Anti-Colonial Struggle Movie & Discussion Night (Olympia)

Via Puget Sound Anarchists

From Fugitive Distro

Sunday, November 5th

6PM at The Mortuary

Masks Required, Extras Provided!

From Palestine to West Papua, Chiapas to Wallmapu, Borikén to Hawaiʻito the very occupied territories we stand on, colonial repression and anti-colonial revolts are taking on a greater frequency and intensity. What is the role of anarchists in engaging in and expanding anti-colonial struggle? What can material solidarity look like from our position in the imperial core? What will it take for anarchist movements to become a global force of opposition that can be relied on as comrades in struggle rather than competing power blocks that offer support with strings attached or a passive international civil society that only wants perfect victims that don’t fight back?

To delve into these questions come join us as we watch Concerning Violence: 9 Scenes from Anti-Imperialist Self Defense to ground our understanding of colonialism and anti-colonial revolt followed by a facilitated collective conversation where we will discuss these questions and more.

This is a special edition of the ongoing Open Anarchist Study Group which meets every Sunday, 6PM at The Mortuary. For more info and schedule see the Fugitive Distro website

https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/anarchists-in-anti-colonial-struggle-po...

Due to an incoming ship to the Port of Tacoma which is to load and ship military equipment to Israel arriving on Sunday, the anarchists in anti-colonial struggle movie night and discussion is postponed.

There is a call to block the ship and we urge people to go block the fucking ship instead. The call is public and already on social media so we feel okay sharing here.

“URGENT UPDATE: We have received information that the boat in Oakland is currently on its way to Tacoma. We are going to show up and block the boat!

Where: 1123 Port of Tacoma Rd, Tacoma, WA 98421

When: Sunday, 11/5, 2:30 PM

Parking is extremely limited near the area, please plan to arrive on time, carpool as much as possible and prepare for the possibility of having to walk some distance.”

The movie and discussion night will be pushed back to 11/19, 6PM @ The Mortuary, Olympia WA

(A)<3

There are 84 Comments

Mask up lmao

anarchists will be the last people in all of society wearing masks. impossible to be more out of touch or conformist

^ has only hung out with Instagram neolib zoomer "anarchists".

^ doesn't know that the masked anarchist has always been a thing.

Every single time there's a publicly announced anarchist event online tOotally inconspicuous cops and fash be all like, "masks are bad for anarchy! masks makes you less freedom!" so they can show up with there little cameras and get all the photos.

Everybody knows this.

to confuse a government mandated mask wearing with wearing masks in blac block is an incredibly stupid conflation

Suuuure. What government mandated mask wearing for this movie and discussion night are you referring to, officer?

Hello, fellow anarchs. Don't you know that its the government controlling these anarchists to require masks at public events and we should be teh real anarchists by not wearing masks for the cameras I mean for our anarchy! Brah!

Anarchists in the USA not realizing nobody else anywhere else has these rules lmao. And also that half of the anarchists here definitely talk shit every time we see this behind your backs.

I mean, I just saw a Sacramento anarchist Bookfair post requiring masks *outside* if you don't find that batshit insane you're helpless

Does critical thinking count or no?

Does anarchism really mean groups beholden to the most batshit person in a room? The jury is out.

Yes critical thinking means no grouping, gotta spread out, individually inspired epiphanies not group methodologies.

When the tear ducts release tears, the pituary gland releases DMT into the brain, but synthetic transcendental drugs can be used. For best results iit's helpful to have read some Stirner.
I cry when people don't read Max :()

I see people every day wearing masks…. do you ever go outside???

You don't want to be a conformist, that's really shameful. I wake up everyday worrying whether or not whether I am a conformist! The "mass murder in the streets" is probably a good idea though, we need to get rid of the authoritarians once and for all.

So... was it the national flag that gave it away, or...?

Yes, the Jihad Army nationalist flag... and the indoctrinated, militarized kids who all been through "schools" where they teach them about Savior Hitler and the Jewish "Big Lie".

Nice hasbara, I guess that’s a good enough reason to create a wildly racist system of government and bomb thousands of people to death. Anyone who opposes the Israeli state MUST be an antisemite, right?? Anyone who doesn’t support Ukraine supports Putin. Etc…

You cant just change the definition of antisemitism to make your revolution kosher. Leavimg room for nationalism is leaving room for nazis in the movement. Sorry as an armchair anarchist in America you can sit and have some moral standards and not putting a double standard on the isereali state where its ok for the palestinian state to exist.

are masks really the most dire thing for some of you still? seems like basic respect to wear one if the venue hosting the event desires this. but of course settler descend anarchists on stolen land might not know about respect for the place they stand on.

should always be wearing masks. I personally am sympathetic if someone was like "someone in this house has an immuno-deficiency, could you wear a mask" *person hands me mask themselves*, but to me expecting people to wear masks in general is overkill, especially if you are against colonialism and imperialism.

no one, certainly not me, is saying wear a mask "in general" (which i take it you mean something like 'all the time'). this event's presenters is desiring of attendees to mask up at the event, not saying anyone should mask up all the time.

and, you are right, masks are always a good idea. i haven't had a cold in 3 years. and, alas, climate change (for lack of a better term) is just going to exacerbate the proliferation of novel viruses, so keep that N95 handy.

during an event which is supposed to be conducive to discussions, it doesn't sound appealing i don't care who you are because private property itself is theft.

there doesn't seem to be a solution, does there? it does make it more difficult, in several ways, to communicate while wearing a mask, harder to hear, harder if you read lips, etc.

on the other hand, what is being communicated when we say it is anti-anarchist to ask for masking?

a collective message. My judgment about the event has more to do with the apparent "education" than it does with the "masks required" rule. Giving people a rule like that can be beneficial to people who simply don't want to wear a mask ahead of time, i don't like to sit around and hear other people talk for long periods of time anyways. I don't go to the movie theaters. I don't see what the point is when the movie is an indoor event, which is bad for the circulation of disease anyway.

"Settler Descendants"? Really, Nettle? That's your guilt-ridden worldview (sounds like the Christian concept of original sin)?

from one phrase you, anon 17:17, think you understand my worldview?

in case you hadn't noticed the event is about colonialism so pointing out the ongoing, intergenerational habits of settler-colonial people seems apt.

Masks might not just be about the plague protocols it might be about anonymity and solidarity too.

This is an anarchist sect that feels strongly about wearing masks at this time in history, people are quirky.

Anti-masking started before the COVID-19 outbreak when Republicans tried to make it illegal for Muslims and protesters to wear masks in public. In some places with low air quality people wear masks when they go out in public. If more people wore masks in public places transmission rates for contagious diseases would go down. It's a similar public health issue to requiring people to wear shoes inside a restaurant or no smoking. The surveillance state doesn't work as well when people wear masks it makes image recognition difficult. I think it used to be fashionable for anarchists to mask up even before the COVID-19 outbreak.

or just skeptical of restaurants, health departments, and the sanctity of public places. I didn't know there was a unified anarchist movement to show solidarity for, or that being against masks was the same thing as trying to use the state to ban them.

if "solidarity" is any more than some totally empty word of support. I would not argue being a health nut is inconsistent with being an anarchist, but it is kinda funny. To be honest with you I don't even know if I am an anarchist or not, i guess i just sympathize with the things I have read in books about anarchists. If being an anarchist means being very preventative towards diseases, then go for it. Maybe people are always some sort of authority, and we all need to be lesser authorities in order to make the world as anarchist as it can possibly be. Maybe being against hierarchy in general is just silly and juvenile.

"inter-generational"? Did your ancestors arrive on the Mayflower, and if they did (mine certainly didn't: they came here fleeing an ethnic genocide in "occupied", so-called Ireland), how would that relate to your personal conduct as an INDIVIDUAL in the 21st century?

family history it was fleeing religious persecution in europe. What time period is a "family" and a "family history" anyway, and how hard is it to know what exactly you are descended from in the scope of the original USA/British colonialism?

a generation is about 20 years, no one need be from the Mayflower to have more than one generation of their family be settlers on this land.

maybe, if you've been paying attention to such things, you know about Black people talking about the ongoing intergenerational trauma of slavery / jim crow etc. maybe you are aware, some things don't end when they officially end.

all i am trying to say is, white and settler people on this land have intergenerational stuff to deal with as well, but like from the other end, the slave holder to the casual racist. not to mention, whether or not one wants it, the privilege that accrues from white skin.

i mean, show me an in-dividual.

...casually hinting about things that are so mindbogglingly traumatic and unpleasant to think about. I have disagreed with you about your perspective this whole conversation, but on principal i never deny that some people have went through things so bad i can't comprehend them, or at least so different.

The slave holder as "the casual racist" fast forwarded in a time machine...what? Now adays, "racist" just basically means any form of bigotry. For example, people keep using "racism" to refer to israeli settler violence, yet a lot of the undertone of that conflict is religious...while all wars are waged for resources ultimately.

Its not that the words are my obsession, the important thing, its that you seem to have become more and more mealy mouthed over time. Idk. Enjoy trolling the comment section.

sigh.

i did not say the "slave holder as casual racist". i said FROM slave holding TO casual racism (and all the points in between) is the intergenerational baggage white & settler people still carry and need to come to terms with.

respectfully, implying that things like slavery are connected in a linear and possibly structural way (which i think you are doing) to "casual racism" is both neoliberalism (the world is an accumulation of individual decisions and attitudes repeated millions of times etc) and is also low-key like denialist. having a bigoted idea and like demolishing an entire neighborhood of black families are not only incomparably different, they also do not depend on the same mechanism to function. they have only an incidental relationship to one another.

Nettle, I don't know what world YOU live in, but racism is Universal, Ubiquitous, and present in EVERY culture. It is by no means limited to "white people"....learn some basic history!

if you say so.... there is just something needlessly, wantonly, brutal about white fuckery that really sets it apart tho . . . you know, in the world i live in...

The human animal is pretty brutal, predatory and debased, Nettle--ACROSS THE BOARD. Any HONEST look at human history demonstrates that. Get over your liberal WOKE ideology and smell the napalm in the air...

white people are just like everyone else until it becomes time to be treated like everyone else and then, etc etc, am i right ?

been around for thousands of years, whereas anglo-saxon colonialism is still pretty far from being a thousand years old, and has all or some of its roots in the earlier activitivies of religious nuts and romans of the landmass that we now call europe. The latter two groups are overwhelmingly not "white people", and the roman empire actually wasn't racist in the same in the same way the anglo-saxons were. During the time period, there were no conceptions of "race", and the "black" Ethiopians were not looked at as sub-human or hethen savage like the original racists did. The romans also arguably were not white people, and enslaved people with either lighter or similar skin as them.

If you look at roman history, or the history of basically any empire, it doesn't make any sense to hold on to this idea that white dominance is somehow worse than the dominance of any other ethnic group. I haven't even brought up anything from "the far east", africa, or the middle east, which for such long periods of time has not been controlled exclusively by white people. Your ideas about anglo-saxons are still on par with the Q conspiracy theories in terms of the emphasis you put on being white and living on "stolen land".

Or, are you just trying to give a free pass to all the things that non-white people do, as a means of entitlement or repayment for colonialism? Because that's what it seems like.

anon 9:57 be truthful, you love trying to explain shit.

in trying to untie the knot of perpetual revenge i try to keep my focus on the long now. it seems to me prudent to notice the damage that western and / or European and / or white thought have wreaked upon all beings of planet Earth. that complex of (erroneous) modes of thinking is what i intend when i say "white." but white isn't a reference to skin color but to a mode of thinking. it is called white because this mode of thinking is, at its core, anti-black. i could say "western" as well, but that is also open to (mis)interpretation. the west is not a place but a project. white is not a (skin) color but a method of thinking that tries to enforce a separation between what is called human from all other beings. the people who developed this method insisted on being thought of as white which is why there is confusion.

what i mean is, why look further back than the European enlightenment? isn't that enough of a mess to try to clean up?

Stop trying to project your knee jerk reactions on masses of people. You are playing some weird game where you are criticizing but not trying to gain any perspective on the opinions you have about others, just like a fucking bigot. I don't care if you think me trying to explain something is an inherent "whiteness", name calling is name calling and i don't need any large ideological structures to further define it.

You're calling bullshit, but it's a really basic thing to understand that people have always had the capability to do absolutely horrible things, the appearance of "now is worse" probably has more to do with the fact that there are more people with more impersonal communication than there ever was on this planet. Whether modern times are worse or not is an opinion and i'm tired of defending it, even though I accept it is probably true.

No: white people are not morally inferior to any other ethnic group, "white" is not a real mindset, but some generic label a lot of people use to define a group of people presumably from northern and western europe. I see what you are actually doing: you are refusing to confront your own christian WASP baggage in its real life form...which brings up another problem:

"what i mean is, why look further back than the European enlightenment? isn't that enough of a mess to try to clean up?"

Sure buddy, and then maybe you could also look back into your short white/WASP existence instead of talking about the bad apples of anarchist subculture and more Others?

"The East" and "The West" are not real either. West has to do with relative position more than anything else, the eastern part of the world is also the western part of the world in terms of how you think about it. Now you are also reminding me of Putin, who is also a "white person" in every standard of the term.

Nobody here has been asking you to forget about the horrible things that white people have done, and there is no poverty of "cultural discussions" and discussions revolving around race. It's fucking stupid to call bullshit on somebody who is being honest, you can maybe also start talking about history, but i am not any more enlightened as a result of talking to you so far.

oops, i thought you were an actual person but you are probably a chat bot.

the irony of having to treat everyone as some sort of fucked up other because you are using the internet and apparently must stop being empathetic towards people you don't know, all at the same time complaining about these horrendous things white people have done...classic @news

i can't stop you misinterpreting my words.

Into accusatory ethno-jibberish either, so maybe this is your queue to stop proselytizing to "white people", or talking about trauma with such mysterious and flattening undetones? Idk, its our comment section i guess, so i dont know who is trying to stop who from doing something bad...

People complain about how bad a they is all the time...not sure why you expect me to read your mind when you aren't being specific. I would at least expect people at a real life de-colonizer event to do that, i like that standard. It is harder to talk while wearing a mask. I hope you can continue to learn from people with darker skin than mine.

right.

we are both talking past each other.

trying again.

you said -- "No: white people are not morally inferior to any other ethnic group, ..."

and I'm wondering where you see that in what i said above? i specifically said "white" was NOT a reference to skin color in the way i was using it. which is also why i added European & western into the mix, but these are also relative terms, particularly western, as you rightly mention. but, did you notice, i said the west is not a place, but a project. I'll say it again, the west is a project, not a place.

so. white, western, European are shorthand terms for a mode of being/thinking that i have not yet found a different/ better term for, okay? western chauvinists & white supremacists proudly use these in defense of their thinking but it is true that this mode of thinking is hegemonic globally now and anyone of any ethnicity or nationality can engage in such thinking.

what is this mode? what is the so-called western project? seems to me to be something like - claim there is a world to own, own it, and then destroy it.

Other are frequently couched in terms of both intelligence and morality...so if you were not intending to judge white people, while you have simultaneously bickered about "behaviors", "stolen land", "white people", than i guess im sorry to misjudge your thoughts.

BUT, to somehow deny the fact you vaguely judging large masses of people based on historical "genocide"...would not be fair to me?

Anyways, in the spirit of not forgetting colonial lies: fuck you.

Hey brah, tis a new semi-radical sjw trend called anarcho-woke,

"Anti-Imperialist" has always meant militant leftist, nothing has changed in this regard.

the problems go so much deeper, and if you stop there, it is clear what you are for.

to me anti-imperialism is more likely some position held by college students or jingoistic fad.

anti-imperialism was the banner under which about 1 billion people fought some of the most heroic insurgencies ever fought last century.

anti-colonialism is a more confusing banner, but could be the banner for some heroic battles if it can distinguish itself from....

decolonialism, which is liberal university id pol HR-department instagram slide show garbage

For someone who focuses on the academic nature of these bullshit terms in favor of other bullshit terms you'd think you would realize its the people who continue to take them and define them through shit action that is the problem.

If you don’t have an understanding of imperialism, you will not understand politics. You might for instance wind up working for the interests of the US government which we can hopefully all agree is the most powerful and most evil political entity on earth. I don’t know who is putting on this event but I think you should be very wary of anyone who dismisses the concept of empire and the struggle against it as “leftist.”

duh. i don't think critiquing the use of anti-imperialism as a limited lens means you don not understand the concept and even agree with many aspects of it. it is more that that term has been too often connected with marxist and national liberation struggles, not anarchists.

and, saying things like "the US government which we can hopefully all agree is the most powerful and most evil political entity on earth. " shows your short-sighted and limited perspective. they are one part of a horrific nightmare, don't sound like a leftist and you might not be called that.

If my sight is short it’s because I consider my horizon to be the social context I exist in, which is the US state. It is in so many ways the keystone of Leviathan or Everything or whatever hipper term you want to use and maybe more significantly to me it is the closest opponent I have. It does everything possible to stamp out any struggles in the direction of liberation almost anywhere in the world. Sorry if that makes me a “leftist” to you but I don’t really care to line up with that state and try to attack the Russian or Cuban state because, why? I really don’t see the point, it seems like a waste of energy! They don’t affect me in any way, and the rulers who DO would be happy to have me distracted as the enemy of their enemies. And this is why I think it’s important to recognize the keystone thing too, in particular the US is really concretely not “just another state”, its proxies are not (to me) on equal footing with its foes. EVEN THO, were i to live there, they’d be my immediate opponents. I don’t really think one needs to be a leftist to see that, just strategically minded and not high on one’s own philosophical fartcasts. And it’s important because then you have so-called anarchists going off to fight and die as NATO auxiliaries in the fascist-infested Ukrainian military. Is that good in your opinion, so long as they’re not doing it for a “leftist” reason?

Or, you have people saying, that while Israel is blowing up hospitals and killing thousands of people with US weapons, “both sides are bad, Hamas is bad too, Muslims are all patriarchal Jew haters” bla bla bla! I’m sure a lot of people here would agree it’s a better use of time to make an egoist zine or something than to protest against the US government and its Israeli allies. I just don’t agree. My politics come from my feelings of humanity, the anger and hope that compels me to try to do something - not airy philosophizing that absolves me of participating in the border world. I know, I know : “society!” “Strugglismo!” Have fun picking your nose behind the book fair table…

with you until the ukraine stuff. i dont think you have quite a solid perspective on that. proxy war, as you probably are aware, is the most common form of warfare on earth. it is mostly practiced in the global south, actually, between state and nonstate partners, or even just nonstate actors all around. in proxy wars, the sponsor shares an enemy with their client (or, their proxy) and they decide to provide support for their clients fight, hoping to withdrawal support after the sponsors goals have been attained, irrespective of whether or not the proxy has attained their goals. this is all typically discussed in advance, actually. for the proxy, normally the struggle is existential. it is life or death. they are paying for the conflict with their own blood. for the sponsor, the war is a form of opportunism. it is not existential. if it was, they would pay with the blood of their own citizens as well, forming a common front with the proxy and not simply sending weapons and money. this is a long way of saying that yes the NATO forces are interested in the war in ukraine because they are interested in pinning down russia in a costly and dangerous war. ukrainians have their own reasons for fighting, not least of all because the authoritarian government to their immediate east is invading their towns and cities. noticing that a conflict is a proxy war is actually only the *beginning* of understanding modern warfare, not any kind of significant conclusion. especially for stateless peoples and militias, finding multiple sponsors is the only way to attain adequate supplies. even the russian revolution (to stick to that part of the world) was aided by the Kaiser of Germany in spring of 1917. that doesnt mean the revolution was a german psy-op.

Hmmm, I still don’t see where you disagree with me exactly? If you agree about the other stuff but not with such a clear example of what I’m talking about. I’m with you too pretty much... If you’ll notice I didn’t say “Ukraine is evil” I said it’s a waste for US anarchists to go fight there when (for one thing) the US state is already sending them tons of perfectly good weaponry. I’m not taking a position on Ukraine really. Russia doesn’t threaten me, and I can’t threaten it. I live in the US and I think anarchists and leftists here could have been doing more to oppose our own world-spanning war machine, instead of getting confused trying to measure whether Putin is “worse” than Zelenskyy or something... That was kinda my whole point. If you “happen to” align with your “local” state, and that state is leading a globally dominant empire of historically unprecedented power… what kind of anarchist are you really? It doesn’t “just happen” but it happens through the failure to understand imperialism and our position within it. One of the most frequent reasons I get called leftist on here is because I encourage grounded *realist* thinking not unfocused idealistic polemical politics it’s like yes we all know how to do a critique of pretty much everything that exists is bad. It’s another thing to actually recognize where you can practically strike and what the effects of that are.

ok in that case we agree. thanks for clarifying and also for being thoughtful on this platform

if you can see that attacking russia, cuba, etc, is too far away and indirect, than you should also see that there are many things even more closely impacting your life than "the US gov't". that's all. and when people use the term "anti-imperialist" and the language that comes along with it, it usually does, historically and contemporarily mean a marxist analysis and practice. there is no escaping that context.

The Evil US Empire is corollary in decrepit (yet still kept-alive) Maoist thought to the anti-Zionist fixation. To a point they almost completely overlap each other. No word being said on how regimes like Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and of course Palestine are fascistic, ultra-conservative hellholes run by dictators...

I find these these narratives to be super-outdated, out of touch, lacking proper grasp of what is going on and how this conflict is going to affect everyone. IMO the true geopolitical tension underneath the surface is China vs USA in a battle for global domination. And lotsa people are acting as propaganda drones for the smokescreens (and created by proxy wars) caused by this core tension.

Like... it's very likely that Russia vs Ukraine was in itself a proxy war not between the US and Russia as many believe, but US vs China, where Russia is only acting as Xi's henchmen, and that comedian Zelenskyy playing Rambo for America.

So you want to replace liberal Russiagate with Chinagate. Cool, very cool…. It seems like your views on all these places aligns completely with the State Dept and the DNC. What is that supposed to have to do with anarchy again?

Left-anarchists already ARE working for the interests of the U.S. government; that should be pretty obvious....

Maybe it should, but pretend I’m a complete fool and elucidate that, please

great ... yeah, encourage that jackass to keep wasting oxygen. awesome. very cool. thx again.

> elucidate

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