Notices by CrimethInc. Ex-Workers (crimethinc@todon.eu)

In response to the highest court in United Kingdom claiming the right to define others' gender for them, let's revisit the words of a famous French anarchist:

"To be gendered is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, & enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so...

"To be gendered is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored.

"That is gender; that is its justice; that is its morality."

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in drag

Against all states, judges, laws and rights—for freedom and anarchy! :anarchoheart1: :anarchoheart2:

25 years ago today, on April 16, 2000, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC to take action against the meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Building on the mobilization that shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle the previous November, they sought to demonstrate the virtues of global solidarity as an alternative to neoliberal capitalist globalization.

This oral history captures the events and the spirit of the times in vivid detail.

http://crimethinc.com/A16

"The black bloc came at that moment when blood was streaming down people’s faces and essentially pushed the police out of our intersection. They were just this wall of bodies that pushed them out and saved our intersection from any further police abuse. I’ve forever been grateful to that black bloc for hearing on the walkie talkies that we needed help and coming so powerfully to our aid."

"As participants in the black bloc, the thinking was: we’re not going to get voluntarily arrested; we’re not going to sit in the street while they put pepper spray in our eyes. We are going to fight back against police abuse."

Even the Financial Times admits that Donald Trump is building a police state.

This should give everyone a new perspective on the movement to abolish the police, which was so controversial a few years ago. Despite tremendous outcry against racist police killings, the Biden administration doubled down on promoting the legitimacy of police and channeled considerable quantity of resources towards them, all of which they will now use to impose Trump's agenda on us.

The movement to abolish the police was our best hope of countering the forces via which autocrats like Trump will impose fascism.

It still is.

"The only possible way out of this mess is to develop the ability to wield power on our own terms, horizontally and autonomously, stripping the police of legitimacy and shattering the illusion that they are invincible. This has been the common thread between practically all the significant movements of the past several years."

We said that in 2014.

crimethinc.com/cwc/bluefuse

Today, Donald Trump made it clear that he intends to have people deported to El Salvador without due process, including United States citizens.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has something to say to us about this moment.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

"Abolish ICE" sounded like a radical demand to Democrats, though ICE itself only dates to 2003.

Today, it should be clear to even the most deluded liberals that if you establish institutions for the sole purpose of brutalizing people, authoritarians will inevitably use them to consolidate power.

The Trump administration is intentionally circulating photographs of dehumanized prisoners crowded into bunks reminiscent of the famous photographs from within the death camp at Buchenwald during the Holocaust. Spectacular violence is central to the fascist program, which hinges on accustoming people to spectatorship and passivity.

https://crimethinc.com/sacrificialviolence

ICE posted—and then deleted—this advertisement on Instagram and the fascist-owned platform X/Twitter, announcing themselves as the thought police stopping ideas from entering the United States.

It's not just about attacking undocumented people, or immigrants, or dissidents—they aim to prevent thought itself.

If Hitler's Nazi Party were still in power today, its Instagram feed would look exactly like the ICE Instagram: a series of photographs of captured, brutalized human beings.

ICE represents fascism. Resist by all means.

https://crimethinc.com/MahmoudKhalil

"Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914, I travelled from Europe to India and America without a passport and without ever having seen one."

-Stefan Zweig

Borders as we know them are a recent concoction.

The passport system as we know it dates to the First World War. ICE was founded in 2003 as part of the so-called "War on Terror," a disaster for freedom in every way.

These institutions are neither timeless nor beneficial nor inevitable.

https://crimethinc.com/borders

At the turn of the century, during the movement against capitalist globalization, we used to say that it was a travesty that products could move across national borders more easily than human beings.

The solution is not to impose more controls on products as well as on human beings.

The tariffs are not intended to benefit the United States economy, nor the capitalist class as a whole. They chiefly benefit Donald Trump and his lackeys, functioning as a tool with which they can punish adversaries and negotiate for personal gain.

This is a hallmark of authoritarian rule.

The arbitrary and autocratic state policy exemplified by these tariffs is emerging as a consequence of the tremendous disparities in wealth and power that the neoliberal world order produced.

The solution is not to try to go back to neoliberalism, but to abolish capitalism.

https://crimethinc.com/work

Those who seek to oppress us are not invincible.

Whatever power they acquire, whatever technology they employ, they make mistakes, they overlook vulnerabilities.

And they are motivated by bigotry and greed, which are not the most powerful forces in the human spirit.

https://crimethinc.com/ActionResources

The Anti-Deportation Collective

Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

http://crimethinc.com/AntiDeportation1998

In this stirring first-person account, a participant recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s, including efforts to blockade the trains via which the police transported captured immigrants to the border.

As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.

Every Tesla is a surveillance device. This is worth knowing regardless of whether you plan to engage in protest activity.

This chart shows the locations and ranges of the cameras, presuming they have an unobstructed view.

Fashion tips for preserving your privacy around Teslas:

https://crimethinc.com/fashiontips

To prepare for the next election, Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sent police to arrest his chief political rival and 100 other political adversaries.

This is the model Trump is importing to the United States.

For background on the roots of Turkish fascism:

https://crimethinc.com/TurkishFascism

On this day in 1871, French troops sided with the people that they were sent to repress against the generals and the oligarchs who sought to dominate them. This set off a revolutionary chain reaction that changed the course of history.

Such things do happen.

https://crimethinc.com/arch18

The Israeli military is bombing Gaza again, unilaterally breaching the ceasefire. Hundreds of people are already reported killed in Gaza.

They are not doing this because the Israeli government was not able to use diplomacy to achieve the goals that made them agree to the ceasefire.

They are doing this because, having achieved those intermediate goals, they are now in a position to resume the genocide, which is their chief goal.

Let no one make excuses for this attack. The Israeli military has already killed hundreds of Palestinian children for every Israeli child who was killed on October 7, 2023. They have already destroyed the schools and hospitals and rendered millions homeless.

This is genocide for the sake of colonial land theft, pure and simple.

Some background:

https://crimethinc.com/Gaza2024

Dictatorship by used-car salesmen.

Declining profit rates have driven capitalists to focus on market speculation. Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump have made their fortunes chiefly by hype.

Now they are perpetrating this scam at the highest level of political power, using the instruments of the state to promote their products. Elon Musk is transferring $100 million to Donald Trump in return for this car commercial.

But what goes up must come down. The more wealth and power they concentrate in their hands, the clearer it is to everyone else that the system that elevated them deserves to be destroyed.

https://crimethinc.com/busdriver

Without the ever-escalating violence of amoral mercenaries, it would be impossible to preserve the disparities in wealth and power that make it possible for men like Elon Musk to buy up elections while millions go hungry.

Abolish billionaires. Abolish the police.

https://cwc.im/cops

We keep hearing a binary narrative in which criminal oligarchs are undermining the rule of law.

It would be more precise to identify three camps:

—centrists who fetishize the rule of law as a good in and of itself;

—oligarchs aiming to overhaul the current courts and laws to be even more brutal;

—and those who reject both camps in favor of real freedom and equality.

In the first camp, we find those who believe that a certain amount of self-determination is acceptable, as long as it falls neatly within whatever laws happen to be on the books. They are also at ease with a wide range of ruthless self-seeking oppressive activity, provided it complies with the law.

In the second camp, we find those who are determined to consolidate power in their own hands, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their various capitalist and fascist backers aim to replace the current laws and courts with something even worse.

In the third camp, we find those who believe that regardless of what laws happen to be on the books, no one should be able to dominate anyone else—whether by hoarding access to resources or wielding the instruments of state repression.

There is no excuse for tyranny.

https://crimethinc.com/becomeananarchist

One year ago today, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC as an act of protest against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The scale of the tragedy in Gaza exceeds anything we can understand from the United States. Aaron was determined not to passively accept it.

Today, in Aaron's memory, let us pledge ourselves once more to solidarity with Palestinians—to fight against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and all forms of colonialism.

In this memorial, we share Aaron’s summary of his anarchist politics, with testimony from his friends.

https://crimethinc.com/AaronMemories

In Aaron's own words:

"I am an anarchist, which means I believe in the abolition of all hierarchical power structures, especially capitalism and the state… I believe that any hierarchical power structure is bound to reproduce class dynamics and oppression. Thus, I want to engage in egalitarian forms of organizing that produce horizontal power structures based on mutual aid and solidarity."

In the words of one of Aaron's friends,

"Aaron has permanently changed the fabric of your being. You know this because for the rest of your life, you will wrestle with the thought of what you will sacrifice for the liberation of others."

For eight years, liberal politicians and pundits have counted on legal strategies to stop Donald Trump. Now that Trump has gained control of the executive and legislative branches of government and is consolidating control of the judicial branch, this isn't just naïve—it's counterproductive. It is past time to stop legitimizing the means they will use to repress resistance and focus on strategies that make use of the power we have when we act together, directly.

https://crimethinc.com/becomeananarchist

Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE

https://crimethinc.com/StopICE

We've produced a guide detailing many different ways you can act to prevent ICE from tearing families apart and terrorizing your community.

This is also available as a PDF for printing. Please circulate these widely!