News Briefs: Solar Flares

Jewishness and Indigeneity, Civil War, and why the climate movement has failed

The quality reading this time around is an insightful piece by a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, Daniel Delgado, “Are Jews Indigenous? A Quechua Jew weighs in.”

The umbrella term “Indigenous peoples” was adopted by the nascent Indigenous peoples movement of the 1970s as an explicitly internationalist term to highlight the commonality of experience between disparate peoples around the world. It was also, in part, a radical act of self-naming meant to repudiate the othering implicit in received names like “Indian.”

That is, resistance to colonization was always part of the definition and the intent.

Anarchists form a black bloc in Mexico City, May Day 2024

Now here’s one from the archives: In Defense of the Black Block This Wordpress page was maintained as a movement resource between 2012 and 2014, years of huge uprisings all across the globe, when pacifists, the cops, the mainstream media, and internet warriors all did their best to spread the conspiracy theory that the black masked anarchists involved in many of the riots were actually police agents. The internet conspiracy theorists actually got a number of people with good reasons to attack major corporations or fight the police locked up. The police and the media were happy, but the pacifists and internet activists never acknowledged they were wrong nor supported the people whose lives they ruined.

The page was authored and kept up by a single volunteer who eventually ran out of steam, and though it doesn’t include any recent stories, it still provides a good slice of history and some essays that are every bit as valid today. Seeing as how conspiracy theories about outside agitators and provocateurs still get traction, if anyone wanted to take this project over and get it up-to-date, I bet it would be possible to track down that volunteer and hand over the keys. And it would be a great project for any up-and-coming translators who want to get these articles available in Spanish or other languages.

Later the same day in Mexico City… turns out power can be toppled!

The May fundraiser isn’t quite ready yet, but in the meantime I’d love to ask you to support Raechel, whom some of you know at least as a writer, and maybe also as a friend and comrade. She could use your support after an invasive fibroid surgery she’s still recovering from. Subscribe to her newsletter, and if you’re able, consider a paid subscription. A reminder that my page is free all May in celebration of May Day, all the major essays on it are free all year round, and all my books have mysteriously ended up for free download on the internet. So if you’ve got a little extra dough, don’t give it to an NGO!

This here is one of my favorite newsletters of hers:

girl culture panic & the failures of feminism.

Can we unpack the cultural phenomena that, on their surface, appear to be an opting out — from bows to Barbie, from Taylor to tradwives — and discern what is legitimately reactionary, and wrestle with the stakes from there? And rather than determining the stakes from a liberal concern about what it means for the next election, the kind of feminism I care about can be a tool to reflect on what it might mean for more radical visions of the future. 

Raechel recently wrote a newsletter on the Alex Garland movie Civil War, which we had some good conversations about. I think the movie can help us break down three topics that are becoming increasingly crucial these days: how absent journalists are when it comes to asking the important, potentially transformative questions; how they’re in fact embedded in the worst forms of systemic harm; and how naïve and self-defeating democratic centrists are. Garland, a self-professed centrist, clearly sees the extremes as equally bad, almost indistinguishable.

Centrists have justified the imprisonment, torture, and murder of anarchists—and they endanger much larger populations—when they equate anticapitalists with fascists. We anticapitalists set fire to banks, kick the cops out of our neighborhoods, and once in a blue moon kill a millionaire, a cop, or a neo-Nazi (consider that, even when these killings are not directly in self-defense, the wealthy make their fortunes on top of thousands or millions of collateral deaths, and the cops kill hundreds of people a year in the US alone). The fascists, on the other hand, advocate genocide and kill dozens of unarmed people every year with attacks on churches, schools, and protests.

Centrists are also complicit in the dangerous, rightward shift in politics, though they somehow fail to realize it. If your political code of ethics holds that the center is good and the extremes are bad, a social shift to the Right is inevitable whenever grassroots, lower class, radical movements are weak or exhausted. The Left is tied to capitalism and the State. From Marxists to progressives, they are unable to acknowledge their partial analysis and their refusal to reject capitalism in its entirety. And by pinning their hopes on the State, they can’t honestly speak of liberation. In other words, the Left is actually anchored to the center, so it cannot push too hard towards an “extreme” position.

The Right, on the other hand, is not anchored in any such way. When social movements are betrayed by the Left, or exhausted by repression (which comes from progressive governments as much as from conservative ones), there is no effective force that can punish the Right for pushing the spectrum of acceptable politics farther to the right. And when the Right becomes more reactionary, so does the center. We have seen that happen in real time, ever since the respectable Left adopted a centrist strategy in the administrations of Carter, Clinton, and Blair, and the Right coalesced around Christian nationalism in the US and around a cannibalistic liberalism in the UK (North Americans, liberalism is not a synonym of leftism or progressivism; please look it up (from a non-US dictionary) if you need to).

Alex Garland doesn’t seem sharp enough to recognize this. He thinks his movie is about how “extremism” is an actual thing and it’s bad, and how journalists are heroes. But really, it’s not. And this brings us to an extremely interesting thing about film, and about art more generally. His ignorance aside, Garland is a talented writer and filmmaker,¹ so even though he doesn’t really understand politics or journalism, he is able to make a movie that casts into relief so many of the important contradictions and deficiencies that jump to the surface when our hegemonic institutions start to crack.

Just point and shoot…

Climate apocalypse and how to survive

This was entirely predictable to anyone who brought an anticapitalist lens to the mainstream climate movement, but now it’s pretty much official: we are not going to keep global warming below the 1.5ºC (2.7F) benchmark. Amongst the “authoritative” climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 77% of climate scientists now believe that global temperatures will rise 2.5C or more, and only 6% believe warming can be kept to a 1.5C rise. This means that instead of human deaths measured in the millions every year, and one of the top ten mass extinction events in the planet’s history (which is what we are facing now: “acceptable losses” according to the IPCC, the UN, and progressive climate activists), we are facing a near future of human deaths that will be measured in the hundreds of millions every year, and a mass extinction event that will probably either be the worst or second worst in the history of the planet.

Anarchists knew that governments would never save us, that capitalism and the State themselves are the cause of the problem, and we have been saying so for over a century (basically for as long as you had people who identified as anarchists living in societies that were conscious of the possibilities of habitat loss, extinction, and ecocide). And we have been fighting for appropriate, realistic responses to the ongoing ecocide. The response of progressive movements was to marginalize and silence us, the response of leftist revolutions was to outlaw us and kill us, and the response of governments today has been to categorize us as terrorists, surveil us and imprison us.

The apocalypse is already here. Many Indigenous groups have been facing it and surviving it for 500 years already. On the whole, Eurocentric progressives have not paid them any attention, and more often than not have put themselves on the side of colonialism and genocide. Likewise, the Left bears its share of the blame for the ongoing ecocide.

Those most responsible for climate change—and the ecological crisis more generally—are the wealthy and powerful. But by spreading the harmful, ahistorical, naïve, baseless idea that green investment from corporations could save us, that governments could save us, that the United Nations would save us, the mainstream climate movement has wasted the 60 most critical years to reverse the crisis and now it is too late.

It is not too late for survival, for many of us anyway, but there is no longer room on this life raft for us and for the comfortable delusions that capitalism can be reformed or that the State can be turned into a force for good. Capitalism is intrinsically extractivist and growth-based. The State is intrinsically ecocidal and oppressive.

Climate reformists deserve the same respect we would give to people who have the blood of millions on their hands. Precisely because climate reformists do in fact bear a significant amount of responsibility for millions of deaths and extinctions.

For me, the key question is: are they sincere, and are they willing to change how they approach such a grave situation? Freedom Press and CrimethInc recently published a piece I wrote sharing some thoughts on how to urgently change the conversation so that no more time is wasted on reformist strategies that never had a chance of success.

Since resistance to ecocide, resistance to genocide, and anticolonialism are all relevant to the ongoing Palestinian solidarity movement, I also want to share this “Open Letter to the Encampments” from here in Cleveland, published on It’s Going Down together with a postscript reflecting on how a movement that is afraid of constructive criticism is probably headed down a bad path.

Anyone with a library card or other printing access? The folks at Haters turned it into a printable zine you can spread around your town!

A Palestinian child launches a rock at IDF soldiers/prison guards on the border of the Gaza Strip on June 8, 2018.

Nothing Started in October 2023

The Israeli genocide against Palestinians has been ongoing since the founding of the modern state of Israel. In a recent episode of resistance beginning on March 30, 2018, Land Day, an independent network of Palestinian organizers in Gaza convoked massive protests demonstrating for the right of return of millions of Palestinians expelled from their homes by force over the prior decades. They were also protesting Israel’s years-long air, land, and sea blockade of Gaza that was subjecting its 2 million inhabitants to poverty and hunger.

Over the next 18 months, Israelis killed 223 Palestinians. Sources dispute whether Palestinians killed 1 or 0 Israelis, and in any case, this was much later in the movement. Not a single Israeli soldier was so much as hurt until one was slightly injured on May 14, but on the very first day Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinians and wounded 800 with live fire. After three months they had injured around 13,000 Palestinians, many of them with live ammunition. 1,400 of the injured Palestinians survived despite being shot 3-5 times. And in the vast majority of shootings that were independently investigated, IDF troops were facing no threat to their safety when they opened fire.

Hamas gradually took over leadership of the campaign and called it off at the end of 2019.

Israel repressed this resistance movement with impunity. Just beyond the militarized border, protected by the IDF and their own heavily armed paramilitaries, Israeli settlers lived in conditions of wealth on stolen land, going shopping, voting for white supremacist parties in their democratic elections, enjoying themselves at music festivals… I am unaware of any protests by settlers in solidarity with the Palestinians on any of the stolen lands around Gaza during those years.

For folks who have a little left over after rent or mortgage, food, transportation, medical care, and education, and definitely for any readers out there who own their own homes, there are a lot of folks in Gaza who, with a little direct support, could access life-saving resources within the hellish situation being inflicted on them.

Here is the info for a comrade in Egypt who is in direct contact with people needing aid in Gaza: colin.hagendorf@gmail.com (Zelle, preferred); @Lizzie-Conner lizzzie.conner@gmail.com (Venmo, PayPal, CashApp)

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That’s all for now. Until next time, take care of one another.

1. Ex-Machina was great. Annihilation was crap.