The Earthquakes: A Gift to Assad
The Assad regime is finding the earthquakes quite useful: they came to help with the destruction. And on a political level, the Syrian regime is weaponizing the aftermath to get out of international isolation.
The Assad regime is finding the earthquakes quite useful: they came to help with the destruction. And on a political level, the Syrian regime is weaponizing the aftermath to get out of international isolation.
The violence is there, it’s in the news: here are the numbers dead, here are the potential war crimes, the hospitals bombed, the markets bombed. We’ve become desensitized to this, globally. And yet there is so much that people are doing on the ground, and a lot of creative actions.
We had a political dissident in Winston Smith. He was an influencer on social media, getting the message out about different tactics than nonviolent protest. You can’t have millions of people getting ideas like that, you know what I’m saying?
A conversation with Indigenous grassroots activists engaging in radical autonomous community care and defense work in the face of the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR).
Something changed in 2011, and despite the massive repression that protest movements have faced, something has changed within people. That’s going to have a massive impact on the future. There’s going to be a lot of change happening in the region, and we’re only at the start of that process.
There is the potential to create an international solidarity network based on basic principles that most people believe in. But you have to listen and not be dicks.
I’m here to remind you to expect resistance. We’re out there. We’re tired of the racist resource colonialism that is continued by your company.
Neither Syrians nor Palestinians need us to teach them how to liberate themselves. They know what they need, and they know what liberation for them looks like. But can we help lessen the extreme conditions they live under so that they have the space to self-organize?
2016: “We do have an opportunity, and it’s our opportunity to lose. We have to get our shit together and seize it. Periods of repression and hardship don’t automatically translate into more resistance.”
“It’s a trip right now, because it’s thirty years later, and here we go again. We’re all grappling with the differences between what we faced in the Reagan era and what we’re looking at right now.”