hushpoint

Stop Rape

(Source: eatthiskitty)

socialrupture:

Protesters charge police with shields in attempted building occupation — Oakland, CA

Police fired what appeared to be smoke grenades on Saturday at a group of hundreds of Occupy Oakland protesters who tore down a chain-link fence as they tried to gain entrance to the city’s shuttered convention center.

The scuffles marked the latest confrontation between police and Occupy protesters seeking to regain lost momentum in their movement against economic inequality after authorities cleared protest camps around the country late last year.

Occupy Oakland organizers had vowed to take over the abandoned building to establish a new headquarters for their movement and draw attention to homelessness in a move seen as a challenge to authorities who have blocked similar efforts before.

But near the convention center, several dozen police officers declared an unlawful assembly and confronted the demonstrators at the fence, firing smoke canisters into the crowd after telling them to disperse through loudspeakers.

The crowd fell back as the smoke hit, but then made a second push toward the fence, where they were held back by police. Some crowd members tried to circumvent the police line, and surged toward police as more smoke canisters were fired, carrying shields made of plastic garbage cans and corrugated metal.

“The City of Oakland welcomes peaceful forms of assembly and freedom of speech, but acts of violence, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be tolerated,” police said in a statement.

Police said they had yet to use tear gas, but made no mention of smoke canisters. They said “use of gas may occur if necessary.”

Protesters in Oakland loosely affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York last year have repeatedly clashed with police during a series of marches and demonstrations.

In October, former Marine Scott Olsen was left in critical condition with a head injury following a confrontation with police on the streets of Oakland in which tear gas was deployed.

Organizers say Olsen was struck in the head by a tear gas canister. Authorities opened an investigation into that incident but have not said how they believe he was hurt.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/29/us-oakland-protests-idUSTRE80S00520120129?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

tsotchke:

The Trench
Jose Clemente Orozco 

Depicts soldiers fighting in the Mexican Revolution 

tsotchke:

The Trench
Jose Clemente Orozco 

Depicts soldiers fighting in the Mexican Revolution 

roo71:

“If you won’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep”

(Source: kawlture)

missalovesyou:

Negro Leagues Baseball 

cultureofresistance:

Egypt gas pipeline ‘blown up by saboteurs’

Blast strikes pipeline carrying gas to Jordan and Israel, in the latest of a series of attacks on the export route.’

A pipeline carrying gas from Egypt to Israel and Jordan has been blown up in northern Egypt by saboteurs, witnesses and security sources said.

Monday’s blast took place some 30km west of the town of El-Arish, near the Israeli border, a few hours before the country holds its first free election since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in February. 

There was a second consecutive blast, about 100 metres away, sources told the Reuters news agency.

Egypt’s state-run news agency MENA said the explosion was in al-Sabeel area. Security forces and fire trucks raced to the scene.

A security cource told Reuters the explosions were detonated from a distance and that tracks from two vehicles were found in the area. 

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Unpopular gas deal

The pipeline was last attacked on November 25. It is the eighth such attack since Mubarak stepped down on February 11. It is the ninth this year, with the first attack a few days before Mubarak was ousted.

Egypt’s 20-year gas deal with Israel, signed in the Mubarak era, is unpopular with the Egyptian public, with critics arguing that the Jewish state does not pay enough for the gas.

An executive of the East Mediterranean Gas Co (EMG), which exports Egyptian gas to Israel, said in July that international shareholders in the firm were pursuing legal claims against Egypt for $8bn in damages from contract violations in gas supplies, following disruptions caused by pipeline attacks.

Egypt doubled the price of gas exported to Jordan last month. Abdullah Ghorab, Egypt’s petroleum minister, said the new price was just above $5 per million BTU, up from $2.15 to $2.30.

The government said this month it would tighten security measures along the pipeline by installing alarm devices and recruiting security patrols from Bedouin tribesmen.

—

To strike where it hurts…

palestiniangunmen:

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine poster.

Palestine: land of oranges, land of revolutionaries.

Face is of Ghassan Kanafani.

Link to Kanafani’s ‘Jaffa, land of oranges’, recollection on becoming a Palestinian refugee.

As if these so-called “accomplishments” represent the height of human aspirations. In fact, they represent the minimum of what’s tolerable. 

But, while we’re on the subject, Liberals need to quit re-writing history:

Radical, militant enslaved Africans ended slavery.

Radical, militant women earned the right for all women to vote.

Radical, militant African-Americans earned the right for all African-Americans to vote.

and on and on…

leftish:

leftish:

“I will pick up that label and wear it as a Badge of Honor.”

~ [Jimmy Smits as] Matt Santos, The West Wing

[NOTE* from Leftish: I’m re-blogging some of my most viral posts from 2011 today, in case you missed any of them the first time around…]

unaguerrasinfondo:

Excerpt from ‘An Untold Chapter in Black History’ by Safiya Bukhari: 

I was nineteen when I joined the Black Panther Party and was introduced to the realities of life in inner-city Black America.

From the security of the college campus and the cocoon of the great American Dream Machine, I was suddenly stripped of my rose-colored glasses by a foray into Harlem and indecent housing, police brutality, hungry children needing to be fed, elderly people eating out of garbage cans, and hopelessness and despair everywhere. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would never have believed that this was America. It looked and sounded like one of those undeveloped Third World countries.

Between 1966 and 1975, eager to be part of the fight for the freedom and liberation of black people in America from their oppressive conditions, thousands of young black men and women from all walks of life and backgrounds joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party. They were met with all the counterforce and might of the United States war machine.

Not unlike the young men who went off to fight in the Vietnam War, believing they were going to save the Vietnamese from the ravages of “communism,” the brothers and sisters who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party, with all the romanticism of youth, believed that the rightness and justness of their cause guaranteed victory. We were learning the contradiction between what America said and what it did. We were shown examples of the government’s duplicity, and we became victims of its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), an all out, multiphasic war designed to stifle dissent in America in general, and in the black community in particular.

We came into the struggle believing that we would prevail. Because our struggle was right and just, we said, “We shall win without a doubt!” All we had to do was present an organized and disciplined united front and be determined to gain our freedom by any means necessary, and our victory would be assured.

We theorized about what we were up against. We marched, sang, and rhetoricized about the implications of being “in the belly of the beast.” We dissociated ourselves from anything or anyone that had been close to us and regurgitated the bravado about the struggle being primary—that, in order to win, we must be willing to sacrifice mother, father, sister, or brother. We embraced all of this in much the same manner that the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps psyched up the recruits to fight in Vietnam.

Veterans of the War in Vietnam

In 1967 my brother came home from Vietnam. He looked good. There were no scars or missing limbs. We were ecstatic. His bedroom was next to mine on the second floor of our duplex apartment in the Bronx. In the middle of the night I heard agonized screams coming from his room. Not knowing any better, I went to him and touched him to soothe him. He instantly went on the attack. He grabbed me with one hand, his other like a claw. I don’t know what saved me; whether it was my screaming his name or throwing myself on him, but he came to himself before he harmed me.

That night, he told me about watching his entire platoon get wiped out; about gouging eyes out with his bare hands; about not knowing who the enemy was, and what direction they would come from the next time; and about some of the other nightmares of Vietnam. After that, we never talked about it again.

Before going to Vietnam, my brother had wanted to become a doctor. After returning from Vietnam, he could not stand the sight of blood. He drank straight gin continuously, like ice water, without getting drunk.

My brother made the horror of Vietnam real to me in 1967. I wasn’t to experience anything remotely close to that again until I joined the Black Panther Party and came to realize that you didn’t have to travel around the world to experience the ravages of war. The physical conditions of the Vietnam War were not present here. But, for those of us who had been raised to believe that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, and who were now involved in a struggle for liberation and human rights for black people, the psychological conditions were just as intense.

We, Too, Are Veterans

We joined the Black Panther Party (and therefore the black liberation struggle) with a lot of hope and faith. We believed that the struggle would end for us only with our death or the freedom of all oppressed people. With the destruction of the Black Panther Party our freedom was still not assured, and we were left with no sense of direction or purpose—no one to tell us what to do next—and the knowledge that the job was not done. We hadn’t just mouthed the words “revolution in our lifetime”; we had believed them. We sincerely believed that the Black Panther Party would lead us to victory.

We had experienced the death and/or imprisonment of countless brothers and sisters who had struggled right beside us, slept in the beds with us, eaten at the same table with us. (As I write this, the picture of Twymon Myers’s bullet-riddled body flashes before my eyes. Shot [by New York City police] so many times that his legs were almost shot off. Then the desecration of his funeral when the FBI jumped from behind tombstones and out of trees at the cemetery, with sawed off shotguns and machine guns pointed toward the mourners. “This is your FBI! Get out of the cars with your hands in the air and line up in a single file with enough distance between each of you so we can see you clearly.”) Pictures pop in and out of our minds with no prompting.

Then there were the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, Sandra Pratt and Little Bobby Hutton, not to mention Fred Bennett,^* the countless shootouts, the infiltrations and setups that left you leery of strangers or of anyone getting too close or acting too friendly. This left you constantly on guard and under the pressure of not knowing who your friends were and from which direction the next threat was coming.

Still, I think I’m one of the lucky ones. In 1983, after serving eight years and eight months of a forty-year sentence, I was released on parole. While in prison I maintained my commitment to the struggle for the liberation of black and oppressed people. What kept me going was knowing that the reason they were killing and locking up Panthers was to break them and therefore to break the back of the struggle. I was determined that I would survive and, one way or the other, live to fight another day. We languished in the prisons and watched the growing lack of activity on the streets and promised ourselves that things would be different when we came home.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as “an anxiety disorder caused by the exposure to a psychologically distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experiences.” Such events might include watching a friend die violently or unexpectedly; experiencing serious threats to home or family; or living under constant or prolonged fear or threat.

As I looked over the list of PTSD symptoms, I recognized myself. And it wasn’t just me. More and more, there seemed to be some kind of pattern developing in the behavior of my other comrades who had survived the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army.

Our intense belief in the rightness and justness of our cause, and that things would be different when we returned to the streets; our awareness that we are still alive while our people’s conditions have grown worse despite all our sacrifices—all this produces a traumatic shock to our system. This is the ultimate shock. We survived while others died. Despite all their intents and purposes, their deaths were in vain. The struggle hasn’t been won. I contend that these elements have caused us to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. We, too, are veterans.

ayiman:

metonymia:

dagseoul:

servile-masses-arise:

sinidentidades:

In June 2008, the neo-Nazi organization the National Socialist Movement, released a statement that announced its intention to demonstrate at Milwaukee’s annual Pridefest as a statement that the Nazis do not support “the promotion of homosexuality in [their] community”. In response, Bash Back! Milwaukee planned a confrontation of the hate group. A group of more than twenty confronted members of the NSM, carrying a banner proclaiming “These Faggots Kill Fascists”. The action prompted Pridefest organizers to criticize Bash Back!. Members of Bash Back! Milwaukee in turn denounced the organizers as betraying the queer community, stating “They would rather see well protected neo-nazis than a well-defended queer and trans community. Nobody will protect us if not ourselves.”

Bravo Bash Back! 

good night white pride

these fggts kill fascists <3 

<3

Intifadah! 

(Source: peak-society)