Notices by ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu), page 2

The "political" in "political violence" is the same kind of "political" that's used of, say, any marginalised group getting the star role in a story, or any representation of gender variance, etc. It's the same "political" that @servo devs ban from their community.

The question is always, which type isn't "political" and why exactly?

a movement's explicit support for thieves, prisoners, sexual deviants, undocumented immigrants, squatters, and sex workers is a precondition for me to trust it in any way.

People who want to immigrate to run away from fascism, I immigrated to what I thought was a super advanced progressive woke land of freedom and ended up with nazis bashing my forehead with a metal bat, and now the same nazis are winning elections.

There's nowhere to run to. Life got much better once I stopped running and understood that *we* have the moral duty to bash *them*. Don't do my mistake, don't wait around until violence visits you, lead the violence to visit them first

Who can join the CSD Pride marches

- CDU
- cops
- USA embassy
- megacorps that donate to fascists

Who cannot march in the CSD

- Queers for Palestine
- Immigrants wearing kuffiyahs

say you want to actually do something actually effective about "abuse in our movement", you actually want to stop it from happening, you want to actually improve the lives of those hurt by it. you don't have to read a whole book by adrienne maree brown to know what that would look like; first of all your movement needs support structures—social, emotional, financial—for people who have been or will be harmed; you need mediators and educators; you need to take collective responsibility, look at past cases of abuse, figure out what sort of situations and structures left people vulnerable and how to change them; and so on; but all this is work. looking at someone you don't know making a sarcastic online quip about someone else you don't know and joining in with your own sarcastic quip _substitutes_ this work. symbolism and (loud, public) identitarian alliances replace the mess of doing things with neat binaries of right and wrong.

if you want to support the liberation of the working class you have to come to terms with the fact that a large part of it is right-wing, misogynistic etc. they still shouldn't be exploited by capitalists. no one should. if you want to abolish prisons, you have to come to terms that a lot of ppl in prisons are in fact abusers, swindlers, murderers etc. they still shouldn't be jailed. if you want to support trans rights you support trans rights for every trans person, including the terrible ones. if you want to run a rape shelter you must be prepared to shelter female MAGA voters etc. and if you oppose colonialism, then you oppose colonialism of societies whose ideology you disagree with. because none of it is about "deserving", the logic of "deserving" is a cover. the logic of punitive justice, dividing the world into innocent and unworthy, will always deflect responsibility from the systemic, and therefore serve power. this is after all the original excuse of colonialism: sure, it's bloody work, but that's a burden colonisers must take because Indians are savages, we're ultimately bringing about progress. Islamic ideology is misogynistic, therefore Gaza should be... well, cancelled.

or you can throw men under the bus and say that there can't possibly be a justification to kill tens of thousands of women and children (leaving unsaid the implication that every Arab man is suspected to be an abuser/murderer/etc).

but all those ripostes are red herrings, they accept the underlying assumption which is the moral blackmail of punitive justice: to be against rape means you want horrible suffering to be inflicted on rapists, and if you question that logic, "ah so you're opening space for abusers in our movement then"? set aside the fact that punitive justice has never remotely worked to actually stop, remedy, or prevent abuse, or any other social ill; set aside the fact that punishment is so easily coopted and therefore always weaponised against the most oppressed classes; the question at the core is the substitution of action for symbolic allegiance. because everyone is terrified of being ostracised forever in the Activist Offender Registry as an -ist, they have to jump at every opportunity to loudly and publicly denounce everything accused of the -ism.

still thinking about how every time they want to whitewash the genocide in Palestine it's always "but they raped Israeli women" or "but they're homophobic" or "but they would kill Jews if they had the chance". it's at a whole other scale, but the structure of weaponising cancel culture feels very familiar:

- you don't want to be _antisemitic_, do you? → you have to support Israel / bar Arab refugees

- are you telling me you're _pro-militarism_ / _pro-imperialism_? → you have to let Russia invade

- you support _feminism_, don't you? → you have to be a terf/swerf

- are you _against gay people_ ? → you have to be Islamophobic

and you can try to question the accusations, e.g. that Israeli reports on the actions of Palestinians have been shown again and again to be wildly unreliable so how can you know that those rape accusations are real. or you can try to tu-quoque it and say, what about the accusations of IDF soldiers raping women—backed by the UN etc. maybe you can Uno-reverse with an accusation of racism and ask, "if an Arabic majority was doing to a Jewish ghetto what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how would you react? if Russia slaughtered Dortmund because they harbours Nazis, would you support Russia"? ...

This was posted by documentary director Yuval Abraham after his speech at the Berlinale, which called for peace in Gaza, was demonised by German politicians and journalists.

In addition to what he's going through, it should be noted that the documentary is co-directed between Abraham (Jewish) and Basel Adra (Palestinian), and the latter is being erased explicitly--politician Claudia Roth went as far as posting on Twitter that her applause at the Berlinale counted only for the former.

(transcription of screenshot in replies below.)

It's not just that another Jewish woman (Hadas) was arrested in Berlin for a sign with the six-pointed star, it's that cops are doing this in name of "fighting anti-semitism." (the Star of David was coloured in Palestine colours.) I wonder how all this will look in the history books.

We all have noticed that they put the most racist cops to police the Gaza protests. They shout insults, humiliate you etc. And there is no reason why German racists would limit their bigotry to Muslims. They must be having a field day, getting to lock up and terrorise Jews in the name of anti-semitism, all while beating up pregnant women, teenagers etc.

At the protest in Bonn I saw a person taken for a sign reading "stop the second Nakba". This while Israeli commentators are openly calling for a second Nakba. lots more are being detained for signs or shouts calling for a stop to genocide. the logic apparently being that if you call what Israel is doing a genocide, you're denying the State's "self-defense" and therefore the unquestionable by law "right to exist". therefore protesting against genocide is a crime in Germany.

and what's heartbreaking to me is that most white leftists are on board with this. spaces and groups that I trusted all flying the "gegen jeden Antisemitismus" + Israel flag emoji...

"What is truly antisemitic is the equating of Zionism with Judaism": Jewish activist Rachel Shapiro arrested today in Berlin after her speech calling for a free Palestine.

"We stand, as a Jewish value, with the oppressed, always", is how she concluded her speech before the German police took her away.

Was at a Kurdish demo and the speaker expressed full solidarity of the Kurdish movement against the genocide in Gaza,

while also repudiating the Oct 7 attacks and acknowledging the Jewish objectors to colonialism and the need to fight anti-semitism,

and condemning each and every form of fascist organisation be it Turkish, Israeli or Hamas.

there. was that so hard? why is a commonsense position like this so hard to find in the German antifa. it's sad that clearly objecting to massacres has to feel refreshing.

I'm surprised at how big the reaction to the #AfD/Identitäre meetup is getting. I wonder if civil society wasn't really taking it seriously what has been obvious to us linksradikale from the start, that the AfD is nazis. Not "conservative", not "economic concerned citizens", not "EU sceptics". nazis.

I think there's something like a "reverse Stormfront" effect. The character in "The Boys", a celebrity who's a stealth nazi, has a quote that went viral online:

> "People love what I have to say! They believe in it! They just don't like the word 'Nazi.' That's all."

but in real life what I'm seeing is the exact opposite. antifa recherchers point out, this guy has friends in C18, in Legio Hungaria, has an SS tattoo, puts up 1488 stickers, quotes Mein Kampf--and nobody cares. People think either we're overly sensitive, or the nazis are "just larping edgelords", or it's "free speech best left platformed" (and, if you're the #Substack owners, give the nazis money too).

I guess it took a leak of a plan to ethnically cleanse Germany for most to realise that when we call them "nazis" we mean *nazis*. People don't mind the word "nazi" anymore. I think we should be more concrete in counterpropaganda.

I'm glad there's a reaction but keep in mind--the Pussy March was big too. #eleNão was big too.

@scrappy_capy_distro @tech_prole @aenea My point is that if you point at an individual German and say "hey you! yes you, this sucks! do more to include immigrants, be nicer! no one has the courage to actually do something other than demos here? come on people, los!", they just feel *more* privilege guilt than they already do, mutter awkwardly about being overwhelmed and "maybe you could try talking to xyz", then melt into a puddle of "mental health", never to be seen again.

(I tried.)

so our question became, how could we do politics in a way that makes first-world people feel like commitment, openness, insurrection is a way *out* of their private impasse. if they won't bother including us, how would *we* prefigure what we want. how do we show Germans by example that courage, humour, sentiment, adventurousness, mischief isn't just allowed in political contexts but *is* a politics, an energising politics, that French-style demos are way more fun. how to show that nothing is gained if everyone looks like this >:| all the time in plenums, that you can take a leap of faith and welcome a new person as if they already are the commune comrade you dream of, that why are you so afraid of losing this middle-class life if y'all hate it so much anyway.

the text above is our attempt at a how-to.

@tech_prole @aenea @scrappy_capy_distro this is widespread enough to count as a systemic issue. it cannot be the fault of individual activists. if everyone is too scared to do anything, if everyone sees themself as irreparably too depressed/scared/weak to fight the enemy, there must be a structural reason.

we have come to understand the predicament of the German scene as something akin to an abusive relationship, with EU citizen / first-world privilege as the abuser. the privilege causes both privilege guilt and a (imagined) dependency to privilege, in a reinforcing, paralysing loop, making people terrified of losing a lifestyle they hate.

in other words, the system coopts the people it abuses by making them feel invested then guilty, like a good scammer. and in the process the first-worlders tear themselves apart from us third-worlders.

so how do we go about solving that.

it is to answer that question (and by comparing and contrasting the German scene with Kurd, Polish/Belarusian, and Latinoamerican approaches to politics) that we wrote "How to do politics like a marginal in 11 easy steps"
https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/11-easy-steps-to-politics-like-a-marginal/

> Yet in the activist scene in Berlin, I faced a wall of total indifference as I suggested over and over again to organize an event and to talk about that [friend arrested in Russia] case. No one knew me, no one wanted to listen.

> ...it became clear to me that you’re not seen unless you have recommendations, people who would take you by the hand, take you to places, and introduce you to the right people. But where can migrants find a resource like this?

> Everyone seems to have accepted it as a truth that you’re not supposed to ask people where they come from. So, for good measure, no one asked me ANYTHING!

> it really hurts, because I have spent 10 years learning german, but just because I make mistakes and have an accent, people think this is not good enough?

> I constantly had the feeling in leftie circles that I had to justify why I was working, why I wasn’t devoting myself fully to activism...

> How many times did I come to an existing collective for the first time and wasn’t asked what I was called.

> The problem is that radical leftists in Berlin demand integration from radical leftist migrants.

I could quote this whole zine and only need to change the word "Berlin" tbh.
https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/article/2022/10/16/berlin-youve-hurt-me-another-berlin-is-possible

@scrappy_capy_distro

@aenea @scrappy_capy_distro There are cops everywhere and there's always has been. The problem is that Germans are so terrified of going to jail that they let the existence of cops prevent them from any building of community, any proposal of action. Which is of course the reason for the cops in the first place, counter-insurgency 101: The snitches are not there to catch people who punch nazis, they're there to make people too paranoid to propose punching nazis. It's working.

It's "security culture" converted into an excuse to prioritise individual interests. Go to a Kurdish meeting some day--don't worry, unlike Germans they're open to outsiders and to different opinions--and see how expansively they organise, how welcoming of new people. And then realise that they are under *way* stronger surveillance and face *way* stronger repression than white German antifa ever will.

@aenea @scrappy_capy_distro

My pet theory is that the moral purity issues mentioned in the zine--ostracism as the only strategy for dealing with harm, absence of transformative justice, oppression olympics, no accommodations for workers and marginals etc.--are a form of overcompensation.

It overcompensates for lack of actual commitment to politics, i.e. the willingness to risk repression, personal harm to one's body, or even the scariest of all: Taking responsibility for communal things. It comes from a place of fearing that material safety, and let's be honest material abundance, is sacrosanct. "I'm so privileged and I'm still this depressed, if I was poor I'd probably just die"--not realising that the comfy individualist alienation is the cause of said depression.

A Kurd half my age once offered to take care of my children for an action that would take months, within *an hour* of first meeting me (a non-Kurd openly non-Apoist total stranger). Could I be a cop and get someone arrested? Sure, whatever. Berxwedan jiyan e.
I had to stop and think which of my queer anarchist comrades would offer taking up childcare responsibility to their most trusted friend, let alone to a new person, for the sake of advancing the society they believe in. I still have no answer for this question.

@nilaypatel @FediPact lmao I have way more other women in my graph than men. If you count not just women but all nonmen, men are absolutely the minority. in fact the majority of my femme & nb partners was originally met via mastodon

If we expropriated the wealth of the 1% richest people so that they had to live like everybody else, we'd stop emissions equivalent to 5 billion people.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66-report-says