first principle? In short: Is it possible to develop an ontologico-political anarchism? Malabou has her doubts:

We must concede that all attempts to think being and politics together have been a disaster. From Plato’s “communism” to the mathematical totalitarianism of some forms of Maoism, through the Heideggerian night, the elaboration of connections between ontology and politics authorized by the original bricolage of archē, which, as we have seen, extends its reign in both fields, has given rise to nothing but terrifying dead-ends. [...] Why risk a new impediment? Wouldn’t it be better, far better, to make a cut between being and anarchism, to stop ontologizing politics and politicizing ontology [...]?

And yet, Malabou specifically attempts this ontologization of anarchism in her conclusion. She even goes so far as to claim that “this is the task dawning in anarchism” and that there is “urgency” in taking up these philosophical challenges. But unlike what is sometimes implicitly or explicitly the case in the various currents of anarchism, the ontology defended by Malabou does not rest on a first principle: Reason, Nature, Life, or even God (for there does exist a Christian anarchism, as illustrated in particular by Leo Tolstoy). The ontology on which anarchism must rest, or which constitutes an-archism, is literally without principle (an-archē): It is therefore, in the words of Malabou, a “plastic ontology.” As the author observes:

As the only political form that is always to be invented, to be shaped before it exists, precisely because it depends on no beginning or command, anarchism is never what it is. That’s where it’s being lies. This plasticity is the meaning of its being, the meaning of its question.

Malabou thus returns to a concept she has been working on since her first book, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, [7] though she unfortunately does not develop it further. After pointing out that this idea was already present in Bakunin—who defined anarchism as a “plastic force” in which “no office petrifies, becomes fixed and remains irrevocably attached to a single person” (quoted by Malabou)—she elevates plasticity to the paradoxical rank of ontological principle of anarchism. This ontological anarchism does not constitute a defined and closed metaphysical system; on the contrary, it is at once flexible and plural, open and multiple, irreducible to a single hegemonic principle yet woven and dispersed between the different points of a “philosophical archipelago.” Anarchism is pluralism. What remains to be done is to trace its lines of flight.

In the very last pages of the book, Malabou addresses more concrete political considerations. Here Audrey Tang provides an unexpected source of inspiration: This Taiwanese cybernetician, free software programmer, and self-proclaimed “conservative anarchist” has been Minister of Digital Affairs in the Taiwanese government since 2016. Malabou expresses astonishment at the presence of an anarchist in government.

However, she does not take offense at this state of affairs, but seems pleased by it: “Joining institutions to better subvert them. Many will respond: These are the words of the powerful. And yet...” It is as if the search for “the governmental prejudice” conducted throughout the chapters on Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Agamben, and Rancière came to a halt with the end of the textual analysis, at the very moment when the question of action, organization, and strategic choices—anarchism’s main concern [8]—posed itself more concretely. As if by giving anarchism a philosophical (and academic) aura that it did not ask for, the ontologization of anarchism defended by Malabou paradoxically led to its depoliticization—for political anarchism is indeed hardly discussed in the book. As if, ultimately, “being an anarchist” were merely a matter of words.

Catherine Malabou, Au voleur ! Anarchisme et philosophie, Paris, Puf, 2022, 408 p., 21 €.

by
Cyril Legrand, 21 November

 

Yintah film review

Nov

24

2024

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From BC Counter Info

Original title: "Yintah film review: Anarchists in the blind spot, or the necessity to write our own histories"

Yintah is the latest installment of a long tradition of indigenous documentaries speaking truth to power against colonial violence in so-called Canada. The story told is of an anti-pipeline struggle to protect the richness of life that the Wedzin kwa river offers, a decade long fight that involved not only the Wet’suwet’en peoples of northern British-Columbia, but also hundreds of dedicated non-indigenous comrades who fought valiantly alongside them. Except the film chose to cast them aside.​​​​​​​

The documentary portrays land reoccupation through the personal projects of Freda Huson and Molly Wickham over the course of ten years, but also makes a point to frame those individual stories in a more expansive and continual relationship of the Wet’suwet’en people to the land. The conflict over industrial and otherwise settler-colonial exploitation of the land is part of the present, past, and future of the territory, and the film does a good job situating the latest struggle against Coastal Gaslink on a longer timeline. The film ends with a strong position of indigenous resilience in the face of lost battles, and should inspire many that the fight is never over as long as we are alive.

A central argument Yintah makes is one most indigenous social movements have been pushing forward in North America, which is that the land should be under local and traditional jurisdiction of its original peoples. This framework opens the door to a legalistic approach to anticolonial discourse (« Who is the rightful decider? »), which Yintah gives legitimacy to for example by recounting the Delgamuukw case as a historical win for the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxan nations. Referring to or using the western legal system is neither revolutionary nor anarchist, and comrades involved in indigenous solidarity work have highlighted this point of tension before. Yintah‘s non-critical approach to legalistic tactics distances its narrative from an uncompromising and feral position against the colonial state. But I guess it also paints a truthful depiction of how unfortunately many activists end up wasting their time and energy in lawsuits and legal cases. If we can briefly hear Freda say Delgamuukw hasn’t changed anything, then why waste precious screening minutes showcasing the legal fight in a positive light beforehand? It only reinforces reformist aspirations to pursue court battles. Relying on the judicial system to recognize indigenous governance also contributes to creating a new class of indigenous elite deciders (sellouts) that move on to exploit the land at the expense of ecosystems. This is happening right now as the Nisga’a Nation, an indigenous political entity legitimized by a treaty signed in 1998, has welcomed and invested in the construction of the PRGT pipeline, northwest of the CGL line.

The question of jurisdiction is not where anarchists and indigenous land defenders share the most affinity. Indigenous jurisdiction, even put through the lens of a pre-colonial political system, opens the door to legitimizing forms of authority that, in a decolonized future, would pit anarchists against indigenous figures of power, and is also today encouraging power imbalance on current shared sites of struggle. Thankfully Yintah does not shy away from including one scene that recounts one of the most discordant moments of the struggle when chief Namoks decided on his own, in fear of police use of force, to open the Unist’ot’en gates to pipeline workers, against the will of companions on site and Freda herself. This was not the only moment when power was yielded in the name of Wets’uwet’en traditional governance and at the expense of the fight against police and CGL. But it was maybe the most impactful one, and I am thankful this movie scene offers a brief moment of nuance in an otherwise sugarcoated version of the power dynamics on the frontline.

Land is of course absolutely central to anti-colonialism. During the struggle against the Northern Gateway project, the Coastal Gaslink construction and the RCMP’s heightened presence (roughly the 2012-2022 decade), the backroads territory has been the site of an impressive game of snakes and ladders to control the access to isolated valleys. Yintah chose to dedicate a lot of its screening time to traditional uses of the land. We are shown many scenes of harvesting game and berries, the importance of transferring wet’suwet’en knowledges and values to younger generations and the relationship between traditional ways of life and health. Crucial to the #LandBack movement and Indigenous resurgence, I understand why these themes are explored as an exclusively wet’suwet’en story. But the story of confrontation with pipeline projects was not exclusively wet’suwet’en, and Yintah turned a blind eye to the central role anarchists playedin defending the land against industrial invasion. This is what every comrade has been whispering about since the film came out. Over the decade, there has been hundreds of anarchists who, from far away and traveling onsite, dedicated their hearts and their time and sometimes took immense risk to defend wet’suwet’en land. Anarchists organized solidarity actions in both affinity based models and in larger scale social contexts across the country, expanding all the way to Europe and the Pacific Northwest of the US for years, and insurgent tactics have flourished during #ShutDownCanada. According to many first hand accounts, the frontline camps could not have survived without anarchists’ contributions. The struggle was huge and has changed many non-wet’suwet’en people’s lives, many anarchists, and many others as well. Including the solidarity from non-Indigenous peoples would only have strengthened the Wet’suwet’en story of resistance, not diluted it. Do we have the audacity to bring this up as a grievance to our Indigenous friends? Is it totally misplaced to critique an indigenous film that makes no place for non-indigenous peoples? Not PC for sure.

The narrative choice of Yintah to focus on Molly and Freda also sometimes feels almost claustrophobic, and we lose a sense of the scale of the movement that involved thousands. There is a risk that countless people will watch Yintah and think that such a large scale moment of rupture rests on the shoulders of a few key figures, or that indigenous resistance can make do without the solidarity of allies and accomplices across all social identities. Leadership is a natural human dynamic that can organically move people to act, and can shift depending on the relationships in a said group. But there is a fine line between recognizing leadership qualities as natural and beneficial, and the development of a cult of personality that can be created by certain media deformations. The image of Gidimt’en Checkpoint portrayed through its media channels (instagram and youtube) has misled many folks who have unfortunately showed up to camp with unrealistic expectations such as finding a space that is constantly active in preparing confrontation or occupied and maintained mainly by Indigenous peoples. The mediatic focus of the struggle might also have put too much weight on our heroines, and health and the need for a sustainable involvement has been deprioritized. One of my concerns for upcoming struggles is that the film could embolden identity politicians to recreate a social hierarchy that enables abuse of power on future frontlines.

What I find unfortunate is that there is the propensity in activist discourse to constantly portray oneself as a victim. Yintah is unfortunately no exception. The 1h45 minutes of the documentary painfully recounts all the possible events and situations under which the state, the police or extractive industries have oppressed the Wet’suwet’en peoples. Not that we must shy away from truth speaking, or that the string of events of the struggle should be manipulated or distorted (blockades were dismantled, cabins destroyed, people arrested, and so on), but every publication whether it be book, artwork or film, makes choices in the words used, the scenes that are shown and the potential scenes that are left out. The History we remember is the one some chose to write how they saw fit. There are ways to speak of and against domination that are unapologetically defiant, with our sight set on the target. CGL might have completed its construction, but it took them extra billions and a couple years more than anticipated, because a handful of strong hearts were barricading roads, scaring away pipeline workers and sabotaging their equipment. There were countless confrontational moments on the territory that were (maybe, maybe not filmed) left out of the editing. With its narrative constructed around resilience instead of resistance, Yintah might not be able to inspire others to draw their daggers. 

It might not be our Wet’suwet’en companions’ responsibility to tell our side of the story, but our complete invisibilisation from the struggle is basically dishonest. If we take a step back, we can see this situation is not new in the historiography of anarchism. Unpleasant to the general opinion and defiant to the leftist movements, anarchist action and involvement in historical events has always been undermined, evacuated, or falsified when it was time to write down a page of History. In some ways the film continues the legacy of writing off anarchists as outside agitators. Instead of recounting how anarchists have been invited to come to the frontlines and have engaged with land defense in a sustained way for years, Yintah litteraly places anarchists outside of the frame of legitimate participants in the struggle, and leaves room for the liberal media narrative of violent hijackers to step forward. This is hard to digest, when we know in reality that there were moments when only masked white anarchists were present and they were asked to pose with warrior flags for a good photo op. As I write this, land defense in northern BC has already kicked off a new chapter of resistance, this time against the PRGT pipeline. When non-Indigenous anarchists show up, they might be once again be met with confusion from Indigenous peoples, just as they were at times during the wet’suwet’en struggle, faced with questions like “why are you here ?” rather than being understood as part of a larger fabric of anti-industiral actors in the region.

Yintah has only received positive public feedback. What is the point of yet another text doing the devil’s work at pointing at the problems? While I wanted to share what I think is valuable criticism that was discussed amongst friends and companions around me, I still think Yintah tells a beautiful story of two exceptional women that is worth sharing, and a story that hopefully inspires other Indigenous peoples to reoccupy their land and defend it against industrial destruction. What I take away from watching the film is the motivation to support and contribute to anarchists telling their own histories. In a world of overlapping truths, different layers of experiences and their takeaways can compliment and contradict each other. We do not need one official History of the past decade of struggle on the yintah.

“If anarchists don’t make their own History, their enemies will. […] Should we not wish that our stories end up in the hands of those who could only write them to suit their own needs” (Plain Words, Roofdruk/Compass editions, 2024​​​​​​​). 

In an anarchist history of the struggle on the yintah, the question of jurisdiction and other legal approaches would be presented as hindrances to the liberation of land and life. In an anarchist history of the struggle on the yintah, internal conflict would not be shoved under the rug but taken as an opportunity to try to draw lessons from, so we can continue to deconstruct how we relate to each other outside of civilization’s dogmas. In an anarchist history of the struggle on the yintah, we would recount the dozens of barricades on fire, cop attacks and destroyed machinery to remind us we are truly alive and free in the blissful moment of action. And there would probably be many more anarchist histories of the struggle on the yintah, I am after all just one amongst many anarchists.

Suggested further reading 

• Between Storms, anarchist reflections of solidarity with Wet’suwet’en resistance 
• Water Falling on Granite 
• The visceral viewpoint
• Call to action against PRGT pipeline
  

 USA

Bernie Sanders Tries to Stop U.S. Military Aid to Israel, Biden Reaffirms His Support, Protests Continue

Sunday 24 November 2024, by Dan La Botz



Senator Bernie Sanders introduced three resolutions in the Senate last week to stop U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. The resolutions to end U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza all received between 18 and 19 votes from Democrats and none from Republicans. While less than twenty percent of the one hundred senators, the vote reflected a growing divide in the Democratic Party and demonstrated significant opposition to President Joe Biden and the majority of Democrats who solidly back the Jewish state. Polls suggest that two-thirds of Democrats would like to either stop military aid to Israel altogether or make it conditional on a ceasefire.

As the Democratic Party failed that political and moral test, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, intentional attacks on civilians, “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” The ICC also issued a warrant for Hamas commander Ibrahim al-Masri, though he is believed to be dead.

Biden condemned the ICC’s actions, stating, “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

Also, at this same time, in the U.N. Security Council, the United States cast the only vote against a proposal calling for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, effectively vetoing the resolution in the 14-1 vote. “We could not support an unconditional cease-fire that failed to release the hostages,” said Robert A. Wood, an American ambassador to the United Nations. This was the fourth time that the U.S. blocked a ceasefire resolution in the Security Council.

The week before, the U.N. Human Rights Office condemned the killing of civilians in the war in Gaza, saying that 70 percent of the victims were women and children. It reported that 43,300 people had been killed but that many other dead are buried under the bombed-out buildings. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said, “this unprecedented level of killing, and injury of civilians is a direct consequence of the failure to comply with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”

While Biden’s support for Israel remained unwavering, Trump’s administration will be even worse. During the presidential debate before Biden dropped out of the race, Trump called for Netanyahu to “finish the job in Gaza.” In his first presidential term (2016-20), Trump supported the Netanyahu government, moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He also supported Israeli claims to the Golan Heights and to the West Bank and cut aid to Palestinians. Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is a Christian Zionist who does not recognize the existence of the Palestinian people.

Protests against U.S. support for Israel and against Israel’s war against Palestine have continued, though the campus movement was suppressed as students were suspended, expelled, or jailed. But off campus, activities continue. At Travis Airforce Base in northern California, about 50 protestors blocked the entrance to the base, and 28 people were arrested. One activist posted on X, “Americans want peace! STOP KILLING CHILDREN People’s Embargo! Stop funding Israel and War crimes.”

Under Trump, protestors will face greater surveillance, investigations, accusations of being foreign agents or terrorists, and the possible deportation of immigrants. Anti-Zionists will be accused of antisemitism and may be charged with hate speech. Resisting Trump is going to require a new strategy on the left.

24 Novembre 2024

P.S.

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• Dan La Botz

  Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.