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Hey friends!

All around the northern hemisphere, spring is breaking out like life itself in insurrection, and we are back with another update on our efforts.

“Every person, every living creature, has a sacred right to the joy of springtime.” -Leo Tolstoy

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Remembering Aaron Bushnell

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 sought to frame this as the consequence of mental illness, but it was a political act arising from Aaron’s deeply held anarchist convictions. In this collection, we offer Aaron’s own summary of his politics, followed by testimony from four of Aaron’s close friends.

This text is also available as a zine in English and Spanish.

A photograph from a vigil in memory of Aaron Bushnell in San Antonio, Texas, where many people knew and loved him.

Germany

For several years now, locals, anarchists, environmentalists, and others have been engaged in a struggle against a Tesla “gigafactory” in the small town of Grünheide, only five kilometers southeast of the Berlin city limits. Now, Tesla is seeking to expand the facility at further cost to local forest and groundwater.

After locals voted against the expansion, activists established an occupation in the forest that is slated for destruction. Saboteurs burned an electrical pylon, halting work at the Tesla factory and costing the company hundreds of millions of euros.

In this article, we present an interview with a participant in the forest occupation and a translation of a statement from the group that shut down electricity to the Tesla plant.

The forest occupation against Tesla and Elon Musk’s brand of “green” fascism.

Meanwhile, 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 AfD politicians 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 the country. 

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

In the streets against fascism, again.

Chile

An uprising broke out in Chile in 2019, wresting control of the streets from police and politicians. Eventually, the authorities managed to redirect this momentum into an effort to replace the constitution, itself a relic of the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. But the attempt to ratify a new constitution failed, and a resurgent right wing has regained the initiative in Chile, while the left politicians who came to power have subordinated themselves to the market and the police.

In this account, members of the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío trace this story through the end of the year 2023, chronicling the consequences of the cooptation of the uprising of 2019.

The Opioid Epidemic

Starting in 2021, drug overdoses have killed more than 100,000 people in the United States every year. While the crack and heroin epidemics of the late twentieth century were used as a pretext to introduce mass incarceration, mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and racial profiling, all of which disproportionately targeted Black and brown people, so many white people have died of overdoses over the past decade that the rhetoric around the opioid epidemic has shifted dramatically. Today, even racist conservatives acknowledge the opioid epidemic as a social crisis—but how to address it remains an open question.

Anarchists struggle against the conditions that give rise to drug addiction, the ways that the authorities take advantage of addiction to inflict additional damage on communities, and also against addiction itself. In the following reflection, Angustia Celeste revisits harm reduction strategies through the lens of personal tragedy and grief.

The Border

As the US presidential campaigns get underway, both parties are competing to present themselves as the ones who are most qualified to do violence to immigrants. While Donald Trump and his minions attempt to scapegoat immigrants for the very same violence and poverty that they themselves engender, Joe Biden seeks to advertise his centrist coalition as the ones who actually get things done—things like deporting people and backing genocide in Palestine.

"The US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back."

-The Insidious Workings of the Political Ratchet

Both parties intentionally obscure the processes that compel people to migrate and deny the humanity of those who do. If we permit them to normalize the idea that those in need are dangerous and unworthy of our solidarity, that idea will later be used to justify our own suffering and exclusion.

For a more nuanced account of the reasons people are forced to travel without documents and the obstacles that confront them when they do, we invite you to read our book No Wall They Can Build. You can order a print copy of the book from us or download it from our website free of charge.

Languages

In the weeks since our last email update, we’ve published translations of our new articles in Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Turkish, and Greek.

But that isn’t good enough! We need your help to make our material accessible in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, French, and other languages. If you can help us translate into any language, please contact us.

Why We Do This

We do this work as volunteers, not seeking anything in return, hoping only to do our part towards a brighter, freer future. Everything we produce is copyright free; we distribute it for free, without advertisements of any kind, or else sell it for the costs of production and delivery alone. If you want us to be able to expand the scope of our efforts, you can support our projects financially.

Above all, we invite you to join us in the lifelong adventure of wresting back our collective potential from the destructive feedback loops in which we are all currently trapped.

In memory of Aaron Bushnell, Flaco, and the thousands of Palestinian children who have been murdered over the past six months.

"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