News Briefs: St. George’s 2024

Gaza, US withdrawal from Niger, and who is stealing our water

I swear I don’t have a thing for saints, but today is significant for me because it’s the day I got arrested in Barcelona, back in 2006, forcing me to stay in Catalunya for the next two years, which became sixteen years, significantly changing my life’s geography.

If you want to read that story, here it is:

It is interesting, though, how medieval and Renaissance portrayals of George slaying the dragon depict a fairly small dragon. I suppose for the Christians it was enough for a thing to be different—color-coded evil—to warrant getting killed.

The quality reading for this news brief will actually be quality listening: the BBC series on the Spy Cops, a British police program that sent agents undercover to infiltrate anarchist, ecological, and other movements for years. These agents, some of whom lasted for over a decade, collected information about radical movements and those who participated in them, got in relationships, fathered children, abused people, and set people up for prison. The movements that were chosen were selected on political grounds. The show itself does not give a radical or systemic framing, it’s mainstream media, but it shares important stories in a format that’s easy to listen to.

A piece from the movement archives, Against His-story, Against Leviathan, by Fredy Perlman. This one makes my list of ten greatest anarchist books of the 20^th century, and though our research takes us in different directions (and are based on sources about 40 years apart), Perlman’s book was an inspiration for me when I started writing Worshiping Power: An anarchist view of early state formation The concept of Leviathan, developed first by Thomas Hobbes, an authoritarian statist, and later in a subversive way by Perlman, an anarchist, shows up in the name of my newsletter, of course. The link above is for a free version, courtesy of The Anarchist Library (donate!), but this book is so good, it’s definitely worth having in paper, here from Black and Red.

So, onto the news digest.

The Guardian, that progressive favorite, ran a short article on how the US Senate renewed the FISA program, which suspends the right to privacy or limitations on search and seizure by allowing intelligence and police agencies to intercept and read the communications of US citizens if one of the parties of the conversation is not a citizen. They wait until the end of the article to mention that the FBI used this policy to spy on Black Lives Matters activists, but they never bother to explain how it actually works, even while they dedicate several lines to politicians from both parties saying how important it is for “security” and to “protect America” from “foreign terrorists.” In fact, the FBI and other agencies are intentionally hoovering up all the data on tens of thousands of people, regardless of their citizenship. When they want to target a US citizenship, they can just classify a non-US citizen we might be communicating with in order to surveil our phone calls, messages, and emails on the backhand.

Ironically, the Guardian notes that most opposition to the law came from rightwing Republicans. Is government surveillance a far-Right issue? It will be if progressives continue to downplay it.

Has Israel murdered 34,000 Palestinians? We know they’ve wounded 70,000, but they’ve probably killed at least 54,000, given that expert estimates continuously reaffirm that there are likely “tens of thousands” of bodies still buried in the rubble of bombed out buildings. Thirty-four thousand is just the number of bodies recovered.

Incidentally, the Israeli government claims 13,000 of the dead are Hamas fighters, though this is not an institution with any credibility. 13,000 probably represents a figure they think people are most likely to believe, since the rest of the 34,000 are, approximately, all women and children. Any investigation of the accuracy of Israeli strikes or how they use AI to determine who is a Hamas member makes it obvious, however, that many and possibly most of the adult male victims are also civilians. Video evidence shows that regardless of age and gender, most victims of Israeli strikes are not actively involved in… defending Gaza from the Israeli invasion.

Meanwhile, Israel denied assaulting and raping Palestinian women and children in custody, but, they have no credibility. Sexual assault by Israeli soldiers and police is widespread.

Remember Lula? Darling of the Left, one of the most progressive heads of state in the 21^st century? He cancelled official events for the commemoration of the 1964 military coup that installed a dictatorship and established death squads targeting radicals and progressives, killing hundreds. That’s the problem with taking power that progressives conveniently forget over and over again: once you take power, you have to take care of power. That was part of Lula’s justification for prohibiting the ceremonies: he was worried about “inflaming” the generals. The second part of his justification contradicted the first, though, staying true to another Leftist tradition. He claimed “This belongs to history now. It’s already caused the suffering it caused […] I’m not going to keep dwelling on this.” Which is curious, given how the military attempted a coup against him two years ago, and the cops still act with the impunity they gained during the dictatorship, killing 5,000 people in 2017. Additionally, off-duty police officers carrying out extrajudicial executions of political enemies or gang figures who disobey them are suspected of thousands and possibly tens of thousands of additional killings every year. Furthermore, these persistent death squads have been linked to political dynasties on the Right, like the Bolsonaros.

So it would be confusing that Bolsonaro is trying to appease death squads and fascists—who we know can never be appeased—until we remember that this is the very nature of taking power. You lose out on the possibility of revolution, of real change, and instead of protecting people and movements for change and finding your protection in that grassroots power, you have to protect the institutions of power, and pray they don’t kill or coup you.

We’ve said it before, and history leaves no room for doubt: the Left, socialists, revolutions that don’t abolish the State – they all end up being counterrevolutionary.

Anyone out there still trust the police and courts? Well, they shoot to kill when anarchists and antifascists are defending themselves or setting police property on fire, but they peacefully capture white supremacists who open fire on them, and far-Right militants who set fire to medical facilities that provide abortion and have plans to carry out mass killings by bombing a Pride parade only get 9 year sentences. For carrying out or even just planning arson of companies and infrastructure involved in ecological destruction, actions that come with no possibility of injuring anyone, on several occasions anarchists get sentences of over 20 years.

Who gets to shoot unarmed children without any consequences, if they’re also shooting at someone with a gun? The cops do.

But at the very least the courts will protect us if it doesn’t require going against their buddies in blue, right? Wrong. We’ve long known PFAS (forever chemicals) were toxic, spiking rates of cancer and other diseases. The government started regulating or banning a few hundred of these chemicals (there are 15,000 total). And then, within a year, the government started striking down those protections. It’s probably for the best (and I say this as someone with cancer caused by environmental toxins). It’s easy for people to be naïve and believe “government protection” is anything but an oxymoron. PFOA is one forever chemical that’s supposed to be phased out. Dupont claimed to have stopped producing it in 2015. Several of their plants are still leaking PFOA into the water, in West Virginia and probably other locations. Government isn’t doing anything. But if I killed a Dupont executive, as a legitimate act of self-defense for myself and any of the tens of thousands of people who drink that water… I wonder what the courts would do?

This article was a gem. After paragraphs and paragraphs dishing on powerful conservative judges, their activist spouses, and the billionaires who take them on expensive vacations or pay their children’s tuition at ritzy private schools, in a single paragraph we hear about Texas prosecutors paid an outside law firm $1,313 an hour of government money (possibly totaling millions) to protect the state from accountability for all the harm caused by rampant abuse of foster children.

Look on the bright side: even though we’re all dying, getting cancer, getting bombed, getting shot at, or being harmed by those in power, at least some companies have found new ways to get rich off of water shortages (and what a shock! the courts have been helping them find loopholes).

And finally, here’s some evidence of what I was talking about in the newsletter on geopolitics: the government of Niger has demanded the withdrawal of all US troops from their country, while increasing military cooperation with Russia.