Speaker 1: Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you know this is a compilation episode. So every
Speaker 1: episode of the week that just happened is here in
Speaker 1: one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you
Speaker 1: to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. Hey, everyone, Robert Evans here,
Speaker 1: Welcome to It could happen here, as I'm sure you're aware,
Speaker 1: at this point over the weekend, somewhere between five hundred
Speaker 1: and one thousand Hamas fighters. Those numbers have a lot
Speaker 1: of flex in them. It's really unclear at this moment.
Speaker 1: That just kind of my guess based on what I've
Speaker 1: seen so far, carried out a successful infiltration and sneak
Speaker 1: attack across a wide swath of the Israeli border. Their
Speaker 1: methods were varied from motorized hang gliders and boats to
Speaker 1: mobile columns of technicals and bulldozers which they use to
Speaker 1: breach fence lines. Surprise seems to have been newly total
Speaker 1: in their worst intelligence failure since the nineteen seventies. Many
Speaker 1: IDF troops were caught literally in their underwear. Casualties seem
Speaker 1: to have been highest among the police, who were unprepared
Speaker 1: for militants armed with conventional military weapons. Casualty accounts remain
Speaker 1: heavily in flux, so I will not labor over them here.
Speaker 1: Suffice to say that the best information at the time
Speaker 1: that I'm writing this suggests at least one thousand dead
Speaker 1: in the first day or so of fighting. It appears
Speaker 1: at the moment to be fairly evenly split between Israeli soldiers, police,
Speaker 1: and civilians, as well as Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians.
Speaker 1: We can expect the death toll among Palestinians to rise
Speaker 1: steadily in the near future as the bombing of Gaza escalates.
Speaker 1: It is very clear, though, that the Hamas did not
Speaker 1: strike only military targets, and Israelis and Palestinians are not
Speaker 1: the only people killed.
Speaker 2: Right now, there are reports.
Speaker 1: Coming in that a music festival, it was some sort
Speaker 1: of sytrance psychedelia festival in southern Israel, on land that
Speaker 1: was possibly illegally occupied, was attacked by Hamas militants. Something
Speaker 1: like two hundred and sixty people are confirmed to have
Speaker 1: been killed. There's pretty hideous video of a young German
Speaker 1: woman in her twenties, her corpse stripped, being paraded around
Speaker 1: by fighters. It's very ugly stuff. There's also unclear videos
Speaker 1: of other killings. I've seen one video of a man
Speaker 1: beating another man's head in it's claimed to be a
Speaker 1: HUMAS militant and civilian clothes beating a Filipino guest worker
Speaker 1: in Israel to death. There's no actual evidence that I've
Speaker 1: seen as to who either person in the video is,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the videos of horrible things that
Speaker 1: are spreading right now are just that, videos that definitely
Speaker 1: show violence, but that are extremely unclear as to who
Speaker 1: is perpetrating the violence and why. We do, of course
Speaker 1: know that hummas targeted a number of civilians. A significant
Speaker 1: number were killed, including people in their homes, and unknown
Speaker 1: numbers of people were kidnapped and taken back across the
Speaker 1: border to be ransomed later for imprisoned fighters and Palestinian civilians.
Speaker 1: This has happened before in previous escalations of conflict in
Speaker 1: the area. It's not a new tactic, and the videos
Speaker 1: of it are of course horrifying. The capturing and killing
Speaker 1: of civilians is by any definition of the term, a
Speaker 1: war crime. Israel's response has been horrifying as well, and
Speaker 1: writ on a larger scale. Significant chunks of Gaza have
Speaker 1: already been leveled in air strikes. At least one hospital
Speaker 1: has been targeted, killing a nurse. Israel has cut off
Speaker 1: power to Gasam, an active collective punishment that also qualifies
Speaker 1: as a war crime. That term has less weight than
Speaker 1: it used to these days. Many of us in the
Speaker 1: West grew up with illusions about a rules based international order.
Speaker 1: The crimes occurring now will continue to erode the idea
Speaker 1: that war might ever have limits, Like whitewater cutting a
Speaker 1: path through stone. I try to stay plugged into such things,
Speaker 1: and I become aware of this most recent eruption as
Speaker 1: it happened. I spent several hours trying to understand the
Speaker 1: early open source dilligence, watching people that I trusted in
Speaker 1: the region post videos that they could verify, and then
Speaker 1: I went to sleep. When I woke up, I saw
Speaker 1: the expected river of bloodthirst on social media. This is
Speaker 1: also nothing new. The Internet has not created this behavior.
Speaker 1: You may have read when you were in high school
Speaker 1: that early in the US Civil War, picnicking civilians would
Speaker 1: show up to ogle the Battle of Manassas. Certain aspects
Speaker 1: of online culture have, however, lent a deeper ugliness to
Speaker 1: the affair. I noticed this for the first time during
Speaker 1: the fighting against ISIS. I reported from Mosel several times
Speaker 1: and kept up with various Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, and
Speaker 1: Twitter accounts that shared footage and updates from the field.
Speaker 1: A subculture developed around this, fueled by a mix of
Speaker 1: professional seeking intel and amateurs, some of whom later became experts,
Speaker 1: and others of whom simply liked watching the violence. All
Speaker 1: of us experienced a degree of desensitization, and Gallo's humor
Speaker 1: was common. Researchers would share their favorite ISIS nachets, actively
Speaker 1: Jihati theme music, and throw Arabic phrases that they'd read
Speaker 1: in issues of Debiq, Isis's magazine into daily conversation. Lines
Speaker 1: of dialogue from different videos of combat became catchphrases. The
Speaker 1: best known of these was probably a video released in
Speaker 1: April of twenty sixteen, which showed a group of four
Speaker 1: ISIS fighters battling Kurdish troops north of Mosul. These guys
Speaker 1: were not overly familiar with their weaponry, much of which
Speaker 1: had recently been looted from Iraqi army stores. One of
Speaker 1: the fighters in the video, Abu Hajar, fucks up constantly,
Speaker 1: at one point roasting his own men with the back
Speaker 1: blast of a rocket launcher. The timing on it is
Speaker 1: pretty perfect, and it's basically impossible not to laugh a
Speaker 1: little at this. His comrade shouts a now infamous line
Speaker 1: at him, what is wrong with you? Abu Hajar. The
Speaker 1: man who filmed the video dies, of course, and so
Speaker 1: did a bunch of other people that day. Now, these
Speaker 1: guys are Isis fighters, so it wasn't hard to laugh
Speaker 1: at the footage and move on. I did, and so
Speaker 1: did many other people. I still chuckle sometime at it.
Speaker 1: Of late, though, I've come to find the laughter more unsettling.
Speaker 1: This started after the expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine. I
Speaker 1: began to see videos of wounded, dying, and dead Russian conscripts.
Speaker 1: These were often close in gory shots, devoid of broader information,
Speaker 1: and shot purely for entertainments. One thing to watch combat
Speaker 1: videos in which people die if it gives you an
Speaker 1: understanding of the nature of combat in that theater of war.
Speaker 1: The kinds of weapons, use the efficacy of certain tactics.
Speaker 1: It's another to just look at a bleeding teenager as
Speaker 1: he slowly dies and joke about it. Now, some of
Speaker 1: the folks who were laughing are people I knew Ukrainian
Speaker 1: civilians and volunteers, and I cannot blame them, and do
Speaker 1: not blame them for taking satisfaction or even mirth in
Speaker 1: the death of an invader. That is how war works,
Speaker 1: that is how war has always worked. It is foolish
Speaker 1: and cruel to ask for decorum from people under siege.
Speaker 1: I'm sure many Goasins feel the same about footage now
Speaker 1: flooding the Internet from this most recent attack. But many
Speaker 1: of the people cheering at dead Russian conscripts were not
Speaker 1: soldiers and not civilians who were being shelled by that state,
Speaker 1: but were random Americans, middle class, suburban war aficionados, far
Speaker 1: from the danger, who spent time, who took a moment
Speaker 1: from their day to joke about suffering soldiers in a
Speaker 1: foreign country. A mirror of that behavior now proliferates as well.
Speaker 1: It curdled my gut then and it still does. But
Speaker 1: my feelings here are immaterial. I have come to believe
Speaker 1: that this behavior is impossible to avoid or even mitigate.
Speaker 1: To a very substantial degree. It also appears to be
Speaker 1: nearly universal. Social media has made barbarism easier than ever
Speaker 1: to monetize. As the years have gone on, every new
Speaker 1: eruption of violence around the world brings with it more
Speaker 1: footage faster. Ocent open source intelligence accounts have gone from
Speaker 1: a niche obsession among reporters and conflict nerds to mainstream entertainment.
Speaker 1: Because views equal money, especially on Twitter, where Elon Musk
Speaker 1: pays people based on the end game age they get,
Speaker 1: there is now a financial incentive to post videos that
Speaker 1: will be shared widely, and as always, the stuff that
Speaker 1: is shared most widely is the stuff that makes people angry.
Speaker 1: Videos need not be truthful to spread. In some cases,
Speaker 1: this means reposting old footage as if it is new.
Speaker 1: This is particularly easy with the conflict in Gaza, since
Speaker 1: Israel has launched so many strikes against it over the years.
Speaker 1: One video of a building crumbling into rubble left or
Speaker 1: a missile strike is as good as another. To the
Speaker 1: rats scrambling for Elon Musk's pocket change, many viral disinformation
Speaker 1: videos are just clips from the check video game Arma two.
Speaker 1: For roughly a decade, footage of in game combat has
Speaker 1: gone viral, netting followers and sometimes money for all manner
Speaker 1: of shady figures. If you see video that's claimed to
Speaker 1: be an Israeli helicopter or a Russian helicopter or an
Speaker 1: American helicopter being shot down in some erupting field, you
Speaker 1: should really double check that, because there's always a very
Speaker 1: good chance that it's a clip from this video game
Speaker 1: of a chopper going down or of some other kind
Speaker 1: of military vehicle being taken out. In real warfare. It's
Speaker 1: quite rare to get footage at a good angle and
Speaker 1: close to that sort of thing. So anytime you see
Speaker 1: footage that seems like it might be too good to
Speaker 1: be real, it probably is. Such disinformation is, of course unsightly,
Speaker 1: but that's not all it is. It can provoke violence
Speaker 1: as well. A recent New York Times article on social
Speaker 1: media disinformation makes this clear quote. The Times found several
Speaker 1: pieces of misinformation that spread out across Israeli and Palestinian
Speaker 1: neighborhood and activist WhatsApp groups this week. One which appeared
Speaker 1: as a block of Hebrew text or an audio file,
Speaker 1: contained a warning that Palestinian mobs were preparing to descend
Speaker 1: on Israeli civilians. Palestinians are coming, parents, Protect your children,
Speaker 1: read the message, which pointed specifically to several suburban areas
Speaker 1: north of Tel Aviv. Thousands of people were in one
Speaker 1: of the telegram groups where the post was shared. The
Speaker 1: post then appeared in several WhatsApp groups, which had dozens
Speaker 1: to hundreds of members. Now there were no reports of
Speaker 1: violence in the areas mentioned in this post. This kind
Speaker 1: of thing happened all over the world and has been
Speaker 1: happening for years, and the fact that it's untrue does
Speaker 1: not stop similar viral lies from inspiring and justifying mass
Speaker 1: violence in places like India and Myanmar. In both those countries,
Speaker 1: much of this targeted disinformation was posted at the direct
Speaker 1: behest of state security agencies to further their efforts at genocide.
Speaker 1: None of this is new. It all just works much
Speaker 1: faster thanks to social media. The one truly significant change
Speaker 1: in recent months has been the addition of a direct
Speaker 1: profit motive to sharing lies. The best recent example of
Speaker 1: this is a fellow named Mario Naffall. He's a con
Speaker 1: artist and a crypto scammer who embezzled from his own
Speaker 1: company and has built a massive following retweeting out of
Speaker 1: context videos, starting with the Wagner rebellion in Russia. Earlier
Speaker 1: this year, Elon Musk, whose ignorance of that conflict is unsurpassed,
Speaker 1: called Naffall's messages the best coverage I've seen so far.
Speaker 1: More recently, Marion Na Fall has been responsible for spreading
Speaker 1: fake news about the potential capture of Nimrod Alone, who
Speaker 1: is the commander of Israel's southern forces in the region.
Speaker 1: The video that he claimed was Nimrod Alone being taken
Speaker 1: into captivity was in fact a completely different person. It's
Speaker 1: actually unclear who. Mario does not know anything about anything,
Speaker 1: and I think was just lying because that would be
Speaker 1: the most salacious thing possible. It's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk recently made a post highlighting a couple of
Speaker 1: ocent accounts that were his recommendations, his picks for credible
Speaker 1: people to report on the conflict, and you should follow
Speaker 1: these folks. He then deleted part of that tweet and
Speaker 1: self censored himself when one of the sources he had
Speaker 1: picked referred to dead Hamas fighters as martyrs, which Elon
Speaker 1: had an issue with. Clearly, what he's doing is attempting
Speaker 1: to pick and set his own propaganda dispensers, you know,
Speaker 1: the people that, for whatever reason he thinks, are providing
Speaker 1: the most convenient narrative about what's happening. None of this
Speaker 1: should be mistaken for actual news.
Speaker 2: It is likely that.
Speaker 1: Much, perhaps most, of the footage on your timeline from
Speaker 1: the fighting in Gaza and Israel is reposted video that
Speaker 1: is not current. Obviously, there is a lot of current
Speaker 1: footage going out right now too, but a significant amount
Speaker 1: of it is not. I find this exasperating, even as
Speaker 1: I wonder how much that really matters. Is sharing old
Speaker 1: footage of civilian homes being leveled by Israeli missiles really
Speaker 1: an issue when similar homes are being bombed at the
Speaker 1: same time. I do still think so, but I'm no
Speaker 1: longer sure that my feelings on the matter are quite rational.
Speaker 1: The most commonly accepted definition of intelligence of intellect that
Speaker 1: you'll find is the ability to adapt to change and
Speaker 1: select environments, or the ability to deal with change in
Speaker 1: your environment. If that is truly the best measure of intelligence,
Speaker 1: then my discussed at disinformation makes me kind of stupid.
Speaker 1: Its purveyors have had blinding success in using it to
Speaker 1: push their own narratives and to shape reality. I use
Speaker 1: the word barbarism earlier to describe this, and it's a
Speaker 1: loaded word, but not nearly so loaded as its synonym, savagery.
Speaker 1: Savagery is a word that inspires powerful emotions for good reason.
Speaker 1: It was often used by white supremacist colonizers to paint
Speaker 1: whole peoples as backwards and less human, especially when they
Speaker 1: engaged in acts of resistance that were in reality no
Speaker 1: bloodier or more violent than the acts being perpetrated against them.
Speaker 1: The word predates European colonialism, though it seems to date
Speaker 1: back to around thirteen hundred, and it entered French salvage
Speaker 1: like the Cologne Johnny depphawks from the Latin salvaticus, which
Speaker 1: literally means of the woods. Why this digression because in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, an Islamist strategist named Abu Baker
Speaker 1: Naji published a book on the Internet titled Management of Savagery.
Speaker 1: In Naji's conception, savagery was defined as terrorist attacks against
Speaker 1: civilian infrastructure and stufflike tourist facilities, which were meant to
Speaker 1: provoke violent escalations from superpowers, that violence would radicalize more
Speaker 1: people against the West and lead to a progressive degradation
Speaker 1: of social order and operational capacity. In the nation's nause
Speaker 1: saw as enemies, The management of savagery was a key
Speaker 1: text for the men who wound up creating the Islamic State.
Speaker 1: Some will use this to argue that the tactics failed,
Speaker 1: since Isis is not exactly thriving at present. To do
Speaker 1: so would be to ignore the six trillion dollars the
Speaker 1: United States lit on fire fighting a disastrous war on terror,
Speaker 1: which supercharged much of the underlying instability in our country
Speaker 1: and may yet lead to a collapse in domestic order.
Speaker 1: I will admit that I have found the framework of
Speaker 1: managing savagery useful in my interpretation and understanding of conflict,
Speaker 1: both domestic and international. In twenty twenty I got to
Speaker 1: watch the process up close over the course of dozens
Speaker 1: of protests. The basic strategy of most Portland protests that year.
Speaker 1: When like this you got a bunch of people to
Speaker 1: march up to a police building, they would chant and
Speaker 1: yell until the police got angry and then gassed and
Speaker 1: or beat up everybody. After a while, this dynamic was
Speaker 1: widely understood and accepted by protesters. They saw their suffering
Speaker 1: and the risk that they engaged in as an acceptable
Speaker 1: trade off because it revealed the violence and savagery inherent
Speaker 1: in policing as an institution. This, they hoped would radicalize
Speaker 1: others against it, people who watched clips of videos from
Speaker 1: the protest or who attended themselves, And for a time
Speaker 1: this strategy worked quite well. Many people who had been
Speaker 1: a political on the matter grew utterly hardened against the
Speaker 1: cops after a few hours in the gas clouds. People
Speaker 1: cannot endure violence, however, without being changed by it, so
Speaker 1: as the week's war on, participants grew more and more
Speaker 1: comfortable with not just property destruction, but with the use
Speaker 1: of things like molotov cocktails. One may consider a molotov
Speaker 1: to be necessary sometimes, and throughout history they often have been,
Speaker 1: but savage is as good a term to describe firebombs
Speaker 1: as any. No one was killed by any molotov that
Speaker 1: I ever saw used in Portland, but of course no
Speaker 1: protests come close to the savagery of warfare. The emotional
Speaker 1: dynamics at play are shades of each other, though, and
Speaker 1: I thought it might be useful to mention. Perhaps a
Speaker 1: more or illustrative example would be my own experiences in Mosul.
Speaker 1: In the early summer of twenty seventeen. My team and
Speaker 1: I were embedded with an Iraqi federal police unit in
Speaker 1: the Old City, where the fighting was intense and hideous.
Speaker 1: We came under fire from a sniper. Some of the
Speaker 1: shots were so close that chipped concrete hit my helmet.
Speaker 1: The mortar team with us responded with the help of
Speaker 1: a spotter. They dropped explosive shells on homes and shops
Speaker 1: until they hit and killed the sniper. In that moment,
Speaker 1: I felt elation I've seldom felt since. After we found
Speaker 1: better cover, I began composing the scene in my head,
Speaker 1: laying out how I would write it. Then my fixer, Sangar,
Speaker 1: said something that interrupted my train of thought and has
Speaker 1: remained with me ever since. Did you count how many
Speaker 1: rounds they fired before they hit him? I told him
Speaker 1: I thought it was six or seven. Maybe where do
Speaker 1: you think the others landed?
Speaker 3: From?
Speaker 1: His tone was clear what he meant. The old city
Speaker 1: was crowded. Many civilians had not yet been able to
Speaker 1: escape the Isis lines. Their homes were often next door
Speaker 1: to fighting positions. And the density of the city meant
Speaker 1: that any honest hit still had a good chance of
Speaker 1: hitting someone. Later, I met a man whose house had
Speaker 1: been hit twenty times by mortar rounds and rockets before
Speaker 1: he had a chance to escape with his family, So
Speaker 1: the glee of the moment faded. My writing about that
Speaker 1: scene was more sober, more careful, and much better. As
Speaker 1: a result, saying our's words have helped me shape both
Speaker 1: my coverage of war and my reactions to it. Ever
Speaker 1: since this shouldn't matter to people being bombed out of
Speaker 1: their homes and losing loved ones right now, it might
Speaker 1: be helpful though, to those of us watching bloodshed from
Speaker 1: behind a screen, at least until we're the ones filming.
Speaker 4: Welcome to It could happen here on Garrison Davis. This
Speaker 4: is the show where we talk about how everything is
Speaker 4: kind of falling apart and how we can sometimes put
Speaker 4: it back together. Joining me is my dear, dear collaborator
Speaker 4: and friend, James is Stout. Good Good morning, James.
Speaker 5: Good morning, Garrison.
Speaker 6: That's very kind of you, Thank you, And we.
Speaker 4: Got a very special episode here today. We are talking
Speaker 4: with four people who have put together a new book
Speaker 4: by Aka Press called no Parseran. We're gonna have kind
Speaker 4: of a little bit of a like a group discussion
Speaker 4: about anti fascist history and this kind of this the
Speaker 4: state of anti fascism in the past few years. I know,
Speaker 4: this is how I kind of got started with radical
Speaker 4: politics growing up in Portland, Oregon. You see Nazis marching
Speaker 4: around in your street and you're like, oh, well, this
Speaker 4: is obviously a problem. Someone should probably do something about this.
Speaker 4: And stuff has changed a lot the past the past
Speaker 4: few years. I mean, like the anti fascist movement that
Speaker 4: I got kind of that I kind of got into
Speaker 4: only twenty eighteen. You know, it's very different now, and
Speaker 4: it's I don't know, there's these types of things live
Speaker 4: on through like oral histories as well as you know, books,
Speaker 4: and I think it's really cool to have these types
Speaker 4: of conversations. So joining us today is Shane Burley, Emily Gorcinski,
Speaker 4: Michael Novic, and Darryl Lamont Jakins. Greetings everyone, I'm going
Speaker 4: to hand it over to Shane and you can kind
Speaker 4: of talk about the book, I guess.
Speaker 7: Yeah, thanks Scarrison, Thanks James for having us on the
Speaker 7: whole crew of us. Yeah, this book was something came
Speaker 7: out last year, but we had been working on it
Speaker 7: for about four years. I'm starting in twenty eighteen. I
Speaker 7: was drunk with Kim Kelly and New York and we
Speaker 7: thought it'd be really great to put together something with
Speaker 7: all of our friends. And what do you do with
Speaker 7: a big group of people. It takes like four or
Speaker 7: five years to pull off. But really the idea was
Speaker 7: trying to do something that was bigger than what had
Speaker 7: been written about anti fascism at that point, which was
Speaker 7: shockingly narrow. What people understood of as of just a
Speaker 7: few movements, mostly very recent history, and so much wasn't
Speaker 7: being included in that conversation. So the idea was, how
Speaker 7: can we build out like a much bigger picture of
Speaker 7: this by including as many voices as possible.
Speaker 2: So we ended up getting a couple.
Speaker 7: Of dozen folks together that had different takes on it,
Speaker 7: some talking about tech, some talking about deep history, some
Speaker 7: talking about anti fascism in their countries other continents, and
Speaker 7: so in general, the idea was to make it feel
Speaker 7: like a discussion between people who either know each other
Speaker 7: or should be like in some kind of comradeship with
Speaker 7: each other. So that was sort of where it came together.
Speaker 7: I think with this conversation, the way we were thinking
Speaker 7: about this is I wanted to I wanted the opportunity
Speaker 7: to talk with basically my friends about their history a
Speaker 7: little bit, and so I asked three folks that had
Speaker 7: a really long history with doing organizing work, and so
Speaker 7: I thought it would be cool maybe if you go
Speaker 7: through talking to them a little bit about their prehistory
Speaker 7: or their early history organizing. And Michael, your history goes
Speaker 7: back the furthest as you know, we know, so I
Speaker 7: thought we could kick off with you and then talk
Speaker 7: with Emily and then Darryl, just kind of getting into
Speaker 7: your background. So how do you get started in movement work?
Speaker 7: Actually I should say first, when did you get started
Speaker 7: in movement where?
Speaker 8: Well, yeah, so I sometimes felt a little bit of
Speaker 8: a dinosaur. I was born in nineteen forty seven, so
Speaker 8: the fascism in power was a fairly recent reality in
Speaker 8: my life. My father was an immigrant from Poland. I
Speaker 8: came here in the thirties. Most of his family was
Speaker 8: destroyed in Ballastoke. They had an uprising there similar to
Speaker 8: the Warsaw Getto uprising, and almost everybody was lipidated in
Speaker 8: that process. So there's a family history there for me
Speaker 8: also obviously grew up in the shadow of the US
Speaker 8: atomic bombing of Rosha Monagasaki and the US incarceration of
Speaker 8: Japanese Americans and concentration camps, so you know, those realities
Speaker 8: in my life. I've lived in a you know, orthodox
Speaker 8: Jewish immigrant working class family and neighborhood in Brooklyn, which
Speaker 8: is now dominated by extremely right wing forces Borough Park.
Speaker 8: It's one of the bastions of probably uh you know,
Speaker 8: neo fashionst Republican prosionists. But somehow when I grew up
Speaker 8: there that was not the case. Anyway, I got involved
Speaker 8: in politics in the sixties and you know student movement stuff,
Speaker 8: anti war stuff, and at Brooklyn College, which when I
Speaker 8: was there was a three public, four year college part
Speaker 8: of the City University system in New York, and I
Speaker 8: was actually eventually elected student body president. They had liquidated
Speaker 8: the student government earlier when you know, people opposed the
Speaker 8: Korean War, and we had a struggle to get you know,
Speaker 8: for student rights and anti war stuff and so on,
Speaker 8: and we succeeded in getting student body elections for officers
Speaker 8: for the first time in about a dozen years. But
Speaker 8: you know, as part of all that anti war and
Speaker 8: anti police brutality and other stuff that was going on
Speaker 8: in Brooklyn at the time. And then we raised the
Speaker 8: question of the fact that Brooklyn College was ninety eight
Speaker 8: percent white or nine percent white in a borough that
Speaker 8: even then was you know, the majority black in Puerto Rican.
Speaker 8: And suddenly all the student support we had had for
Speaker 8: all the other struggles cops off the campus and you know,
Speaker 8: Navy off the campus, and so on we go, you know,
Speaker 8: got a dean of students fired and other stuff. But
Speaker 8: as soon as we raised the question of opening the
Speaker 8: campus up and having open ambissions to the city university
Speaker 8: system and a special emissions program for black and Puerto
Speaker 8: Rican high school students, most of our student support evaporated.
Speaker 8: And for me that was an object lesson that unless
Speaker 8: you're you know, conscious the organizing about internalized and institutionalized racism,
Speaker 8: everything else you do that is you know, progressive or
Speaker 8: anti imperialist or anti war is kind of a house
Speaker 8: of cards or you know, castles made of sand. And
Speaker 8: in particular and raising those issues, we discovered that there
Speaker 8: was a fascist element down the campus. There were people
Speaker 8: who formed the early Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn who
Speaker 8: were primarily anti black and Also there's a group called
Speaker 8: the youth what was it, Young Americans for Vitom YAF,
Speaker 8: which was like the youth wing of the National Review,
Speaker 8: right wing Republican formation, and they were pretty openly fascistic
Speaker 8: in their politics. So, you know, it became a question
Speaker 8: that if you were doing you know, anti racist and
Speaker 8: anti war and anti capitalist organizing, you were going to
Speaker 8: face not just you know, a struggle against the force
Speaker 8: of the state, but that there were reactionary elements within
Speaker 8: particularly white society. And I think because I said the colonialism,
Speaker 8: you know, there's a mass base for that. And struck
Speaker 8: by the title of the show just say, I don't
Speaker 8: know if people are familiar with the book, it can't
Speaker 8: happen here, but obviously your title is a reflection it
Speaker 8: could happen here. I think it has happened here. For
Speaker 8: one thing, I think the fashion has always been an
Speaker 8: element of US political culture because of settler colonialism. You knows,
Speaker 8: definition of fascism is that it's bringing the methods of
Speaker 8: rule of the colonies into the metropol But the US
Speaker 8: is the settler colony, and therefore there are colonized people
Speaker 8: inside this country. You can always have been and so
Speaker 8: fascistic elements of you know, slave labor genocide, you know,
Speaker 8: land theft, all the rest have always been part and
Speaker 8: part of that is also creating that mass base within
Speaker 8: the settler population that supports you know, that leadership. So anyway,
Speaker 8: I think that that you know, that both those personal
Speaker 8: aspects and that consciousness, and so I came in contact with,
Speaker 8: you know, the very radical forces in the Black Freedom
Speaker 8: Circle back then. The Black Panther Party is very active.
Speaker 8: There was one of the people in the Black Student
Speaker 8: Union joined the Black Panther Party. You know, there's a
Speaker 8: period of very fascist attacks and the Panthers had formed
Speaker 8: the National Committee of Combat Fascism and had an analysis
Speaker 8: that you know, the US was fascistic, and you know,
Speaker 8: George Jackson at that time said, you know, fascism is
Speaker 8: already here, and I think he meant it, you know literally,
Speaker 8: And so that's part of the perspective I've carried through
Speaker 8: for you know, I don't know what that is sixty
Speaker 8: years now close to him.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think really quickly, I would like
Speaker 7: to hear kind of what your experience was with forming
Speaker 7: John Brown. Where did the idea come from? Because I
Speaker 7: think for a lot of a lot of people are
Speaker 7: thinking of recent anti fascist American anti fascist history ends
Speaker 7: up being kind of a starting point for a certain
Speaker 7: kind of no platform tactic. So how did you first
Speaker 7: kind of develop that? What brought you in?
Speaker 8: So, yeah, just to say, I was, you know, coming
Speaker 8: out of the movement as I did, I moved from
Speaker 8: New York to California because there was a strong There
Speaker 8: was a newspaper called The Movement, which was the newspaper
Speaker 8: basically of friends of Snick. It was the people who
Speaker 8: left Snick when Snick adopted a black power analysis and
Speaker 8: said that white people who were involved should go organize
Speaker 8: in the white community. And there was a you know,
Speaker 8: kind of a I was part of a working class
Speaker 8: organizing collective in Hayward, California. Eventually out of that I
Speaker 8: got connected with, you know, some of the people that
Speaker 8: lad a foreign Prairie Fire organized committee. I was in
Speaker 8: a group in the Bay Area called the June twenty
Speaker 8: eighth Union. It was a gay ends, pro socialist, anti imperiallests,
Speaker 8: pro feminist collective of mostly people of being the set.
Speaker 8: And we went to what was called the Hard Times Conference,
Speaker 8: which was put on by Prairie Far Organizing Committee in Chicago,
Speaker 8: and it turned out that there was secretly an effort
Speaker 8: by the weather underground to come up from underground to
Speaker 8: create a new communist party, and they surfaced that at
Speaker 8: that conference. But there's a lot of opposition to that
Speaker 8: from across the board, from different Black liberation, American Indian movement,
Speaker 8: the Puerto Rican, depending, the Struggle, Chicago movement, all of them,
Speaker 8: you know, felt that there was a sell out of
Speaker 8: the politics there anyway. Out of that process I was
Speaker 8: part of. I joined a Prairie Fire Organized Committee eventually,
Speaker 8: and that split and then it was a West coast
Speaker 8: group which captained Prairie far the East coast formed a
Speaker 8: group called the main Eineteenth Communist Organization and they launched
Speaker 8: the original John Brown Anti Clan Committee, an initiative from
Speaker 8: the prisons, the organized prisoners and New York had discovered
Speaker 8: that there was an extensive network of clan claverns that
Speaker 8: were based in the prison guards and some of the
Speaker 8: white prisoners, and they asked for outside supporters to begin
Speaker 8: to expose that and deal with it and help them
Speaker 8: deal with it. And John Brandon, the Gillen Committee, was
Speaker 8: formed out of that. Separately very far on the West
Speaker 8: Coast had formed a group called Take a Stand against
Speaker 8: the Klan. There was a lot of you know, that
Speaker 8: was the period that the beginning of the sort notification
Speaker 8: of the clan that was going on. So this is
Speaker 8: the seventies and eventually, you know, under a challenge from
Speaker 8: particularly the New African Independence movement, the Malcolm Xis grassroots movement,
Speaker 8: New African People's Organization, which both Prairie Fire on the
Speaker 8: West Coast and May nineteenth and the East Coast were
Speaker 8: connected to, they pushed for a joint organization. So at
Speaker 8: that point there was a kind of reconstitution of John
Speaker 8: Brannan at the Clan Committee, and so I was part
Speaker 8: of that and we merged. You know, there were chapters
Speaker 8: in Atlanta, Chicago, the Bay Area, Los Angeles where I
Speaker 8: ended up in New York, I think Bowling Green, maybe
Speaker 8: the couple of Connecticut, and so they were quite active
Speaker 8: in that period, and you know, street level confrontations and
Speaker 8: you know, other exposures of early Neo Nazi activity and
Speaker 8: clan activity, but particularly from a perspective of conscious and
Speaker 8: active solidarity with the black freedom struggling, particularly the New
Speaker 8: African Independence Movement which is a very high level of unity,
Speaker 8: and over a period of time, you know, there was
Speaker 8: a struggle to broaden that out and try to be
Speaker 8: a more all embracing organization that could relate to the struggle.
Speaker 8: There were a lot of different formations at that time.
Speaker 8: There was the National Anti Clan Network, and there was
Speaker 8: a couple of others, and there were different politics among
Speaker 8: all of them, and you know, John Brandeth Glen made
Speaker 8: that time took more of a position of pro direct
Speaker 8: action and also, as they say, kind of just salidated
Speaker 8: with the Black freedom struggle as a basis for doing
Speaker 8: that work.
Speaker 7: The Anti Clan Network I think so people kind of
Speaker 7: know that's where the Southern Poverty Law Center eventually came
Speaker 7: out of another networks of these different groups out here
Speaker 7: in Oregon, the Rural Organizing Project was sort of like
Speaker 7: a down the line there. I think it's interesting too
Speaker 7: about the founding story. I was talking with our mutual
Speaker 7: friend Lisa Roth, who is part of the founding of that.
Speaker 7: Very first iteration of the John Brown Committee was they
Speaker 7: were doing a prison organizing with Black Panthers and Upstate
Speaker 7: New York and they were writing these letters saying the
Speaker 7: prison guards are clan and they thought, you mean, they're
Speaker 7: really racist, you know, obviously they're the prison guards. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and when they went and looked it up. No, the
Speaker 7: president of the prison guard union was the Grand Dragon
Speaker 7: of the State KKK.
Speaker 8: He actually he had a position within the prison system
Speaker 8: as the head of the sort of education activity, educational
Speaker 8: activities in the prisons, and was using his formal position
Speaker 8: within the prison system to organize white prisoners along with
Speaker 8: the guards into clan collaborance.
Speaker 7: Which seems like a total that was sort of a
Speaker 7: validation with the centerpiece of John Brown being that cops
Speaker 7: and clan have that kind of collaboration because that was
Speaker 7: there kind of the founding like lesson of that organizing.
Speaker 8: Sure, the blue by day, White by night and a
Speaker 8: lot of those slogans come out of that period, and
Speaker 8: you know, I think it is you know, it's related
Speaker 8: to the later the ar a line that you know,
Speaker 8: fascism is built from above and below that there's you know,
Speaker 8: elements within the state that are operating independently, but there
Speaker 8: are also state forces and then they're you know independent. Yeah,
Speaker 8: so called revolutionary fascists that claim to be opposing the state,
Speaker 8: but we're not really.
Speaker 7: Well, I think to fast forward a little bit, quite
Speaker 7: a bit, Emily, I remember when we first met each other.
Speaker 7: Obviously it was probably shortly after Unite the Right happened.
Speaker 7: But how did you first get drawn into organizing? Did
Speaker 7: you have a long history before that happened, or were
Speaker 7: you just part of getting involved around the ramp up
Speaker 7: to that now?
Speaker 3: I think, you know, compared to the other folks here,
Speaker 3: I'm sort of the summer child of the group, right,
Speaker 3: I don't have a super long history in organizing. I
Speaker 3: think that, you know, I came to anti fascism before
Speaker 3: Unite the Right happened. I work in the tech industry,
Speaker 3: and sometimes sort of around the gamer Gate era, I
Speaker 3: started noticing how white supremacist the tech industry had become. Right,
Speaker 3: it was sort of this nexus for a lot of
Speaker 3: this strongly libertarian, strongly supremacist mindset. It was sort of
Speaker 3: the worst of that meritocratic ideal that a lot of
Speaker 3: us had to experience in university and in our workplaces,
Speaker 3: and it just seemed like it was getting out of control.
Speaker 3: And that was kind of at the same time that
Speaker 3: we were seeing a lot more women come into the
Speaker 3: tech industry, we were starting to see a lot of
Speaker 3: changes in the space, and then there was sort of
Speaker 3: like this this vacuum left by gamer Gate as that
Speaker 3: all sort of died down, a lot of this sort
Speaker 3: of energy needed to go somewhere, and so I started
Speaker 3: speaking out against some white supremacist organizing that was happening
Speaker 3: at conferences and things like that. And I think the
Speaker 3: first wake up call for me happened when some folks
Speaker 3: that are linked to Milo Yanapolis put together a list
Speaker 3: of SGW Social Justice Warriors and this was journalists and
Speaker 3: activists and people who were speaking out and I somehow
Speaker 3: made that list. And I realized, after you know, looking
Speaker 3: at this and seeing what was going on, that be
Speaker 3: political being sort of just somebody with an opinion, wasn't
Speaker 3: you know, there was no way to be that wasn't
Speaker 3: a defense against what was coming. And so I just
Speaker 3: sort of looked inside and said, well, if this is
Speaker 3: the way it's going to be, like, I'm going to
Speaker 3: fight back, I'm gonna I'm gonna figure out what to do.
Speaker 3: I didn't really have a lot of organizing ties, they
Speaker 3: didn't really have a network, so like every other person,
Speaker 3: I just you know, shouted at Twitter and somehow that worked.
Speaker 3: The irony of this all is that all this was
Speaker 3: going on, I was starting to do you know, digital activism,
Speaker 3: using my my tech skills to try to shine light
Speaker 3: on things that were wrong in the federal government and
Speaker 3: the Trump administration and things like that, and I really.
Speaker 9: Just wanted to step away from that.
Speaker 3: I kind of had, like I went to Prague after
Speaker 3: Trump was inaugurated.
Speaker 9: I wanted to like, you know, clear the air a
Speaker 9: little bit.
Speaker 3: I didn't like the fact that I was on this
Speaker 3: hit list that was put together by people who have
Speaker 3: like a couple of handshakes away from the president's desk.
Speaker 3: So I went to Europe. I went to Prague, and
Speaker 3: I cleared my head. And when I came back, I said,
Speaker 3: you know what, I'm going to just focus on local activism.
Speaker 3: I'm going to focus on the issues that are in
Speaker 3: my community. I knew that we had things going on
Speaker 3: with our local low income housing space, we had a
Speaker 3: lot of you know stuff around the statues that was
Speaker 3: coming up in town, and I didn't really expect, like
Speaker 3: it was kind of random that Unite the Right was
Speaker 3: you know, destined for Charlottesville, and so all of the work,
Speaker 3: all of the organizing that I had started to do
Speaker 3: that spring, and that where I guess that winter in
Speaker 3: that spring started to pay off, as you know, as
Speaker 3: Charlottesville became the target of all of the neo Nazis.
Speaker 3: So I think it was sort of I don't want
Speaker 3: to say it's it's fortunate, because it's not really the
Speaker 3: greatest like it's not a positive thing that that's what happened.
Speaker 3: But I guess that I am lucky as I came
Speaker 3: to this awakening it was happening you know, before and
Speaker 3: not after, and that I was able to use the
Speaker 3: network that I was building, the audience I was building
Speaker 3: in order to help like back. So yeah, I guess
Speaker 3: that's that's sort of like, I don't know that I
Speaker 3: would have been, you know, as much as dedicated as
Speaker 3: it was if it wasn't for that very personal sort
Speaker 3: of experience. And I look back at that and I'm
Speaker 3: kind of embarrassed by that. But you know, we all
Speaker 3: have our own paths.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely, And I think, you know, there's something interesting
Speaker 7: about that year in advance of the Unite the Right,
Speaker 7: where we're different groups were testing the waters a little bit,
Speaker 7: and how that was their ability to ramp up in
Speaker 7: the area but it was also the anti fascist ability
Speaker 7: to ramp up, you know, so talking with Mimi and
Speaker 7: other organizers there, like those earlier events, like the earlier
Speaker 7: Clan rally that happened like, you know, months earlier, or
Speaker 7: kind of those that early flash mob that Richard Spencer led,
Speaker 7: that gave people the opportunity to build up the base.
Speaker 7: So how did you kind of shift to focusing on
Speaker 7: that first? I guess how did you hear about Unite
Speaker 7: the Riots, this big kind of like target event, But
Speaker 7: what was the steps along the way there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think one of the things that really that
Speaker 3: I really tried to do that year was to use
Speaker 3: the experience I was having traveling to try to understand
Speaker 3: the history of movements that were against you know, great
Speaker 3: state powers. Right when I was in Prague, I spent
Speaker 3: a lot of time reading about and looking into and
Speaker 3: walking through the sites of where the Prague Spring took
Speaker 3: place and where the Builder Revolution took place, and how
Speaker 3: these groups of people were able to overcome this massive
Speaker 3: amount of state violence and still be successful. And when
Speaker 3: Richard Spencer first came to town that first flashbob is
Speaker 3: now called Charlottesville one point.
Speaker 9: Zero, I was in Berlin at the time.
Speaker 3: I woke up to see what was going on, and
Speaker 3: it was, you know, I think again just sort of
Speaker 3: these you know, the universe coming into alignment. As that
Speaker 3: was happening, there's also this big anti Nazi demonstration that
Speaker 3: was happening in Berlin. So I took that opportunity to
Speaker 3: go and learn about what anti fascists are doing in
Speaker 3: other countries and other localities, how they are organizing, how
Speaker 3: they spread their message. And so I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: as I learned about all of this going on, what
Speaker 3: the first thing that I tried to do is just
Speaker 3: look around and say, what can we learn from people
Speaker 3: who have been here before, who have done this before
Speaker 3: and have this in their living memory. And that's what
Speaker 3: I tried to take back to Charlottesville. And then, you know,
Speaker 3: I think it was after that trip I was in
Speaker 3: Berlin in May. I came back for that trip. I
Speaker 3: joined in the anti fascist march almost as soon as
Speaker 3: I got back, and that's when we had heard we've
Speaker 3: like learned about the two rallies, the July eighth KKK
Speaker 3: rally and the August twelfth Unite the Right, and at
Speaker 3: that point, like from that moment, it was just like
Speaker 3: every making moment of my day was spent organizing for
Speaker 3: those rallies.
Speaker 7: It's the sort of effect that just circumstance sort of
Speaker 7: speeds people's capacity to do it, but that maybe even
Speaker 7: maybe capacity is not the right word. They're kind of
Speaker 7: understanding of what it takes to do that work. So
Speaker 7: I was interviewing a number of the rabbis in the area,
Speaker 7: and these were not super political folks. These were not
Speaker 7: people like from some activist synagogues who were mainline synagogues,
Speaker 7: but they connected with a number of faith leaders from
Speaker 7: the historically black churches, both of which were saying, Okay,
Speaker 7: we're both going to be targeted here, and there's no
Speaker 7: there's no institutions coming to help. Really, there's no one
Speaker 7: we can count on here. So they created those collaborative
Speaker 7: spaces and really pretty complicated and effective organizing models, having
Speaker 7: no experience doing it because of that hyper intense space,
Speaker 7: which I think is in a way that's why those
Speaker 7: circumstances have such an important effect on it. So how
Speaker 7: did you basically planned those couple of weeks in advance?
Speaker 7: How are you thinking about it, and what was the
Speaker 7: kind of groups you were working with so like networks
Speaker 7: that were coming together formal organizations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there were a bunch of you know,
Speaker 3: organizations on the ground that I connected with. Certainly, we
Speaker 3: had a local chapter of Surge showing up for racial
Speaker 3: justice and they were doing a lot of organizing. And
Speaker 3: there was you know, the Anarchist People of Color APOC.
Speaker 3: They were a great group of people that we connected
Speaker 3: with and that I connected with. And it also happened
Speaker 3: that I started dating somebody who's also connected to the
Speaker 3: local anti fascist scene at the time, so I sort
Speaker 3: of brought into all of these circles through that relationship
Speaker 3: as well. And so I think that sort of all
Speaker 3: of these things combined really made it clear that we
Speaker 3: had a small but very knowledgeable base of people that
Speaker 3: could organize. And I think that one of the things
Speaker 3: that we did exceptionally well in the lead up is
Speaker 3: because we had such a small core of people who
Speaker 3: don't who didn't really have you know, a breadth of experience,
Speaker 3: you know, in doing this, we were able to compartmentalize
Speaker 3: really well. You know, some people were focusing on, you know,
Speaker 3: what are we going to do with the you know,
Speaker 3: the clergy collective and how are they going to organize
Speaker 3: what is their action going to be? And we had
Speaker 3: a media collective and that was where I put most
Speaker 3: of my energy. And so I think that we had
Speaker 3: these different groups of people that could focus on different
Speaker 3: things that helped helped us unblock ourselves from like the grander,
Speaker 3: sort of more theoretical, more abstract way to respond. We
Speaker 3: just we didn't have the time to debate over tactics,
Speaker 3: We didn't have time to debate over the ideology of
Speaker 3: anti fascism, what the right thing to do was, or
Speaker 3: what the best thing to do was. We really had
Speaker 3: to focus our time on what do we have time
Speaker 3: to do? What can we achieve given the constraints that
Speaker 3: we have, And with those sort of constraints, I think
Speaker 3: that maybe we left some good actions on the table,
Speaker 3: But what we came up with I think was fairly effective.
Speaker 7: Do you think that it carried those community folks together
Speaker 7: through and after the event you feel like those community
Speaker 7: ties are still there?
Speaker 3: I think some of them are and some of them
Speaker 3: are not. There are certainly community times that have broken.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of pressure that built up. There
Speaker 3: were differences of opinions that we set aside and hoped
Speaker 3: to resolve afterwards, and those did not necessarily get resolved
Speaker 3: in some cases, some interpersonal issues, interorganizational issues.
Speaker 9: I remember at one point there was a.
Speaker 3: Decision that was being made, driven by a couple of
Speaker 3: the organizing groups, that they would not support anyone that
Speaker 3: was going to be armed, and this was a tension
Speaker 3: point between those groups and groups like Redneck Revolt that
Speaker 3: were coming armed to help support anti fascist rallies, and
Speaker 3: that like that is something that still, you know, affected
Speaker 3: me pretty well because I was being targeted because of
Speaker 3: how present I was in social media and Twitter and.
Speaker 9: Things like that.
Speaker 3: I needed to have an armed security detail, and you know,
Speaker 3: that freated a lot of a lot of tension.
Speaker 9: I didn't have legal like I had legal support pulled
Speaker 9: away from me.
Speaker 3: I didn't have legal support until until November of that
Speaker 3: year when noise of a.
Speaker 9: Lawsuit started happening.
Speaker 3: So I think that some of those things did create
Speaker 3: some tension that led to fracturing of community, but some
Speaker 3: things actually really did tie the community back together and
Speaker 3: kept it close even as we have drifted apart and
Speaker 3: moved into different you know, different cities, different countries, different states, whatever.
Speaker 9: I think it's a bit of both you.
Speaker 7: Know, there's one of the founding members of Rose Head
Speaker 7: Antifa said something that cast stuck with me, which is
Speaker 7: that a lot of people will look to anti fascism
Speaker 7: as a way to rebuild the left or as to
Speaker 7: build this big mass united left. But that's not actually
Speaker 7: what's being demanded of the situation. The situation is very
Speaker 7: pretty straightforward is to basically destroy this opposition of people.
Speaker 7: And how you do that. I mean, you can have
Speaker 7: considerations about how they bring in the community and try
Speaker 7: and align with other groups, but in the end, there's
Speaker 7: other decisions are being made, and so people often get
Speaker 7: disappointed when that ends up being what those projects actually are. Now, Darryl,
Speaker 7: you were down there, I unite.
Speaker 2: The right right, correct, that was there. You're everywhere when
Speaker 2: we're there, I try to be. I think one of
Speaker 2: the things about Charlottesville that was really important is that
Speaker 2: we saw it coming, and we had seen it coming months,
Speaker 2: probably even years before it even happened. Hell, we saw
Speaker 2: it before in my case, because one of those everywhere
Speaker 2: places I had been was in York, Pennsylvania about twenty
Speaker 2: years prior, where you had somebody from a group called
Speaker 2: the World Church Creator. He was he was a local
Speaker 2: from World Church to the Creator that invited the leader
Speaker 2: of that group, Matt Hale, to hold the public meeting
Speaker 2: at their local library. It was a tactic that that
Speaker 2: particular group had and what that resulted in was about
Speaker 2: three hundred Neo Nazis coming to York, PA, about three
Speaker 2: four hundred anti fascists coming out to oppose them. And
Speaker 2: you pretty much saw a parallel of Charlottesville. As I said,
Speaker 2: up to an including a this was January twelve, twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: and up to and including a someone driving into a
Speaker 2: group of people and no one pad, no one died,
Speaker 2: no one was killed, hurt pretty bad. I think the
Speaker 2: only reason why he served two years was because one
Speaker 2: of the people that he hit was a cop. Now
Speaker 2: we fast forward to Charlottesville, and ironically, I saw the
Speaker 2: person that organized things in York represented Vanguard America at Charlottesville.
Speaker 2: And two days prior, Mike for One People's Project had
Speaker 2: a little bit of a podcast where we basically said
Speaker 2: that after everything that was going on in Charlottevielle prior
Speaker 2: to Charlottefvield one point oh, Charlottesville two point zero, and
Speaker 2: then this whole Unite the Right thing was happening where
Speaker 2: it was just making a big production out of having
Speaker 2: this event. We pretty much were resigned to the idea
Speaker 2: that this was going to be the so called rights
Speaker 2: ultimat in the sense that this was going to be
Speaker 2: what and everybody, you know, realizing how bad things can get,
Speaker 2: you know it's gonna be bad. We expected it to
Speaker 2: be bad. I went to Charlotteville armed, and I think
Speaker 2: really it was one of the first times that I
Speaker 2: ever did strap up when I went to one of
Speaker 2: these things. When everything went down, I mean, prior to
Speaker 2: everything going down, I was just basically doing my think
Speaker 2: videotaping everyone cracking jokes. I was playing happy Warrior because
Speaker 2: you know, you see this all before up to and
Speaker 2: including the fighting. The fighting is there. I mean, that
Speaker 2: happens all the time, even that massively, I'm used to it.
Speaker 2: What I wasn't used to was when someone was murdered,
Speaker 2: when someone was killed, because that's never happened, and that
Speaker 2: actually freaked me out. It Actually, I actually got really
Speaker 2: pissed off when that went down, and I think a
Speaker 2: lot of us did because if we recognize this ourselves,
Speaker 2: if we who had been on the front lines all
Speaker 2: these years recognized that this was the direction that was
Speaker 2: going in. We also recognized that we had the ability
Speaker 2: to do something about it beforehand. That's one of the
Speaker 2: reasons why the ACO you got into a lot of
Speaker 2: trouble because they were busy trying to protect the free
Speaker 2: speech of everybody in all the neo Nazis there and
Speaker 2: insisting that they were going to be in that park
Speaker 2: because that's where they wanted to be. And when everything
Speaker 2: went down, a lot of people just looked at the
Speaker 2: ACO and said, could you at least recognize us how
Speaker 2: dangerous they was trying to make the situation ACOU I
Speaker 2: believe will no longer represent groups that insist on holding
Speaker 2: armed rallies. I think that was one of the things
Speaker 2: that they had said, that they were one of the changeups.
Speaker 2: And even with the whole discussion about their freedom of
Speaker 2: speech and saying it was a matter of that freeze speech,
Speaker 2: people's attitudes were just like, Okay, fine, that's a given,
Speaker 2: But couldn't you let them get their own attorneys? Why
Speaker 2: do you have to keep defending the worst of society
Speaker 2: in the name of a free speech that frankly doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be afforded. The rest of us whenever we
Speaker 2: are opposing them. That's the attitude that a lot of
Speaker 2: people had, and it was really the last straw. Charlotteville
Speaker 2: was really the last straw, and people really got on
Speaker 2: a different footing and dealing with fascism. I was used
Speaker 2: to people trying to pull all the stops and trying
Speaker 2: to defend the quote unquote defend the freedom of speech
Speaker 2: of not just the fascist in our society, but the
Speaker 2: right in general. So every time I would criticize somebody
Speaker 2: on the right, somebody would try to say things ranging
Speaker 2: from we have to respect their freedom of speech or
Speaker 2: we should just ignore them, you know. And I hated
Speaker 2: it whenever it was and when it was combined the
Speaker 2: best way to fight hate speeches with more speech you
Speaker 2: use the more speech, Well, why don't you just ignore them?
Speaker 2: That stopped after Charlottesville. All of a sudden, people started saying, Okay,
Speaker 2: we need to start doing something about this group. That's
Speaker 2: why you saw forty thousand people in Boston protesting against
Speaker 2: the fascist up there when they tried to hold a rally.
Speaker 2: Maybe a week or two later, you know, that's why
Speaker 2: you saw websites like the Daily Stormer get you know,
Speaker 2: yanked out of yanked out of the mainstream, and now
Speaker 2: they're sitting on the dark web. That's why you saw
Speaker 2: people disowned their family members because they went to this rally.
Speaker 2: We are seeing people being not just James Field's but
Speaker 2: others being held legally accountable for what they did in Charlotteville.
Speaker 2: And all of those individuals are fascists. All of the
Speaker 2: individuals were white supremacists. We realized that we had the
Speaker 2: ability to do something, and we started doing something. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: we stopped after Trump lost and people tried to go
Speaker 2: back to that whole just ignore them routine, and within
Speaker 2: months we got January sixth, and that was when they
Speaker 2: tried they ratcheted up again about how we're going to
Speaker 2: really curtail the right and all and all that we
Speaker 2: but now that just became rhetoric. We're here again because
Speaker 2: you're starting to see a lot of the rumblings with
Speaker 2: the attacks on the trans community. Basically, conservatives across the
Speaker 2: country are primarily trying to essentially do something to the
Speaker 2: rest of the country. I mean, you heard that when
Speaker 2: you go to the SEAPAC meeting, the Conservative Political Action
Speaker 2: Conference a couple of months ago. All they did was
Speaker 2: talk about things they wanted to do to America, you know,
Speaker 2: And this is what we have been fighting all our lives.
Speaker 2: This is what we have been warning about all our lives.
Speaker 2: And while anti fascism has essentially become mainstream, there is
Speaker 2: still a lot more work that we have to do
Speaker 2: in order to basically see all that work therefore, and
Speaker 2: that's them pretty much the deal.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that forty thousand person kind of response to a
Speaker 7: Proud Boy rally in Boston just a couple of weeks
Speaker 7: after Unite the Right, it was one of the most
Speaker 7: common sense kind of moments and it totally dwarfs to them.
Speaker 7: I mean, forty thousand people will do whatever they want, right,
Speaker 7: forty thousand people will stop any kind of small march,
Speaker 7: even a large one. And so the lesson was learned,
Speaker 7: then it seemed to be forgotten immediately.
Speaker 2: And they're perfect example of that because that group that
Speaker 2: they were protesting went on to become super Happy Fun America.
Speaker 2: They're the group that now pushing the straight Pride rallies
Speaker 2: and they are really in the forefront of all the
Speaker 2: anti trans anti LGBTQ plus activity, and of course some
Speaker 2: of them got arrested in at January sixth, so they
Speaker 2: pretty much built up their stock since then, but so
Speaker 2: did we, and it's just a matter of using this
Speaker 2: Who's going to use their stock more effectively?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it was really interesting how you centered this,
Speaker 5: like this shift that happened among people who weren't previously
Speaker 5: involved in anti fascism from this kind of neoliberal understanding
Speaker 5: or that maybe even liberal understanding of the sort of
Speaker 5: struggle against fascism being one that could take place in
Speaker 5: the open, with free speech being the most important thing
Speaker 5: that's at stake, and one that moved like in a
Speaker 5: moment right when when I Nazi killed Heather Higher two.
Speaker 5: There's a ton more at stake than we thought. And
Speaker 5: I think you're right that we've gone back, like right,
Speaker 5: we've gone back to the previous understanding, which I think
Speaker 5: is what everyone kind of a lot of people. I
Speaker 5: guess they felt like they could vote for Joe Biden
Speaker 5: and then it was done, like it had disappeared. And
Speaker 5: I'd be interested to hear all of your insights, with
Speaker 5: all your experience in the movement and like what needs
Speaker 5: to be done. I guess to keep that organizing going
Speaker 5: as wearing this kind of Nadir or thermidor of like
Speaker 5: anti fascist organizing in the US.
Speaker 8: If I could offer something from maybe a little bit
Speaker 8: of a longer view, you know. Yeah, you know, Darrell
Speaker 8: talked about somebody being killed and that never happening before,
Speaker 8: but of course it has happened before. And so in
Speaker 8: nineteen seventy nine there was a death of the Clan
Speaker 8: rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and people were you know,
Speaker 8: attacked and killed by an alliance of the clan and
Speaker 8: the Nazis with you know, the ATF had people in
Speaker 8: one and the I forget I think the FBI had
Speaker 8: people in the other and were instrumental in bringing the
Speaker 8: two forces together to attack the anti Clan group and
Speaker 8: several people were killed in that. And then the same
Speaker 8: thing with.
Speaker 10: Aar in.
Speaker 8: Las Vegas. Lynn spit new Born, a black tattoo artist,
Speaker 8: and Darren Shirsey was actually I think a sailor, active
Speaker 8: duty sailor who were in anti racist action in Las
Speaker 8: Vegas were executed and killed by neo Nazis there. And
Speaker 8: so I think there is a history of that that
Speaker 8: we need to be aware of, but also that there's
Speaker 8: ups and downs and lulls in both fascist organizing anti
Speaker 8: fashion organized. One of the things that happened after the
Speaker 8: seventy nine killings is that Ronald Reagan launched his campaign
Speaker 8: for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the killing
Speaker 8: of schwar Er Chainyan Goodman, on a state frights platform,
Speaker 8: And while he was president, you know, I brought in
Speaker 8: Pat rob Pat Buchanan and you know, went to Bittberg.
Speaker 8: So there's a long history of the state, you know,
Speaker 8: playing foot seat with these people, and I think we
Speaker 8: should recognize that, but also that there are going to
Speaker 8: be ups and downs in and both fascists and anti
Speaker 8: fascist organizing, and you know, just see that that I
Speaker 8: think the longer range perspective that is important to understand.
Speaker 8: The other thing I did want to take a little
Speaker 8: exception to is the idea that the role of anti
Speaker 8: fascist is to destroy fascists, and I think that I
Speaker 8: don't completely agree with that analysis. I think that it's
Speaker 8: critical that actually anti fascists force to see themselves as
Speaker 8: part of a revolutionary transformation of this society and its entirety,
Speaker 8: and that the ability to actually reach an organizing people
Speaker 8: has to do with making it clear that fascists are
Speaker 8: not proviting an alternative to what's wrong with the society
Speaker 8: although they claim to be and that we are, that
Speaker 8: we're part of liberatory and you know, self determination elements,
Speaker 8: anti colonial elements, you know, support for sovereignty of indigenous people,
Speaker 8: you know, support for LGBTQ people's rights and all those
Speaker 8: things that have a positive aspect of a way to
Speaker 8: reorganize society in a different way than the facts are
Speaker 8: putting forward. And I think that that is critically trying
Speaker 8: to sustain the base and build a base by you know,
Speaker 8: having a positive you know, one of the things that
Speaker 8: I've been doing for many years, I published Turning the Tide,
Speaker 8: which you know, started as a little zine we were
Speaker 8: sending to the other chapters of Anti Racist Action and
Speaker 8: also went to the prisons, and you know, eventually we
Speaker 8: changed the subtitle of that to the Journal of Intercommunal Solidarity.
Speaker 8: In the sense of saying, Okay, it's not just anti
Speaker 8: racist action, it's not just anti fashions, but what are
Speaker 8: we ford You have to have a positive if you
Speaker 8: really want to organize people, you have to have a
Speaker 8: positive sense of what they're struggling for, not just what
Speaker 8: they're struggling against.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Michael's right, Greensboro did happen. I was really referring
Speaker 2: to in recent time. It wasn't. It was the first
Speaker 2: time for myself to be at a rally and not
Speaker 2: see anyone and see somebody get murdered. But yes, Greensboro,
Speaker 2: November third, I believe, nineteen seventy nine in North Carolina,
Speaker 2: that happened, and all the clan members had actually gotten
Speaker 2: away with it. They did not, They were found, they
Speaker 2: cleared them. Meanwhile, federal court both.
Speaker 8: Their claim was that they were not. They were brought
Speaker 8: up in civil rights charges in federal court and they
Speaker 8: claim they weren't against black people, they were just against communists.
Speaker 2: And that right, there was something that even family members
Speaker 2: when I first heard of. Remember I'm a kid at
Speaker 2: this time. I'm sitting there listening to family members basically
Speaker 2: laugh about the situation because all they saw were clan
Speaker 2: and communists and they were just had the attitude of
Speaker 2: just let them kill each other. And that was actually
Speaker 2: a line that was said. I don't I don't know
Speaker 2: which family members said it, but that was a line
Speaker 2: that stuck with me since I was a kid and
Speaker 2: at the time I wasn't really politically a stud I
Speaker 2: just that's how I recalled that situation. And with Dan
Speaker 2: and Spit the Las Vegas murders that that is a
Speaker 2: different situation however, because that wasn't the rally they sought
Speaker 2: them out. That was basically on the off time, so
Speaker 2: to speak. Assassination. Yes, and we've seen that before, most
Speaker 2: certainly Luke Kerner from Portland for example. I mean he survived,
Speaker 2: but he's quadriplegic because somebody came after him.
Speaker 3: The German police intercepted one when Adam often came to
Speaker 3: Germany to try to get me.
Speaker 9: I don't know if you know about.
Speaker 2: I think because I have been fairly public.
Speaker 8: I've been docked and tracked down by fascists and several
Speaker 8: different occasions in different places that I lived in. You know,
Speaker 8: we've had armed patrols that you know, at various points
Speaker 8: that you know. It's clearly you know they do try
Speaker 8: to target people as well as you know, attacking mess action.
Speaker 7: Emily, you've gotten it as much as anyone I've ever
Speaker 7: seen in terms of doc saying and harassment and targeted
Speaker 7: attacks and threats like that.
Speaker 9: Wait, who are you referring to? Oh, I think we've
Speaker 9: all gotten it bad. I don't. I don't think that
Speaker 9: there's any there's no competition.
Speaker 4: Here contests who has the most death threads on.
Speaker 3: I did want to just jump back real quick to
Speaker 3: the thing that you were mentioning, Michael about you know, building,
Speaker 3: anti fascism needs to be about building, and I think
Speaker 3: that there's two there's two sides to this. I like
Speaker 3: to talk about, like the breaking work, which is what
Speaker 3: a lot of the street anty fascism is about. Right Like,
Speaker 3: sometimes Nazis come marching into your town and.
Speaker 9: You have to break that.
Speaker 3: You have to stop that, you have to confront that,
Speaker 3: and you have to do things to make it so
Speaker 3: that they don't want to come back into your town
Speaker 3: or any other towns like your town. And I think
Speaker 3: that that's breaking work, you know, the work of cracking
Speaker 3: down Nazis, docsing them, exposing them, whatever, that's breaking work.
Speaker 3: I think that in the last few years has become
Speaker 3: more high profile for various reasons. But I think that
Speaker 3: as we're looking at you know, what you were mentioning there,
Speaker 3: like the anti trans legislation, the rise of the political
Speaker 3: far right in government in power, we do need a
Speaker 3: different solution. I'm not saying that you can't go out
Speaker 3: and like intercept Ron DeSantis's motorcade and like punch them.
Speaker 9: In the face.
Speaker 3: I am saying it will probably end very badly for
Speaker 3: you if you try to do that, right, So, maybe
Speaker 3: what we actually also need is to try to build
Speaker 3: those alternative structures that are not reliant on the state.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: You know, when we see these these trans bands coming
Speaker 3: in like it's a horrible thing, But the only thing
Speaker 3: that actually comes through my mind is we have more tools,
Speaker 3: more resources now to create the networks of support than
Speaker 3: we've ever had in history. A lot of our energy
Speaker 3: should be pouring into supporting those networks, supporting that that care,
Speaker 3: supporting that mobility and that freedom of movement, rather than
Speaker 3: just trying to run up against this brick wall that
Speaker 3: is this Republican you know, behemoth that is moving you
Speaker 3: forward into all of our rights. Like we're not going
Speaker 3: to face it down head on. We need to go
Speaker 3: around it in some way. And I think that that
Speaker 3: that going around it is going to require that building,
Speaker 3: that community, that that sort of redevelopment of those alternative structures.
Speaker 3: So I think it's so important to have that as well.
Speaker 4: Big thanks to Shane Burley for setting up this conversation.
Speaker 4: The second half of our talk with Michael Novic, Emily Gorchinski,
Speaker 4: and Daryl Lamont Jenkins will be coming out tomorrow. We'll
Speaker 4: talk a bit more about the modern state of anti
Speaker 4: fascism and what things from the past might help inform
Speaker 4: us in the anti fascist struggle of today. See you
Speaker 4: on the other side, Welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 4: This is Garrison Davis. This episode is part two of
Speaker 4: a conversation that myself and James Stout had with some
Speaker 4: of the contributors to a book by AK Press titled
Speaker 4: No Passeran. It's an anti fascist anthology that talks about
Speaker 4: the modern anti fascist movement and some of the writer's
Speaker 4: own experiences with anti fascism. So we'll pick up our
Speaker 4: conversation basically right where we left off, talking about the
Speaker 4: modern state of anti fascism, anti fascists and like, you know,
Speaker 4: the left quote unquote in general right now is kind
Speaker 4: of in a weird place. You know, like a lot
Speaker 4: of people were you know, extremely kind of catalyzed after Charlottesville,
Speaker 4: and that led to a like massive resurgence of anti
Speaker 4: racist action, anti fascist action, and I think the quote
Speaker 4: unquote like Antifa movement of the twenty teens, as like
Speaker 4: was is probably one of the largest like politically radicalizing
Speaker 4: forces for people, especially people my age, people a little
Speaker 4: bit older. It's you know, it's very influential in what
Speaker 4: the kind of the modern like anarchists or you know,
Speaker 4: left you know scene is, and there's like there's a
Speaker 4: lot of positive parts of that. There's also you know,
Speaker 4: there's some some drawbacks for that as well. Kind of
Speaker 4: one one kind of recurring thing is that like when
Speaker 4: your only tool is a hammer, then everything is a nail,
Speaker 4: and there's certain elements of of like and and this
Speaker 4: like antifa notion or like people who like grew up
Speaker 4: with with like anti fascists and being their primary kind
Speaker 4: of mode of practice. Then it can be very easily
Speaker 4: turned horizontally. But you know, it's after after j six,
Speaker 4: after after Biinden's been inaugurated, we have had this very
Speaker 4: weird lull, but there's still been you know a lot
Speaker 4: of fascist mobilization. But this is the sort of response
Speaker 4: to it that you know, was very normalized in twenty
Speaker 4: eighteen has has definitely shifted. We we've seen, like, you know,
Speaker 4: the one thing that's been new is like you, like
Speaker 4: you mentioned regarding you know, Charlotte Speld there's a lot
Speaker 4: of like debate around if people should show up armed.
Speaker 4: We now have like the Drag Time Story Hour kind
Speaker 4: of defenses, like armed defenses with John Brown gun clubs
Speaker 4: becoming more popular. But you know, one of the kind
Speaker 4: of recurring things that everyone's kind of been talking about it.
Speaker 4: I've been hearing like there's so many parallels to for
Speaker 4: what we've been going through the past like five ten years,
Speaker 4: to other kind of things in the past. Like while
Speaker 4: all of the John Brown Anti Clan Committee stuff, there's
Speaker 4: just a lot of cyclical notions. I mean, even I'm
Speaker 4: here in Atlanta right now, there's this Rico grand jury indictment.
Speaker 4: Everyone's thinking about like green scare stuff. Even even John
Speaker 4: Brown Anti Clan Committee did grand jury resistance back in
Speaker 4: like the eighties. Like it's this this, These things have
Speaker 4: happened before. And I think one thing that you know,
Speaker 4: the quote unquote laughter anti fascists sometimes they're kind of
Speaker 4: bad at is actually passing down the history. There's this
Speaker 4: tendency that when people get involved, we're kind of forced
Speaker 4: to reinvent the wheel every time but it's like completely
Speaker 4: like unnecessary, but we tend to just keep trying the
Speaker 4: same things over and over again. So there's even people
Speaker 4: younger than me who weren't even old enough to get
Speaker 4: involved in anti fascist stuff in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen,
Speaker 4: and they're now kind of growing up. There's still this
Speaker 4: fascist mobilization. You know, Liberals are kind of passive because
Speaker 4: they have their guy in the White House, and we're
Speaker 4: going to be reaching a really interesting tipping point in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four. So for these types of people who
Speaker 4: are like either wanting to get involved or who are
Speaker 4: like just just starting to realize that, hey, maybe we
Speaker 4: should actually do something about all this stuff, especially as
Speaker 4: you know, trans existence is one of the main things
Speaker 4: under attack right now. What is kind of some like
Speaker 4: lessons from the passage you would like to be passed
Speaker 4: down to people.
Speaker 8: A couple of things that come to mind. I was
Speaker 8: reminded because James is in San Diego about you know,
Speaker 8: one of the things we haven't talked about at all
Speaker 8: is the border, and that's been a recurrent theme of
Speaker 8: the right and of the state, both in terms of
Speaker 8: building you know, a repressive apparatus so going back to
Speaker 8: you know, the early days of People Against Racist Terror,
Speaker 8: which is the group that I had in l A
Speaker 8: after John brand Ask and Anti Clan Committe left. One
Speaker 8: of the first actions we did was there was something
Speaker 8: called the American Spring at the Mexican Border, which was
Speaker 8: a neo fascist element. It kind of grew out of
Speaker 8: the previous Clan border Watch that David Duka done and
Speaker 8: they were trying to you know, build up a base
Speaker 8: of support for you know, very you know, close the borders.
Speaker 8: And so we did bring people from la and joined
Speaker 8: up with San Diego. And actually at one of those
Speaker 8: rallies somebody drove a car at and nearly hit someone
Speaker 8: from the the you know, the anti fascist forces. So
Speaker 8: I think that's an important piece of we should be
Speaker 8: thinking about the other thing in terms of killings and shootings.
Speaker 8: You know, somebody from the Red Nation was just shot
Speaker 8: in Albuquerque, and you know, I think that again, the
Speaker 8: question of Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous rights is a leading
Speaker 8: edge of struggle. A lot of the struggles around missing
Speaker 8: and murdered Indigenous women have to do with the you know,
Speaker 8: fossil fuel industry and in the back in other places
Speaker 8: where you know, women have disappeared and been killed by
Speaker 8: you know, people in the fossil fuel industry basically, And
Speaker 8: I think bringing all that to bear is really critical
Speaker 8: to have the breadth of consciousness and the understanding that
Speaker 8: there is a global struggle that's going on and indigenous
Speaker 8: people in particular are part of that, about the survival
Speaker 8: of humanity and of the planet in a sense. And
Speaker 8: to situate anti fascist struggle in that context, I think
Speaker 8: is really really important and relates to who are our allies,
Speaker 8: who are leadership, where is the struggle being led by?
Speaker 8: And so you know, one of the things we uncovered
Speaker 8: here in La is that people involved in the militia
Speaker 8: movement started their operations by supporting Christian militias in Guatemala
Speaker 8: and the Philippines, attacking left forces in those countries and
Speaker 8: indigenous forces in those countries. And you know, having that
Speaker 8: global perspective, I think that's one of the really great
Speaker 8: strengths of the book. By the way, that I thought
Speaker 8: was really amazing, as the coverage of anti fascist movements
Speaker 8: all around the world, and you know, the anti fascists
Speaker 8: in India and so on, and having that sense that
Speaker 8: it's not just you know, people of European descent or
Speaker 8: you know, African Americans in the United States who are
Speaker 8: post to fascism.
Speaker 2: But there's a.
Speaker 8: Very very broad, you know, movement around the world and
Speaker 8: inside this country of people who are experiencing fascism literally
Speaker 8: all the time that you know, gives a strength to
Speaker 8: anti fascism.
Speaker 3: There is an exceptionalism that exists even in the left.
Speaker 3: American exceptionalism that exists even in the American left when
Speaker 3: it comes to how bad things are, how good we
Speaker 3: are at organizing or whatever. And I think that a
Speaker 3: lot of the time is one of the things that
Speaker 3: we often forget is that we are not the only
Speaker 3: people going through this, both in time and space. Right
Speaker 3: there's movements that are going on elsewhere that are facing
Speaker 3: a much deeper sort of repression than what we see
Speaker 3: in the United States, and they are still finding ways
Speaker 3: to organize. I like to do you know when we
Speaker 3: talk about like the attack on queer rights, and you.
Speaker 9: Know, things like.
Speaker 3: All of these hateful laws that are being passed, which
Speaker 3: will almost certainly be thrown out in the courts, and
Speaker 3: that's you know, it's going to be a couple of years.
Speaker 3: But you know, people are saying, well, this is going
Speaker 3: to make Pride illegal, and this is you know, this
Speaker 3: is the worst thing. This is like, you know, a
Speaker 3: step towards genocide and all of that stuff. And I
Speaker 3: think it's actually important for us to put things in perspective.
Speaker 3: Istanbul has a much stricter set of restrictions on we
Speaker 3: are organizing quirget demonstrations. Pride happens every year. Pride is
Speaker 3: attacked by cops every year. They still continue to persist.
Speaker 9: What can we learn as Americans from that movement.
Speaker 3: I think that's a really important thing for the American
Speaker 3: anti fascist scene to really start to think around and
Speaker 3: try to take this moment. As you mentioned, there's a
Speaker 3: lull that is happening now, both in the organizing and
Speaker 3: in the popular support. We need to take that moment
Speaker 3: to reflect on what is working, what is not, to
Speaker 3: regroup and to find new approaches, new tactics. This is
Speaker 3: something that I write about in the chapter I wrote
Speaker 3: on trans anti fascism. Right, we need to, like, we
Speaker 3: need to absolutely bring in historical contexts and comparative analysis
Speaker 3: into our into into what we're doing. But that does
Speaker 3: not mean that we need to say that everything is
Speaker 3: literally the Holocaust. What we need to do is look
Speaker 3: at what are the factors, what are the causes, what
Speaker 3: are the root causes of the things that are happening,
Speaker 3: and how can we strategically organize to disrupt and to
Speaker 3: bypass those forces. So I think it's really important to
Speaker 3: have that multifaceted perspective.
Speaker 2: I think that Emily is touched on something that is
Speaker 2: really important. When we say that the police are are
Speaker 2: attacking pride events, pride marches and such, that suggests that
Speaker 2: somebody initiated something on our side. That speaks to what
Speaker 2: it is we have to do. We have to initiate
Speaker 2: certain actions. We cannot keep waiting for the fashions. We
Speaker 2: can't keep waiting, we can't keep being reactive. We do
Speaker 2: have to go on the offense. I mean, that's one
Speaker 2: of the reasons myself and me and others have been
Speaker 2: so successful. It is because we don't wait for the
Speaker 2: fascists to do something. We do something to them before
Speaker 2: they make a move. And we know when to do
Speaker 2: it because they basically send us signals out courtesy of
Speaker 2: their free speech, that they want to do something, and
Speaker 2: we just take those cues and say, okay, here's how
Speaker 2: we are going to go forward. We're going to let
Speaker 2: people know about you. We're going to let people know
Speaker 2: how to keep you at bay. I mean, that's the
Speaker 2: kinds of things that we need to do. We need
Speaker 2: to just basically say we are establishing this institution, we
Speaker 2: are establishing the security around this institution, and you are
Speaker 2: not going to be able to breach this institution. The
Speaker 2: other thing that we do need to do in that
Speaker 2: while we build that is also make it clear to
Speaker 2: some of those that lack of a better term, or
Speaker 2: wishy washy on the subject, are more mainstreamers and liberals
Speaker 2: and such who are quick to defend the fashionsts that
Speaker 2: they say they don't believe in before they defend us.
Speaker 2: We gotta start telling them to chill, and we gotta
Speaker 2: start telling them to pick a side and stop getting
Speaker 2: in everybody's way. Stop being a bulwark because you're too
Speaker 2: cowardly to put up this fight or you're too interested
Speaker 2: in protecting your other interests as opposed to being concerned
Speaker 2: about what's coming down the pike. The book starts off
Speaker 2: with a discussion about a three way fight. We definitely
Speaker 2: are in one.
Speaker 4: Do you want to explain what a three way fight is.
Speaker 2: Well three way fight is not only you're dealing with
Speaker 2: the obvious enemy, so to speak, but you're also dealing
Speaker 2: with those that are hesitant to do something about that
Speaker 2: enemy to the point that they will fight you more.
Speaker 2: To the point that they will fight you more. And frankly,
Speaker 2: it's frustrating. It is a frustrating thing. But it is there,
Speaker 2: and it has been there through our history, and I
Speaker 2: mean even the mo I mean, I'm surprised I'm actually
Speaker 2: referencing a Mel Gibson movie, but even the movie Brave
Speaker 2: Heart brought that up. Now, I don't think that we
Speaker 2: need to smack people upside their head with a mace,
Speaker 2: but by the same token, we do have to let
Speaker 2: people know that we do have to be a little
Speaker 2: bit more I should say, assertive in our efforts as
Speaker 2: we go forward and basically try to route this particular
Speaker 2: fascist element, and an assertive means blowing past those that
Speaker 2: are supposed to be on our side. I mean, because
Speaker 2: I was thinking about the fact that this is now
Speaker 2: the twelfth anniversary of Occupy Right, and Occupy was trying
Speaker 2: to do that. Occupy it's still trying to do that.
Speaker 2: In many respects. The folks that were in Occupy, but
Speaker 2: some of the folks, because what you also saw at
Speaker 2: Occupy were a lot of folks who thought that they
Speaker 2: will be able to take advantage of the progress that
Speaker 2: we were making in this effort and turned it into
Speaker 2: a more fascist thing. I mean, I was just looking
Speaker 2: at a lot of the characters that come out of
Speaker 2: Occupy that went to the fascist side, and when you
Speaker 2: look at who they are, you realize that you had
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of opportunities that were within our ranks
Speaker 2: that were looking for something totally different than what the
Speaker 2: rest of us. We were looking out for each other
Speaker 2: and Occupy. The true people that were dealing with Occupy
Speaker 2: Wall Street were looking out for each other in our communities.
Speaker 2: These guys just thought, hey, perfect opportunity to just say
Speaker 2: that we're one with them and drag them over here
Speaker 2: to the right. That's strasserism, that straight up stratsirism. But
Speaker 2: when you look at it even further, it's just a
Speaker 2: bunch of people that only cared about themselves ultimately. And
Speaker 2: we've seen it after year after year in this fight.
Speaker 2: So I think that it's going to be very important
Speaker 2: to build and protect our institutions and recognize what it
Speaker 2: is we are protecting them from. And it's not hard.
Speaker 2: We have shown over and over and over again that
Speaker 2: we are prepared to weigh that kind of war. We
Speaker 2: just have to basically recognize it within ourselves when we
Speaker 2: have to do it. And that's just. And do not
Speaker 2: wait for people to die. I mean, Heather Hire did
Speaker 2: not have to die. No one in January sixth, regardless
Speaker 2: of how I feel about any of them had to die.
Speaker 2: That should not be the thing that we should respond to.
Speaker 2: We already know what to do, we just need to
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it picked up on a lot of
Speaker 7: what everyone said, especially Michael. I think part of what
Speaker 7: gets out here is having a place for like broad
Speaker 7: social movements where they're able to interact with one another
Speaker 7: and support one another. So anti fascist movements as a
Speaker 7: defensive movement have often been essential to actually operating other
Speaker 7: kinds of organizing, you know. So like when I was
Speaker 7: working with houseless encampments and we were doing food not
Speaker 7: bombs and stuff. You get attacked by far right groups,
Speaker 7: you had to have a defense development. There was no
Speaker 7: other choice.
Speaker 2: Same thing.
Speaker 7: I've been at union offices that were attacked by the
Speaker 7: far right, you have to have that defensi development. And
Speaker 7: then on the same token, we're talking about mass actions
Speaker 7: against far right demonstrations. It requires people that are coming
Speaker 7: probably from all kinds of political backgrounds, but they've gotten
Speaker 7: involved from different kinds of practices. We're having mutual aid
Speaker 7: networks that support people getting there, sustaining themselves there, medical care,
Speaker 7: all kinds of component pieces. So those things require that
Speaker 7: kind of back and forth. And I think that also
Speaker 7: begs to how do you get people in. We're talking
Speaker 7: about a lot of problems with people on like the
Speaker 7: moderate left not kind of taking the next steps, those
Speaker 7: defensive steps that are necessary, but also how do we
Speaker 7: find a pathway for them in? You know, if we're
Speaker 7: talking about mass participation in something, if we're talking about
Speaker 7: like a revolutionary movement with huge masses of people, we
Speaker 7: have to figure out what those pathways for people are
Speaker 7: and giving them access to them. And I think also
Speaker 7: moving past what we've thought of as the far right before.
Speaker 7: I mean, people have talked about this a little bit.
Speaker 7: You know, a lot of what we think of as
Speaker 7: recent anti fascism was built around finding the alt right
Speaker 7: and other kind of recent short term projects and what
Speaker 7: we have now is just radically different, just like it
Speaker 7: will be in a few years, and so having a
Speaker 7: deep kind of intersexual understanding of how that works, because
Speaker 7: when you do that, you have that kind of natural
Speaker 7: understanding of where that's going to show up again, how
Speaker 7: it might interact with different communities, and what rule places
Speaker 7: for you, How are you able to interact with it
Speaker 7: as this person coming into a social movement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, especially considering something I've been kind of
Speaker 4: watching and we're seeing a little bit of it with
Speaker 4: this with this set of Republican primaries, is that we
Speaker 4: have an incoming new wave of kind of gen z
Speaker 4: and millennial Republicans who grew up in the alt right
Speaker 4: era who are now bringing that sort of like alt
Speaker 4: right street politics to electoralism, and how that's going to
Speaker 4: be a posed it's going to be. You know, I
Speaker 4: was just talking about before how we shouldn't just try
Speaker 4: to like retread the same ground over and over and
Speaker 4: without learning the histories from the past. But like this,
Speaker 4: for a lot of people who have just been doing
Speaker 4: like street politics the past few years, figuring out how
Speaker 4: they're going to oppose like fascism in this much more
Speaker 4: like electoral setting. It's going to be an interesting shift because, yeah,
Speaker 4: you can like punch Richard Spencer and no one really
Speaker 4: cares too much. But if you punch someone like you know, DeSantis,
Speaker 4: that is going to be a different thing to kind
Speaker 4: of sort through. And so, yeah, I think that is
Speaker 4: kind of one of these shifts that you know, maybe
Speaker 4: maybe coming up here soon and whatever kind of evolves
Speaker 4: on the anti fascist side to kind of meet that
Speaker 4: is going to be interesting to watch and take part in.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think that, you know, the part of the
Speaker 8: ARA analysis has always been that fascism is built from
Speaker 8: above end below, and I think we really have to
Speaker 8: understand that that the fascism is fascism is not only
Speaker 8: the factor of the street politics and the people who
Speaker 8: declare themselves to be fascist, but that there are fascist
Speaker 8: elements in the structure of this society, and there are
Speaker 8: fascist elements in power in this government right now. And
Speaker 8: you know, the fascism has come to power in quite
Speaker 8: a number of you know, in Italy, neo fascists as
Speaker 8: the prime Minister in you know, in the United States,
Speaker 8: Matt Gates, and that element has a clear you know,
Speaker 8: they're in power within the Republican Party they control the
Speaker 8: House representatives in a way, and I think that that's
Speaker 8: a critical understanding. But also it speaks to the fact
Speaker 8: that fascist practices and elements exist in a lot of
Speaker 8: different places. And I think one of the things I've
Speaker 8: always tried to put out to people is that this
Speaker 8: is an aspect of the nature of imperialism, central colonialism,
Speaker 8: and I want to emphasize that because I think there's
Speaker 8: a fractal character to what we're dealing with or holographic,
Speaker 8: you know, there's any element of this society that you
Speaker 8: attempt to deal with, you're actually facing the entirety of
Speaker 8: imperialism and fascism there. So if you look at the
Speaker 8: labor movement right now, labor is a big resurgence, particularly
Speaker 8: here in southern California. There have just been you know,
Speaker 8: the hotel workers and restaurant works on strike, the screen
Speaker 8: actors on strike, the writers go on strike, and the
Speaker 8: fact that there, you know, there is a fascist element
Speaker 8: to the employment structure and trying to organize it. If
Speaker 8: you look what happened with the Amazon union, or just
Speaker 8: the fact that again going back in history, you know,
Speaker 8: the Taft Hartley Act was written to criminalize you know, communists,
Speaker 8: and also solidarity with the labor movement and outlaw, you know,
Speaker 8: solidarity strikes and that's fascist, that is you have to
Speaker 8: understand that. And you know, one of the reasons that
Speaker 8: the Puerto Rican Dependence Movement attack Congress was that the
Speaker 8: US attempted to put the taft Tartly Act into practice
Speaker 8: against the labor in Puerto Rico, and the Nationalist Party said, no,
Speaker 8: we're going to counterattack. So I think that that's a
Speaker 8: really critical understanding. We started out talking about the prisons,
Speaker 8: and you know, there's nothing more fascists's in prison. And
Speaker 8: one of the things they do in prison is they
Speaker 8: use privilege to try to divide the prisoners, you know,
Speaker 8: and we haven't talked much about privilege and how it
Speaker 8: operates in the society, but you know, it's a key
Speaker 8: factor in how people are are organized by the system
Speaker 8: to collaborate to you know, get along by going along
Speaker 8: and so. But even inside the prisons we've seen here
Speaker 8: in California and elsewhere, you know, the Alabama, Georgia, elsewhere,
Speaker 8: prisoners are able to organize under conditions of fascism that
Speaker 8: exist in the prisons. They have ways to communicate with
Speaker 8: each other they've built into racial solidarity in many cases.
Speaker 8: So I think those are examples of anti fascism that
Speaker 8: we need to embrace and understand the same way that
Speaker 8: people organ you know, if you're organizing a union, you're
Speaker 8: operating on a certain level clandestinely, because if you're open
Speaker 8: about it, you're going to get fired, and they're going
Speaker 8: to retaliate and they're going to Anybody you talk to
Speaker 8: is going to get fired. So we need to have
Speaker 8: an understanding of ways to organize that are not always
Speaker 8: I'm not talking about arms struggle, but I'm saying that
Speaker 8: people have to organize below the radar when you're dealing
Speaker 8: with fascism, especially when it's in power, and fascism isn't power,
Speaker 8: and a lot of sectors of the society right now
Speaker 8: and people are dealing with it, as Emily said about
Speaker 8: you know, Istanbul and Pride marches, you know, so you know,
Speaker 8: I think we need to make those connections into the
Speaker 8: labor movement, into the prison movement, into the you know,
Speaker 8: formally incarcerated people's movement, you know, the solidarity with indigenous
Speaker 8: druggers are going on against fascist the colonization of their
Speaker 8: lands and struggles, and I think that if we understand
Speaker 8: that that's an aspect of anti fascism, I think it
Speaker 8: actually strengthens what we're engaged in.
Speaker 5: Definitely. I think it's also important just to, like, I guess,
Speaker 5: if people are thinking about their organizing, and it's always
Speaker 5: important to hear from those struggles as well as you know,
Speaker 5: to to include them, but to really include them in
Speaker 5: a sense of like listening and learning from rather than
Speaker 5: sort of telling and saying this is like a cis
Speaker 5: hat white guy. It's definitely a thing that I've perceived
Speaker 5: in the movement in the last few years is a
Speaker 5: desire to speak a little more and listen a little less.
Speaker 5: And one thing I enjoyed about your book is that
Speaker 5: when we talk about fascism, and we'd already mentioned Michael's
Speaker 5: mentioned the border as a sort of a location for
Speaker 5: fascist experiments within the United States, which I think it's
Speaker 5: very hard to argue against living on the border. If
Speaker 5: you protested in twenty twenty against police violence, you were
Speaker 5: surveiled using technology that has been used for years where
Speaker 5: I live, against migrants and citizens who live here. But
Speaker 5: I really liked your perspective on looking at global fascisms,
Speaker 5: because fascism is it's very easy to spend too much
Speaker 5: time defining fascism, especially as anti fascists, right, Like, it's
Speaker 5: extremely easy to be like, it's not fascism unless it
Speaker 5: comes from the Fascia region of Italy, kind of like
Speaker 5: this like cheese or champagne definition of fascism. But like
Speaker 5: they've focused on, for instance, fascism in India, Like if
Speaker 5: I go to the border, I was at the border
Speaker 5: a couple of days ago, right that there are tons
Speaker 5: of Punjabi Sikh people camped out in the desert right
Speaker 5: now because border patroller are holding them in an open
Speaker 5: air concentration camp, essentially because of what's happening in India
Speaker 5: that they turn up here, right and as well as
Speaker 5: bringing sort of migrant detention resistance and migrant mutual aid
Speaker 5: and twenty fascism. I think it's in n AETI fascists also,
Speaker 5: like we can take concrete action to protect and like
Speaker 5: to care for victim survivors of fascisms. I guess people
Speaker 5: who fled fascism, and like, when I think about what
Speaker 5: my backgrounds in the study of the Spanish Civil War,
Speaker 5: right that that's what my PhD is about the thing
Speaker 5: that radicalized young often Jewish men growing up in the
Speaker 5: same part of New York that you did, was often
Speaker 5: seeing people fleeing fascism coming to their communities and then
Speaker 5: being like, we can't allow that not only to not
Speaker 5: happen here, but the crucial step that like, we can't
Speaker 5: allow that to happen anywhere, and that being what kind
Speaker 5: of motivated them to travel to Spain, and many of
Speaker 5: many of them died fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Right.
Speaker 5: But I think we could do better to do that
Speaker 5: as well. Like now, I know not all of us
Speaker 5: are living in the To States right now, but sometimes,
Speaker 5: like Emily said, American anti fascism can be very exceptionalist
Speaker 5: or whatever. But I think that we have so much
Speaker 5: to learn from anti fascists in my sort of formative
Speaker 5: experiences who were in Catalonia, in Spain, but also in India,
Speaker 5: also in Russia, right, And I wonder if anyone could
Speaker 5: shell like sort of I guess concrete ways that people
Speaker 5: listening can help to expand that solidarity into an international
Speaker 5: anti fascism.
Speaker 7: I think there's an interesting example, and it gets to
Speaker 7: what Michael was stressing about fascism being kind of colonial
Speaker 7: rule brought back to homeland.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 7: A lot of the methods that were used against kind
Speaker 7: of mid century anti fascist organizers, for example, the Anti
Speaker 7: Nazi League or later anti fascist action in the UK.
Speaker 7: We're basically test run against Irish Republicans in Northern Ireland, right,
Speaker 7: So those uprisings, different kind of methods of crowd control,
Speaker 7: use of quote unquote non lethal weapons, different kinds of
Speaker 7: forms of incarceration, and then used later against the Anti
Speaker 7: Nazi League. So there's sort of a step. They're taking
Speaker 7: this colonial rule back home that's the testing ground, and
Speaker 7: then using it domestically. And I think what that actually
Speaker 7: does is create a certain bridge between two communities that
Speaker 7: there's now a point of connection where they can relate.
Speaker 7: That doesn't mean they're in the same situation, right, Like
Speaker 7: it doesn't mean that like someone protesting in the United
Speaker 7: States is in the same situation as someone in to
Speaker 7: call in my space. But having that shared system that
Speaker 7: actually binds us together in that sense of solidarity, that's
Speaker 7: a new model of safety, that's a new model of community.
Speaker 7: So it's now seeing my strength in that alignment with
Speaker 7: someone else, So connecting with communities internationally, learning from what
Speaker 7: they're doing, but making real connections between them, ones that
Speaker 7: have a real sense of weight between them, where someone's
Speaker 7: success in international social movement has real effect on your
Speaker 7: lives and back and forth. I think committing to that
Speaker 7: is actually the kind of biggest thing we can do
Speaker 7: that creates an international movement and it makes everyone stronger,
Speaker 7: everyone more effective.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think one of the strengths of anti racist
Speaker 8: action was that it was always an international organization. It
Speaker 8: was US and Canada, and there were a lot of
Speaker 8: chapters in Canada, and that really helped break some of
Speaker 8: the US exceptionalism understanding. But he also had corresponding organizations.
Speaker 8: It was Resistancia, Redskin in Colombia, in Bogaton, and a
Speaker 8: couple of like Colleie. I think, and you know, I
Speaker 8: think that that really is an important element. And again
Speaker 8: what I said is that we need to understand that,
Speaker 8: you know, similar to what Lennon said about the Russian Empire,
Speaker 8: that is the prison house of nations, that there are
Speaker 8: captive nations inside the borders of the United States, and
Speaker 8: that you know, indigenous sovereignty and you know Puerto Rican independence,
Speaker 8: and you know Hawaiian sovereignty and a lot of other issues.
Speaker 8: And I think those are things that you know, the
Speaker 8: fascists try to exploit. Also, you know, they present themselves,
Speaker 8: you know, fascionism presents itself in the Third World as
Speaker 8: a strategy for you know, national dependence. When the Japanese
Speaker 8: you know, empire.
Speaker 2: But it so forward.
Speaker 8: It was the you know, they presented themselves as being
Speaker 8: opposing British and US imperiless in Asia. You know that,
Speaker 8: and you know then they were imposing their own imperialism.
Speaker 8: But you know that that internationalist element I think is
Speaker 8: really critical. And uh, I think the same thing in labor.
Speaker 8: I think that the labor movement, you know, needs in
Speaker 8: this country needs to think about, you know, prison struggles
Speaker 8: as part of the labor movement, needs to think about
Speaker 8: the internationalists aularity with labor struggles elsewhere. One of the
Speaker 8: things I raised with in relation to the Screen Actors
Speaker 8: Guild and Writers Guild here is that you know, they
Speaker 8: raised this whole thing about artificial intelligence. And I don't
Speaker 8: know if people are aware, but artificial intelligence depends on
Speaker 8: tens of thousands of people in the Philippines and elsewhere
Speaker 8: that are working you know, as gig workers processing stuff
Speaker 8: to put it into artificial intelligence. And you know, the
Speaker 8: same thing you're saying about the border, the technology of
Speaker 8: self driving vehicles is based on the same technology using
Speaker 8: to you know, for motion detection on the border.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 8: And the reason they're doing that is also because the
Speaker 8: people driving self driving vehicles is not just Google and Uber,
Speaker 8: but it's the US Army Tank Division, which wants to
Speaker 8: have automated self driving tanks the same way they have drones.
Speaker 8: And having that understanding that it is up against the
Speaker 8: global system and the fascists or a piece of that,
Speaker 8: but they're not the only piece of that, I think
Speaker 8: is really really critical to understanding what we have to
Speaker 8: deal with.
Speaker 3: We talk about, you know, what would a fascist government
Speaker 3: look like if it was in control, you know, full
Speaker 3: control with no opposition. I think there are plenty of
Speaker 3: examples of that, and there's a fascist war happening right
Speaker 3: now in Ukraine, and I think that there's so much
Speaker 3: that we can learn from what is going on there
Speaker 3: that oftentimes I think that as anti fascists we find
Speaker 3: ourselves wanting to be with the left, that we get
Speaker 3: into a political situation that gets muddled. I went to
Speaker 3: the border twice in Ukraine when the war broke out.
Speaker 3: I would relive Unite the right one hundred times before
Speaker 3: I had to go back to that again. We don't
Speaker 3: understand scales until you have seen it, until you've seen
Speaker 3: the hundred or the thousand yards there from hundreds of people,
Speaker 3: you know, poring over the border. I'm sure James, you're
Speaker 3: you're you're very familiar with this, with the border work
Speaker 3: that you're doing there.
Speaker 9: These things are.
Speaker 3: So often distant to abstract to us that we we
Speaker 3: lose sight, that we think that we can influence things
Speaker 3: within our own spaces that will then have an impact
Speaker 3: on these bigger, bigger systems, and we can't write. So
Speaker 3: I think that you know, to go back to you know,
Speaker 3: what would be the call of action? You know, what
Speaker 3: would I want the listener to take take away from this.
Speaker 3: I think that this is about as somebody said earlier, listen,
Speaker 3: listen more, and speak less. Right, try to read, Try
Speaker 3: to to see what people elsewhere are doing, how they're organizing,
Speaker 3: what their needs are. You know, how do we do
Speaker 3: mutual aid in earthquake and flood stricken areas? How do
Speaker 3: we do mutual aid for refugees who are fleeing a war,
Speaker 3: and things like that. There's just so so much out
Speaker 3: there that we need to bring into perspective. And if
Speaker 3: you think that you can fix any of it, or
Speaker 3: even just a small part of it simply through speaking
Speaker 3: up or you know, awareness campaigns, I think that you'reld.
Speaker 3: So I think my call it action is go out,
Speaker 3: read books, meet people, get off of Twitter. Scrass for
Speaker 3: me to say it. But the master's tools can't dismantle
Speaker 3: the Master's house, right. We can't keep this pattern of
Speaker 3: outreach cycles up. In order to move the issue forward,
Speaker 3: we have to come up with something new. My challenge
Speaker 3: to people is to put your brains together and figure
Speaker 3: out what that new is going to look like.
Speaker 5: Maybe that's where we could end actually is with each
Speaker 5: of you suggesting something like Emily has just done right,
Speaker 5: something to read, something to do, and an action to
Speaker 5: take they could concretely help us oppose and rebuff and
Speaker 5: push back against fascism.
Speaker 2: I think it was pretty much going back to what
Speaker 2: I was saying earlier that it will begin when we
Speaker 2: take the bull by the horns. It will begin whenever
Speaker 2: we decide that we are going to with establish this.
Speaker 2: I mean, it goes back. You know, I grew up
Speaker 2: with hip hop. I was in the punk scene. Both
Speaker 2: those genres, both those cultures were created by people who
Speaker 2: by those who didn't see, say the mainstream listening to them.
Speaker 2: So they said, you know what, we don't need them.
Speaker 2: We need to just go ahead and do what we
Speaker 2: need to do so we can benefit what it is
Speaker 2: we want to do. And that's the attitude that we
Speaker 2: got to have. We got to have that hip hop attitude,
Speaker 2: gotta have that punk attitude, and we just simply got
Speaker 2: to build the institutions that will address the situation. And
Speaker 2: I will say it again, that's what Occupy was about.
Speaker 2: I think we need to continue to learn the lessons
Speaker 2: from Occupy in order to go forward. And once we
Speaker 2: start doing that, first of all, when we do that,
Speaker 2: we're going to see again people trying to either co
Speaker 2: op or or take it down. And we got to
Speaker 2: also protect ourselves from from that as well. I mean,
Speaker 2: I know I'm repeating what I had said earlier, but
Speaker 2: I think that the solutions and you know what what
Speaker 2: I didn't say, I think the solutions are already being implemented.
Speaker 2: I think that we are all have been working and
Speaker 2: doing this. Folks that aren't on this Folks that aren't
Speaker 2: on this podcast, folks that would never be on any
Speaker 2: pockets are just basically putting their time and to make
Speaker 2: sure that the things are done properly. I just got
Speaker 2: I just saw on the news that they had in Delaware,
Speaker 2: they just passed the law against I guess what they
Speaker 2: call panic panic killings in regards to the l g
Speaker 2: B t Q community. You know that what they also
Speaker 2: call back in the day, the gay panic thing defense. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Delaware became the seventeenth state, I believe, yesterday to make
Speaker 2: that illegal. It should have been illegal in the first place,
Speaker 2: but they basically for those who don't know what that means,
Speaker 2: it generally means you cannot kill somebody because you're freaked
Speaker 2: out over someone being gag. I mean, that's just basically
Speaker 2: what it is concerned for. It happened after Jenny Jones.
Speaker 2: Somebody expressed their feelings towards another man, and that person
Speaker 2: after the Jenny Jones show, had murdered that person, and
Speaker 2: the killer, instead of getting first degree murder, got second
Speaker 2: degree murder because he used the gay panic defense. So
Speaker 2: people initially, so that was where everything started and everybody
Speaker 2: was saying that we got to do something about that.
Speaker 2: If it was not for us putting together the mechanism
Speaker 2: and the institutions to basically basically voiceocers and voice our
Speaker 2: issues and say we got to do something about this today,
Speaker 2: would that have happened. It should not be seventeen states,
Speaker 2: by the way, it should be all fifty. But that's
Speaker 2: the kind of things that we need to do. These
Speaker 2: are the things that it's all going to depend on
Speaker 2: us and how we act to things that is going
Speaker 2: to make all the difference in the world. So when
Speaker 2: everybody's ready, that's rock and roll.
Speaker 7: I think I'm really interested in getting people connected to
Speaker 7: social movements for their entire lives and seeing things through
Speaker 7: being really connected with the communities. And I think that's
Speaker 7: about looking about where people fit in, where they feel
Speaker 7: comfortable building those relationships because it happens both at the
Speaker 7: kind of local and national international scale. So finding I
Speaker 7: think a piece and pathway for folks. I mean, right now,
Speaker 7: I think considering what we're dealing with climate and economic collapse,
Speaker 7: mutual aid networks or a natural central piece of that.
Speaker 7: So it's a labor movement.
Speaker 2: And going where the far right is.
Speaker 7: Having their front lines, making our defensive front lines. So
Speaker 7: for example, in defense of trans healthcare against that that
Speaker 7: trans legislation, and defense of queer events like directing story
Speaker 7: are that's absolutely important and we have those relationships now.
Speaker 7: So it's about sort of finding a place to be
Speaker 7: able to reproduce those social movements and grow them. And again,
Speaker 7: like Daryl said, people are doing that, and I think
Speaker 7: like as there are shifts, people have to kind of
Speaker 7: redefine that a little bit. But having that adaptability is
Speaker 7: what we've kind of learned over this rapidly changing environment
Speaker 7: the last few years.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'll tacond again to give people a little bit
Speaker 8: of sense of the longer view. I think that the
Speaker 8: rise of the Christian Right in this country has a
Speaker 8: lot to do with the destruction of the labor movement
Speaker 8: and the collapse of organized labor. Was that vacuum was
Speaker 8: filled by, you know, the Christian right, because the labor
Speaker 8: movement at one point did touch people throughout their lives
Speaker 8: and their culture, and it was not just in your workplace,
Speaker 8: but it was a community organization. And I think that
Speaker 8: we have to rebuild that, you know, from the bottom up,
Speaker 8: and it is happening. There's a lot of young people
Speaker 8: involved in labor organizing. I think that again what I
Speaker 8: said earlier about the fractal nature of the system, I
Speaker 8: think one of the things people left in the name
Speaker 8: is anything they're trying to do, they have an enemy.
Speaker 8: It's not just a problem that they're trying to face.
Speaker 8: They have there is an enemy out there that is
Speaker 8: trying to enforce the system that we have as it collapses.
Speaker 8: And I think that that's critical. So, yes, the mutual
Speaker 8: aid and the kind of things Emily was talking about,
Speaker 8: I think are critical. I think people are working on
Speaker 8: people's assemblies. I was at this dual power gathering and
Speaker 8: the Midwest, and there was just one up in Portland recently.
Speaker 8: And I think that the understanding that all the power
Speaker 8: and all the wealth that this system possesses is actually
Speaker 8: stolen from the people that it oppresses and exploits, and
Speaker 8: that it's our power and it's our power to take
Speaker 8: it back. We have the creative power. I think that's critical,
Speaker 8: and that their power is exploitive and power over an
Speaker 8: hour is the power, you know, to create. I think
Speaker 8: that understanding and that concept of solidary and I do
Speaker 8: think that you know again, Stephen Bico, part of the
Speaker 8: Black Conscience movement in South Africa, said the you know,
Speaker 8: the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is
Speaker 8: the minds of the oppressed. And I think to the
Speaker 8: extent that we can wage to struggle for a different
Speaker 8: consciousness that is not based on privilege, is not based
Speaker 8: on getting along by going along, is not based on individualism,
Speaker 8: you know, but it is based on collective solidarity, and
Speaker 8: that actually disempowers the people that we're dealing with and
Speaker 8: threatens them in ways that you know, they're they're they're
Speaker 8: freaked out. They understand better than we do the the
Speaker 8: tenuous nature of their power. And you know, the reason
Speaker 8: for fascism to turn to fashions is that they want
Speaker 8: to try to intimidate people and you know, U you know,
Speaker 8: break people people solidarity up. And I think that that,
Speaker 8: you know, we need to understand there's a dialectic there
Speaker 8: and to the extent that we can create those connections
Speaker 8: between people that actually disempowers them, the fascists and the state.
Speaker 8: You know, I have a different perspective on the three
Speaker 8: way fight. I think the three way fight is versus
Speaker 8: the fascists, you know, the self declared fascists and against
Speaker 8: the state and the capitalist, the bourgeoisie, and you know,
Speaker 8: they're not identical. They have contradictions with each other, and
Speaker 8: we can exploit those and drive wages of our own.
Speaker 8: I think we have to find wedge issues that peel
Speaker 8: people off from their identification with the oppressor, with white
Speaker 8: supremacy and with imperialism, and you know, pull people together
Speaker 8: and then who've been you know, separated from that identification
Speaker 8: with the state and with white power, and bring them
Speaker 8: into solidarity with you know, the global majority of people
Speaker 8: who are struggling for you know, survival the better world.
Speaker 4: Does anyone have anything to plug besides the book?
Speaker 5: Yeah, explicitly plug the books. I don't think we did, Like, like,
Speaker 5: what where can you buy it?
Speaker 6: What's the code?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I can plug in and do the self promotion. So
Speaker 7: the book is no passon Anti Fascist Dispatches from a
Speaker 7: World on Crisis, So we all have chapters in it.
Speaker 7: I edited it. It's with AK Press, who listeners are
Speaker 7: probably familiar with, so you can get Akpress. Always recommend
Speaker 7: folks go to Akpress and buy directly if they can,
Speaker 7: but you can get it pretty much anywhere and it's
Speaker 7: a hefty read. It's about five hundred pages, about twenty
Speaker 7: five chapters, and it really covers the gamut. Some of
Speaker 7: the stuff we talked about, some stuff we didn't get to,
Speaker 7: so it's a really good overview of some of the
Speaker 7: different conversations happening in the anti fascist movement and hopefully
Speaker 7: where it goes in the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll take that.
Speaker 8: I think the chapter in anti Fascism in the black
Speaker 8: metal scene was really fascinating and worth the price of
Speaker 8: the book all by itself. Honestly, the stuff by India
Speaker 8: I did want to talk to other books. I've been
Speaker 8: involved in what is called the Blue Agave Revolution. It's
Speaker 8: self published myself and Olso Blanco, Indigenous political Prisoner Contact,
Speaker 8: Anti Racist Actions, anti Racist dot org or email me,
Speaker 8: Anti Racist on the Square, laid Yahoo dot com. I
Speaker 8: was also involved with, although I did edit or anything,
Speaker 8: but I contributed a lot of material to We Go
Speaker 8: Where They Go, which is from PM Press. It's the
Speaker 8: history of AAR and it's chock full of incredible material
Speaker 8: about you know, specificity. One of the things we didn't
Speaker 8: talk about AARs involved in was cop Watch. But you know,
Speaker 8: just a lot of you know cultural material and other
Speaker 8: stuff there that it's well worth reading.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess I'll chime in. I'd say I have
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff out there right now. One of
Speaker 2: the things that you can look for with me is
Speaker 2: a documentary that was put out in twenty eighteen called
Speaker 2: all Right, Age of Rage. It's somewhere online. I believe
Speaker 2: it's on TB right now. What was on Netflix. I
Speaker 2: found out that the reason why it's not on Netflix
Speaker 2: anyway is because Netflix has deemed it too political. But
Speaker 2: you can still find it out there. It's a really
Speaker 2: good remer on basically what it is we're fighting in
Speaker 2: this current time. We don't walk in fear is the
Speaker 2: is the latest documentary that I've been involved with. Some
Speaker 2: students in Villanova University wanted to do a documentary about me,
Speaker 2: and it's not exactly available to the public. What I've
Speaker 2: been doing. You can probably find it at film festivals
Speaker 2: and things like that. But what I've been doing is
Speaker 2: showing it at various events that I've been invited to,
Speaker 2: whether it's some sort of speaking engagement or what have you.
Speaker 2: So it's only a half hour long, but if anybody
Speaker 2: in a university or in a bookstore or whatever, and
Speaker 2: would like me to come out and show the documentary
Speaker 2: to folks and talk about it later. Please feel free
Speaker 2: to give me hit me up over at our website
Speaker 2: One People's Project dot com. We also have a newsline
Speaker 2: that's adevox dot com. Both of them on threads and
Speaker 2: on ig We also have also The last thing that
Speaker 2: I would like to hype is also in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: there are There was the movie Skin where Mike Culter
Speaker 2: who played Luke Cage and it's in the TV show Evil.
Speaker 2: He plays me. It's about a neo Nazi, someone from
Speaker 2: the villain the Social Club, one of the nastiest and forces,
Speaker 2: who got out thanks to myself and others. And it's
Speaker 2: a beautiful story and it's been out since twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: The short film is a different story. I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: say too much about it because you need to watch it.
Speaker 2: You can find it on YouTube, or you can find
Speaker 2: a feature feature Skin on Amazon Prime. But you can
Speaker 2: find they find a short film on YouTube. It actually
Speaker 2: won an Oscar in twenty nineteen and I'm listening as
Speaker 2: a consulting producer, so I guess I have an oscar.
Speaker 2: And that's about it. I mean, if you want me
Speaker 2: to speak, come to your colleges or whatever to speak
Speaker 2: or show the documentary. We don't walk in fear. Feel
Speaker 2: free to give me a ring. I'll be happy to
Speaker 2: see you. I love traveling.
Speaker 8: I can mentioned one other things. Actually I did. We
Speaker 8: talked earlier. I am the intern general manager of KPFK
Speaker 8: ninety point seven FM in Los Angeles. It's one of
Speaker 8: the PACIFICA radio stations, so it's KPFK dot org. We
Speaker 8: have stopped labed spying on the radio. We have It's
Speaker 8: going down on the radio. We have Society of Native
Speaker 8: Nations and American Nadian Airwaves in the radio. We have
Speaker 8: La Rasa Radio, a lot of others very worthwhile. It's
Speaker 8: at KPFK dot org and we're in a current membership
Speaker 8: drive for October. Anyone else joined the station. They don't
Speaker 8: live in La Anti Racist dot org has about thirty
Speaker 8: five years of turning the tie and a bunch of
Speaker 8: stuff actually from earlier. I put some of the stuff
Speaker 8: from brother Reform from being in sexism but I worked
Speaker 8: on in the seventies up there, including a letter from
Speaker 8: Michelle McGee was just recently released. Finally, after I think
Speaker 8: forty eight years in prison, survivor of the Marine Courthouse rebellion.
Speaker 9: I don't have anything to plug.
Speaker 3: I have a book that I'm working on getting representation for,
Speaker 3: but that's still a little bit too early for me
Speaker 3: to plug. So I'll just maybe plug a little bit
Speaker 3: of what is continuing to happen in Charlottesville before we end.
Speaker 9: So some of you may.
Speaker 3: Not be aware that criminal cases are still being brought
Speaker 3: against the neo Nazis who marched with the tiki torches.
Speaker 3: We have sort of successfully convinced the local prosecutor.
Speaker 9: To do something about.
Speaker 3: These fascists who have obviously terrorized the community and continued
Speaker 3: to do it in.
Speaker 9: Their other communities. Whether or not you agree.
Speaker 3: With that approach, the community in Charlottesfield and Alcomorell still
Speaker 3: needs that support and that witnessing. As this all heads
Speaker 3: to trial this winter, we're expecting some renewed fascist attention.
Speaker 3: So I'll just give a shout out for the community
Speaker 3: and ask.
Speaker 9: For your awareness.
Speaker 5: Great, well, thank you very much for time everyone. I
Speaker 5: think that was really instructive and interesting, and yeah, everyone
Speaker 5: should read the book. I read much of it before
Speaker 5: we started today. It's great, it's very interesting. Yeah, thank
Speaker 5: you very much.
Speaker 4: Welcome to what could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. This
Speaker 4: is the show where we talk about how everything kind
Speaker 4: of feels like it's falling apart and how we can
Speaker 4: perhaps sometimes put some of that back together. In about
Speaker 4: a month's time, there's going to be what's being labeled
Speaker 4: a quote unquote mass nonviolent direct action converging on the
Speaker 4: Cop City construction site in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: A few weeks ago I interviewed the two people going
Speaker 4: around the country giving the block Cop City Speaking Tour
Speaker 4: in preparation for this upcoming action next month in Atlanta.
Speaker 4: Like always, the opinions of those interviewed on the show
Speaker 4: don't necessarily reflect the views of the show or myself.
Speaker 4: And with this action in particular, there has been quite
Speaker 4: the variety of opinions regarding its risk level and its
Speaker 4: ideological and tactical validity. But the action is going to happen.
Speaker 4: It is going to take place on November thirteenth, no
Speaker 4: matter you know some people disagreeing with aspects of it
Speaker 4: or having concerns about aspects of it, it is it
Speaker 4: is going to take place. So my interest in putting
Speaker 4: out this episode is to have a very open and
Speaker 4: clear discussion regarding some of the questions people have about
Speaker 4: this quote unquote non violent action and also provide enough
Speaker 4: informations that people can make their own informed decision regarding
Speaker 4: what's going to happen next November. So with that, here
Speaker 4: is my conversation with Sam and Jamie from the Block
Speaker 4: Cop City speaking tour. Joining me today is Sam from
Speaker 4: Block Cop City and Jamie Peck. Both of you have
Speaker 4: been going around the country I think it's around seventy
Speaker 4: cities right now, doing a speaking tour to talk about
Speaker 4: this upcoming action in November to Block cop City. Thanks
Speaker 4: for coming on.
Speaker 11: Guys, No problem, Yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 4: So I assume anyone who's listening to this is already
Speaker 4: familiar with cop City, whether through their own their own
Speaker 4: keeping up with the news, or even if they're just
Speaker 4: even if they just listen to the show. We have
Speaker 4: covered Coup City quite extensively the past like two years.
Speaker 4: So let's talk about this this kind of upcoming action,
Speaker 4: because it's very different than kind of the previous mobilizations
Speaker 4: that we've seen, which have taken form as like weeks
Speaker 4: of action. We had one last last June, we had
Speaker 4: one the previous March. So what's different about this new
Speaker 4: upcoming three day kind of mobilization.
Speaker 12: So yeah, obviously it's taking place on one day instead
Speaker 12: of a whole week, and there's gonna be two days
Speaker 12: of nonviolent direct action training leading up to the day
Speaker 12: of which would be really important to make sure that
Speaker 12: everybody feels prepared for what we're.
Speaker 6: About to do.
Speaker 12: It's different in a few different ways. I feel like
Speaker 12: this is a passover. I answering the four questions, Right,
Speaker 12: how has this action different from all other actions? Well,
Speaker 12: it's gonna be like a real centralization of efforts, right
Speaker 12: because other weeks of action have been a little more diffuse,
Speaker 12: a little more right out, And here we're sort of
Speaker 12: bringing to bear the full power of all the people
Speaker 12: coming from all over the country in the same place
Speaker 12: at the same time. Because there's safety in numbers and
Speaker 12: there's power in numbers. And I feel like the June
Speaker 12: Week of Action people were kind of going all over
Speaker 12: the place, not really sure what to do when. And
Speaker 12: I talk to a lot of people who were like,
Speaker 12: just tell us what to do, tell.
Speaker 6: Us what the move is on this particular day.
Speaker 12: And we'll be there and there is no one to
Speaker 12: do that, which you know is sometimes a hazard of
Speaker 12: sort of anarchistic movements. Right, nobody's in charge, and we're
Speaker 12: not in charge right now either. I should say. Everybody
Speaker 12: is going to have a chance to have input on
Speaker 12: the final plan in a thing called spokes councils that
Speaker 12: we're doing the weekend before the action.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I think we're picking.
Speaker 12: A lane, and we're doing a thing, and this particular
Speaker 12: lane has been chosen for a number of different reasons.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: The movement is in an interesting place right.
Speaker 12: Now, where more people than ever know about cop City,
Speaker 12: more people than ever are.
Speaker 6: Opposed to cop City, as.
Speaker 12: Evidenced by the one hundred and twenty thousand petition signatures
Speaker 12: that the referendum campaign was able to collect to actually
Speaker 12: get a referendum on the ballot to let the people
Speaker 12: of Atlanta actually vote on whether or not they want
Speaker 12: this thing built.
Speaker 6: Of course, the city is throwing every trick in the book.
Speaker 12: At them because they do not want to let the
Speaker 12: people vote. But on the other hand, right, lots of
Speaker 12: people know about it, lots of people oppose it, but
Speaker 12: the number of people who are willing and able to
Speaker 12: show up and do direct action against it has dwindled,
Speaker 12: and that's for a few different reasons. Right, there's been
Speaker 12: so much repression of the movement. One hundred people at
Speaker 12: least are now facing charges. We've got people facing domestic
Speaker 12: terrorism charges, We've got people facing RICO charges, just like
Speaker 12: an absurd overreach of the state, even according to mainstream
Speaker 12: legal scholars. So we really need a way for people
Speaker 12: to feel empowered doing direct action again is what we've
Speaker 12: settled upon as a solution, and maybe Sam can take
Speaker 12: it from there.
Speaker 10: Sure, thanks, yeah, to build upon that, I suppose, Right,
Speaker 10: you were sort of asking why is it that less
Speaker 10: people than ever are taking embodied action in the forest,
Speaker 10: And one of those reasons also is.
Speaker 11: People have been directing attention to other initiatives.
Speaker 10: Right, So the one hundred and twenty thousand petition signatures is,
Speaker 10: you know, gathered by something like three thousand volunteers.
Speaker 11: There's all sorts of different parties throughout the movement who
Speaker 11: have been trying, you know, just another diverse tactic.
Speaker 10: Right, This movement has seen incredibly diverse tactics over the
Speaker 10: last two years, all sort of moving in unison with
Speaker 10: one another, and we sort of see block Top City
Speaker 10: as just another type of tactic in a larger repertoire
Speaker 10: of a toolkit. You know, we haven't actually had an
Speaker 10: instance of over a thousand people doing embodied direct action
Speaker 10: in the forest, like that's never occurred in this campaign.
Speaker 10: We've had a lot of people during some weeks of Action,
Speaker 10: but this is a little bit different in the scope.
Speaker 11: It's a little bit different in flavor.
Speaker 10: I liked what you were saying, Jamie about the sort
Speaker 10: of like a lot of other sort of convergences in
Speaker 10: Atlanta that were called weeks of action where we're distributed,
Speaker 10: we're very autonomously organized, and we're sort of treading a
Speaker 10: line between like the main sort of organizing style. You know,
Speaker 10: we're on tour right now, right calling in from Vancouver
Speaker 10: and you're over in Maine, vast continental wide tour. One
Speaker 10: of the primary functions of this tour is like the
Speaker 10: activation of affinity groups to sort of catalyze and come
Speaker 10: down to Atlanta so that crews can sort of have
Speaker 10: the confidence of flexibility, the warmth and the revelry that
Speaker 10: comes with moving through space with your homies, with your comrades,
Speaker 10: while at the same time there's a very large cohort
Speaker 10: of various logistical teams trying to figure out various programming events.
Speaker 11: The locations of these trainings, how to feed.
Speaker 10: People, how to house people, how to keep people entertained,
Speaker 10: things like that. So it's I think the scope is larger,
Speaker 10: potentially hitting eighty cities if we can finalize a few
Speaker 10: final requests and the sort of the action itself, right, so,
Speaker 10: as Jamie was saying, is sort of confined to one day, right,
Speaker 10: but it's a four day convergence. So the action itself
Speaker 10: is being Our goal is to sort of carve out
Speaker 10: of space.
Speaker 11: That day of on the morning of Monday, November.
Speaker 10: Thirteenth, which thousands of people can take embodied action together
Speaker 10: in the forest.
Speaker 4: Again, when you say like embodied action, this thing has
Speaker 4: been advertised as using quote unquote strategic non violence as
Speaker 4: opposed to like moralistic non violence, like where you like
Speaker 4: oppose violent direct action on principle. Instead, this has been
Speaker 4: trying to employ non violence as a strategic action. Do
Speaker 4: you want to talk a little bit about kind of
Speaker 4: how that's being envisioned, because I know there's certainly, even
Speaker 4: in Atlanta, there's a lot of people who are either
Speaker 4: skeptical or confused or fear that there's like other you know,
Speaker 4: safety issues with within action as public as this, right,
Speaker 4: because you're trying to get thousands of people to show up,
Speaker 4: So this is this very publicly announced thing, which also
Speaker 4: gives the police a big heads up. So I know
Speaker 4: there's been a lot of you know, there's there's a
Speaker 4: lot of questions, and I feel like, you know, the
Speaker 4: this this aspect of non violence is a very interesting
Speaker 4: one because the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement has been
Speaker 4: I think very historically defined by you know, very spontaneous,
Speaker 4: fiery acts of sabotage. So I guess, yeah, just that's
Speaker 4: I want to kind of I'm interested in this kind
Speaker 4: of strategic non violence aspect.
Speaker 12: Well, I don't know that it's been defined by these
Speaker 12: strategic acts of sabotage, which, by the way, I don't
Speaker 12: consider violence against private property to violence. Tend to apply
Speaker 12: that to human beings only. But yeah, we certainly we
Speaker 12: don't disavow violence. We don't dis about any tactics in
Speaker 12: the fight. I mean, the highest level of violence that
Speaker 12: any activists have even been accused of is probably about
Speaker 12: the same level that you'd find if you've ever had
Speaker 12: a Roman candle fight with your friends, right, you're shooting
Speaker 12: fireworks in each other's general direction. Obviously that wasn't happening
Speaker 12: for fun when folks did it in the activism world.
Speaker 12: But yeah, why non violence?
Speaker 6: Why now? It's a great question, and I think a
Speaker 6: lot of.
Speaker 12: It has to do with responding to the charges on
Speaker 12: the table.
Speaker 6: A lot of it has to.
Speaker 12: Do with wanting to create an easier on ramp for
Speaker 12: people and something that can be openly promoted because, you know,
Speaker 12: for better or for worse, the media has at times
Speaker 12: portrayed certain corners of the movement as these like scary
Speaker 12: eco terrorists, and you know, when people are doing a
Speaker 12: higher risk action, it's inherently something that you can't really
Speaker 12: go around the country talking about and engaging groups of people.
Speaker 6: That you don't know.
Speaker 12: So, you know, we wanted to strike this balance, right
Speaker 12: and what are we doing? Well, yes, technically it's a crime,
Speaker 12: so was what Martin Luther King did in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 12: And we wanted to draw on that legacy, right, because
Speaker 12: the civil rights movement has a deep, deep legacy in
Speaker 12: Atlanta itself.
Speaker 6: So like we've had rallies at the MLK Center.
Speaker 12: And now, so, okay, we're doing a thing, right, There's
Speaker 12: a thousand people there, there's children, there's clergy, it's in
Speaker 12: broad daylight. The state is sort of caught in a
Speaker 12: buyant now because okay, it could arrest one thousand people
Speaker 12: in broad daylight and charge them with domestic terrorism. That
Speaker 12: would create a political crisis, and that would be an
Speaker 12: international outrage, and I think it would also be fairly unprecedented.
Speaker 12: It's possible that that would happen, although I don't think
Speaker 12: that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 6: There was recently a similar kind of.
Speaker 12: Direct action on the construction site that the Faith Coalition
Speaker 12: against Cop City did. Actually, five people chained themselves to
Speaker 12: the construction of equipment and they were arrested. They're all
Speaker 12: out on misdemeanors now, which is what you usually get
Speaker 12: charged with for a protest of that nature. Right, So, yeah,
Speaker 12: the state could hypothetically arrest a thousand people and charge
Speaker 12: them with terrorism. That would be an international outrage, that
Speaker 12: would be a political crisis. On the other hand, the
Speaker 12: state could do and there are signs that has been
Speaker 12: pulling back, right because what I just said, if the
Speaker 12: state charges people with misdemeanors for doing the exact same
Speaker 12: thing that people were recently charged with terrorism or hit
Speaker 12: with RICO charges for doing that will also serve to
Speaker 12: further delegitimize these charges for the people already facing them.
Speaker 4: Mass arrests are certainly pretty big concern for people when
Speaker 4: they're deciding if they want to go to such an action.
Speaker 4: And I mean, because this action is happening, and you know,
Speaker 4: one of the most I would say, it's probably in
Speaker 4: like the top five most police areas of the country
Speaker 4: right now, is in the South River Forest is specifically
Speaker 4: the Copsity construction site. It's certainly concerned a lot of
Speaker 4: people have, especially when you know we're talking about possibly
Speaker 4: police arresting hundreds of people try to kettle them in
Speaker 4: the site. It's it's certainly a very very valid concern
Speaker 4: to have.
Speaker 10: I'll also add a little bit to that. So for me,
Speaker 10: the the question of like mass arrest is actually maybe
Speaker 10: not even in the top five reasons why I'm interested in.
Speaker 11: Doing this campaign.
Speaker 10: I think it obviously is a possibility, right, I would
Speaker 10: say the goal of this action for me at least
Speaker 10: is not to get arrested. Yeah, obviously, like you know,
Speaker 10: many civil disobedience campaigns, like that's an explicit part of
Speaker 10: their understanding.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like a lot of change, right, Yeah, A lot
Speaker 4: of like the extinction rebellion kind of tactics, even some
Speaker 4: of them more kind of earth first tactics kind of
Speaker 4: revolve around being arrested as a part of the tactic itself.
Speaker 4: And there's certainly been a lot of pushback towards that
Speaker 4: type of like self sacrificial tactic here in Atlanta the
Speaker 4: past few years, and kind of in the general kind
Speaker 4: of anarchistic mill you that's kind of been like stewing that,
Speaker 4: you know, is is this kind of self sacrifice of
Speaker 4: being arrested actually useful in any way? And I'm sure
Speaker 4: that is part of part of some people's thought process
Speaker 4: going into this, is is you know, if there's a
Speaker 4: decent chance I am going to get arrested just for
Speaker 4: walking onto a site, is is it worth it? But
Speaker 4: sorry you were I realized I was interrupted you and
Speaker 4: went on a short, a short rant.
Speaker 10: No, that's okay, it's a it's a it's a very
Speaker 10: important issue to a lot of us, right, So, yeah,
Speaker 10: like sort of as I was saying, like that the
Speaker 10: goal of this act is action is not to get arrested.
Speaker 10: But but obviously, as you were saying, like we're waltzing
Speaker 10: onto the fucking sorry cops city construction site, it's a
Speaker 10: very good chance, to say the least. And but for me,
Speaker 10: the other interesting parts about this is right is embodied
Speaker 10: action in the forest has just not felt possible for
Speaker 10: months and months and months. There hasn't been an occupation
Speaker 10: of the forest since the cops killed tort in January
Speaker 10: of this year, except for a couple of days during
Speaker 10: the March Week of Action, But largely speaking, in the
Speaker 10: forests has been held by big scary men with big
Speaker 10: scary guns for many months now, and the horizons feel
Speaker 10: incredibly obscured.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 10: It's it's very unclear what the movement could do right now,
Speaker 10: that could that could jump start our energies, that could
Speaker 10: serve as a container for the thousands and thousands and
Speaker 10: thousands of disillusioned and disenfranchised folks who have been working
Speaker 10: tirelessly at other methods of change as well. Right so,
Speaker 10: our sort of theory is the most powerful action that
Speaker 10: we can do is one that's sort of defined by
Speaker 10: our by our power in numbers, by our power in
Speaker 10: our unity by our power and sticking together in order.
Speaker 10: So for me, the interesting question isn't even necessarily what
Speaker 10: happens on November thirteenth of this year, the day of
Speaker 10: the action. For me, the interesting question is like, what
Speaker 10: new horizons does this open up in the movement? How
Speaker 10: we can reactivate and recatalyze our energy and understand and
Speaker 10: prove to ourselves in a collective fashion that embodied action
Speaker 10: in the forest is indeed possible at a math level,
Speaker 10: and this actually sort of seeks to advance the energy
Speaker 10: and the movement to a new height that hasn't actually occurred.
Speaker 10: What's going to happen is more people than ever will
Speaker 10: be in the forest together at the same time, and
Speaker 10: that right now is precisely what's needed in this.
Speaker 11: Moment, and the only way to do.
Speaker 10: That as we're doing this publicly and above ground one
Speaker 10: to help aid in that sort of facilitation of just
Speaker 10: a numbers game, right, and then two is like we
Speaker 10: want people to be able to make an informed and
Speaker 10: consensual decision on how they want to engage, and the
Speaker 10: only way that they can do that is for them
Speaker 10: to actually know what the heck is going to happen, Right, So,
Speaker 10: we're going around and being incredibly clear about what the
Speaker 10: plan is and how the finalized version of the plan
Speaker 10: will be, as Jamie sort of opened with, discussed democratically
Speaker 10: and horizontally at these in person outdoor COVID Safe Spokes
Speaker 10: Council meetings on Saturday, November eleventh and Sunday, November twelfth,
Speaker 10: down there in Atlanta, where all these affinity groups from
Speaker 10: around the country, around the state, and around the city
Speaker 10: of Atlanta will sort of elect one of their home
Speaker 10: needs to go to this larger general assembly type thing
Speaker 10: that will then sort of democratically and horizontally determine what
Speaker 10: the actual specifics of Monday's plan will be. Are there
Speaker 10: any sort of community agreements that we want to that
Speaker 10: we want to uplift and highlight so that we can
Speaker 10: all sort of know and be on the same page
Speaker 10: and move in a similar way together. And those could
Speaker 10: be I don't want to speak for with there because
Speaker 10: those will be determined in the Spokes Council. But the
Speaker 10: sort of like there's been questions, I guess lastly, there's
Speaker 10: been questions about well, what does that actually look like
Speaker 10: to maintain a level of non violence whatever that might
Speaker 10: actually mean.
Speaker 11: In a space.
Speaker 10: Right, Like, I'm sure a lot of folks listening, and
Speaker 10: myself included, probably all of us here have witnessed, you know,
Speaker 10: for lack of a better word, peace policing or something
Speaker 10: to that effect. Right, Our wager with this, our goal
Speaker 10: with this, is the activation of affinity groups of crews
Speaker 10: that roll up together who enter into this sort of
Speaker 10: like consensual horizontal decision making space where community agreements are
Speaker 10: explicitly laid out in the days leading up to the action,
Speaker 10: those specific affinity groups can hold each other accountable to
Speaker 10: those norms in whatever way that they want, Right, you
Speaker 10: and your homies holding it down for one another in
Speaker 10: like what we're calling for, right is non violence. Like
Speaker 10: that we can debate, we can have a heavy political
Speaker 10: debate about.
Speaker 11: Like the meaning of violence and the meaning of non violence.
Speaker 11: But like the.
Speaker 10: Language of non violence has a rich history in American
Speaker 10: social justice movements, right, Like that term has meaning to
Speaker 10: a lot of people, And that's actually what's being advocated
Speaker 10: for on this day, but only on that day. Right, Like,
Speaker 10: So what we're talking about is like in this specific
Speaker 10: space that we're going to like create together, this is
Speaker 10: what we're doing. What we're calling for in this moment
Speaker 10: in time, in this specific geography, if people have other
Speaker 10: ways to engage in other spaces or at other times.
Speaker 10: One of the hallmarks of the movement is that by
Speaker 10: all means they should right.
Speaker 11: That's what's kept this movement strong and this is no different.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I'd like to add that there's definitely a precedent
Speaker 12: for this within the movement. There were probably a number
Speaker 12: of events like this, but this was the one that
Speaker 12: I was there for. There was a march a rally
Speaker 12: into March at the MLK Center during the March Week
Speaker 12: of Action, and it was put on by Community Movement Builders,
Speaker 12: which is a great group, all black group organizing in
Speaker 12: specifically black working class communities in Atlanta, led by Kamal Franklin,
Speaker 12: and he put out a statement before this rally in
Speaker 12: March saying, you know, attention camera, this particular event is
Speaker 12: going to be a low risk event. We've decided that
Speaker 12: is what we need today. We've done a lot of
Speaker 12: work in the community getting community members to come out
Speaker 12: to this who maybe haven't been that involved in the past.
Speaker 12: A lot of older working class Black people are going.
Speaker 6: To be there.
Speaker 12: Please don't do anything that's going to attract extra attention
Speaker 12: from the cops. Don't do anything spicy, you know, don't
Speaker 12: break windows. If they tell you to stay on the sidewalk,
Speaker 12: stay on the sidewalk. Not that there's anything wrong with
Speaker 12: those tactics right in general, And he went out of
Speaker 12: his way to say, we do not denounce these tactics
Speaker 12: in general. It is just not the right thing to
Speaker 12: do today at this particular thing. And everybody pretty much listened,
Speaker 12: and everybody bathed themselves, and I thought it was a
Speaker 12: really cool example of you know, the respect, the mutual
Speaker 12: respect across different different corners of this movement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've definitely been thinking about that action in relation
Speaker 4: to this, to this upcoming kind of event.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think it was on the Thursday of the fifth
Speaker 4: Week of Action, a few days after there was like
Speaker 4: the mass arrests at at the music festival, because I
Speaker 4: mean there were they were in the in the in
Speaker 4: the lead up to that Community Movement Builders march, there
Speaker 4: were very similar questions around like, yeah, like who's going
Speaker 4: to enforce nonviolence, which really is kind of a silly question,
Speaker 4: and that there is you know, there is precedent absolutely
Speaker 4: of people like peace policing and even turning over people
Speaker 4: to the cops. That that that that that is a precedent.
Speaker 4: But in this case, like you you know, these specific
Speaker 4: people and community movement builders have been pretty down with
Speaker 4: the more militant aspects of this movement for years, and
Speaker 4: you know, in the in the hours before that action,
Speaker 4: you know, people sought and gained more clarification on like no,
Speaker 4: like we're not going to like fuck you over, but like, hey,
Speaker 4: we're trying to like bring our grandmas and our kids
Speaker 4: to this. And not that the police need any excuse
Speaker 4: to you know, attack people, but this is you know it,
Speaker 4: this is the thing that we're planning, This is what
Speaker 4: this is what we're trying to do. You don't have
Speaker 4: to come if you don't want to, you know. And
Speaker 4: it's it is that type of like mutual understanding and
Speaker 4: agreement that actions like this kind of rest on. Because
Speaker 4: I certainly know that there's there's probably a good deal
Speaker 4: of forest defenders who you know, would like to jump
Speaker 4: at the opportunity to do you know, spicy stuff on
Speaker 4: the site, because that's that's a you know, from their perspective,
Speaker 4: that's a very uh, it's a very attractive proposal, which
Speaker 4: you know also as president. In these types of big
Speaker 4: mass mobilizations, There's there's certainly aspects of that that kind
Speaker 4: of intersect with this especially. You know, one concern people
Speaker 4: may have is that this is being pushed as like, hey,
Speaker 4: we're you know, we're going to all these cities, We're
Speaker 4: trying to mobilize all these people, get a thousand people,
Speaker 4: we're all planning this thing together. There's there's a certain
Speaker 4: risk that that type of language could be turned against
Speaker 4: any of the possibly hundreds of people arrested on March
Speaker 4: thirteenth and rule these into and have that role in
Speaker 4: to the reco charges that people are facing in Georgia. Now,
Speaker 4: I also kind of, from my understanding, part of this
Speaker 4: action is to kind of showcase the kind of absurdity
Speaker 4: of these reco charges by by demonstrating this is like
Speaker 4: very typical civil rights kind of you know, social movement organizing.
Speaker 4: But I think those two things I think can actually coexist,
Speaker 4: where yes, this is very typical civil rights organizing, and
Speaker 4: also the state specifically, you know, the state that you
Speaker 4: know in Atlanta have been have have not cared at
Speaker 4: all and is very is very willing to use these
Speaker 4: to use charges like this as a chilling tactic to
Speaker 4: suppress any future like protest or mobilization against cop City.
Speaker 4: So this is like, I think one other dynamic that
Speaker 4: people are certainly thinking about in terms of, you know,
Speaker 4: deciding if they want to participate in something like this.
Speaker 10: Sure, yeah, above all, one of the primary functions repression, right,
Speaker 10: is to to scare us into inaction, right, And in
Speaker 10: the face of that, the worst thing that we can
Speaker 10: do is power away and shrink. And precisely, this type
Speaker 10: of mass mobilization is the ultimate show of solidarity with
Speaker 10: all people who have been swept up into various trumped
Speaker 10: up legal charges related to this movement. And and also
Speaker 10: there's you know, throughout the history of American social movements,
Speaker 10: there's there's there's president after president after precedent of people
Speaker 10: organizing their communities and their friends that they care about
Speaker 10: to travel to a place of you know, of injustice
Speaker 10: and stand in solidarity together.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 10: This is like, this isn't a classic organizing tactic. It's
Speaker 10: nothing particularly new. It's the first time that I've been
Speaker 10: involved in and sort of this scale of organizing and
Speaker 10: this sort of specific flavor I think with any action,
Speaker 10: right just because we call it non violence doesn't mean
Speaker 10: that violence won't occur on the site, specifically maybe at
Speaker 10: the hands of the police or other law enforcement agencies. Right,
Speaker 10: just because we call it non violence doesn't mean that
Speaker 10: there isn't risk involved. Right, with any action that we
Speaker 10: go to, there's risk involved. But you know, our understanding
Speaker 10: is that the risk of inaction far outweighs the risk
Speaker 10: of action in this moment.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because they're going to build that thing if nobody
Speaker 6: does anything. They're trying to build it right now.
Speaker 12: And what's going to happen after that, Well, there's going
Speaker 12: to be hundreds and hundreds more cops on the streets,
Speaker 12: trained in all the latest militarized technological ways to you
Speaker 12: oppress and terrorize civilian populations and put down the next
Speaker 12: big popular uprising, which they've connected it with very explicitly.
Speaker 6: So we should be thinking about it in that way too.
Speaker 10: And you know, we're a generation without victories, right.
Speaker 11: It just sort of feels like we.
Speaker 10: I don't want to minimize the real tangible wins that
Speaker 10: do indeed happen, but largely speaking, it feels like we're
Speaker 10: a generation without victories.
Speaker 11: We need to win social struggles.
Speaker 10: And tens of thousands of people from around the world
Speaker 10: are watching the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement hoping that
Speaker 10: it wins. Right, So I sort of asked myself what
Speaker 10: would have happened if Standing Rock would have won? Right,
Speaker 10: Like Standing Rock raised the bar for what it means
Speaker 10: to resist a pipeline en camp in an unseated indigenous
Speaker 10: territory in this country. It raised the bar for that, right,
Speaker 10: So the next time that invariably rulls around, hopefully we
Speaker 10: can begin from that ploy that point.
Speaker 11: But the pipeline is built.
Speaker 10: Right, oil is flowing through it, oil is leaking through it.
Speaker 10: It didn't win that element of the work, and that's
Speaker 10: why it's important that we have victories. And that's why
Speaker 10: you know, there's so much, so many people pouring so
Speaker 10: much energy into the Defend the Atlanta Forest, Stop cop City,
Speaker 10: No Hollywood Dystopia campaign, because we know it's winnable, but
Speaker 10: we need to ratchet up. And this is precisely the
Speaker 10: sort of level of accessible but also drastically heightened level
Speaker 10: of ratcheting up of our intensity of our collective power
Speaker 10: together that's possible in this moment.
Speaker 4: One thing that Sam you kind of mentioned earlier in
Speaker 4: this conversation is that this plan is really just one
Speaker 4: spear in the many that's trying to put cracks in
Speaker 4: the facade of the cop City project, and this action
Speaker 4: is really just being put in relation to a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of other things that could happen that would eventually
Speaker 4: lead to cop City being stopped. I think that's a
Speaker 4: really important aspect to kind of clarify, because you know,
Speaker 4: there are some detractors who are you know, framing this
Speaker 4: action as being like the only you know, path forward
Speaker 4: that organizers are wanting to do, and I don't know this.
Speaker 4: This movement's been very very based on people taking their
Speaker 4: own spontaneous action and there being not just one strategy,
Speaker 4: not just one plan. There's always a big, a big,
Speaker 4: you know, litany of things that could be going on,
Speaker 4: which all kind of starts to put pressure on this
Speaker 4: on this house of cards, so to speak.
Speaker 10: There's a political crisis, a bruin in Atlanta that has
Speaker 10: been for a very long time. Right, Andre Dickens, for
Speaker 10: some reason, has put all of his chips into this thing,
Speaker 10: and he is like hated for it.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 11: The Atlanta Police Foundation has taken out millions and millions
Speaker 11: and millions of dollars of loans to build this thing.
Speaker 11: If they fail to build Copcity, which they will, then
Speaker 11: they will default on those loans and they might go bankrupt.
Speaker 10: So this entire project not is essentially a house of cards,
Speaker 10: and it doesn't really feel that way because it's being
Speaker 10: buttressed on all sides by corporations, by crony politicians, by
Speaker 10: big men with big guns, you know. But they're doing
Speaker 10: so precisely because it's fragile, precisely because it's a house
Speaker 10: of cards, and there's zero buy in from the community
Speaker 10: and from people and standing in solidarity around the world
Speaker 10: for this project.
Speaker 11: What could be a fatal death blow to this movement
Speaker 11: is a mass quantitative uptick in the number of people
Speaker 11: taking action in the forest, and that would be a
Speaker 11: new and novel blow to this thing that it hasn't
Speaker 11: really seen.
Speaker 12: There really is a battle happening over the like who
Speaker 12: gets to use this language of social justice and who
Speaker 12: gets to draw on the legacy of the civil rights movement?
Speaker 12: Right and there are two really competing narratives right now.
Speaker 12: You have the stop Cop City movement, which has a
Speaker 12: pretty complete analysis, i would say, of the ways that
Speaker 12: racial oppression and class exploitation power, American capitalism, right, and
Speaker 12: the ways that copcity feed into and enable those.
Speaker 6: Things with the help of the bourgeois state.
Speaker 12: And then you have the cynical take from the City
Speaker 12: of Atlanta and from the political class.
Speaker 6: I'm looking at a.
Speaker 12: Post that just I think just was posted by the
Speaker 12: City of to Twitter account. It says Mayor Andre for
Speaker 12: Atlanta welcomed guests to the March on Washington's sixtieth Dream
Speaker 12: Youth panel at North Atlanta High School. Mayor Dickens highlighted
Speaker 12: the significance of mlk's nonviolence movement and shared his hopes
Speaker 12: that our youth will work together to fulfill mlk's dream
Speaker 12: hashtag m W sixty. So there we have a cynical
Speaker 12: attempt to harness the legacy of the civil rights movement, right,
Speaker 12: because what the fuck is he even talking about? Like,
Speaker 12: how are youths going to work together to fulfill Mlk's
Speaker 12: dream of you know, freedom equality? Uh, not just in
Speaker 12: terms of who gets to buy things at a particular store,
Speaker 12: but like true economic power and equality for everyone, especially
Speaker 12: black proletarians who have served a very specific and important
Speaker 12: role in American capitalism.
Speaker 6: Right, what is he talking about? If not, like, we're
Speaker 6: doing exactly what MLKA.
Speaker 9: Used to do.
Speaker 12: This is a non violent act of civil disobedience. So
Speaker 12: what could he What else could he mean by that?
Speaker 12: Does he mean voting for Democrats? Does he mean, you know,
Speaker 12: working for NGOs? Does he mean joining this political class?
Speaker 12: Because I think, like it actually makes me feel better
Speaker 12: that the people of Atlanta seem to know that this
Speaker 12: is bullshit. Despite all of the propaganda that's been coming
Speaker 12: out from from the state and from the you know,
Speaker 12: the bourgeois media and the mainstream press that just kind
Speaker 12: of uncritically reports the things that the mayor says, the
Speaker 12: things that the cops say. The propaganda isn't working. One
Speaker 12: hundred and twenty thousand people signed this petition in a
Speaker 12: city of five hundred thousand. I mean, I think they
Speaker 12: can clearly see who's really carrying on this project of
Speaker 12: social justice and equality.
Speaker 4: Great. I always I always love checking up on the
Speaker 4: City of Atlanta Twitter account because at least once a
Speaker 4: day they post some absolutely absurd thing. I guess because
Speaker 4: the last thing I think it's probably worth mentioning is
Speaker 4: that like a big part of this plan is trying
Speaker 4: to catalyze affinity groups to come to the city, you
Speaker 4: know with you know, specifically with the idea of them
Speaker 4: participating in this in this action on November thirteenth, But
Speaker 4: you know, nothing is stopping affinity groups from pursuing other
Speaker 4: forms of direct action during the for the four or
Speaker 4: so days they might be in town. I think it's
Speaker 4: you know, a big, a large part of this movement's
Speaker 4: been very based on like self determination and radical autonomy,
Speaker 4: whether that's that includes your ability to participate in you know,
Speaker 4: big big collective max big collective mass actions, or just
Speaker 4: having fun with your friends around the city, like what
Speaker 4: happened near the end of the last week of action
Speaker 4: where eight motorcycles mysteriously vanished from the material plane.
Speaker 11: So that.
Speaker 4: We're about a month away from this. If people are
Speaker 4: interested in want to kind of learn more information about
Speaker 4: this proposal, where can people find, as said information.
Speaker 11: Yeah, thanks for that.
Speaker 10: We're currently in the middle of our Wei Lanni worldwide
Speaker 10: Math Action speaking tour eighty cities from from Portland, Maine
Speaker 10: to Portland, Oregon, Vancouver to Tijuana and everywhere in between.
Speaker 10: Jamie and I will also be co hosting a Zoom
Speaker 10: tour stop on Saturday, October fourteenth, at three pm Eastern time.
Speaker 10: Check out blochcopcity dot org for information on those tour stops,
Speaker 10: including the ones on Zoom. There's also going to be
Speaker 10: a schedule for the weekends festivities that is coming up
Speaker 10: quite soon, which could include several cultural events, welcoming ceremonies too,
Speaker 10: in person spokes concil meetings, general direct action, non violent
Speaker 10: direct action trainings, as well as other ways to spend
Speaker 10: time quality time together down in the forest leading up
Speaker 10: to the mass action on the morning of Monday, November thirteenth.
Speaker 11: If people have resources.
Speaker 10: They would like to donate to the movement, whether that
Speaker 10: be in the form of in person housing. Has helped
Speaker 10: with transportation, help with collective cooking processes, help with social
Speaker 10: media outreach, journalistic outreach, help with just thinking through this
Speaker 10: thing right and how we can make it as empowering
Speaker 10: and successful as possible and help sort of allow this
Speaker 10: to once again raise the bar for what it means
Speaker 10: to fight against deforestation, to fight against over policing in
Speaker 10: black and brown communities around the country, to fight against
Speaker 10: economic injustice and the attack and dignified forms of life,
Speaker 10: cross social movements and regions.
Speaker 11: You can contact us.
Speaker 10: Via our contact form on the web page, which you
Speaker 10: can find on black opsidt org, slash contact and there's
Speaker 10: a contact to fill out. There's also a Gmail block
Speaker 10: coopcityatgmail dot com. So if any of those things are
Speaker 10: if you want to figure out how to plug in,
Speaker 10: feel free to direct your correspondence to one of those channels.
Speaker 6: Yeah, blockcopcity dot org.
Speaker 12: You can watch our hype video, you can read our
Speaker 12: invitation to action. You can well, the tour might be
Speaker 12: mostly over by then, but you can look at where
Speaker 12: the tour has been.
Speaker 6: Lots of good.
Speaker 12: Information on that website, and there's also lots of ways
Speaker 12: to get in touch. So yeah, hope to see you
Speaker 12: all in November.
Speaker 10: You're cordially invited to activate an affinity group. Come down
Speaker 10: to November between Friday Veterans Day November tenth to Monday
Speaker 10: November thirteenth, and then also it's important to note that
Speaker 10: probably on the fourteenth and the fifteenth there'll be collective
Speaker 10: days of healing and anti repression work that will be
Speaker 10: happening citywide as well.
Speaker 4: That does it for us today on the show. Once again,
Speaker 4: thanks to Sam and Jamie for talking with me about
Speaker 4: this action. Hopefully you have a little bit more information
Speaker 4: about this than you had going into it. You can
Speaker 4: certainly find more information about this action and a variety
Speaker 4: of other opinions on the scenes. Do Noblog's website and
Speaker 4: other kind of anarchistic news websites if you want to
Speaker 4: go seeking out those other opinions. See you on the
Speaker 4: other side.
Speaker 13: Hello everybody, and welcome to it could happen here. My
Speaker 13: name is Sharene, and a lot has happened recently and
Speaker 13: we definitely need to talk about it. There's a lot
Speaker 13: to cover and things are changing every day. I can't
Speaker 13: possibly talk about everything in a thirty minute podcast episode,
Speaker 13: but just for context, I'm recording the bulk of this
Speaker 13: on Wednesday, October eleventh. There are many different things that
Speaker 13: we should get into, and we'll probably get into them
Speaker 13: in other episodes, so look forward to those. But today
Speaker 13: I want to talk about why exactly this attack from
Speaker 13: Hamas is so different and so unprecedented for many reasons,
Speaker 13: and why the response by Israel is also extremely unprecedented.
Speaker 13: There has been a lot of violence, a lot of death,
Speaker 13: and I thought a better way to start to learn
Speaker 13: about this might be with something really specific, like learning
Speaker 13: about the border fence that has been cajing in Gaza
Speaker 13: for years, why Israel thought it was so impermeable, and
Speaker 13: how they were wrong. So let's begin the video and
Speaker 13: images going around on social media of a bulldozer breaking
Speaker 13: through a portion of the fence that has long enclosed
Speaker 13: the Gaza stript for years, this cage that surrounds that territory,
Speaker 13: the image of a bulldozer there's running straight through it
Speaker 13: and Palestinians running to the other side. I don't think
Speaker 13: you can find anything better to represent the long history
Speaker 13: of Israeli Palestinian tensions, the decades of brutal Israeli occupation,
Speaker 13: the recurrent Hamas bombings and rocket strikes, and the political
Speaker 13: deterioration on both sides than this image. No one thought
Speaker 13: this was going to happen. Professor Clive Jones, director of
Speaker 13: Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University, said,
Speaker 13: this is the first time since nineteen forty eight that
Speaker 13: any Palestinian militant movement has taken territory in Israel proper
Speaker 13: that symbolic victory and defeat for Israel will resonate across
Speaker 13: the region. So on the morning of October seventh, there
Speaker 13: was a surprise attack from Hamas against Israel. What happened
Speaker 13: was a colossal failure of Israeli intelligence as well as
Speaker 13: the Israeli government. I'll go into this in more detail
Speaker 13: in a bit, but in this surprise attack, resistance fighters
Speaker 13: were entering an up to twenty nine different locations outside
Speaker 13: the Gaza Strip. Most significantly, fighters tore through the border fence,
Speaker 13: which has also been called the Iron Wall. They knocked
Speaker 13: it aside with bulldozers, drove right through it with jeeps
Speaker 13: and motorcycles. Other Hamas fighters sailed right over it with
Speaker 13: fan powered gliders, and others hopped on boats to try
Speaker 13: to reach the other side by sea. A crucial component
Speaker 13: of Israel's defense from an attack like this, or at
Speaker 13: least it was supposed to be, was this sophisticated border fence.
Speaker 13: I want to talk about how exactly Israel came to
Speaker 13: build this fence, because throughout most of its history, the
Speaker 13: IDF did not want much to do with defensive measures.
Speaker 13: Its traditional security concept rested on three complimentary pillars, the terrents,
Speaker 13: early warning, and decisive battlefield victory. Guided by the concept,
Speaker 13: the IDF built offensive power designed to deter enemies from
Speaker 13: attacking and intelligence raised in order to detect when that
Speaker 13: deterns had eroded. If it was unable to convince the
Speaker 13: other side that it was better off avoiding conflict, the
Speaker 13: IDF would bring the full might of its offensive capabilities
Speaker 13: in search of a rapid and decisive quote unquote victory,
Speaker 13: which just means they would end up killing a lot
Speaker 13: of people. They would fly in cities and masker hundreds
Speaker 13: of people in order to essentially make the other side
Speaker 13: lose all hope and not fight back, and if they did,
Speaker 13: to tell them never to fight back again. This would,
Speaker 13: according to this concept, initially strengthen the terrens. The idea
Speaker 13: of defense for Israel began sneaking into the conversation in
Speaker 13: the nineteen sixties, as Israel considered purchasing the Hawk surface
Speaker 13: to air missile system from the US. This idea had
Speaker 13: some opposition at the highest level of the IDF. Air
Speaker 13: Force Commander Ezer Wiseman opposed the idea on the grounds
Speaker 13: that it would give Israel's political chiefs an excuse to
Speaker 13: avoid the bold offensive operations, in this case, surprise airstrikes
Speaker 13: that would take out entire buildings, which he viewed as
Speaker 13: necessary to win a war in the end, though five
Speaker 13: Hawk missile batteries were purchased just before the nineteen sixty
Speaker 13: seven Six Day War for thirty million dollars. The first
Speaker 13: makings of the present day security fence began in nineteen
Speaker 13: ninety four, after the signing of the Interim Agreement on
Speaker 13: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, when Israel constructed
Speaker 13: a forty mile fence along its boundary with Eastern Palestine.
Speaker 13: The construction was completed in nineteen ninety six, though it
Speaker 13: didn't necessarily represent a hard border. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 13: under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel carried out a
Speaker 13: disengagement from Gaza, which included, among other things, pulling out
Speaker 13: its troops. This meant that the one kilometer buffer zone
Speaker 13: that the Israeli Defence forces maintained after the first fence
Speaker 13: was torn down by Gozens in two thousand was no
Speaker 13: longer a possibility. A plan for an alternate forty five
Speaker 13: fence a few dozen meters east of the original fence,
Speaker 13: entirely on Israeli land, was then developed. The present day
Speaker 13: forty mile long barricade has several sections. A twenty foot
Speaker 13: high smart fence, which is the over the ground fence
Speaker 13: with a maritime section manned by sensors to detect encouragements
Speaker 13: from the water, and an underground wall of classified depth
Speaker 13: and thickness with sensors to detect any digging. The overground barrier,
Speaker 13: which makes up eighty one percent of the fence, is
Speaker 13: supported by a complex network of cameras, radar systems, as
Speaker 13: well as command and control rooms. One hundred and forty
Speaker 13: thousand tons of iron and steel were used in the
Speaker 13: construction of the underground wall, which took three and a
Speaker 13: half years to complete. The total cost of the project
Speaker 13: is estimated at one point eleven billion dollar. The project
Speaker 13: of the quote unquote smart fence was publicly announced in
Speaker 13: twenty sixteen, and in twenty twenty one, Israel announced the
Speaker 13: completion of the smart fence, which included an underground concrete barrier.
Speaker 13: This addition, which I feel like is important to mention,
Speaker 13: was because Hamas used underground tunnels to blind side Israeli forces.
Speaker 13: In twenty fourteen, access near the fence on the Gaza
Speaker 13: side was limited to farmers who were on foot. On
Speaker 13: the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put
Speaker 13: in place to monitor threats and slow intruders. With the
Speaker 13: announcement of its completion in twenty twenty one, the then
Speaker 13: Defence Minister Benny Gantz said, the barrier placed a quote
Speaker 13: iron wall between Hamas and southern Israel. But on October seventh,
Speaker 13: as we saw, the wall failed massively and a surprise
Speaker 13: series of coordinated efforts enabled Tamas to get past the wall.
Speaker 13: The fence was breached at twenty nine points, according to
Speaker 13: the IDF. There were also Israeli guard towers positioned at
Speaker 13: every five hundred feet along the perimeter of the wall
Speaker 13: at some certain points, and the Hamas fighters there appeared
Speaker 13: to encounter very little resistance. It soon became apparent that
Speaker 13: the border was minimally staffed, with much of Israel's military
Speaker 13: diverted to focus on the unrest in the West Bank.
Speaker 13: Matthew Levitt is the director of the counter Terrorism Program
Speaker 13: at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said
Speaker 13: the most compelling parts of the system were the ones
Speaker 13: that provided indicators and warnings. But you don't see in
Speaker 13: advance that someone is masked at the fence. It's still
Speaker 13: just a fence, a big fence, but just defence. Still,
Speaker 13: he says, the idea of a bulldozer getting that close
Speaker 13: to the fence at all just boggles the mind. The
Speaker 13: attack has been documented as the following. To put it
Speaker 13: very simply, using commercial drones, Hamas bombed as Raeligh observation towers,
Speaker 13: communications infrastructure, and weapons systems along the border. Israel said
Speaker 13: Hamas fired more than three thousand rockets into its territory,
Speaker 13: with some reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Speaker 13: Militants also use explosives to blow up sections of the barrier,
Speaker 13: and men and motorbikes drove through the gaps, and then
Speaker 13: the bulldozers did the rest and this allowed for enough
Speaker 13: space for their larger vehicles to drive through. Experts said
Speaker 13: an attack of this magnitude with all of these elements
Speaker 13: would have required weeks at least of preparation and subterfuge.
Speaker 13: But maybe you're asking, well, why now, why did Hamas
Speaker 13: now decide to launch an attack of this magnitude. There
Speaker 13: are some clues in the name that Hamas gave the attack.
Speaker 13: They named it Operation of Alxa Flood. Just days before
Speaker 13: the attack, hundreds of Israeli settlers, with the protection of
Speaker 13: the Israeli forces stormed Atlexa Mosque and occupied Easter Russ.
Speaker 13: I've talked about this before, but this compound is a
Speaker 13: very important and contested religious site, and it's often very
Speaker 13: often a target by Israeli settlers and the IDF. And
Speaker 13: Hamas said it launched its attack in response to the
Speaker 13: desecration of Alexa. Mohammad'ef, the Rassam Brigades commander said, we
Speaker 13: have decided that the time has come to draw the
Speaker 13: line for the enemy to understand their time is up
Speaker 13: and they can't keep going without consequences. But again, experts
Speaker 13: said this plan would have taken weeks to plan. I'm
Speaker 13: sure the attacks on Aleximosque played a role in the attack,
Speaker 13: but it was probably being worked on for quite some
Speaker 13: time before that. And Hamas also said the attack was
Speaker 13: a response to decades of Israeli violence and occupation. The
Speaker 13: daily impact of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians
Speaker 13: in Gaza and other occupied territories at the West Bank
Speaker 13: is a huge part of this story. Let's take our
Speaker 13: first break before I forget no clever segue here. Just
Speaker 13: listen to these ads and we're back. Analysts and experts
Speaker 13: have been warning for months that the reality on the
Speaker 13: ground in Palestine and Israel was leading up to this.
Speaker 13: Nor Ude, a political analyst and former Palestinian Authority spokeswoman,
Speaker 13: said the record number of Palestinians killed, dispossessed, injured and
Speaker 13: traumatized by Israeli forces and settlers across the occupied West Bank,
Speaker 13: the continued siege on Gaza, the relentless attacks on Elxamosque,
Speaker 13: they were all pushing the situation towards this moment. I
Speaker 13: don't think anybody imagined the particulars of this moment, but
Speaker 13: I think everybody with a sense of what was going
Speaker 13: on knew that this quote unquote calm was deceiving and
Speaker 13: that something was going to happen, something big. And it
Speaker 13: did happen. The wall came down. But for the two
Speaker 13: point three milli million Palestinians who have been virtually trapped
Speaker 13: for fifteen years, as well as the Palestinians on the
Speaker 13: West Bank who have been constantly surveilled, having their movement restricted,
Speaker 13: and have experienced growing military violence, bulldozing through this fence
Speaker 13: means something else. While the Israeli response was feded by
Speaker 13: the failure of this system, making the future of all
Speaker 13: Palestinians even more precarious. The impact of Saturday's attack for
Speaker 13: Palestinians is hugely significant psychologically and symbolically. It shatters the
Speaker 13: idea of Israel's military superiority. It's a physical symbol of
Speaker 13: breaking out of the open air prison they've been held
Speaker 13: captive in, letting them step onto the land that they've
Speaker 13: been forced out of, some of them for their entire lives.
Speaker 13: Most of the Palestinians in Gaza are children, and they
Speaker 13: have only ever known life within the confines of that fence.
Speaker 13: So bulldozing a hole right through this fence to the
Speaker 13: other side will obviously have ripples in more ways than one.
Speaker 13: I want to mention something here that I've been thinking
Speaker 13: about is that Gaza is often referred to as the
Speaker 13: world's biggest open air prison, which is true, but I
Speaker 13: was thinking about it, and prison implies that they did
Speaker 13: a crime. They did not do a crime. The Palestinians
Speaker 13: are innocent. They're stuck in a cage against their will,
Speaker 13: and they have no way out. I think a better
Speaker 13: way to describe Gaza might be an open air concentration camp,
Speaker 13: the biggest open air concentration camp period. It's just something
Speaker 13: I've been thinking about because I feel like open air
Speaker 13: prison implies they're all criminals and they're not. So just
Speaker 13: something to think about when it comes to semantics and
Speaker 13: the power of words, I suppose, even if it's subconscious.
Speaker 13: Gaza has been under a land, sea and air blockade
Speaker 13: since two thousand and seven. More than two point three
Speaker 13: million Palestinians live there, all crammed in and they cannot
Speaker 13: leave without Israeli permission, which very few people get. Hamas
Speaker 13: is a political and armed group that took control of
Speaker 13: two thousand and six, and there hasn't been an election since.
Speaker 13: It's part of a regional alliance which also includes Iran
Speaker 13: and the armed group has Bela and Lebanon. Hamas has
Speaker 13: been designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and
Speaker 13: the EU, among many others. We'll be doing a history
Speaker 13: more in depth about Hamas soon, but it's important to
Speaker 13: note that Israel basically helped create it. More details will
Speaker 13: be in that episode, obviously, but just to summarize very briefly,
Speaker 13: Israel bolstered Hamas's creation and funded its expansion because it
Speaker 13: wanted to divide the Palestinians amongst themselves and they viewed
Speaker 13: the leftist PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was the
Speaker 13: governing party at the time, as a threat, and so
Speaker 13: they encouraged Haamas to flourish and thrive, which leads us
Speaker 13: to now again be separate episode. There is so much
Speaker 13: to cover and I can do it all today. Although
Speaker 13: the PLO used to be the dominant party decades ago,
Speaker 13: in recent years, the PLO and the secular FATA party
Speaker 13: which the PLO is centered around, is often criticized for
Speaker 13: being ineffective, and so many Palestinians see Hamas as the
Speaker 13: most active group when it comes to resistance against the
Speaker 13: violent Israeli occupation. Palestinians have lived in violent occupation for
Speaker 13: seventy six years and the world has largely done nothing.
Speaker 13: Palestinians have no outside support whatsoever, and no one is
Speaker 13: coming to their aid or rescue. They unfortunately only have
Speaker 13: this militant group because of this, and also just a
Speaker 13: reminder that Palestine has actually tried everything and that violence
Speaker 13: is not their first resort. Many Palestinians don't even support Hamas.
Speaker 13: Let's not forget about BDS, which is a Palestinian nonviolent
Speaker 13: movement which calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions for Israel.
Speaker 13: BDS is now deemed illegal. In twenty twenty one, thirty
Speaker 13: five states passed anti BDS laws, so even boycotting Israeli
Speaker 13: products is suddenly illegal. So that was BDS. People are
Speaker 13: obviously still engaged in BDS, and I encourage everyone to
Speaker 13: read more about it, because divestment and sanctions work. It
Speaker 13: worked in South Africa, but here we are. And then
Speaker 13: in twenty eighteen, Palestinians in Gaza mounted the Great March
Speaker 13: of Return to show the world their plight. Day after
Speaker 13: day they walked unarmed to Israeli's military fences around Gaza.
Speaker 13: How did Israel respond to this non violent protest. They
Speaker 13: shot eight thousand Palestinians with live ammunition, killed two hundred
Speaker 13: and twenty people and wounded thirty six. One thousand, one
Speaker 13: hundred and forty three. Palestinians are getting killed regardless of
Speaker 13: the existence of Hamas, because Israel bombing Gaza isn't actually
Speaker 13: about Hamas but occupation and ethnic cleansing. Israel and Hamas
Speaker 13: have fought many on and off quote unquote wars. I say,
Speaker 13: quote unquote because it's not a war if only one
Speaker 13: side has an army, and I personally really hate when
Speaker 13: it's referred to as a war because it's falsely portraying
Speaker 13: an occupation as an equal fight when there's actually an
Speaker 13: oppressor and an oppressed. But regardless, the last big war
Speaker 13: Israel had had with Hamas was in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 13: In the past, it's usually been an exchange of fire
Speaker 13: across the Gaza border. Hamas launches rockets into Israel, Israel
Speaker 13: drops more bombs on Gaza. Hamas launches rockets into Israel,
Speaker 13: Israel drops more bombs on Gaza, and so on. Usually
Speaker 13: this results in a huge civilian death toll in Gaza,
Speaker 13: with Israel bombing entire residential buildings and killing entire families
Speaker 13: and hundreds of children. And just a reminder here that
Speaker 13: Gaza does not have an iron dome to defend itself.
Speaker 13: When Israel bombs Gaza, it does so knowing it is
Speaker 13: very densely populated and filled with hundreds of innocent people
Speaker 13: that have nothing to do with Hamas. They drop bombs
Speaker 13: on buildings, hospitals, schools, nothing is off limits. I don't
Speaker 13: have to remind you, or maybe I do that they've
Speaker 13: also killed members of the press clearly wearing press vests.
Speaker 13: But I guess that's another topic for another day. What
Speaker 13: happened this time around with the attack that Hamas launched
Speaker 13: on October seventh was very different, though it's repeatedly been
Speaker 13: called unprecedented, and this is true for a few reasons,
Speaker 13: One because of the scale of the attack that Hamas launched,
Speaker 13: and two because nobody really saw it coming. As of
Speaker 13: this recording, more than one thousand and two hundreds of
Speaker 13: Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians,
Speaker 13: were killed and more than three thousand were wounded. Hamas
Speaker 13: also said that it captured more than one hundred Israelis,
Speaker 13: including some senior military officers. Nothing like this, especially at
Speaker 13: this magnitude, has happened since two thousand and six, when
Speaker 13: Hamas captured one Israeli soldier, Galatschilit and held him in
Speaker 13: Gaza for five years. And in three days after Hamas
Speaker 13: launched this attack on October seventh, there were still gun
Speaker 13: battles going on between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces in
Speaker 13: the three main areas in southern Israel, and despite verified
Speaker 13: footage and reporting from Gaza that indisputably shows countless Palestinian
Speaker 13: children who Israel has killed so far. Israel's murder of
Speaker 13: Palestinian children is receiving little to no media attention in
Speaker 13: the US or globally, but they create the worst possible
Speaker 13: enemy the world, supports the destruction of an entire people,
Speaker 13: And as an Arab, I want to mention that it's
Speaker 13: really hard to see all of this play out, and
Speaker 13: if you have any Arab friends, I'm sure they're going
Speaker 13: through it too, especially if they're Palestinian, because it's almost
Speaker 13: like deja vus of what happened after nine to eleven,
Speaker 13: and what happened after nine to eleven didn't really stop.
Speaker 13: To be honest, it's not like a somophobia took a
Speaker 13: break and then came back. It's always been there, but
Speaker 13: now it's very shameless and disgusting, and it makes no
Speaker 13: attempt to cover itself because it's not only ignored, but
Speaker 13: encouraged in order to validate the actions of the US
Speaker 13: military and the Israeli military. Another reason for this all
Speaker 13: being so unprecedented is Israel's failure to stop it from happening.
Speaker 13: The Israeli Army is one of the world's most sophisticated
Speaker 13: military and intelligence organizations as well as one of the
Speaker 13: most powerful armies in the world. Because of the United
Speaker 13: States support and billions of dollars in funding, any kind
Speaker 13: of communication going in and out of Gaza, at least
Speaker 13: in theory, would be listened to by Israel's intelligence units.
Speaker 13: And again, the offence is heavily militarized, but still it collapsed.
Speaker 13: I think another significant result of this, which I kind
Speaker 13: of touched on earlier, is that this successful attack from
Speaker 13: Hamas completely undermines the never endingly talked about power of
Speaker 13: Israel and the power of their army and military, especially
Speaker 13: their capability in the region. It kind of disrupts their
Speaker 13: entire image in a way. I also want to quickly
Speaker 13: mention that the claim that Hamas's attack was unprovoked is
Speaker 13: ignoring the years of brutal occupation and exactly why they
Speaker 13: attacked in the first place. It was a surprise, yes,
Speaker 13: but I would never say it was unprovoked, because you
Speaker 13: can't keep someone in captivity their entire lifetime and expect
Speaker 13: them to hug it out. And maybe what I'm saying
Speaker 13: sounds radical to you, especially by the standards of American media,
Speaker 13: but here is this award winning Israeli journalist and writer
Speaker 13: Gideon Levy. He wrote an incredible piece about what's happening
Speaker 13: right now. He writes opinion pieces in a weekly column
Speaker 13: for Herits, and he focuses particularly on the Israeli occupation
Speaker 13: of Palestine, and he has won awards for his articles
Speaker 13: on human rights. He wrote an incredibly moving, powerful piece
Speaker 13: called Israel can't imprison two million Gozzens without paying a
Speaker 13: cruel price. I want to read excerpts from this because
Speaker 13: he is speaking as an Israeli and I think it's
Speaker 13: extremely important to hear what he has to say. Behind
Speaker 13: all this lies Israeli arrogance, the idea that we can
Speaker 13: do whatever we like that will never pay the price
Speaker 13: and never be punished for it, will carry on undisturbed.
Speaker 13: We'll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess, and protect the settlers busy
Speaker 13: with their programs. Will fire at innocent people, take out
Speaker 13: people's eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob grab
Speaker 13: people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing, and of
Speaker 13: course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip
Speaker 13: and everything will be all right. We'll build a terrifying
Speaker 13: obstacle around Gaza and we'll be safe. Will rely on
Speaker 13: the geniuses of the Army's eighty two hundred cyber intelligence
Speaker 13: unit and on the Shinbet Security Service agents who know everything.
Speaker 13: Fe'll warn us in time. It turns out that even
Speaker 13: the world's most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached
Speaker 13: with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great.
Speaker 13: This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped,
Speaker 13: despite the billions poured into it and all the famous
Speaker 13: experts and fat cat contractors, we thought, we'd continue to
Speaker 13: go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the
Speaker 13: form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits, always
Speaker 13: contingent on good behavior, and still keep them in prison.
Speaker 13: We'll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates,
Speaker 13: and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they're erased, as
Speaker 13: quite a few Israelians would like. We'll keep holding thousands
Speaker 13: of Palestinian prisoners, some without trial, most of them political prisoners,
Speaker 13: and we won't agree to discuss their release, even after
Speaker 13: they've been in prison for decades. We'll tell them that
Speaker 13: only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought
Speaker 13: we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution,
Speaker 13: only because we don't want to deal with all that,
Speaker 13: and everything will continue that way forever. Once again, it
Speaker 13: was proved that this isn't how it is. A few
Speaker 13: hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in
Speaker 13: a way no Israeli imagine possible. A few hundred people
Speaker 13: proved that it's impossible to imprison two million people forever
Speaker 13: without paying a cruel price. Just as the smoky old
Speaker 13: Palestinian bulldozer tore through the world's smartest barrier, it tore
Speaker 13: away at Israel's arrogance and complacency. And that's also how
Speaker 13: it tore away at the idea that it's enough to
Speaker 13: occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones and sell them to
Speaker 13: half the world to maintain security. On Saturday, Israel saw
Speaker 13: pictures it has never seen before, Palestinian vehicles patrolling gets cities,
Speaker 13: bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear
Speaker 13: away at that arrogance. The Gaza. Palestinians have decided they're
Speaker 13: willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom.
Speaker 13: Is there any hope in that?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 13: Will Israel learn its lesson? No, On Saturday, they were
Speaker 13: already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about
Speaker 13: occupying the strip and punishing Gaza, quote as it has
Speaker 13: never been punished before. But Israel hasn't stopped punishing Gaza
Speaker 13: since nineteen forty eight, not for a moment. After seventy
Speaker 13: five years of abuse. The worst possible scenario awaits it
Speaker 13: once again. The threats of flattening Gaza prove only one thing.
Speaker 13: We haven't learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay,
Speaker 13: even though Israel is paying a high price once again.
Speaker 13: Prime Minister Benjamin N. Yaho bears a very great responsibility
Speaker 13: for what happened, and he must pay that price. But
Speaker 13: it didn't start with him, and it won't end after
Speaker 13: he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the
Speaker 13: Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza. Gaza,
Speaker 13: most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel, Gaza,
Speaker 13: which has never known a single day of freedom. I
Speaker 13: just think that piece is very powerful, and I know
Speaker 13: I read a good chunk of it. But I think
Speaker 13: it's important to hear, especially from an Israeli as he mentioned, Israel,
Speaker 13: because of this, has responded to the attack with extreme force.
Speaker 13: Prime Minister a little Bitchna and Yahoo said the enemy
Speaker 13: will pay an unprecedented price. Israel has bombed Gaza for days,
Speaker 13: hitting Gaza with air strikes, targeting hospitals, mosques, entire residential buildings,
Speaker 13: and calling Palestinians animals to the media, Israeli Defense Minister
Speaker 13: Yoav Galant said we are fighting animals and acting accordingly.
Speaker 13: Israel also said that it wants to wipe out Hamasa's
Speaker 13: military capability and end its control of Gaza, which doesn't
Speaker 13: really make sense because they're kind of targeting anything and
Speaker 13: now anything they can hit, including civilians, and at the
Speaker 13: end they want control themselves. So I think a lot
Speaker 13: of right wing Israeli politicians, which was most of them
Speaker 13: these days, say empty, stupid shit. And it also looks
Speaker 13: like amidst all this, that a ground invasion is likely
Speaker 13: going to happen because the IDF has been readying tanks
Speaker 13: and military jeeps. It sucks that I have to say
Speaker 13: this out loud, but peace should not come at the
Speaker 13: spence and the brutal oppression of others. There was no
Speaker 13: peace before this attack. The violence of the Israeli occupation
Speaker 13: has been there since the state was established in nineteen
Speaker 13: forty eight. Hamas is a direct result of that violence.
Speaker 13: There has never been peace in Israel because it was
Speaker 13: created in violence. And this clearly does not justify Hamas
Speaker 13: killing innocent people. That is never okay. But Israel also
Speaker 13: can justify killing thousands of people because of that. Abby Martin,
Speaker 13: who is the creator and host of the Empire Files.
Speaker 13: She also made the film Gaza Fights for Freedom, which
Speaker 13: I highly recommend. She posted this exchange on her Twitter
Speaker 13: between her and one of their field producers in Gaza,
Speaker 13: and he says, I'm scared, Abby, I feel I could
Speaker 13: die any second. Most of the people here lost power
Speaker 13: and internet connections, so we don't know where they hit.
Speaker 13: Entire neighborhoods are being erased. They killed twelve hundred of
Speaker 13: us so far and destroyed massively, and yet they say
Speaker 13: they have not started yet. We know massacres are coming,
Speaker 13: and we're sure they got the green light from the
Speaker 13: US to kill us all. So that is a perspective
Speaker 13: of someone standing in Gaza living in fear which isn't
Speaker 13: entirely new as far as living in fear goes, because
Speaker 13: that's been the reality for Gazans for decades. But this
Speaker 13: time it's different because it's very clear that Israel's committing
Speaker 13: a purposeful genocide. But they're in the dark with no
Speaker 13: one to help them, and I can only imagine how
Speaker 13: helpless and hopeless it feels. It just it breaks my heart.
Speaker 13: I just want to give a update, an unfortunate update,
Speaker 13: because things are just fucked and people keep dying. But
Speaker 13: I'm recording this update on the afternoon of October twelfth,
Speaker 13: like a day after I recorded the original stuff, and
Speaker 13: Israel has killed five hundred Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
Speaker 13: since this morning, five hundred in the last six hours
Speaker 13: twelve hours. Gaza's Health ministry said that one thousand, five
Speaker 13: hundred and thirty seven Palestinians, including five hundred children and
Speaker 13: two hundred and seventy six women, have been killed and
Speaker 13: there are almost seven thousand others wounded because of these
Speaker 13: Israeli air strikes. Loss of this magnitude is unsettling and overwhelming,
Speaker 13: and I also want to mention this is something I
Speaker 13: just learned. Israel has bombed the international airports of Aleppo
Speaker 13: in Damascus in Syria, and this has forced them out
Speaker 13: of service. So not only are they massacring the entire
Speaker 13: families in Gaza, but they're also dropping bombs on civilian
Speaker 13: airports in Syria. And the Western media still wants you
Speaker 13: to think that Israel is the victim. It bears repeating
Speaker 13: that Gaza is very densely populated, with two point three
Speaker 13: million people trapped in a very small space, unable to leave,
Speaker 13: with nowhere to escape to. An example of this empty,
Speaker 13: stupid rhetoric that Israeli politicians are saying is when Natanyahu
Speaker 13: said that civilians should leave and evacuate Gaza. He said
Speaker 13: that knowing full well that that is impossible because his
Speaker 13: government forbids it. He said that to the media so
Speaker 13: the world can see that he is just and not
Speaker 13: trying to attack any civilians. It's all a fucking show,
Speaker 13: like I guess all politics are. But it's still really
Speaker 13: infuriating and I hate it so much. And in Gaza,
Speaker 13: before all of this, before the thousands that have already died,
Speaker 13: there was already a blockade. They were trapped for fifteen years.
Speaker 13: And now in addition to this blockade, Israel has imposed
Speaker 13: a total siege on Gaza, inflicting collective punishment, which is
Speaker 13: illegal under international law. But Israel routinely commits war crimes
Speaker 13: and goes about its business unchecked. Why would it be
Speaker 13: any different this time. Remember that half of Gaza's population
Speaker 13: are under eighteen. Hundreds of children have been murdered, and
Speaker 13: horrific videos have been circulating of the destruction of Gaza,
Speaker 13: of bodies and babies and innocent people being pulled out
Speaker 13: of the rubble. I had a break down last night
Speaker 13: because I saw a video of a Palestinian father holding
Speaker 13: his dead child's corpse and hugging it for the very
Speaker 13: last time. And I'm very privileged to be sitting here
Speaker 13: recording this, And if I have difficulty processing it, I
Speaker 13: cannot imagine what Palestinians are going through. Israel controls everything
Speaker 13: in Gaza. If cut off electricity, food, water, and gas
Speaker 13: for an entire population, Israel is massacring Palestinians in a
Speaker 13: blackout on purpose, so they're unable to connect with anyone
Speaker 13: from the outside. No electricity also means that hospitals have
Speaker 13: no way of the already limited machines they have available
Speaker 13: to them so they can save lives. Before this, the
Speaker 13: water in Gaza was already ninety seven percent undrinkable, and
Speaker 13: now it's completely gone. This will lead to dehydration deaths,
Speaker 13: among many, many other deaths. Israel is starving an entire
Speaker 13: population live on your television, openly committing genocide as the
Speaker 13: world watches on as it always does.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat Death of the Universe.
Speaker 6: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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