AshayGuevara

-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP. 

-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.

-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics.  He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.

-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.  

-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening.  If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why.   It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)  

-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner.  One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.  

-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times.  The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun.  He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling.  This was the only shot fired by the Panthers. 

-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken.  He was shot in his bed.  Twice, in the head, at point-blank range.  He was 21.  

The first japanese woman to stake her life in socialist cause and raise her voice on behalf of social justice was Kanno Sugako (1881-1911).

She was one of Japan’s first female anarcho-feminist journalist and advocate of women’s rights, as well as a prolific writer.

She was the author of a series of articles about gender oppression, and a defender of freedom and equal rights for men and women.

At fifteen Kanno was raped and this traumatic experience left her with a lasting sense of shame and guilt, like she was supposed to according to the traditional moral standards in Japan.

Kanno's interest in socialism was aroused when she read an essay by Sakai Toshihiko in which he counseled rape victims not be burdened with guilt.

After reading it, Kanno began to read Sakai's other writings and eventually gravitated to the circle of socialists. And gradually radical ideas became strongly related to Kanno's personal pride and the meaning of her life.

Then she wrote a series of short stories, articles, and essays for many magazines.

At the Muro Shinpō, she published her views regarding socialism:

"Our ideal is socialism, which aims at the equality of all classes. But just as a great building cannot be destroyed in a moment, the existing hierarchical class system, which has been consolidated over many years, cannot be overthrown in a day and a night ... So we [women] must first of all achieve the fundamanetal principle of 'self-awareness', and develop our potential, uplift our character, and then gradually work toward the realization of our ideal".

She was a firm believer in gender equality too, arguing in a Muro Shinpō piece:

"In these postwar years there are many tasks facing the nation in politics, economy, industry, education, and so on. But for us women the most urgent task is to develop our own self-awareness. In accordance with long-standing customs, we have seen as a form of material property. Women in Japan are in a state of slavery. Japan has become an advanced, civilized nation, but we women are still denied our freedom by an invisible iron fence..."

By 1903 Kanno had become interested in many movements.

She joined the "Woman's Christian Temperance Union" due to a personal attraction to a shared belief in charity and reform in gender equality.

In addition, she chastised men for constantly harping on the importance of female chastity. Instead, she argued that men should focus more on being "wise husbands and good fathers", than criticizing women for lacking of it.

She also parteciped in the association called Women's Moral Reform Society, a campaign against the system of concubines and advocating for the independence of women.

Kanno lambasted the official sanctioning of prostitution, disgusted that the Japanese government would allow the sexual exploitation of the daughters of the poor. Furthermore, she also blamed male customers of the various red-light districts.

In june 1908 Kanno attended a socialist-anarchist rally, which would be known as the Red Flag Incident, where red flags were hoisted and anarchist songs were sung. The authorities arrested the leaders of the gathering, and when Kanno went to the police station to demand about her comrades, she was shocked to see the brutal manner in which the men were being beaten.

Furthermore she too was thrown in jail for visiting her friends. This experience convinced Kanno that peaceful change was not possibile under the existing system.

After she was released, she became a firm anarchist.

But before the Red Flag Incident, she was a pacifist. She had joined "Heminsha", an association by Christians and socialists in opposing the Russo-Japanese war, and she published the anti-war short story Zekko (Severed Relations) in October 1903.

In 1910 She had become involved in a plot to produce a bomb to assassinate the Emperor.

Kanno was enthusiastic about carrying out the plan, hoping to emulate Sophia Perovskaya, the woman who had partecipated in the assassination of Alexander II of Russia.

However the plot was uncovered in May 1910 and the leaders were arrested, including Kanno.

She was accused of treason by the Japanese government for what became known as the High Treason Incident.

Kanno bluntly confronted the government, refusing to avoid responsibility. She remarked:

"Basically even among anarchists I was among the more radical thinkers. When I was imprisoned in June 1908 in connection with the Red Flag incident I was outraged at the brutal behavior of the police. I concluded that a peaceful propagation of our principles could not be conducted under these circumstances. It was necessary to arouse the people's awareness by staging riots or a revolution or by undertaking assassinations... I hoped to destroy not only the emperor but other elements too... Emperor Mutsuhito [Emperor Meiji], compared with other emperors in history, seems to be popular with the people and is a good individual. Although I feel sorry for him personally, he is, as emperor, the chief person responsible for the exploitation of the people economically. Politically he is at the root of all the crimes being committed, and intellectually he is the fundamental cause of superstitious beliefs. A person in such a position, I concluded, must be killed."

Later, when the judge asked Kanno if she wished to make a final statement, she stated her only regret was that the plot failed and she feels that she has failed those who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the people.

Kanno was executed by hanging on January 25, 1911, at the age of 29. She was the first woman with the status of political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.

In her prison diary she wrote: “I am convinced our sacrifice is not in vain. It will bear fruit in the future. I am confident that because I firmly believe my death will serve a valuable purpose I will be able to maintain my self-respect until the last moment on the scaffold. I will be enveloped in the marvelously comforting thought that I am sacrificing myself for the cause. I believe I will be able to die a noble death without fear or anguish.”

In her final entry she wrote of her happiness upon learning that 12 of her fellow defendants were reprieved, and whose lives were spared.

You can read her full diary here: https://libcom.org/history/reflections-way-gallows @historicwomendaily

The Tokio Asahi News commented after her execution: "She lived her life without believing in the gods or spirits. She indulged herself by reading biographies of russian anarchists and nihilists who had given their lives to their so-called principles. It is said that she prided herself as a pioneer among japanese women."

Ok listen up ladies and motherfuckers ‘cause I’m about to learn you on why anyone who says that they mistook a Glock for a taser is a fucking idiot. I’d like to dedicate this to the stupid fucking Republicans who, although they love talking about guns apparently don’t know a damn thing about how they work.

Warning: This post contains screenshots from the bodycam footage of the murder of Daunte Wright. The only objects shown in these screenshots are a gun and a taser; I have cropped Mr. Wright out of the image and there is no graphic content.

How the FUCK do you mistake a Glock for a Taser, Lesson 1: Basic Fucking Eyesight

 [IMAGE 1: Left photo from this NYT article shows the Glock 17 model and the Taser X26P beside each other. The Glock 17 has a longer grip, is darker colored, and is more rectangular. The X26P is bright yellow and has a curved grip and trigger space. Right photo from the bodycam footage video linked beneath the cut, timestamp 1:24, shows a fellow cop with a yellow taser similar to the X26P.]

Look at the pretty colors. Now listen to me very carefully, Blue Lives Matter: yellow is the color of the sun and also this taser. The Glock is the fucking black one.

Lesson 2: Basic fucking touch

Now, let’s say you can’t see. Well, even if it’s not color coded and you’re either blind or stuck in a cave and can’t see your hand from your face, that shouldn’t matter.

Humans are incredible in the animal kingdom because we have an extraordinarily developed sense of touch. Some researchers have proven that humans can feel the difference between a level of molecules.

Which is why it is so incredibly fucking stupid that Potter allegedly didn’t realize that she was holding a gun.

Look at the basic differences in the shapes, the grips, the trigger. I’m pretty sure the outside is made out of plastic or some other lightweight, matte substance. Grabbing a Glock instead of a pistol should be like reaching in your backpack for a pencil and grabbing a banana. And that’s ot even factoring in the weight.

Lesson 3: Guns are fucking heavy

If you’ve never shot a gun, then you might not realize how heavy they are. Hell, I can shoot a lightweight pistol and my arms will still be sore. This is partially because I’m a twink, but mostly because when you hold a chunk of metal for an extended period of time your arms get tired.

Although the NYT article I stole that picture from states that although the exact model Potter is holding is unknown, standard issue for the department are the Glock 17, 22, and 26 Models.

([MAGE 2: The Glock 17, 19, and 26 Models side by side (source) with a screenshot of Potter’s weapon from the body came footage (timestamps 1:30 and 1:31 in the video linked below). The Glock 17 is larger than the 19, which is larger than the 26. The body cam footage shows a gun that resembles either the 17 or the 19. Potter is holding her gun in a loose grip. A caption says Do not hold your fucking gun like this. You are not tomb raider”.]

Now, unless Potter has a rare condition where her hands did not grow past the age of 6, there’s no way that the grip of that gun belongs to a Glock 26 (yes, there could be another grip on it, but I digress). To me, it looks like a Glock 17 because of the length of the grip, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on Glock models.

So let’s say it is the lighter of the two, the 19. The Glock 19 weighs 670g unloaded and 855g loaded. The  X26P Taser used by law enforcement weighs 213g unloaded and 338g loaded.

Don’t know the difference between those two weights? Okay, well first pick up this cute little copy of “If You Give A Mouse a Cookie”  (weight ~345 g.)

[IMAGE 3: Picture of “If You Give A Mouse a Cookie”, a popular and very short children’s book]

Now, pick up the 752-page monstrosity that is the entirety of The Divine Comedy (weight ~794)

[IMAGE 4: Picture of a large copy of “The Divine Comedy”)

The weight difference between those is still smaller than the difference between a Glock and a Taser.

Or go pick up 3.4 apples and 8.5 apples. The list goes on. The point is that it takes an extraordinary lack of care and critical thinking to not realize the difference.

And Potter is holding the gun with one fucking hand.

Lesson 4: The Safety

This is maybe the most important part of the whole situation.

[IMAGE 5: A picture from the X26P User Manual, which displays a safety trigger than must be flipped up for the gun to work].

All tasers have a safety. You have to flip it up so you don’t accidentally shoot yourself in the ass. Now, I’ve only ever owned stun guns and never actually used ones, but I do shoot. When I’m shooting say, a shotgun, it’s an automatic instinct to undo the safety before I shoot. Close, shoulder, aim, safety. Fire. Fire. Close, shoulder, aim, safety. Fire. It’s automatic, but at the same time if I went to flip the safety and my finger ran over where the lever should be, I’d be pretty fucking confused.

And I don’t even going shotgun shooting that often!

Now let’s look at a close-up of the triggers of the Glock 17 and the X26P.

[IMAGE 6: A close up image of the Glock 17 trigger, the X26P trigger, and a diagram of the inside of a Glock 17.]

Glock’s don’t have the standard manual thumb safeties that come with other guns. Instead, they have a trigger safety. It’s hard to see in the first image, but there’s actually a second trigger/piece of metal protruding from the center of the trigger. This way you don’t have to deal with a manual trigger, but the gun won’t go off unless you pull directly back on the trigger.

Again, tactile sense. If you’ve trained with a weapon, a musical instrument, a piece of sports equipment, you know that object inside and out. You might be amazing with a tennis racquet, but if your shorter friend hands you her’s it’ll take awhile to get used to.

Now, it could just be that Potter is incredibly fucking stupid. Let me rephrase that: Potter is definitely incredibly fucking stupid. It’s not just the things she didn’t notice; besides her lack of protocol, she holds her gun with one hand. Maybe you can do that easier with a taser, which doesn’t have this nice little thing called “kickback”, but it’s still bad practice. She fires when one of her coworkers is close to Mr. Wright—generally, it’s a bad idea to fire a stun gun in an enclosed area.

I can’t speak on the sheer malice or racism in Potter’s own views, but I can say this: Potter was no rookie. She had spent 26 years as a police officer. She was training others. She was head of a fucking police union. So even if she is incredibly apologetic and pro-BLM, even if—this is who the policing system puts their trust in. This is the standard you get, after over 2 decades of experience. A mildly confrontational situation, an officer who doesn’t know her fucking weapons, and a man dead, and a little girl without a father.

Fuck the police. There’s nothing to reform here.              

The second THANOS AND DARKSEID: CARPOOL BUDDIES OF DOOM. Guest starring: Doctor Doom!

Written by Justin Jordan (who has a new issue of Green Lantern: New Guardians coming out this Wednesday and has a new series, Dead Body Road, coming out in December) and drawn by Rafer Roberts (who is currently making Plastic Farm and Nightmare the Rat comics).

Gonna break down this response as clearly as possible. 

The origins of the police are evil. 

It has been shown repeatedly that the police were formed to oppress the working class and (1, 2) and enforce white supremacy (1, 2, 3). In fact, the early U.S. police grew directly out of slavery.

The police aren’t the people you think they are.

The police don’t care about you – they don’t even have a constitutional duty to protect you. They’re allowed to take your property without your consent (the NYPD seizes so much property they can’t even log it in their computers). In fact, cops are more likely to steal your property than burglars are. They commit hundreds of crimes and human rights violations against people like you & me and get away with it because they cover for each other.

Cops tend to be unusually aggressive, authoritarian, and secretive (Greene & Heilbrun, 2011). They are more than twice as likely to commit domestic violence than the rest of the population, and (once again) they cover for each other when doing so. The police are on the side of neo-Nazis (1, 2). In fact, many times the police themselves are the neo-Nazis/klansmen (1, 2, 3). And even besides all this, cops do all kinds of other shady shit – for instance, undercover police are used to instigate fights during protests and rallies.

The police terrorize those of us who are marginalized.

The police disproportionately arrest Black people for drugs even though white people use drugs more often. They disproportionately pull Black people over for traffic stops. The police terrorize people with disabilities.They are viciously anti-indigenous – and always have been. Police terrorize sex workers. There are countless examples of police brutalizing homeless people (1, 2, 3). The police have a lengthy history of brutality against the LGBT community (1, 2). They terrorize women of color and get away with it (1, 2, 3). They kill massive numbers of people each year – and a disproportionate number of their victims are Black and native. On top of that, recent data suggests cops may kill up to twice as many people as we even thought they did. And while police love to defend themselves by saying they have the most dangerous job, that’s not even close to being true.

The police’s best kept secret: We don’t need them! 

A world without the police is completely possible (1, 2, 3, 4). We have resources for resolving violence as communities without the need for state intervention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – as some examples). We as communities are better capable of resolving violence than the police are, because we don’t have the vested interest in the status quo that they have. Even if a few cops are well-intentioned here or there, it doesn’t change that the role of the police is to work against the vast majority of us in the interests of the (white) elite few. 

——–

In the mornings we had military training, and in the afternoons political study circles. Basically we talked about the realities of Nicaraguan life, the conditions in our country, the Sandinista platform for struggle. We had a lot of information about what was happening in other parts of Nicaragua; we were both informing and forming ourselves. We talked a lot about the objectives of our struggle: education, the position of women, health, the Atlantic Coast, fundamental rights… Everything we wanted for the future.

I was more of a student than a teacher there, and those who taught me most were the peasants. What I knew in theory, they were living. 

It was an extraordinary experience to see how the individual experiences fused and the differences just disappeared. Share lack of food, rain, danger, the possibility of death with someone, and a very strong group feeling grows, a feeling of human solidarity that I’ve felt at no other time in my life. 

Lenin walks around the world.

Frontiers cannot bar him.

Neither barracks nor barricades impede.

Nor does barbed wire scar him.

Lenin walks around the world.

Black, brown, and white receive him.

Language is no barrier.

The strangest tongues believe him.

Lenin walks around the world.

The sun sets like a scar.

Between the darkness and the dawn

There rises a red star.

so i made my own list:

Seven Steps to Starting a Food Not Bombs Chapter

How To Start a Community Kitchen

https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org

Industrial Workers of the World - an anticapitalist union for all workers

Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

Say You Want An Insurrection - crimethinc

Incarcerated Workers Organising Comittee

Starting an Anarchist Black Cross

How to Form an Affinity Group - the essential building block of Anarchist Organisation

Threepers will be the first people to tell you that they’re not bigots or dangerous or violent or terrorists.  But they’d be either straight-up lying or wrong. 2015: The Idaho Three Percenter chapter holds two anti-refugee rallies: “Now, refugees coming from Islamic hotbeds of terrorism, don’t you think that poses a threat to Idaho communities?” shouted III% of Idaho spokesman Chris McIntire into a bullhorn at one of the rallies.