Anarchist News

Montreal city councillors have approved a bylaw that bans the wearing of masks at public protests.

The vote at Montreal City Hall on Friday afternoon passed 33-25.

“When a cause is just, why is it necessary to hide behind a mask?” Mayor Gérald Tremblay said during a news conference following the vote.

A woman protests against the proposed bylaw outside of Montreal City Hall Friday. (Shaun Malley/CBC) The bylaw will also force demonstrators to provide police with an itinerary for protests.

The bylaw will come into effect Saturday, Tremblay confirmed.

I know what you’re thinking: Unwashed skinny guys wearing dirty black jeans, dirty black shirts and dirty black bandanas covering their dirty white faces.

And over the last few days, folks who meet that description have been marching all over Chicago. They typically don’t submit to interviews with “evil mass media” types, so finding out exactly what they’re protesting isn’t always easy.

Is it soap? Is it corporate greed? Bright colors? The politics of war?

Ironically enough, as it turns out, some anarchists also don’t conform to dress codes.

It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos.
It is not robbery or murder. “It is not a war of each against all.
It is not a return to barbarism or the wild state of man.

- Alexander Berkman, early-20th-century anarchist

Late one night, during one of the scores of antituition-hike demonstrations that have paralyzed Montreal for 14 weeks, I looked around and wondered who all these angry young people were.

This was during the tranquil part of the protest, before drunken girls staggered into horseback police, daring them to charge; before masked hoodlums hurled rocks at storefronts; before that now-routine testosterone climax of firecrackers, smoke bombs, pepper spray and chemical gas.

Ecological resistance is in the air this summer in Cascadia, and to spread the word, some Earth First!ers are hitting the road. To promote this summers (bio)regional rendezvous, set for june 20-25, the tour starts in the far north of Cascadia then heads down south.In solidarity with the Winnemem Wintu tribe, we’ll be headed down south to Shasta Lake, colonized California where the Winnemem Wintu tribe has put out a call to action to directly confront the forest service in preserving their traditional Coming of Age Ceremony.
Earth First!ers coming to a town near you;

Earth First!- Creating a Culture of Resistance tour 2012:

Hundreds of people from all over Ireland are expected to attend the 7th annual Dublin Anarchist Bookfair which takes place in Liberty Hall, Dublin on Saturday 26th May. The Bookfair, organised by the Workers Solidarity Movement, will consist of a day of meetings, debates, discussions and films and will also host bookstalls and information stands from a large number of political organisations and campaigning groups.

Workers Solidarity Movement spokesperson Gregor Kerr said he expects attendance at this year’s Bookfair to “reflect the fact that more and more people are beginning to search for an alternative to the chaotic political system that is capitalism.”

The last number of months has seen a new awakening of political awareness in Ireland,” Kerr continued. “Hundreds of thousands of people have refused to pay the household tax. Communities are organising to resist the water tax. People are beginning to realise that we don’t have to accept the inevitability of the boom-bust cycle of capitalism and that the extent to which the austerity agenda can be imposed on us is related to the extent to which we are prepared to resist it.

Nostalgia

The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while the demonstrated unity is divided.

-Guy Debord

It’s been a decade since I walked down that particular stretch of MacArthur, along the foothills, near the Eastmont Mall. The only major change I could see happened years ago when the police station was installed where the old Mervyns used to be. The mall imploded because no one with any money came there anymore and all the big stores pulled out, leaving behind a lifeless shell, a testament to the inevitable failure of capitalism. It is now largely a social services hub, created as an afterthought once the money disappeared.

ROME — Italian authorities moved Thursday to step up police protection for thousands of people and offices considered potential targets of violence triggered by anger over Italy’s economic crisis.

The decision by Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri to assign 18,000 law enforcement officers to security detail was prompted by the shooting two weeks ago of a top nuclear industry executive and recent threats and acts of aggression directed at offices of Equitalia, the state tax-collection agency.

Hostility is running so high against Equitalia that Prime Minister Mario Monti paid a visit Thursday to the tax agency’s office and assured employees of his unconditional support.

The police in New Orleans are rabid. Cops and the city are “circling their wagons” after multiple high-profile police murders, the conclusion of the Danziger Bridge and Henry Glover cases highlighting the code of silence and willingness of many cops to plant evidence and cover up crimes, and the recent scathing investigative series Louisiana Incarcerated detailing “how we became the world’s prison capitol.” Judging by the reactions of NOPD Chief Ronal Serpas, Sheriff Marlin Gusman and other elected officials, it would seem that the official response will be denial, procrastination, and attempting to evade any consequences and point the finger away from themselves.

At a modest home full of 5 small children in a quiet Gentilly neighborhood, an innocent 20 year old college-bound high school graduate emerges from his bedroom and is shot through the chest and bleeds to death, gasping for air, shirtless on the floor of his mother’s home over a search warrant for weed that yielded only his brother’s tiny personal stash;
the Police Department and now the District Attorney do everything they can to suppress the release of the details of the case in the name of a “pending investigation.” His killer, Officer Joshua Colclough, continues to work for the NOPD despite admitting to murdering an innocent, unarmed, shirtless young man and the DA has so far refused to filed any charges. Wendell Allen‘s family members have been tirelessly protesting, often alone, on street corners demanding justice and Colclough’s arrest. More rallies are planned.

This is Marc; a charming and horrendously dubious character that has existed in our lives long enough for us to notice how the downfall of their teeth seems to act in some bizarre accordance with society’s decline.

Although we all want to continue watching the strange ways in which the world prepares for the climax of 2012, most of us would like to do this while our good friend is not in pain, or losing part of their face to a Boca burger.

Sometimes we forget that wearing the true mark of the proletariat can physically hurt and traumatize us. As comrades, we must remind ourselves to make attempts at healing these wounds, especially when they have become unbearable.

Fuck dental insurance and teeth pigs! Let’s put what little money we have where Comrade Marc’s mouth is! Join this glorious endeavor and let’s fix them teef! If twenty people each give a benjamin we’ll have it. Go team care-machine!

Note from authors: This summary is not meant to be exhaustive – we exclude several important parts of the day, leaving out details about the Seattle Central Walkout, the many great speeches and musical acts on stage, as well as the basic hard work of those who provided food and art supplies to the green zone. For all the talk of property destruction and police repression, we should not forget that a completely safe, “family-friendly” area was maintained around Westlake Park for the duration of the day’s events.

May Day in Seattle

The rain finally came in the evening. Organizers of the permitted immigration rights march fought with a tarp on the stage as the rest of us looked around, feet sore, our scarfs and backpacks stinking of pepper spray, a few nursing bruises left by billy clubs or police bicycles. All day there had been talk of rain. In the morning, cold heavy clouds had strung themselves out across the sun. They dropped between skyscrapers, swollen with icy water gathered up from Puget Sound. But it had not rained then. Then we were in the hundreds, black flags cutting in the wind like ravens somehow drawn to the ruin of this city from dew-soaked Cascadian rookeries and the red flags behind them like trailing embers—like bright worlds wrought of darkness.