A tale of blind doctors and good illnesses
Deutsche originalversion kann hier gelesen werden / Original German (and further articles in many languages) at the excellent Refugee Strike Berlin blog
Refugee Strike Berlin’s Statement on Torture of Refugees in North Rhein-Westphalia
On Sunday, 28 September 2014, several cases of abuse of refugees by private security personnel in German refugee centers were made public.
We are outraged. We are furious. We are not, however, surprised. It was not without reason that we left the camps ourselves.
translated into English by the Russian Reader with an afterword by Gabriel Levy.
The verdicts for the second group of defendants in the Bolotnaya Square case – brought against participants in the Russian protest movement of 2011-12 – will be announced on 18 August in Zamoskvoretsky Court in Moscow. The prosecutor has asked the court to sentence Alexander Margolin and Alexei Gaskarov to four years in prison; Ilya Gushchin to three years and three months in prison; and Elena Kokhtareva to three years and three months suspended, with four years of probation. All four defendants have been charged under Article 212 Part 2 (involvement in riots) and Article 318 Part 1 (use of non-threatening violence against a public official) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. On 4 August, 28-year-old Alexei Gaskarov made his closing statement in court. This is the complete text of his speech.
Alexei Gaskarov in court. Source: gaskarov.info via LeftEast
AntiNote: In keeping with our goal of amplifying the voices of those struggling against political repression and social domination, we have reprinted below an English translation of the manifesto issued today by 18 hungerstriking Iranian asylum-seekers in Bern, reacting in part to Switzerland’s easing of sanctions against the country they fled.
The original German can be found here.
Their focus, understandably, is on human rights violations in Iran. We wish to call attention, however, to the refugees’ plight here in Switzerland, which they humbly relegate to point 2 of their demands.
Text published on January 15th, 2012 in the Regensdorf prison by ecoanarchist Luca ‘Billy’ Bernasconi
Prison separates us physically from the struggles. It isolates us from our loved ones and from the daily complicity of our paths of struggle, denying us our own desires. However it doesn’t manage to take them away from our head, nor the fight from our spirit. On the contrary, the rage and hate we feel against these walls and our jailers roots them further on into our soul, into our flesh.Continue Reading
The book is divided into two parts. The first attempts a complete diagnosis of the totality of modern capitalist civilization, moving through what the Invisible Committee identify as the “seven circles” of alienation: “self, social relations, work, the economy, urbanity, the environment, and to close civilization”.The latter part of the book begins to offer a prescription for revolutionary struggle based on the formation of communes, or affinity group-style units, in an underground network that will build its forces outside of mainstream politics, and attack in moments of crisis – political, social, environmental – to push towards anti-capitalist revolution. The insurrection envisioned by the Invisible Committee will revolve around “the local appropriation of power by the people, of the physical blocking of the economy and of the annihilation of police forces”.Continue Reading
Euromaidan and a Program for the Left
“Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning.”
Gaza Youth to Planet Earth! Anyone out there? “Gaza what?”
The previous manifesto seems to have grown bigger than expected; many supported us, many others stood firmly against us, and very few stayed indifferent. Everyone had an opinion, yet rarely did they listen to others’ and in the middle of that mess, our own voice remained unheard.
Using the influence of a symbolic photograph is not a sign of justice
The woman in red (Ceyda Sungur) is not satisfied that the police officer who sprayed her is being prosecuted (http://translatingtaksim.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/policeman-who-sprayed-tear-gas-to-woman-in-red-faces-three-years-in-jail/)
In an article she wrote in Radikal (http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/kirmizili_kadin_radikal_icin_yazdi_o_polisin_yargilanmasi_yetmez-1171207), she says:
I didn’t want to speak till now as I didn’t want to change the symbolic value of ‘the woman in red’ and I didn’t want to make an individual more important than the movement itself. But now I feel I owe an explanation especially to the families of those who were killed during Gezi. No one should talk of justice until the killers and those responsible for the killings are punished. Prosecuting a 23 years old police officer for acting alone yet still under the orders of his superiors is not sufficient compensation for the violence incited by a government who described the police…
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Since 10pm yesterday, the as yet unused factory buildings of the Labitzke Complex in Zurich have been occupied. And not a moment too soon: at 7:30 this morning, per the real estate firm Mobimo’s plan, the remaining tenants of the Complex were to hand in their keys.Continue Reading
