I get this feeling every time the plane touches down at Dubai Intl. Airport. A sort of “I’m home” thought that just involuntarily runs through my mind. It’s hard not to feel this when you’ve called one country your home for 19 years.
This time, that feeling was strangely absent. Perhaps not too strangely. A number of my friends are, like myself, planning to bid goodbye to the country and leave for better futures. My parents, nearing retirement age, are planning to move to India where they have rights and a far more relaxed life free of the constant threat of deportation.
Our chants reverberated under the St. Paul skyway. The 2008 RNC protests were underway, the culmination of two years of anarchist/anti-authoritarian organizing materializing before our eyes. For once, we were many, and they were few… or maybe not. With 3500 cops and an uncounted number of National Guardsmen and Secret Service agents on the streets, this time they had both the guns and the numbers.
Overwhelming force was only one element of the state’s repression strategy. The main hub of direct action coordination– the RNC Welcoming Committee– had been infiltrated by at least one undercover cop and two paid informants almost a year prior. On Friday night, the hammer came down with a raid on the St. Paul Convergence Center. Cops busted in the doors with guns drawn, forcing about 100 people to the ground, zip-tying them, and then photographing everyone and taking IDs. What a start to the weekend…
The Stimulator’s on a mission to expose the current social control mindfuck! Now through June 5, you can catch the West Coast tour in Seattle, Olympia, Portland, Salem, Beaverton, San Francisco, Fresno, L.A. and Denver. Scroll down for the deets and dates.
HOPIUM delivers 90 minutes of short films, mashups, and clips from It’s the End of the World and We Know It and I Feel Fine, the world’s most subversive news show. The evening culminates with highlights from the forthcoming END:CIV, and the documentary hit GROUND NOISE & STATIC, a video report from the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2008.
Brace yourself for video montages that mix culture jamming, news, satire, music and plenty of action to scratch the social justice itch. Hopium is a crash course on the countercultures, protest movements, and underground forces set to collide in the post-Bush world.
For good or for ill, the protests at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions constituted the most significant nationwide effort anarchists have undertaken to organize militant action in the US in several years. Two weeks later, the global economy collapsed, followed shortly by anarchist-initiated rioting in Greece dwarfing anything in Denver or St. Paul. It’s easy to feel that the DNC and RNC mobilizations were inconsequential by comparison. But if US anarchists are ever going to be capable of contributing to insurrections like the ones in Oaxaca and Greece, we either have to figure out how to improve on the models applied at the conventions, or else identify their shortcomings conclusively so as to adopt more effective approaches.
I get this feeling every time the plane touches down at Dubai Intl. Airport. A sort of “I’m home” thought that just involuntarily runs through my mind. It’s hard not to feel this when you’ve called one country your home for 19 years.
Who's talking shit