A wave of deadly attacks took place last night in Paris and Saint-Denis. The French government has been conducting wars in several countries (Libya, Mali, Syria ...) for years. These wars today have an impact on the French territory.

We are confronted to attacks aiming to spread terror and to stir up divisions within the population. Alternative Libertaire condemns these attacks: killing people at random in the street in the sole purpose of frightening is abject. These attacks are the work of a political movement - the Salafist jihadism - whose first victims are the civilian populations of the Middle East and which has already hit Beirut in recent days. This same political movement that continues to wage war against Kurdish progressive forces in Syria.

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.

The WSM is one of the signatures on this international anarchist statement produced for Mayday 2014 involving 8 groups in 7 countries at time of publication.  This is part of our ongoing involvement in the Anarkismo.net network involving anarchist organisations in some 30 countries.

PDF version of the text & graphic

Conversation with Dimitris,  a Greek anarchist living in Melbourne, co-founder of Anarkismo and translator of many English anarchist publications. I began by asking Dimitri, who became active in anarchism after a background in the Greek Communist Party, the nature of austerity in Greece and resistance to it. We also discussed briefly the history of Greek anarchism, its strengths and weaknesses in contrast with anarchism in Australia.

August saw a gathering of a couple of thousand anarchists from all over the globe in St Imier, Switzerland. This small town was the site of the founding of the Anarchist International in 1872, the gathering was organised to commemorate this event and involved dozens of political, organisational & cultural events.  As part of this gathering Anarkismo, the international network that the WSM is the Irish section of, held both a European conference and a global gathering.