In 1990 Canada laid siege to sovereign Mohawk territory, in Kanehsatà:ke. With helicopters and tanks and soldiers they showed Indigenous people everywhere how far they will go to steal the land out from under our feet. The Mohawks stood firm and showed the world how strong we are.
It is 30 years since the start of the “Oka Crisis,” and the fires of Indigenous resistance are still burning.
The Mohawks did not start this crisis. It began when the Mohawks were ignored as the true owners of their lands. It continued when the army rolled in with tear gas and rubber bullets. It has continued ever since, every time the state asserts its genocidal force on sovereign Indigenous territories. When we fight back, when we stand up for our lands and our people, we are painted as criminals.
Nothing has changed. Canada is still waging war on Indigenous people.
When we observed the colonial invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory in February 2020, the RCMP took over local communities and transformed them into staging grounds for their siege on our lands. They deployed dozens of militarized police, with dogs, with automatic weapons, with sniper rifles and snow mobiles and helicopters. They spent millions of dollars to arrest a handful of our matriarchs, our relatives, and supporters. They tore down our tower where we stood to bear witness to their violence.
Today we burned the remains of the tower in a ceremonial fire.
We know there is a time to build and a time to burn it down.
30 years ago, the Wet’suwet’en blocked Highway 16 in solidarity with the Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke. Months ago, the Mohawks stood with us to shut down Canada after our lands were invaded.
We stand united today.
We were born in the fires of resistance, our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and ancestors fought this fight.
We defend the land for our ancestors, for our children, for future generations.
On this day, 2 August 1944, around 4000 Roma people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp resisted being taken to the gas chambers. The SS swarmed into the Roma camp, but prisoners had armed themselves with sticks and crowbars, and barricaded themselves indoors, fighting the Nazis with hands and nails. A non-Roma prisoner who survived described that everyone was fighting, and that “women [were] the fiercest in their fight” as they were “younger and stronger” than the other detainees and were “protecting their children”. Eventually they were overcome, and all murdered in the gas chambers in Birkenau.
The date of the rebellion was initially reported as being May 16, hence that day being designated the annual Romani Resistance Day, but subsequent research by the Auschwitz Museum determined it was actually August 2.
Pictured: a Roma prisoner at Auschwitz https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1490123291172816/?type=3
well, i think first of all “state atheism” as presented in capitalist media is in many ways a strawman. 60 percent of cuba is catholic, for example, and only 24 percent atheist.
while attempts by previous socialist governments to address reactionary sentiment in religious spaces have been at times excessive, they’ve been exaggerated by propaganda to an absurd degree (no, clearly you won’t be dragged into the street and shot for mentioning jesus in cuba when 60 percent of the population is catholic) and the issue of reactionary forces in religious spaces is a real one that should be addressed.
however rather than encouraging atheism, a better tactic would be to encourage a kind of secular agnosticism- we ultimately can’t really know if there’s some kind of cosmic consciousness or what, if anything, happens after we die, so let’s focus on what we can know and just try to get along.
i generally take a lot of inspiration from anatoly lunacharsky in my views toward religion, though less so than i used to. he laid out six core principles:
1. Socialism is fighting against religious superstitions and prejudices based on empirical knowledge of objective and subjective science.
2. Socialism is fighting against the religious intellectuals serving the bourgeoisie, just as with the secular intellectuals supporting the bourgeoisie.
3. Socialism is alien to militant atheism, based on opposing prejudice and violence against people.
4. Socialist freedom also implies freedom of religion and an independent search for the truth for every person.
5. Socialism cannot dogmatically hold any one position on the statements “God is” or “There is no God”, and takes a position of agnosticism or “open possibilities”.
6. Socialism unites secular and religious ideological groups in the struggle for the proletariat. Any action aiming to merge socialism with religious fanaticism, or militant atheism, are actions aimed at splitting the proletarian class and have the formula of “divide and rule”, which plays into the hands of bourgeois dictatorship.
overall, i think there’s a lot of truth to these points, though which of these points seems most important to me is a function of material conditions- when i was becoming fed up with the nu-atheist community and it’s problems with islamophobia, points 3 and 6 seemed very important to me, and now while i’m distancing myself from the occult community after getting fed up over the astrology housing discrimination incident, suddenly point 1 seems to be very important to me.
it’s kind of established that there is no “get out of a beatdown” role you can take other than being a cop yourself, right? media, medics, lawyers, all fair game.
Turns out that cops are just dudes who really like beating the shit out of defenceless people. There’s really no other qualification.
For those who hate lawyers I do want to point out that legal observers are sent by the National Lawyer’s Guild, which is the primary organization providing pro-bono legal defense to protesters and black community leaders who have been jailed to try to derail the movement. So, these are not the lawyers you hate.
Just to reiterate: the entire point of NLG legal observers is to deter unlawful or improper behavior on the part of the police / law enforcement personnel–and to document such behavior, if they aren’t successful in deterring it. In the U.S., they have to be trained and certified. Their job is to help you protest to the full extent of your constitutional rights and with minimal interaction with the criminal justice system. I cannot stress the extent to which they are on your side.
The National Lawyer’s Guild’s motto is “human rights over property interests” and was created as a direct fuck you to conservative and exclusionary bar associations. Their dues are way cheaper than other bar associations and you can join even as a jailhouse lawyer (a prisoner who teaches themselves the law to advocate for others).
And just because this is literally my job: your negative perception of lawyers is literally propaganda. The portrayal of defense attorneys as evil for defending criminals, the idea that suing people is something only rich or very greedy people do, the complete erasure of legal aid as a thing that exists, are all designed to make you afraid to advocate for your legal rights.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
Anonymous
