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Germany: In the Streets against Fascism, Again

http://crimethinc.com/Germany2024

The far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany”) has been gaining momentum in German politics since 2017, when they entered the parliament. On January 10, 2024, an investigative journalism group reported that prominent members of the AfD had met with a member of another fascist party to devise a plot to deport millions of immigrants, including those with German citizenship. This precipitated a wave of anti-fascist demonstrations around Germany.

In this translation and interview, German anti-fascists explore the rise of fascist politics in Germany and the potential of the mobilizations against it.

Photographs by Jannis Grosse.

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103 years ago today, the participants in the Kronstadt uprising released the first issue of their daily paper.

Three proposals contended within the Russian Revolution. Russian anti-capitalists debated whether power should be vested in representative electoral politics, in a one-party dictatorship, or directly in horizontally organized workers’ councils [soviets]. The Kronstadt uprising demanded direct control by workers’ councils.

Here, you can read the entire text of all 14 issues of the newspaper published by the Kronstadt rebels, the Izvestia [news] of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Sailors, Soldiers, and Workers of the Town of Kronstadt.

https://crimethinc.com/kronstadt

Many different factions have attempted to portray the Kronstadt uprising according to many different ideological frameworks. This is a rare opportunity to see the rebellion from the perspective of the rebels themselves

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Memories of Aaron Bushnell

https://crimethinc.com/AaronMemories

On February 25, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC as an act of protest against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Hostile critics have attempted to shrug off Aaron’s action as the consequence of mental illness. On the contrary, Aaron’s choice was a political action arising from his deeply held anarchist convictions.

In this collection, we share Aaron’s own summary of his politics, followed by testimony from three of Aaron’s close friends.

“I am an anarchist, which means I believe in the abolition of all hierarchical power structures, especially capitalism and the state… I view the work we do as fighting back in the class war which the capitalist class wages on the rest of humanity. This also informs the way in which I want to organize, as I believe that any hierarchical power structure is bound to reproduce class dynamics and oppression. Thus, I want to engage in egalitarian forms of organizing that produce horizontal power structures based on mutual aid and solidarity, which are capable of liberating humans.”

-Aaron Bushnell

“My friend Aaron was kind, compassionate, and principled, sometimes to the point of being annoying, and he was incredibly reflective and willing to change to meet my needs in our relationship. He was one of my quickest and best friends.”

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“This Is What Our Ruling Class Has Decided Will Be Normal”

On Aaron Bushnell’s Action in Solidarity with Gaza

https://crimethinc.com/AaronBushnell

On February 25, we received an email from a person who signed himself Aaron Bushnell, announcing that he was going to engage in an act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Shortly afterwards, Aaron set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.

All afternoon, while other journalists were breaking the news, we discussed how we should speak about this. Some subjects are too complex to address in a hasty social media post.

Here, we share some of our thoughts about tragedy, urgency, and sacrifice.

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“Every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”

-Tucker Carlson

Liberal outrage over Carlson saying this to excuse Vladimir Putin—immediately before Putin had Alexei Navalny killed—is beside the point. Supporters of Carlson, Putin, and Donald Trump admire killers. Disapproval is not going to shame them out of this.

Liberals are only offering a more milquetoast version of the same vertical political model. This can put them at a disadvantage today. As push comes to shove in a world in crisis, leaders who have openly presided over killings are drawing more and more support. Think Tayyip Erdoğan—or Benajmin Netanyahu.

The anarchist alternative is to seek to distribute agency horizontally: not to worship leaders and glorify the state and its violence, but to become capable of self-determination, making it impossible for anyone to systematically dominate others. In the long run, this is the only real alternative to authoritarianism.

“Leadership is a social disorder in which the majority of participants in a group fail to take initiative or think critically about their actions. As long as we understand agency as a property of specific individuals rather than a relationship between people, we will always be dependent on leaders—and at their mercy. Truly exemplary leaders are as dangerous as the obviously corrupt, in that all their praiseworthy qualities only reinforce their status and others’ deference, not to mention the legitimacy of leadership itself.”

https://tochangeeverything.com

As Egypt builds a five-meter-high concrete wall to seal off a five-square-kilometer area along the border with Gaza, we cannot help but think of the “no-go zone” on the border between Poland and Belarus, in which thousands of refugees have been enclosed over a period of years, trapped between countries and left to die.

https://crimethinc.com/NoBordersTeam

Since 2021, the government of Belarus has cynically used thousands of refugees displaced by wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, and elsewhere as a weapon with which to exert pressure on the European Union. EU governments have callously left these refugees in limbo between two militarized borders, establishing a restricted zone so that observers cannot see them die.

The majority of the inhabitants of Gaza were already refugees from other parts of Palestine. The world has already turned a blind eye while the Israeli government has set about ethnic cleansing in Gaza. If we permit them to complete that process by forcing the survivors into a containment zone across the Egyptian border, it will set a gruesome precedent that will be repeated elsewhere around the world.