Notices by ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu)

Dedicating this weekend to the cop who went through like three hundred naked selfies on my cellphone because the antiD randomly accused us of photographing them, after they tried and failed to intimidate us through direct confrontation. (Yes Zionist "antifa" don't hesitate to call the cops.)

No but for real, dedicating this weekend to the 02 (two) women who took a silent stand with Palestinian symbols and refused to move despite the pressure from cops and Zionist antifa men double their size. One of the women wore a hijab and I can only imagine, like it's easy for me to be brave when I can out-thug any gringos (and I did just that until they went away), but a small immigrant woman with 1 ally in between 900 Ultradeutsche and a stream of riot cops on horses, both hostile?

But I have to imagine she must feel the way I feel all the time these days, which is: Would I be able to look in the eyes of a Gaza prisoner being bombed and say, sorry I did nothing I was afraid of… uh, German prisons? Shouty Mackers? Deportation? Indymedia callouts?

My heart also to the white-haired German grandma who covered herself in text-heavy signs and flags and stuff and also took a silent stand, sandwitched in a grass patch between the Zionists and the general demo who asked her to stay out because of "no national flags". I tried to invite her to come with our AG but with my bad German she must have misunderstood my practical concerns, because she responded in a high register: "I stand here because I am a human being, and as a human being I cannot stay silent. If I oppose the Nazis I must oppose all oppression..." Her resolve was unshakable. If you keep an eye open you find people like this everywhere, in Germany too. Not everyone is willing to maintain wilful denial or prioritise narrative over basic humanity.

I wish more people in the anti-Nazi demo were explicitly connecting Jewish liberation to Palestinian liberation (including me who prepared no signs, this is self-criticism). Elsewhere in Germany the Jewish dissident community remains combative and vocal, despite their recently increased criminalisation as self-hating anti-semities by gentile German politicians, and they protested the cooptation of Nov 9 remembrance; I'm confident Jews will never let pass the instrumentalisation of Jewish history for Israeli propaganda purposes.

"I don't fight fascists because I'm going to win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." Where is this quote actually from? The answer will shock you!! Well maybe not, but: New text on the blog about Sartre, Kamen Rider, elves, nerds, and antifascistische Aktion:

"Sartre on nerds who fight: Or, the Sailor Moon model of antifascism"
https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/the-sailor-moon-model-of-antifascism/

(archive if the blog is down: https://web.archive.org/web/20241108112855/https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/the-sailor-moon-model-of-antifascism/ )

Incidentally: As of last week, Women on the Web, who provides abortion pills to 200+ countries, now ships them to all USA states.

If you leave somewhere that criminalises abortion, consider ways you could spread this information locally and offline.

https://linktr.ee/womenonweb

I don't have anything especially informed to say, but I want to blog online anyway to cope.

1. With the Presidency, the Senate, probably the House, and, importantly, the Supreme Court, there's no legalist barriers to fascism left in the USA. The system has some inertia and I don't expect to see project 2025 by February; capital doesn't like disruption. But any shakeup, like a climate disaster or war escalation, may now lead to power grabs that will make the Patriot Act feel like the good old days.

2. Similarly, I don't know how much the world's most powerful corporations will let Musk bring the Milei treatment to the USA. But Musk will be more powerful than ever and absolutely insufferable. For those who haven't been destroying your sanity by following this man, he's been full masks-out for a while about his white supremacism, routinely boosting literal Hitlerist Nazis and racist conspiracies. He's also self-destructing, and I have no idea if he will be in a hospital next year or history's cringiest Goebbels. I hope his own energy of "whatever is the funniest happens" manifests and results in Trump uncerimonously throwing him under the bus.

3. Fascism in the USA is out of the "skinheads and paramilitary outcasts" stage, and now in the institutional stage. Your most urgent, violent existential threat isn't the Proud Boys, it's the police. For more on this see the podcast It Could Happen Here, episodes Nov 4 "Trump's Constitutional Sheriffs", and Nov 5 "An Election Episode"
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/trumps-constitutional-sheriffs-234514900/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/an-election-episode-feat-robert-235319776/

4. I wish I could say I am surprised at Latinos licking boots of the deportation don, but alas, I'm Latina.

5. What's up with polls being so wrong? This has been a thing globally since the 2016, and maybe there's some analysis I missed but the only way I can interpret this is: people who want to vote for fascists are hiding their intentions. Which I can't attribute to opsec, given how the right behaves elsewhere. I can only interpret this as shame without guilt, impliying a conscious choice for what Žižek called the "obscene deal" of fascism: people are not seeing themselves as heroes, they're opting for a level of disruption and subservience in exchange for the opportunity of exercising violence and power. Trump may crash the economy but you get to beat your wife and shoot at the Blacks. Therefore it's useless to appeal to stability or self-interest. We saw this in Russia and now with Musk gleefully promising a crash: no one wants to be Homo economicus, people need something to live for. I myself would very gladly live in poverty, pain and privation if that's what it takes to advance anarchism—I would be happier in the trenches than in a meaningless rat race; so would the fascists.

6. We are now one cerebrovascular accident away from having an Opus Dei apontee tradcath, neoreaction tescreal rationalist, resentful Gamergate incel as commander of the world's largest army.

I don't know why we still have to point this out but:

You don't have to apologise for Putin, Maduro, or the Kim dynasty to oppose the USA,
You don't have to apologise for Israel to oppose anti-Semitism or Islamofascism,
You don't have to apologise for Iran or Turkey, to oppose Israel,
You don't have to apologise for Russian imperalism, Neo-Ottoman imperalism, or Chinese imperialism to oppose USA or EU imperalism,
You don't *have* to make apologia, in fact, for anyone or anything, and you can take a position like, "I am critical of the Ukrainian government but that doesn't give Russia the right of invasion". You can call out things that are wrong on all sides, and still point out which side of a war is legitimate; it's not hard. You don't have to pick an ethnic group or nation-State and bat for them unconditionally forever. You can in fact go outside and meet some actual people affected by whatever horrible thing is keeping you awake at night, and be there and give material support, and this is much more important and also more rewarding than being an unpaid keyboard warrior for their leaders.

> What is not clear to the German Left is what’s painfully, tragicomedically obvious to all of us from the colonial South: The excuses are the exact same. The settler is allowed to take the land because the indigenous inhabitants are: barbaric; primitive; violent; unethical; a danger to women; [...] The more massacres they suffer, the more the indigenous resort to their own violent retaliations, their own massacres... Every time this happens, the settler-colonial project renews the righteousness of its land-grabbing; every time, the settler-colonial project feels more justified in ethnic cleansing. The colonist doing an ethnic cleansing is merely tragic, but the indigenous attacking a settler village in retaliation is proof of bad blood. Where I come from, we call this the long night of 500 years. Palestine is like watching the 500 years on a speedrun, and it’s downright chilling to watch, in person, so-called antifascists of European privilege, who have never stared at the wrong end of a gun in their lives, comfortably repeating verbatim the arguments we all know from letters to the Spanish Crown.

From: "Oh no you don’t get to blame Netanyahu: Against Germanic bothsideism", https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/oh-no-you-dont-get-to-blame-netanyahu-against-germanic-bothsideism/

(archive if blog is down: https://web.archive.org/web/20241007202330/https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/oh-no-you-dont-get-to-blame-netanyahu-against-germanic-bothsideism/ )
@palestine

It's frustrating that with catastrophe after catastrophe people still are so reluctant to discuss retaliation against the owners and shareholders of ecocidal companies.

If one talks of doing violence to skinhead nazi punks everyone is like, yass slay. But an oil executive who knowingly profited from the death of millions, a landowner who ordered the murder of indigenous folk to burn rainforest, a capitalist who invests in climate disinformation campaigns—damage on a scale that the skinhead nazi can only dream of, and somehow it is taboo to even suggest that maybe our ancestors had a point in their predilection for arson, bombs, insurgent tactics, and assassinations.

I blame a few tendencies for this—the disastrous "anti-militarism" of First World activists, the success of police fear campaigns in terrifying people too much for direct action, a generalised phobia of the situation of violence—but most of all I think this is because even climate activists are still invested in the illusion of normalcy, even while understanding collapse. The military occupations we all live under have told us that we aren't at war, and people will cling as long as they can to the routines given to us—university, jobs, marriage—to avoid the reality that our enemies are in power and killing more of us every day.

New text on the blog: " Oh no you don’t get to blame Netanyahu: Against Germanic bothsideism"
https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/oh-no-you-dont-get-to-blame-netanyahu-against-germanic-bothsideism/

> The Israeli ethnostate is a colonial enterprise no matter which "wing" of government it props up. Putting a "leftist" government in Israel might give us a much-needed ceasefire but it wouldn't stop the genocide, any more than the "progressive" governments of Canada stopped their indigenous genocide. The only path to justice and peaceful coexistence in Palestine is the same as in any settler colony: land back, reparations, right of return, and institutional equality, i.e. the end of the Israeli settlement project.

(blackblogs goes down periodically; if it's down for you right now, here's an archive link
https://web.archive.org/web/20241008073720/https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/oh-no-you-dont-get-to-blame-netanyahu-against-germanic-bothsideism )

Waiting for German society to start a moral panic over multiple violent attacks to Pride demonstrators by Nazis yesterday, like they do about all immigrants every time an ISIS jihadist attacks. Which borders are you going to close over this?

From povertyIsViolence:

> Respecting the self-determination of a group of people, from an anarchist perspective, should look a lot less like listening to the leaders or elders of a group you aren't a part of, than like finding common cause against those that constrain self-determination in the first place. Primarily this is the state but it's also the economic relationships that subjugate all of us. Respect doesn’t mean friendship or agreeing. It means recognition, boundaries, and qualified solidarity.

"If we work against climate change there will be less immigration" isn't the progressive position some of you assume it is

Not a blazing hot take or anything, but interesting to note that the transgender-hating moral panic over Imane Khelif, and the racist+anti-migrant riots in the UK, have been triggered by completely fictional pretexts.

It is OK to choose your antifascist work based on personal risk levels. There are many non-violent and reasonably safe ways to help the fight at a distance, and those are essential work too. The frontline would never hold without the support of those working on the down low.

But if you invite people to go help with a blockade, don't go to the scene without a mask or black bloc gear, only to panic when the Nazis film you, and then flee the scene with your whole affinity group, leaving the rest of the antifa at a significant numeric disadvantage.

I don't want anyone to put their bodies in more danger than they're willing to. It's one thing to find yourself in deeper waters that you expected, and have that survival instinct kick in; most of us have been there. But if you're calling people to go stop a planned attack from known violent Nazis... What did you expect that they would do? What did *you* expect to do?

Please be aware of the risk you put the rest of the crew in, if you call on people to fight together, then leave them behind suddenly and without discussion. Be aware of the role you're applying to fulfill. Be aware that "fighting Nazis" is not a metaphor. When your 20th century ancestors said that antifa heißt Angriff, they were not speaking in metaphors.

USA people who are donating money to #MastodonForHarris rather than homeless people should listen to Corinne Green explaining how the Democratic Party has just thrown trans folk under the bus.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/the-democrats-turn-on-trans-people-199387257/
It Could Happen Here podcast, July 26 2024, "The Democrats Turn On Trans People".

Trans people and immigrants in the USA: Both parties are fighting over one another to compete on who eliminates you the fastest. What are you going to do about it?

@julieofthespirits

The other day I was in a rendezvous with some antifa from a small village and they were reporting on how one of the nazi groups sank their roots in the place, over the past five years or so. And it made me really scared. Not of the nazis, I'm not afraid of them, I'm not afraid of fighting them. I was afraid of their garden. That they have a garden.

After a lot of judicial disputes they bought a house, so they can't be easily evicted. They built a big communal garden, and they offer crafts and fighting classes for the youth, a direction for young men (be healthy, take charge of your life, be a fighter, fight for your fatherland), they run a festival… They're a part of the village now, you see them all the time, visible, unafraid of being identifiable, their indoctrinated children are in your children's classrooms, they're next to you on the football game.

We were talking about mobilising local resistance and they said that they tried, there's been (of course) demos, but locals are wary of building anything because of escalating threats and violence, in one memorable occasion they knocked on the house of a politician, talked to their children and left the child with a package with a death threat.

I.e. the nazis are doing all the things I wish we were doing.

@julieofthespirits
While our side is too busy mobbing and ostracising one another because of online hot takes and interpersonal conflicts, their side has been making schools, farm compounds, shooting ranges. Setting up the alternative to neoliberalism—materially, ideologically. Unafraid of commitment, unafraid of being arrested or of exercising violence. And when I look at that I start thinking that I have to get better at finding meaning in the struggle itself, because I look at our disposability culture and think, how are we ever going to catch up…