UK: 10 Point Guide for Post-Brexit Resistance

   June 24, 2016

The statement of  Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Response to Brexit Leave Vote

1. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the European Union demonstrates that even weak parliamentary democracy is incompatible with escalating neoliberal inequality. In the UK as elsewhere a tiny segment of the population have taken a larger and larger share of total wealth in the last decades. Particularly under austerity almost everyone else has seen their share of the wealth they produce decline massively.

GREECE:Europe’s solidarity crisis: a perspective from Greece

June 8, 2016  Source: roarmag

Dimitris Christopoulos, George Souvlis

Refugees are not a cause but a symptom of a broader European political crisis, which a leading Greek scholar argues might well end up with Europe in ruins.

UK:Leeds AFN statement on the murder of Jo Cox

Photo kbctv

June 17, 2016,  Source: leedsantifascists

Yesterday, after a constituency surgery at the library in Birstall, neer Leeds, Labour MP Jo Cox was subjected to a targeted, brutal and prolonged attack by an assailant who,     according to multiple eyewitness accounts, shouted the words “Britain First” as he attacked, shooting and stabbing her multiple times. By the evening, news broke that Jo had died as a result of her injuries.

GERMANY: Summary of the fight for the social center Avanti

Church squatted
In the evening of Friday the 22nd of August 2014, activists occupied the former St. Albertus Magnus church in Dortmund which was unused for over 7 years. Only minutes after the occupation was made public, nearly 40 supporters came to the area and held a gathering in front of the church in solidarity with the project and the squatters. Of course, it didn’t take long before the cops also arrived at the location, but they didn’t attempt to raid the building, and instead controlled the supporters outside. The next day, a priest in charge of matters of the church building spoke to the squatters and stated he will tolerate the occupation for one week. Immediately activists began to form work groups, trying to renovate the building to establish a social center.

FRANCE: Weekend of anti-fascist resistance in Calais, 5-7 September and Defence Of Migrant Squats

On Sunday 7 September, local fascist group ‘Sauvons Calais’ will once again try to hold a demonstration ‘against immigration’ in Calais, bringing in hardcore neo-nazis from across France. A number of high-profile fascists have already confirmed their presence including Thomas Joly (general secretary of Parti de la France), Yvan Benedetti (conseiller municipal of Vénissieux and former-member of the now banned organization L’Œuvre française), and Richard Roudier (of Réseau Identités). It is also likely that some neonazi gangs will arrive before and stay for more time after the demo to attack vulnerable people in the streets.

FRANCE: letter from the inhabitants of the squat fort Galoo

[French follows English]

Mr, Mrs,

We are the refugees who squat this place and we are from different nationalities. We demand you not to use sadistic violence against us and not to make us go out of this place without any dignified solution.

We ran away from our countries because of injustice, war, dictatorship, ethnic cleansig, poverty, arbitrary imprisonment, religious persecution, theocracy which prevent us from believing in what we want : for example, in Sudan, if you drink a beer you can be whiped 40 times. We suffer from marginalisation in our countries because we fight the opression of our government and because of this we don’t have access to medical care, to school, we don’t have access to anything.

GREECE/SYRIA: Statement by SRSB in solidarity with struggle against dumping of chemical weapons in the Mediterranean sea

[Greek and Arabic follow English]

Protests in Crete continue against the destruction of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons in the Mediterranean sea. The United States, Russia and the United Nations wanted to get rid of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons and did not mind turning the Mediterranean sea into a waste dump for toxic agents.
The process of burying the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons in international waters between Malta, Greece and Italy has already begun, but local communities are not watching this idly.
On 23 March, almost 10,000 Cretans rallied in the tiny village of Arkadi against the plan to dump the chemical weapons in the Mediterranean.  An international online petition has been issued to demand a a halt to process that poses catastrophic ramifications on the marine ecosystem.  On 25 July, a flotilla of three boats carrying about 30 fishermen, activists and scientists attempted to sail to prevent the destruction of the chemical weapons aboard the US vessel MV Cape Ray. The flotilla, however, was derailed by bad weather and high waves. Protests took place in Italy, too. Some of the Majors of Gioia Tauro protested outside the parliament against the arrival of chemical weapons in their port. Activists from Crete said: “If you don’t fight you won’t achieve anything. If you fight, you might achieve something.” And now more than ever, it’s our duty to support their fight and reject the destruction of Assad’s weapons in our sea.

Neo-nazi Frequencies

The far right is a hot topic right now and Chrissi Avgi\Golden Dawn (GD) are increasingly making headlines all over Europe, as this recently small neo-Nazi group suddenly stumbles onto the political stage; rabid and unclean compared to many of its European cousins, punching and threatening and speaking of civil war whilst for a long time no one does anything even though migrants and other undesirables are beaten and killed, and the cops are participating actively or at least not preventing it as the government tries its best to do even better in its own bureaucratic way. The murder of the antifascist Pavlos Fyssas by a GD member has created a sharp u-turn that recently saw surprised members of GD marching on their own as cops busted in on them and the state went antifascist. I have chosen the term ‘far-right’ to act as a massive umbrella term under which fascists, Nazis, xenophobic populists and nationalists can be categorised. I know that this is a simplification, but simplification is necessary if one is to talk about a new political climate which is spreading over Europe, a climate which is created by many groups with differing backgrounds and ideologies but which most significantly is characterised by racism and cultural protectionism. When analysing Golden Dawn it is relevant to look at Greek history as well as the ideologies of fascism and national socialism, but the international context is also important. If we look at international connections between GD and other far right groups, we can narrow our definitions, because we find the solidarity coming from a very specific political grouping: the neo-Nazis.

GERMANY: “We want our freedom!” Refugees resist in Berlin

by Joris Leverink

The resistance of a group of refugees against the eviction of an occupied school building in Berlin is exemplary of migrant struggles across Europe.

For eight days, a small group of about forty refugees from different but mostly African countries have been occupying the roof of a vacant school building in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood. The former Gerhart Hauptmann School on Ohlauer Strasse had been home to more than two hundred people since October last year, ever since a nationwide wave of refugee protests culminated in a six-hundred kilometer long protest march from the Bavarian town of Würzburg to the center of the country’s capital, Berlin. The refugees first set up camp at the central Oranienplatz, and later moved on to occupy the vacant school building where they were holding up, awaiting the slow processing of their asylum applications.

UK: Who are the Polish cutlers from London?

by Codzienik Feministyczny i Centrum Informacji Anarchistycznej – Translation Tahrir ICN

On Suturday, around 20:30 in London/Tottenham a group of several tens of Polish neonazis and hooligans from ‘United Emmigrants’ attacked an open techno party (in fact it was not just a techno party, but a whole day family event with lots of children and various artists) in Markfield Park. The attackers were repulsed, and then a lot of them arrested. Before they managed to hurt one person with a knife, fortunetelly not serioously.

Tottenham Festival was part of The Music Day event, one of hundreds of linked concerts held around the world on Saturday to “celebrate the universal language of music”. At least a dozen linked events were held in London alone at the weekend.