Showing posts with label Anarchism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anarchism. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

How Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot Escaped Russia (VIDEO)

I don't listen to this band. Not particularly to my tastes, though your mileage may vary.

I like their rebellious politics though. Frankly, what other politics could they have in Putin's Russia?

There new music video is here, "Hate Fuck." 

At the New York Times, "Leader of Pussy Riot Band Escapes Russia, With Help From Friends":

After more than a decade of activism, Maria Alyokhina disguised herself as a food courier to evade the police — and a widening crackdown by President Vladimir Putin.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Maria V. Alyokhina first came to the attention of the Russian authorities — and the world — when her punk band and performance art group Pussy Riot staged a protest against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.

For that act of rebellion in 2012, she was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.” She remained determined to fight Mr. Putin’s system of repression, even after being jailed six more times since last summer, each stint for 15 days, always on trumped-up charges aimed at stifling her political activism.

But in April, as Mr. Putin cracked down harder to snuff out any criticism of his war in Ukraine, the authorities announced that her effective house arrest would be converted to 21 days in a penal colony. She decided it was time to leave Russia — at least temporarily — and disguised herself as a food courier to evade the Moscow police who had been staking out the friend’s apartment where she was staying. She left her cellphone behind as a decoy and to avoid being tracked.

A friend drove her to the border with Belarus, and it took her a week to cross into Lithuania. In a studio apartment in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, she agreed to an interview to describe a dissident’s harrowing escape from Mr. Putin’s Russia.

“I was happy that I made it, because it was an unpredictable and big” kiss-off to the Russian authorities, Ms. Alyokhina said, using a less polite term. “I still don’t understand completely what I’ve done,” she admitted, dressed in black except for a fanny pack with a rainbow belt.

Ms. Alyokhina, 33, has spent her entire adult life fighting for her country to respect its own Constitution and the most basic human rights, like freedom of expression. After being freed early from prison in December 2013, she and another member of Pussy Riot founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet focused on crime and punishment in Russia.

She also wrote a memoir, “Riot Days,” and traveled internationally performing a show based on the book. Though her dream was to tour with it in Russia, only three venues agreed to host the show, and all faced repercussions.

Ms. Alyokhina was committed to remaining in Russia despite regular surveillance and pressure from the authorities. But now she has joined the tens of thousands of Russians who have fled since the invasion of Ukraine.

Alyokhina, whose friends call her Masha, had bitten her nails down to stubs, and she puffed almost unceasingly on a vape or on Marlboro Lights. She made the journey in black, three-inch platform boots without laces — a nod to her many stints in jail, where shoelaces are confiscated.

In prison, she and others instead threaded moist towelettes through the eyelets of their shoes to keep them on. As a statement, she and other members of Pussy Riot will wear them while they perform during a tour, starting on May 12 in Berlin, to raise money for Ukraine.

When it first began more than a decade ago, Pussy Riot seemed as much publicity stunt as political activism. But if their protest in the Moscow cathedral — where they sang a “Punk Prayer” ridiculing the symbiosis that had developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin — seemed overwrought at the time, today it appears prescient.

The church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, recently blessed Russian troops going to Ukraine, and the European Union put his name on a proposed list of people to be sanctioned.

Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.

Ms. Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for her country.

“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”

During the interview she was surrounded by other members of the group, now a collective with about a dozen members. Most of them had also recently fled Russia, including her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein.

Ms. Shtein had chosen to leave Russia a month before, also evading restrictions on her movement by sneaking out in a delivery-service uniform. Her decision came after someone posted a sign on the door of the apartment she shared with Ms. Alyokhina accusing them of being traitors...

Keep reading.

 

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Bicentennial of Birth of Karl Marx, the Man Whose Ideas Killed Untold Millions

From Paul Kengor, at WSJ, "Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face":

May 5 marks the bicentennial of Karl Marx, who set the stage with his philosophy for the greatest ideological massacres in history. Or did he?

He did, but deniers still remain. “Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag,” writes Francis Wheen in “Karl Marx: A Life” (1999). Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, Mr. Wheen insists, created “bastard creeds,” “wrenched out of context” from Marx’s writings.

Marx has been accused of ambiguity in his writings. That critique is often justified, but not always. In “The Communist Manifesto,” he and Friedrich Engels were quite clear that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” they wrote. “But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.” And this: “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”

Marx and Engels acknowledged that their views stood undeniably contrary to the “social and political order of things.” Communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things” and represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.”

Toward that end, the manifesto offers a 10-point program, including “abolition of property in land,” “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” “abolition of all right of inheritance,” “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,” “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” and the “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.”

In a preface to their 10 points, Marx and Engels acknowledged their coercive nature: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.” In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

They were right about that. Human beings would not give up fundamental liberties without resistance. Seizing property would require a terrible fight, including the use of guns and gulags. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and a long line of revolutionaries and dictators candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary...
More.


Friday, July 21, 2017

Majority of Republicans Say Colleges Have Negative Impact on the U.S.

At Pew Research, "Republicans skeptical of colleges’ impact on U.S., but most see benefits for workforce preparation":
Currently, 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, while just 36% say their effect is positive, according to a survey conducted last month by Pew Research Center. Just two years ago, attitudes were the reverse: a 54% majority of Republicans and Republican leaners said colleges were having a positive effect, while 37% said their effect was negative.
Noah Rothman writes about this, at U.S.A. Today, "Conservatives are increasingly hostile to higher ed. Who can blame them?":
The collapse of GOP support coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on college campuses.

The Pew Research Center has a new survey confirming that, as you'd expect, Republicans have little love for institutions such as media and labor unions. What's surprising, however, is the extent to which Republicans have grown hostile toward colleges and universities, and how quickly their attitudes have changed.

Pew found that 58% of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on “the way things are going in the country.” Only 36% disagreed. As recently as 2010, 55% of the GOP viewed colleges positively.

The shift Pew observed is too uniform to be random. This is a response to external conditions. The collapse of Republican support for colleges and universities coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on campuses. Take, for example, the University of Missouri-Columbia.

In 2015, Mizzou students sparked a firestorm by rallying in defense of a student who claimed that the campus was plagued by people in pickups chanting racist slurs. That accusation reopened the still festering wounds resulting from clashes that had erupted between peaceful protesters, rioters and police in Ferguson just months earlier. The popular narrative in the news media and on the left — that a righteous protest against injustice had been summarily crushed by the heavy hand of law enforcement — led to disruptions across the country in 2015.

As The New York Times observed, the protests soon became typified by the Marxist ideal of “intersectionality,” which contends that all discrimination is rooted in class, gender and race and is therefore linked. The demonstrations swelled, a series of administrators resigned, and the intersectional student movement appeared victorious.

It was, however, a video featuring communications professor Melissa Click that turned the campus controversy into a national story. She was filmed attempting to prevent a student journalist from taking pictures of the protests and calling for “some muscle” to be deployed...
More.

RELATED: At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Details on University of Missouri cuts: 474 jobs cut; Mizzou takes the biggest hit."

Yeah, keep it up "intersectional" leftists. Just keep it up. Nothing hurts your movement more than destroying the life chances of everyday Americans. So keep it up. Overreach will destroy radical leftism. We need to see more of it.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

L.A. Kauffman, Direct Action

Not to neglect my radical reading, heh...

Here's L.A. Kauffman, at Amazon, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism.

And check out the excerpt, "In 1971, the People Didn’t Just March on Washington — They Shut It Down."


Saturday, February 25, 2017

Godswill Forche

The vote for the new Democrat Party chair is due any moment, and my money's on Keith Ellison. What a joy it will be when he's selected. Talk about sealing the party's fate, heh.

This dude Godswill Forche, who's on Twitter, nails it:


Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The Most Politically Dangerous Book

It's Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?


Sunday, February 5, 2017

Heh: CNN's Marc Lamont Hill Can't Name One Example of Right-Wing Rioters on Campuses

That's because "right-wing rioters" is an oxymoron.

Heh.

At Instapundit, "WELL, TO BE FAIR, NEITHER CAN ANYONE ELSE: CNN’s Marc Lamont Hill Can’t Name One Example of Right-Wing Rioters on Campuses."

Nancy Pelosi Claims Democrats Are 'Capitalists' (VIDEO)

This has to be one of the biggest laughers of the new year.

The Democrats are "capitalist"?

Well, no.

The Democrats are a quasi-Marxist socialist party that can't stand the free market. The only thing holding back leftists from nationalizing huge sections of the American economy is the historic commitment to free enterprise by the American people. Polls do show lagging support among the young for the free market, but of course these people are idiots. One of the greatest benefits of electing President Trump is the brake he puts on Democrat attacks on the free market economy. Trump's literally saving this country from ruin. And leftists hate him for it.

In any case, more from John Sexton, at Hot Air, "Nancy Pelosi on Democrats: ‘We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is. However…’"



More at PuffHo, "Why Nancy Pelosi’s Comments About Capitalism Disappointed Progressives."

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Tomi Lahren: Antifas 'Claim to Stand Against Hate, Intolerance, and Bigotry ... Are All About Love, Tolerance, and Acceptance, Unless It Offends Them...' (VIDEO)

Here's the lovely Tomi Lahren, at Faceook, "I Stand with Milo."

Tomi Lahren photo Cl1uZ2QWIAAQjYf_zpsqsgclnna.jpg

PREVIOUSLY: "Lauren Southern: A Right Wing Call to Self-Defense (VIDEO)."

We're going to have to fight back against these thugs. Simple as that.

Lauren Southern: A Right Wing Call to Self-Defense (VIDEO)

She's a cool chick.

And following-up, "Only 'Antifas' Allowed 'Free Speech'."



Berkeley Riots Provoked by Freedom Center Campaign (VIDEO)

David Horowitz appears on Lou Dobbs' show, at the video.

And here's Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Berkeley fascists shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled anti-sanctuary campus speech":

Leftist UC Berkeley students and outsiders rioted last night to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from delivering a David Horowitz Freedom Center-sponsored speech demanding the end of “sanctuary campuses” that harbor illegal aliens. Milo's address, which was canceled amid violent mob attacks, fire-setting, and wanton property destruction, had been scheduled to mark the launch of the Freedom Center’s #nosanctuarycampusforcriminals campaign.

“One thing we do know for sure: the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down,” Yiannopoulos, tech editor at Breitbart News, said after being safely evacuated from the campus.

“This is what tolerance looks like at UC Berkeley,” Mike Wright, a Berkeley College Republicans member told SFGate as smoke bombs exploded nearby. He said paint was thrown on his person. “It’s sad.”

“The so-called ‘sanctuary movement’ is a concerted effort by left-wing administrations in major cities to thwart the purposes of the Patriot Act, undermine federal immigration law, and cripple the efforts of the Department of Homeland security to protect American citizens from terrorist threats,” David Horowitz, founder and CEO of the Freedom Center, said on Jan. 31.

“Thanks to the efforts of left-wing activists and administrators, this seditious movement has now spread to our colleges and universities.”

Backed by the Freedom Center, Yiannopoulos, an outspoken gay, Jewish, Greek-born British citizen who ardently supports President Trump, was on campus to demand that federal grants to UC Berkeley be withdrawn and that university officials like UC President Janet Napolitano and Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks who endanger their students with their illegal alien-shielding policies be prosecuted.

UC President Napolitano, formerly President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary, is under the microscope because, as head of the taxpayer-supported University of California system, she is deliberately harboring hundreds of illegal aliens attending UC system schools. She has forbidden campus police from working with immigration law enforcement and provided $5 million to aid the illegals UC is sheltering from ICE.

The University of California system even provides legal aid to illegal alien students who wish to keep breaking U.S. immigration laws.

The executive director of the University of California Undocumented Legal Services Center at the UC Davis School of Law explained to Rolling Stone in December what a sanctuary campus was.

“Basically it’s a concept that says, ‘You’re safe here, and your immigration status, we won’t ask,’” said Maria Blanco. “’We won’t turn you over. We won’t turn your records over.’”

Not all the rioters were from Berkeley.

Many of those dressed black bloc-style so police can’t identify them appear to be associated with the “antifa” movement. Antifa may be short for anti-fascist but these thugs, usually a mix of anarchists and communists, use violent fascistic tactics against their targets. These terrorists do not tolerate opposing views. Before the riots broke out those gathered carried signs that read “hate speech is not free speech.” Signs from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PLS) also showed up in Berkeley.

Antifa is also involved in the protests and melees at airports nationwide launched in opposition to President Trump’s Executive Order 13769 which as of Jan. 27 temporarily banned visitors from a handful of terrorism-plagued Muslim nations.

The Berkeley police had reportedly been given a “stand down” order which allowed rioters to generate mayhem. Later when the police declared the throng of troublemakers an unlawful assembly and ordered those present to leave, the mob chanted “you go first!”

After leaving the campus Yiannopoulos reflected on the night’s events in a video on his Facebook page...
Keep reading.

'Antifas' Will Come After You, So-Called 'Liberals' Too

People are going to get killed.

Following-up, "The Old Gray Lady Promotes the Black Bloc: 'Anarchists Vow to Halt Far Right's Rise'."

Seen on Twitter:


The Old Gray Lady Promotes the Black Bloc: 'Anarchists Vow to Halt Far Right's Rise'

Following-up, "Only 'Antifas' Allowed 'Free Speech'."

I gotta say this is pretty fascinating. Anarchists and communists brawling with alleged brown shirts. It's like the 1930s, although let's hope not with the same results.

And the Old Gray Lady is playing it up. See, "Anarchists Respond to Trump’s Inauguration, by Any Means Necessary":

The videotaped sucker punch that staggered the white nationalist Richard Spencer on Inauguration Day quickly inspired mockery on social media. But it echoed loudly in an escalating confrontation between extreme ends of the political spectrum.

With far-right groups edging into the mainstream with the rise of President Trump, self-described anti-fascists and anarchists are vowing to confront them at every turn, and by any means necessary — including violence.

In Berkeley, Calif., on Wednesday night, masked protesters set fires, smashed windows and stormed buildings on the campus of the University of California to shut down a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, an inflammatory Breitbart News editor and a right-wing provocateur already barred from Twitter. Five people were injured, administrators canceled the event, and the university police locked down the campus for hours.

That followed a bloody melee in Seattle on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, when black-clad demonstrators — their faces concealed to minimize the risk of arrest — tried to prevent a speech by Mr. Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington, and a 34-year-old anti-fascist was shot and seriously wounded by a supporter of Mr. Yiannopoulos.

The outbreaks of destruction and violence since Mr. Trump’s inauguration have earned contempt from Republicans — including Trump supporters who say it is exactly why they voted for his promises of law and order — and condemnation from Democrats like Berkeley’s mayor, Jesse Arreguín. He called Wednesday’s display “contrary to progressive values” and said it “provided the ultranationalist far right exactly the images they want” to try to discredit peaceful protesters of Mr. Trump’s policies.

But anarchists and anti-fascists, who often make up a small but disproportionately attention-getting portion of protesters, defend the mayhem they create as a necessary response to an emergency.

“Yes, what the black bloc did last night was destructive to property,” Eric Laursen, a writer in Massachusetts who has helped publicize anarchist protests, said, using another name for the black-clad demonstrators. “But do you just let someone like Milo go wherever he wants and spread his hate? That kind of argument can devolve into ‘just sit on your hands and wait for it to pass.’ And it doesn’t.”

Anarchists also say their recent efforts have been wildly successful, both by focusing attention on their most urgent argument — that Mr. Trump poses a fascist threat — and by enticing others to join their movement.

“The number of people who have been showing up to meetings, the number of meetings, and the number of already-evolving plans for future actions is through the roof,” Legba Carrefour, who helped organize the so-called Disrupt J20 protests on Inauguration Day in Washington, said in an interview.

“Gained 1,000 followers in the last week,” trumpeted @NYCAntifa, an anti-fascist Twitter account in New York, on Jan. 24. “Pretty crazy for us as we’ve been active for many years with minimal attention. SMASH FASCISM!”

The movement even claims to be finding adherents far afield of major population centers. A participant in CrimethInc, a decades-old anarchist network, pointed to rising attendance at its meetings and activity cropping up in new places like Omaha.

“The Left ignores us. The Right demonizes us,” the anarchist website It’s Going Down boasted on Twitter. “Everyday we grow stronger.”

Little known to practitioners of mainstream American politics, militant anti-fascists make up a secretive culture closely associated with anarchists. Both reject social hierarchies as undemocratic and eschew the political parties as hopelessly corrupt, according to interviews with a dozen anarchists around the country. While some anarchists espouse nonviolence, others view property damage and even physical attacks on the far right as important tactics...
I hate these people. Anarchists were among the leftist goons that attacked me in Anaheim, in 2014. See, "Cowardly #ANSWER Communists Violently Harass 'American Power' at Anaheim Police Brutality Protest!"

They will resort to violence to shut you down. I've confronted them numerous times, but if you're going to do it, you need to do it in numbers. I'm not going out to cover another one of these events unless I've got a posse with me.

Only 'Antifas' Allowed 'Free Speech'

I've been checking out the "Refuse Fascism" Twitter feed for a couple of weeks now. These people are the real fascists, and they're not shy about it.

According to the collective's editorialists, Milo Yiannopoulos has no free speech rights because "he spews forth hateful, crude, unthinking bigotry and low-level insults against marginalized and oppressed people, and he has a documented record of knowingly unleashing campaigns of harassment, stalking, and threats of violence." (Via Memeorandum.)


All of this is false, of course. Even if his comments are "hateful," they're still protected by the First Amendment. Anyone with half a brain knows this (or anyone who wants to be taken seriously).

Indeed, even the far-left Los Angeles Times got it right the other day, when it defended Milo's right to speak at Berkeley. See, "The No Free Speech Movement at Berkeley":
A leaflet circulated at the Berkeley protest said Yiannopoulos has “no right to speak at Cal or anywhere else” because he’s a “tool of Trump’s possessive fascist government."

This is just the latest variation on the age-old argument of the censor that “error has no rights,” or, put another way, that one only has a right to free speech if one is speaking the “truth.” It’s an insidious notion that needs to be opposed in every generation.
Well, leftists don't want free speech. They don't want open debate and discussion, because they don't want their ideas exposed to critical examination (and repudiation). So, instead of engaging their opponents, they seek to destroy them. That's the textbook characteristic of fascism, hence the irony of "refuse fascism." For more on that, see Guy Benson, "Berkeley's 'Anti-Fascism' Protesters Embrace Fascism to Shut Down Free Speech."


We're in the midst of a political war. The Berkeley riot was just an advanced column of the left's forces of annihilation. The way to respond is with equal force, pushing back through vigorous law and order policies. (Governor Reagan sent in the National Guard at Berkeley in the 1960s. I expect we might be seeing a repeat of that kind of action in the current era, especially if the Trump administration decides to crack down.)

More at Right Wing News, "Who’s Funding the Liberal “Protests”?"

Monday, January 23, 2017

Is it Okay to Punch a Nazi?

Well, it's okay if you're a leftists. It's totally cool.

Frankly, I imagine some conservatives or populists are fine with it as well. I hate to defend someone caught on video raising his hand in at "Heil Hitler' salute, but it is what it is. I wouldn't punch him (unless he punched me first.)

See Popehat, "On Punching Nazis."

And at the New York Times, "Attack on Alt-Right Leader Has Internet Asking: Is It O.K. to Punch a Nazi?"

Spencer gets punched at the video.


Monday, January 16, 2017