Today's Topics:
1. DAF Meydan #35 - ‘We Are Being Cornered' - Turkish
Anarchist Communiqué (tr) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. iwa-ait: A Comrade has Left Us (ca) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. Chomsky speaks in London, 25/2/17 (Noam Chomsky's 'The
Responsibility of Intellectuals', 50 years on) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
Below I reproduce a statement from Turkish anarchists in the latest edition of the Meydan
anarchist newspaper (follow Meydan at: meydangazetesi.org; @MeydanGazetesi and
facebook.com/meydangazetesi). The editor of Meydan, Hüseyin Civan, was sentenced to 15
months in prison in December for allegedly supporting terrorism, as the Erdogan government
continues it crackdown on political dissent, and its war against the Kurds. ---- We are
being cornered ---- With the fear and shock that constantly oppresses our lives, with the
agendas that change by the day, by the hour, with the constant repetition we see in news
articles, debates, newspapers and radios, with the shares and retweets, the media that
takes us for idiots and is fed by manipulation, with the gentrification and demolition
policies that erase our past, our identity and our memory, with the "illusion of
democracy" that weakens and imprisons our freedom, and with the reality that becomes more
and more incomprehensible everyday, we are being cornered.
We are being cornered because the rulers require it in order to declare their authority
and assert their dominance over our stolen willpower. We are being cornered because the
rulers require it to keep their power and to create new objects to use in their own wars.
We are being cornered because this is the only way the government is able to create space
for itself and to exist.
We are being cornered by misery
The days that have to keep going through the exhaustion, the bodies that fall powerless,
the minds that become unhappy as they weaken...
The rulers submerge the streets that we use to walk to school in the mornings, to go to
work and to catch a bus in darkness. They corner us with unhappiness by squeezing us into
minibuses and metrobuses that are full to the brim and by sending us to work at the crack
of dawn. As the government corners us with unhappiness, they drag us towards hopelessness
and despair.
We must resist the government that decides when we may sleep and when we must wake, that
snatches our morning sun and pushes us towards darkness and despair, in order to win back
our bodies and minds. We must find the courage to defy those who would turn us into blind
and deaf, unknowing and unfeeling individuals and break out of this complacency and
cornered-ness.
We are being cornered by panic
The broadcasting prohibitions that follow exploding bombs, the unfounded accusations after
suspicious packages are found and bomb threats are made, the people who choose or are
forced to choose to stay away from crowded places, the dollars that are exchanged in order
to "prevent a crisis," the people who dream of running away from the land that is
oppressed by war, death and economic crises...
In the land we live in, the government dominates the individual with fear and panic, it
incapacitates, corners and in time, annihilates. As the government enforces this state of
fear and panic in all public areas, the individual loses control, becomes vulnerable and
is cornered into the annihilation imposed by the rulers.
Our lives are cornered into the grip of crises or death, and our days are spent looking
for a way out of fear and panic, out of this cornered-ness.
The only way out of this fear and paranoia that wear down our bodies and minds, and that
allow the socio-economic circumstances to slowly consume us, is through creating spaces
for ourselves outside of this panic-culture. The way to create a world where we won't be
cornered and imprisoned by fear and panic is to expand the spaces where the
rulers[cannot]impose fear on us and eliminate the culture that makes paranoiacs of us all.
We are being cornered by agendas
The attempted coup and the OHAL (regional state of emergency) that was declared in the
aftermath, the operations that are conducted against the Kurdish movement and
revolutionaries almost every day with the excuse of FETÖ (Fethullah Terrorist
Organisation, which Erdogan claims is linked to Fetullah Gulen and behind the abortive
July coup last year), the surveillance and arrests, the people dismissed from their jobs
because of new KHK's (rulings by decree) that are announced every day, the judges that are
put under surveillance during trials, the bills that are put forward, amended and passed
as we all sleep, the bombs that explode in two different locations in the same week, the
assassinations occurring before the effects of the bombs have passed, the images of
soldiers burned alive by ISIS...
In the geography we live in, we've greeted each new day of the past six months with
"last-minute news." When one day is clouded by news of bombs, the next is greeted by
Turkish military tanks entering Syria. Just as the friendship between Russia and the
Republic of Turkey starts to settle, the assassination of a Russian ambassador sends us
into a panic of "we're going to war with Russia."
We can no longer keep up with news that drops like bombs and headlines that can change
multiple times a day. Far from keeping up with the ever, and increasingly swiftly,
changing agendas of our ruler, we are flung from one agenda to the next, we are cornered
by them.
In order to escape this current in which we have been swept up and cornered, we must break
free of this "agenda traffic" and find a way to create our own agendas to countermand
those of the government. Against the government that locks us in our homes for fear of
bombs one day, and calls us to "democracy meetings" the next day, against the government
that denies the existence of an economic crisis one day and urges us to exchange our
dollars as a "preventative" measure the next day, we must come up with our own agendas,
discuss and debate them, circulate them.
We are being cornered by repetition
The news that is presents all day long as "breaking news" with the same subtitles, the
news programs that broadcast the same reporter, repeating the same deaths with the same
expression every hour, the headlines that are debated for hours with no resolution, the
repetition that knows no end on TV and other communication channels...
The government uses media, and the unending reiteration of news and debates, to pull us
into relentless repetition. The same news of death, in the same sorrowful tone, the same
news of rising costs, with the same commentary, the same news of war, with the same
dismissal, are transmitted on our TVs every hour of every day. Through this excessive
repetition, we become accustomed to poverty, to starvation, to death and soon find
ourselves desensitized and cornered by the onslaught.
We must have our guard up against this repetition and desensitization, and especially, we
must keep the senses that they are trying to usurp alert and vigilant. We must not become
accustomed to that which they want us to accept, and we must not let our will be usurped
in order not to be cornered by these repetitions.
We are being cornered by media
Especially after (the coup of) July 15th, the sole purpose of the media became
manipulation. From news to debate programs, from sports to TV shows, everything we see, be
it on the government's official channel or not, is used as a means of propaganda. Far from
relaying information or showing reality, the media becomes a platform where reality is
warped and propaganda is delivered through provocation. Social media, for its part,
carries the same function in the even more easily controlled medium of the internet.
Media corners us through the ever present manipulation imposed on us in every bit of news,
every TV show, every TV program. This manipulation aside, all we can do to protect
ourselves against incomplete or regulated information is to create our own platforms on
which to communicate and share information.
We are being cornered by gentrification and demolitions. While the rulers use every
instrument in their hands as a means of oppressing the individual, they resort to attacks
from every angle to sustain their tyranny. Gentrification and demolition are examples of
this type of attack.
The government, in an effort to control the individual, firstly controls the spaces in
which the individual lives. In areas where the government's own dominant culture does not
exist and cannot take root, the use of gentrification and demolition is a way of
dislodging and uprooting the individuals living there, but even more so, it is a way of
displacing the yesterdays, the todays, the identity and the cultures of those people.
The rulers that redevelop areas for the purpose of their own existence, of course, wish
their identity and presence to take hold in the new spaces they create. Especially in the
aftermath of July 15th, the renaming of so many streets, squares, parks and intersections
to "democracy" is telling of a government dismantling existing truths and imposing its own
culture.
They intend not only to demolish our living spaces through gentrification, but also to
recondition our history, our culture, our identity and our memory.
In defence against this assault on our space and "selves" and this attempt by the rulers
to corner us in their areas of command, we must create new, collectively operated places
and communal, unrestricted living-spaces. Against the transformation of these public areas
by the government we must create new spaces without government, without capitalism, where
the individual cannot be oppressed politically or economically.
We are being cornered by democracy
The term "democracy'"that we keep hearing, especially since July 15th, is imposed on us by
the current rulers as a means of[ensuring]their longevity. In this era where everything is
done in the name of "democracy," where all practices are theorised as benefiting
democratization, we experience day to day what is really meant.
Every day they place media organisations under surveillance and arrest, they push people
to unlawfulness in the name of their own "democratic" purposes and interests, and it is in
this unlawfulness that the people are cornered. The "democracy" they speak of means that
all individuals will have their willpower usurped and all will be cornered into places
where the rulers are accountable to no one.
Of course it is possible to fight against the "democracy" being forced on us. We must
construct politics outside of the politics of the government, we must build a
self-organizing, center- less, unrepresented political process, we must create a culture
where our lives aren't cornered, where our will is not usurped by the rulers.
We are being cornered by truth being rendered meaningless. In order to destroy the current
reality and create one of their own, the rulers corner us in a construct of their own
politics. The most essential tool they have as a means of realising this construct is to
"create an illusion that can render the truth meaningless." Since the dawn of time, rulers
have used a series of constructs to disconnect people from their realities. But the rulers
of our time, who have become highly adept at using such tools, with their social media,
mainstream media and their crazy politicians, are launching the biggest ever war on
reality, specifically, on the reality of the downtrodden.
The easiest way to enslave a person, to seize their sense of self, to corner them into a
constructed illusion, is to remove that person's existing reality. Those who lose touch
with reality, in time also lose their ability to think correctly and be productive. They
lose their sense of self and are cornered into the illusions produced by the rulers.
The rulers corner the individual with fear and panic, with ever-changing agendas, with
unending repetition, with media that only serves to manipulate, with gentrification and
demolition, with the illusion of democracy, and with the meaninglessness of truth. Because
the more they corner the individual, the more space they have to roam free.
It is when the individual becomes aware that they have been condemned into a corner in
every facet of their lives that they begin to struggle against it.
They begin to create a new reality first in a self-organising way, and then through the
perspective of organizations and community, and then to experience this collectively
created reality, collectively.
The buses, metros and metrobusses of dawn, the hopeless unhappiness, the impotent
helplessness, the minimum wage squabbles over tea and simit[a circular bread], morning
marriage programs, the evening news programs and the night time debate programs, the
workplace deaths filed under ‘accident', that people are uprooted from the neighbourhoods
they built with their own hands and placed into 60 metre squared flats, that those without
dollars or gold coins to exchange are falling into an economic crisis, that people are
destroyed by male dominance and slaughtered by hate policies, the cement walls and iron
bars, that people are burned alive and beaten with chains for the sake of our governments
engaging in a war of interest, the unreal reality, the loneliness, the hopelessness and
the chaos. Yes, we will escape these things.
Against those that incarcerate us, that break our will as they corner us, and that in
time, make prisoners of us, from the cornered-ness that we have been subjected to, we must
break free. We are at the threshold of a socio-economic explosion due to this very
cornered-ness that we must step over, we must mold unrestricted lives with our collective
hands, that is to say, with our organisations.
Meydan No. 35, January 2017
https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/we-are-being-cornered-turkish-anarchist-communique/
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Message: 2
We are sorry to hear of the death of long-time anarchist militant and member of the CNT
Spain, Jose Luis Garcia Rua. Garcia Rua passed peacefully on Friday morning, January 6 at
the age of 93. Rua was born in 1923 in Asturias, Spain. His father had been a member of
the CNT who perished on the Oveido front during the Civil War. In 1939, he was forced into
exile in France, eventually winding up in a concentration camp of Argelers and Barcarès,
however he was able to return later than year. ---- Garcia Rua began a career as an
academic, but worked in construction, metal and mines. He was involved in anti-Francoist
activity and ultimately repressed for his role in a miners' strike. He lost his job in
academia for some time but ultimately became a professor of philosophy in the University
of Granada in the mid-70s. In 1977, after the death of Franco, he was chosen Secretary of
the Andalucian region of the CNT, a position he held twice. Between 1986-1990, he served
as the General Secretary of the CNT and from 1997-2000, as the General Secretary of the IWA.
He is the author of numerous articles and books, both related to anarchosyndicalism as
well as his academic interests. On May Day 2015, he made an impassioned speech about the
International Workers Assocation, calling on comrades to continue the tradition of
militant anarchosyndicalism. This was the last speech that he made in public.
We send our condolences to his family.
IWA Secretariat
http://www.iwa-ait.org/content/comrade-has-left-us
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Message: 3
Contributors include: ---- Noam Chomsky (live video link from Arizona, USA) ---- Nicholas
Allott (co-author of Noam Chomsky, Ideas and Ideals) ---- Chris Knight (author of Decoding
Chomsky) ---- Craig Murray (former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan) ---- Milan Rai (author of
Chomsky's Politics) ---- Hilary Rose (author of Love, Power and Knowledge) ---- Neil Smith
(co-author of Noam Chomsky, Ideas and Ideals) ---- Jackie Walker (former Vice-Chair of
Momentum) ---- Saturday, 25th February 2017, from 1 pm to 6.30 pm. ---- The Cruciform
Lecture Theatre, University College London, WC1E 6BT.
For more info see here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/camilla-power-10728753218
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