Over 30 years of anarchist writing from Ireland listed under hundreds of topics
Imperialism
WSM International Secretariat on the defence of Kobane
Date: Wed, 2014-10-15 20:13
The WSM considers the struggle for Kobane and the autonomous zones of Rojava to be crucial for the development of a political alternative for the region. We view Daesh as the toxic excrescence of the results of global and regional imperialist intervention in Syria and Iraq.
Insurrections at the intersections: feminism, intersectionality and anarchism
Date: Wed, 2014-10-15 12:12
A critique of liberal conceptions of 'intersectionality' and an outline of an anarchist, class struggle approach.
We need to understand the body not as bound to the private or to the self—the western idea of the autonomous individual—but as being linked integrally to material expressions of community and public space. In this sense there is no neat divide between the corporeal and the social; there is instead what has been called a “social flesh.” - Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar1
Dublin Solidarity rally with Kobane
Date: Thu, 2014-10-09 15:08
On October 8th about 200 people marched though Dublin to show solidarity with Kobane under attack by ISIS in an emergency demonstration organised at short notice.
What was intended as a rally turned into a march on the Dail (Irish parliament) when more than the expected 30-40 people turned up. The attendance was made up of members of the Kurdish community in Ireland, Turkish leftists and anarchists, left-republicans and other socialists.
Tell Us Lies About Kobanê -unpicking the demand for Turkish & western intervention
Date: Thu, 2014-10-09 14:12
The notion that the fall of Kobanê could be prevented by the intervention of the Turkish army is a smokescreen that covers the truth that they are already intervening - on the side of ISIS. The Turkish state's selective blockade of the border, which allows arms and volunteers to cross for ISIS, but strangles them for the YPG defenders of Kobanê is the decisive intervention that is giving ISIS the upper hand.
This fundamental truth has been put forward by some minority voices in the mainstream media. Chiefly those intrepid reporters on the ground trying to cover the story. Honourable mention should be made of the BBC's Paul Adams amongst others. But these marginalised voices have been drowned out by the official media line issuing from the central editorial offices downwards, that the Kurds of Kobanê and Turkish Kurdistan are protesting "against Turkey's inactivity" or "failure to intervene". This is the world turned upside down. And Orwellian newspeak where the exact opposite of the truth is reported as accepted fact. The banners the protesters are holding say "Turkey Stop Supporting ISIS".
Origins of the hostility and the split between Al Qa’ida and ISIS
Date: Wed, 2014-09-17 15:41
Geo-strategically the Al Qa’ida leadership (Azzam, bin Laden, Zawahiri) are products of the Cold War, specifically the Afghan Mujahidin war against the USSR. Rather like their American neo-con previous employers, Al Qa’ida view the end of the Cold War as a victory over the USSR by their own side. The Al Qa’ida perspective is that, having “defeated” one superpower, the global jihad now needs to turn its offensive against the remaining superpower. Al Qa’ida worry that the Zarqawists of ISIS may be restricting the struggle to a parochial Mesopotamian sectarian struggle that could fail to engage Muslim jihadists around the world, outside the MENA region, say in West Africa or Indonesia and the Philippines where the US is a more credible #1 enemy than Iran.
Kurdish "Terrorists" Rescue Yezidis
Date: Thu, 2014-08-14 22:43
The US special forces finally sent to Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq to assess a mission to rescue the threatened Yezidis this morning, reported that most of the displaced population had already been rescued in the previous days. What is not being widely reported is the identity of the Kurdish forces who secured the northern side of the mountain and opened a safe passage for the threatened Yezidi civilians, through the Syrian territory they control to Dohuk in the north of the Kurdish Autonomous region in Iraq.
Embarrassingly for the US, arriving on its white charger to save the day, only to discover they are far too late, the saviours of the Yezidis are the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and their Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) allies. The PKK are officially on the US and EU “terrorist” lists and the autonomous Syrian region defended by the YPG is subject to blockade by ISIS to the South and West, Turkey to the North and the corrupt Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) regime in Kurdish Northern Iraq to the East. The PKK’s pariah status dates from the war which it fought in the 1980s and 90s against the Turkish state, first under the the dictatorship, then the civilian government, for independence for the mainly Kurdish region of South East Turkey. Since late 2012 peace talks began with the Turkish government and a ceasefire was declared in March 2013.
Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State
Date: Thu, 2014-08-14 19:34
The desperate plight of tens of thousands of Yazidi people stranded for the past week and a half on Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq, having fled their homes in the nearby city, has focussed the world’s attention on what has been happening in that region.
Threats of airstrikes from U.S. president Barack Obama in a region where U.S. intervention in such recent memory has already been responsible for the killing of up to a million people and the injuring and displacement of many more causes alarm bells to ring in the minds of all who care about a fair and just world. This is further exacerbated by the knowledge that it is the stoking of sectarian tensions as a result of U.S. policy in Iraq that is largely responsible for the emergence of the fundamentalist and ultra-reactionary Islamic State organisation.
The Warsaw Ghetto and the assault on Gaza - is there anything in the comparison?
Date: Tue, 2014-08-05 15:45
The text below is translated from the poster at the centre of this image of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli state. But it refers not to this horror but another in 1943 when the Nazis crushed the Warsaw ghetto, wiping out the poorly armed organised resistance that operated out of a warren of bunkers & sewers hidden beneath the ghetto. This poster was by one of the armed factions that defended the Ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB)
All people are brothers;
Yellow, brown, black, and white.
Talk of peoples, colors, races -
Is all a made-up story
Mainstreaming Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in the Israeli Media
Date: Sat, 2014-08-02 12:32
The Jerusulem Post carried an opinion piece today with the sub-heading:
"The only durable solution requires dismantling Gaza, humanitarian relocation of the non-belligerent Arab population, and extension of Israeli sovereignty over the region."
This echoes the words of Moshr Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, and a member of the ruling Likud Party, who, only two weeks ago said that "Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly, expel the population and resettle the territory with Jewish settlers".
The expression of these views are not isolated, they represent a significant section of mainstream Zionist thinking and could not be freely aired if they did not. In reality they are the honest expression of the Zionist project to create an ethnically pure state, permanently rid of the native people.
The Zionist Project, Anti-Semitism and Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine
Date: Thu, 2014-07-31 20:39
We published the map (insert in graphic) and accompanying text on our facebook page four days ago as a commentary on Israeli expansionism in Palestine. It's proved massively popular, some 400,000 people have now seen it. There are also many comments and in one of those, a WSM supporter said "I do think that you've very lazily reproduced an image that is borderline anti-semitic by back dating the problem of israeli expansionism to before Israel existed when the "problem" was not Israel, but Jews"
We take the issue of continuing to oppose anti-semitism while opposing the Israeli state's massacre in Gaza very seriously. That has involved deleting blatantly anti-Semitic comments and banning repeat offenders (and the same with Islamophobes) and debting with and educating those making softer versions of such comments. So this criticism coming from a supporter concerned us, had we, albeit accidentally, stepped over the line?
Another supporter (David Landy) responded to that accusation and we found that response so educational we asked if he might write it up in more detail.
Below David discusses the difficult question of the nature of Zionist colonisation prior to the creation of the state of Israel.
