Leila Khaled: A Hero of the Palestinian Struggle Returns to Palestine

Palestine liberation hero Leila Khaled of the PFLP at a rally this week in Gaza.

There are very few living revolutionaries I revere. History has been hard on heroes: so many have been transformed into martyrs. But one of my real heroes returned to the stage of history this week, though you might not know it from the lack of mainstream press coverage. Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled bravely returned to Palestine this week. In the aftermath of Israel's recent war on the tiny swath of Palestinian territory, the border between Gaza and Egypt is now more open than it has been in decades. And so Khaled was able to travel from her home as a refugee in Jordan to a part of her country long forbidden to her by the state of war and occupation between the Israeli state and the Palestinians.

Leila Khaled arriving in Gaza after crossing from Egypt at Rafah.

I read Khaled's now out-of-print autobiography "My People Shall Live" many years ago. In it she tells the story of how she came to be a revolutionary, and what lead to her role hijacking airplanes for the Palestinian cause. She describes how the view from the plane flying over Haifa was as close as she could come to returning to the place of her birth. While of course many accuse Khaled of being a terrorist, her hijackings were political statements and not instruments of random terror against innocent people. (See an earlier post here at The Cahokian for some thoughts on the politics of airplane hijacking). At a time when the Palestinians were a defeated, victimized people, considered a non-entity by so many, Khaled became a human face for the spirit of resistance.

The revolutionary Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine celebrates its 45th birthday.

Khaled is a member of the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was founded 45 years ago. The rally in Gaza was meant to celebrate the anniversary of the PFLP as well as the 25th anniversary of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising. Speaking to the people of Gaza, Khaled clearly expressed the PFLP's point of view, quite different than the conciliatory view of the PLO majority that governs the Palestine Authority. She said:

"I am proud of you, you raise all of our heads high. The entire Palestinian people is unified behind you, united with the resistance even when split on negotiations and calm, and in the camps and diaspora we hear the echoes of your struggle and say ‘We are with you, Gaza’. During the Zionist aggression, everywhere in the camps and in diaspora our people were cheering for the resistance.... I said that I am going to Gaza, this holy land of resistance which raised all of our heads high. I am going to my family, my friends and our people there. I bring with me great love from the parents who want to return to Gaza, Haifa, Yafa, Jerusalem and Ramallah. We want to return to all of Palestine and we will definitely return to all of Palestine.... At this moment I will repeat the words of the martyr and leader Abu Ali Mustafa: I come to continue the revolution, to continue resistance, and never to compromise on the constants.... [the right of Palestinians to return] is baptized with the blood of the Palestinian people who will continue to struggle until achieving our goals and our return.”

The PFLP was the most important of the Palestinian liberation organizations formed to to the left of the nationalist Fatah movement. The PFLP of George Habash and Ghassan Kanafani came to be among the most militantly revolutionary, influenced by Maoism in the moment when the People's Republic of China seemed interested in fomenting worldwide revolution. Unlike the Islamic militant wings of today's Palestinian movement like Hamas, the PFLP was (and is) a secular movement: many of its founders were in fact largely drawn from the Palestinian Christian community, and they explicitly adopted Marxism-Leninism. The current head of the PFLP, Ahmad Saadat, is imprisoned by Israel. Ironically he had been arrested by the Palestine Authority and was later seized by the IDF.

The iconic portrait of Leila Khaled taken in the late 1960s.

Leila Khaled's image has come to be iconic of the struggle of the Palestinians. At the time of her courageous acts she was young, beautiful, and eloquent. She reflected the will and determination of a people fighting for freedom against desperate odds.

"My People Shall Live"

I am inspired by her continued courage and determination. When American or Israeli politicians try to proclaim "there is no Palestine or there are no Palestinians," Leila Khaled's visage is there to prove them wrong. And her commitment to women's liberation and vision of a radical and socially just society adds dimension to the idea of the Palestinian revolution. In revering Khaled I honor not violence but resistance, courage, selflessness, and the indomitable hope of the human spirit.

The PFLP was formed out of revolutionary necessity.

World AIDS Day 2012: In Memory of Joe Galanti

"He Kills Me": AIDS activist art from Gran Fury. Ronald Reagan, burn in hell!

I wish I had a picture of my late friend and comrade Joe Galanti. I have a vivid if incomplete memory of a specific photograph: taken at a revolutionary counterprotest of some KKK/Nazi rally in the midwest in the late 1970s, it shows Joe and other comrades charging forward against the enemy lines. The comrades are wearing painted football helmets and bearing shields: the anti-fascist confrontations of those days were serious business. I remember the expression on Joe's face in this photo, yelling some warcry: it's like a battlefield photo, which I guess indeed it was. I don't remember if Joe was charging the fascists directly in this photo or up against their police protection. I vaguely remember this action ended in arrest, but it was taken right before I got to know Joe, and the details are lost to time.

Joe was born Joe Alongi, but in the ways of the revolutionary left of those days renamed himself Joe Galanti, picking an old family name for his nom d'guerre. The Chicago left wasn't so huge that he was a stranger to me when we finally became friends in 1978 or 1979: I had surely seen him around at demonstrations or events. His party, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was notorious for its anti-Klan/anti-Nazi work. While not quite as notorious as the Communist Workers Party who had comrades literally martyred by fascist killers down in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end of that period, the RSL was definitely committed to building counterprotests that could literally stop the fascists in their tracks. Others on the left called them adventurists for their tactics, and remembering that photo there are certainly grains of truth in that argument. Chicago's segregated suburbs were infested with fascist vermin, of both the home-grown Klan variety and swastika-bearing, uniform dress-up German-style nazophiles. These were dangerous situations: I remember coming back from one suburban confrontation, must have been 1979 or 1980, when our car was followed from a counter-rally by a carload of Nazi sympathizers who tried ramming us off the highway: we escaped at high speed through a maze of suburban streets. The RSL had given up the football-helmeted charges by then but not the war itself.

The funny thing was that Joe was a pussycat. If he could be dynamic in action and a deft speech maker, he was soft-spoken and goofy in person. He was brilliant, with a great grasp of revolutionary politics and obviously a real commitment to fighting for his vision. Joe was also proudly out and gay, at a time when the left's relationship with the gay struggle was marked by great deals of ambivalence or even hostility.

Even though I had been warned off their adventurism, when I came out those many decades ago it was only natural that I would be forced to reevaluate the RSL since I was looking to integrate my communist politics with my newly open self-identity. I don't remember when I decided to treat Joe as something other than a raving lunatic, but at some point we began talking politics, and he really rocked my world.

He gave me a lot of space: he introduced me to another person in the RSL periphery, Michael Botkin, who would shortly become my roommate and also Joe's lover. We formed a sort of transitional organization, the boldly named Gay Revolutionary Discussion Group (GRDG, which we pronounced "Grudge"), and drew others toward the RSL from the gay activist world through this nominally independent core. Eventually I was ready to return to the hardcore left, formally joined the RSL, and GRDG folded into the League. It was smart organizing on Joe's part: and all the time we were studying the issues and organizing protests and intervening in the community. We organized protests against the movies "Cruising" and "Windows" and got involved in a fight against police repression of the Chicago gay community. I was really won to the RSL by Joe, who built a bridge between the critical Leninism of the RSL, community activism, and personal expression and identity.

Joe was fiercely charismatic: if he was intimidating at first, everyone who knew him soon fell in love with him. Having lived in New York City now for over thirty years, it's easy to forget how novel New Yorkers like Joe seemed to us quaint midwesterners back then. His New York accent and his dark Italian good looks were charming and compelling. I was happy when he and Michael became an item. We, sometimes with other comrades, would socialize frequently, going out to gay bars and discos or holding houseparties. Partying, Joe became a kind of psychedelic hippy, and warmly touchy and feely in ways enticing to those of us who grew up in Chicago's icy urbanity. He was an apostle of free love, and adored the icons of early gay counterculture.

It turned out Joe also had a personal secret dark side. He would sneak off to leather bars where he lived a whole different kind of life, one that even Michael didn't learn about til months after they had started becoming involved. This proved a bit of a challenge for Michael who didn't share the seriousness of the leather/S&M world, but he was game at least for a while. I remember sitting in our living room listening to music when Michael came out of his bedroom looking thoughtful and a little perplexed. "Hey I just fistfucked Joe." He announced before turning around and going back to his room off the kitchen in the back of the apartment. Joe seemed even happier having come out of this sort of second closet, though the intensity of Joe's sexuality became a tension on their relationship.

I was sad to leave Joe and Michael behind when I moved to New York in the late summer of 1981. I moved here to work for the League itself, and soon lived and breathed politics 24 hours a day. I stayed in touch with them, and saw them occasionally at national gatherings. But then that world just ended.

I remember several disturbing phone calls a couple years later. Calls from Joe, or Michael, or a mutual RSL friend. Joe was sick. Michael was sick. There was some weird factional trouble in the Chicago RSL. Michael left. It's confused in my memory... I remember a difficult conversation with Joe over the phone when he seemed deeply panicked...he had indeed been diagnosed with AIDS. Not a brand-new disease by then but still always a death sentence. He was discussing his plans: "If I live long enough..." the rest of this terrible pronouncement is blotted out of my memory by a rush of noise.

I saw him one more time. He came home to NYC on a sort of last pilgrimage...this was somewhere between 1985 and 1987. He seemed well, but much thinner.  He had a list of things to do. He wanted to feast on Nathan's oysters: he was shocked that they had become so expensive. Shortly thereafter I fell away from the League myself: personally terrified by AIDS and demoralized by the Reagan era, I was in political retreat and heading for hibernation. I don't even remember when the call came, or who it came from, that Joe had sickened again and succumbed to the disease. I'm guilty as hell that I was nowhere to be found. I miss him still: I miss his passion, his commitment, his courage, his ability to synthesize revolutionary politics into a compelling narrative. There's so much Joe didn't get to see. What a terrible terrible loss.

Joe loved to dance. He loved disco, and loved the adventurous new sounds that crept into the music after its r&b/funk base seemed to tire. One song I remember he loved to no end was "Pop Muzik," by M. This one's for you Joe.




I have been trying to honor my friends lost to AIDS each World AIDS day. Click here for my previous writings about them and the struggle against AIDS.

Anti-Americana: Burn, Baby, Burn

Two more stamps from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), from 1971 and apparently produced but withdrawn or not officially issued. These are some kind of rarities; I copped the graphics from ebay. I don't know the theme or circumstances of this issue, but the top value clearly shows the Statue of Liberty and the US Capitol engulfed in flames so it's not hard to guess what these stamps are about. The foreground figure is breaking chains of oppression, and is probably a South Korean revolutionary. The bottom stamp shows a militiaman slamming a US soldier whose helmet has gone flying; in the foreground is an industrial worker. These are all common archetypes in North Korean iconography. World anti-imperialist sentiment was at its height in 1971; the American war against Vietnam having taken a particularly ugly and genocidal turn.

Anti-American art is an irregular feature here at the Cahokian: for more click here.

Defend Palestine! Stop the Israeli Attack on Gaza!

Omar Jihad Mashrawi holding his one-year-old son, who died from his injuries following an Israeli air strike.

With the full assent of the just re-elected Obama administration, today the Israeli government carried out a series of attacks on Gaza, including the targeted assassination of Ahmed Jabari, the military leader of Hamas, the organization that rules Gaza.

أحمد الجعبري "خالدٌ فينا" -
Ahmed Jabari " You're eternal to us," graphic from the PFLP

The Israeli attacks, which have already taken the lives of a number of Palestinian children, have been widespread in besieged Gaza, and an incursion of ground troops has already been threatened by the Israeli government. Below, blogger and activist Abu Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada exposes the Israeli lie machine's usual dissembling inventions over who started shooting first. Making its point of view clear, the Obama administration issued a disgusting statement: "We strongly condemn the barrage of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel, and we regret the death and injury of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians caused by the ensuing violence. There is no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel." Yes that's right, the US is condemning Hamas for being attacked.



Attacks apparently continued overnight; I'm writing this night-time on Wednesday before dawn in Palestine. Decent human beings everywhere must stand up for the right of the Palestinian people to live their lives free from Israeli terror and occupation. There's a protest now scheduled for New York City on Thursday afternoon.

That's All Right, We Got This

View of downtown Manhattan after the Hurricane Sandy blackout showing only the Goldman Sachs building still lit.

At the height of hurricane Sandy on Monday night, lower Manhattan was plunged into darkness. As the wind buffeted the city and the waves overran low-lying coastal areas, electric power failed in many parts of the city. My Brooklyn neighborhood was lucky, surviving with only a few downed trees. In lower Manhattan, one building stayed alit: the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, the massive Wall Street firm legendary for corporate greed on a massive, should-be-criminal scale. This symbolic coincidence has not been lost on the people of New York City. Fuck Goldman Sachs. Fuck Wall Street. We don't need you.

Occupy Sandy Relief NYC: almost ten thousand likes on Facebook in 4 days translated into many hundreds of volunteers on the ground and significant real-world mutual aid.

While Mayor Bloomberg debated cancelling the New York Marathon with the tabloid press, while President Obama claimed to be sending massive amounts of FEMA assistance, as the Red Cross started cranking up its donation engines, the people of New York also noticed something else: nothing was actually happening on the ground to help the thousands of people either displaced by wind, flood and fire, or trapped in powerless, heatless homes no longer served by public transportation. Enter the Occupy movement, yes the Occupy Wall Street movement derided as dead by so many on all sides of the media. Occupy activists gathered together and quickly formed "Occupy Sandy Relief: NYC," simultaneously unveiling a Facebook page and going out to the ravaged Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook to see what was up with our neighbors and try and lend a hand. Fuck the liberals who are phonebanking for Obama this weekend. Fuck the smug pundits writing their contemptuous obituaries for Occupy. Fuck you Mayor Bloomberg and your private NYPD army. We don't need you.

Outreach for Occupy Sandy at a Brooklyn Church (photo by me)

Within a day the Occupy Sandy activists had a food kitchen set up near a blacked-out low-income housing project and were prowling the flooded streets reaching out to frightened hurricane survivors. In a few hours they expanded operations to the Rockaways, both to the middle-class neighborhood ravaged by a massive fire, and the working class areas full of people seemingly abandoned by the city and alleged relief agencies. They soon began to reach out to Staten Island, where angry residents were feeling ignored and forgotten. (While Staten Island is home to a notoriously right-wing white community it's also home to large working-class communities of color: A community of color which just lost two of its youngest sons, swept away in the flood to their deaths as their mother cried for help, ignored by cold-hearted neighbors.) Politicians started to tour the scenes of devastation. And yet, people were still left to fend for themselves. Grassroots organizations started to follow Occupy's lead and soon started helping to fill the void. But one thing became very clear: those who were most effected by Frankenstorm Sandy needed mutual aid. We would have to do this ourselves.

After my small neighborhood General Assembly meeting this morning, now held in the lobby of an apartment building on rent strike because of the machinations of a charitable agentocracy, we walked over to St. Jacobi's church and joined the hundreds of people arriving every few minutes to make donations of food, material goods, or their time to the cause of people's hurricane relief. We sat through a quick volunteer orientation where it was explained that this was not about saving other people it was about empowering communities to help themselves. It was explained that this was Occupy walking its principles of anti-oppression and horizontal organization. Racism, sexism and homophobia were condemned. We were advised to treat each other and members of the afflicted communities with respect, without being condescending or patronizing, to listen for what was needed. Each of us could be a leader in the relief effort. In a half hour I was leading volunteer orientations myself. This was Occupy's radical vision in action. Fuck the nonprofit industrial complex with its overpaid staff and its penchant for channeling people's rage into harmless nonprofit triplicate. We don't need you.

Altar for the Day of the Dead at St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in the recreation room being used by hundreds of volunteers to sort donations and prepare food for meals to be delivered to hurricane victims. (photo by me)

Tens of thousands of meals were prepared for people in affected neighborhoods. Carpools were organized to ferry goods and people between Occupy Sandy intake centers and those neighborhoods. Donations flooded in. People spread out to help neighbors support each other, help clean up, help find out who was in need. People were motivated and stayed enthusiastic and united. This happened under the leadership of a movement led largely by anarchists and social justice activists radically influenced by anarchist thought. An activist friend of mine complained on facebook that a "socialist" acquaintance had shouted at her, "we need solidarity not charity." Which is sadly typical of much of the left's sneering dismissal of Occupy. Because this is real solidarity. This is the real world. This is what it means to organize, to relate to real people. These downtrodden and oppressed people don't look like a history book, they look like your neighbors, surviving a hurricane. Fuck the social democrats waiting for an imaginary labor party they can make themselves head of. Fuck the trotskyists and their world of weasel-word formulations. Fuck the condescending saviors who think they know everything but don't even know who the workers are and won't lift a finger to be with them.

Time has moved on. This is not the world of 2008. This is not the world of 2010. This is why I am not voting for Obama. This is the future. This is hard work. This is painful. This is joyful. This is the not-so-slow-motion apocalypse that we can only stop if we get real busy now with our friends and comrades. This is the possibility of winning. This is the possibility of losing. This is fear, this is hope. This is how it's going to be, from now on.

Fuck the government, fuck the state. We don't need you. People's power is coming.

Hurricane Sandy Relief

Flooded subway in Brooklyn, from the Daily Mail UK

Those interested in helping victims of the Frankenstorm "Sandy" in New York City should visit the following sites:

• on Facebook, comrades of the Occupy movement have established "Occupy Sandy Relief NYC" as a clearinghouse. They've established food kitchens in the flooded neighborhoods of Red Hook and Rockaway.

• working with Occupy folks and established community organizations, recovers.org has established three relevant pages for hard-hit neighborhoods, which include portals for donations.
The Lower East Side Recovers
Red Hook Recovers
Astoria Recovers

• It's capitalism. Great article on Kasama, "How the 1% Created a Monster."

My neighborhood lucked out this time. Lots of wind but only minor tree damage. We've had electricity the whole time. But many of my friends in Manhattan have been flooded out or stranded without power or heat. 

Bronco Bamma & Mitt Romney

I tried to hold it together. But it got too much for me. My tears are captured here on film. Only another week!

Communism? Really? Yes, Really.

This audio-only clip is from a panel discussion at a conference held late last summer in Seattle called the "Everything for Everyone Festival." The speaker is Mike Ely, one of the people behind the Kasama Project, a revolutionary website which I have cited positively many times here on my blog and which I have also written for. The subject of the panel was "revolutionary strategy today," and the presentations of the other panelists — all great listening — can all be heard on the Kasama blog.

In this short presentation Ely argues for the renewed relevance of communism, that is, restating a process of revolutionary struggle toward a transformative goal, a radically egalitarian future that is not only desirable but possible. Ely calls for figuring out how to move beyond the failures of the left in the last century with creativity and determination. I find Ely's words inspiring and compelling. "Serve the People! Power to the People!"

8 Months Later: Surviving Police Terrorism in Oakland

Police violence against Occupy Oakland. Photo from UWire.

This article was written by my friend Scott Anansi Rossi, a queer anarchist living in the Bay Area in California. I'm posting it here as a guest post because it's such a vivid first-hand tale of experiencing police terrorism against the Occupy movement, but also because it communicates some of the many ways repression, indeed capitalism itself, attacks the core of our humanity. Scott bravely talks about the personal struggles awakened by his political activism, something I can completely relate to. And so much for all the sneering, dismissive contempt offered up by the media against Occupy: this has been a sea change moment, not only in terms of our willingness to fight back as people, but in terms of the willingness of the state to use brutality against its citizens. This testimony gets at why my own re-radicalization has been so vivid. As I return to calling myself a revolutionary, to calling myself a communist even, this story of survival inspires me. Thanks Scott!

Hey everyone. Thanks for reading this. I want to talk about the last 8 months. 8 months and 8 days to be exact. This is probably going to be the hardest thing I've ever written about in my life, but I need to do it. I'm not really writing with a structure here, I'm just going to write and write it all out until I can't write anymore. Some of this I've put in writing in one form or another over these last 8 months, so forgive me if you've heard or read this before or we've talked about it, and forgive the length here, this is one thing I can't edit for brevity. Indulge me this, so you can see the whole picture and understand.

 251 days ago was January 28, 2012. I don't know how many of you remember that day, but for me, and many others, it's a day I'll never forget. It became one those days in your life that transform you, where one chapter ends and another begins. This started out as a really dark, sorry chapter of my life, but an important one, and one that deserves telling. So here goes.

 January 28, 2012. Occupy Oakland organized an event called "Move in Day" and the goal was to seize an abandoned building and turn it into a community center. Feelings aside, there was a desperate need in the community, the city was unresponsive and there's a historical precedent. I didn't plan on going because I had to work and I was convinced that there was some "bacon in that sandwich" as I put it when I fear police infiltrators are in the mix or shit's been compromised. About 2,000 people that showed up that day, which really was amazing. Elderly, children, parents, families, everybodies. It was a good cross section of Occupy Oakland. I was sitting at work watching the livestream, and just ... I don't have words for how I felt when OPD attacked the protest. It was a fucking massacre. (Breaking the narrative/4th wall here, I've got goosebumps and tears in my eyes already just remembering it) The cops started shooting less than lethal projectiles at the march as soon as it neared the convention center they had targeted for Liberation. At first it was smoke bombs, but as the march retreated to a nearby street, OPD launched rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper ball rounds and other things into the crowd. If it wasn't for the protesters with shields, dozens of people would have been wounded. As it was, quite a few people were hit and hurt pretty badly. This culminated in a running street battle for a few blocks which basically cemented my decision to go to Oakland as soon as I got off work. I just couldn't sit there all comfy and safe, knowing that innocent people were being brutalized by the very force that was supposed to protect and serve them. That day, for myself, and a lot of people, we learned that the oaths the police swear come secondary to the concerns of Capital. Those with money and power will have their property and privilege defended and the worse abuses will be heaped upon people to preserve that. I mean, I knew that on paper, I read all the books, this wasn't my first venture into anarchist or radical theory. But knowing on paper is different from seeing. I would come to rue that realization over the next few hours.


As some of you may remember, I posted a picture of me just before I left my house that night. The look on my face makes me cry sometimes, because that was the last time I was "me". I knew I was going into a charnel house, I knew I should have just stayed home and raged into Twitter and dumped revolutionary screed into Facebook, but that wasn't the right thing to do. The right thing to do was go out there and help the innocent; the people who were getting a face full of broken social contract and trodden civil rights and OPD brutality. As a famous leader* once said, "the right thing is not necessarily the smart thing". And so I went to Oakland.


The BART ride was the worst. Everyone I knew was kettled by the Oakland Police Department at my old apartment complex at 19th and Telegraph. Kettling is where the cops trap you and give you dispersal orders but no exits, and on that day, they decided to tear gas everyone while they were trapped, also gassing everyone in that apartment complex. So again, I knew I was going into the mix. To this day, every time I cross the bay on BART and come out of the tunnel into West Oakland, my throat gets tight and I get this rush of adrenaline and fear and bile in the back of my throat. EVERY TIME. I was trying to prepare myself for the worst via Twitter, but there's just no way you can do that. My brain reads shit on twitter as though it's a video game or crap on the internet. I'm mad, or I feel sad, but there's not much substance to it. It passes with the next cat video or funny picture. What I walked into was real and it changed my life and it will be with me until I die and now that I'm putting these words out there, it'll be around long after I'm gone.


The train stopped at 19th Street BART, and right here, I'd love to say that the story stops, I came to my senses and got the fuck out and went home. But I'm not going to say that. As soon as I stepped out of the train, I saw two older women from OccupySF. Veteran activists I respected what they had to say and loved hearing their stories and learning from them. Instead of hugs and smiles, these women were in tears, warning me not to go up top, that the cops were "going crazy and gassing everyone". As they were telling me what they had been through, I could hear what I assume were flashbangs going off in the distance. We talked for a few minutes until their train came and I went upstairs. It was eerily quiet. By that time, the march had broken out of the kettle at the Uptown Apartments and was moving up Telegraph or Broadway towards the YMCA. I spent some time talking to people at the bus stop, one woman had thrown up because she couldn't stop coughing and crying, a few others were in various stages of grief and anger and had the telltale white splash of LAW on their faces. LAW, in case you're wondering, stand for Liquid Antacid + Water, whcih is the Street Medic's answer to Tear Gas and Pepper Spray.
 

Scott Anansi Rossi

Tear gas in the US isn't a gas actually, it's a particulate, and I got really upset thinking that most of these people probably didn't know how to treat their clothes afterwards. You can't just wash them, because you'll activate the particles and expose yourself again and again and again, and there are SERIOUS long term health issues associated with long term tear gas exposure. I'm not really a praying person, my religion is centered in science and pragmatism and the believe that maybe, just maybe, there might be something out there that cares about us little motes of consciousness, but that night, I prayed a lot. Sometimes I think it was to keep me sane, sometimes in the hope that whatever or whoever was on duty would listen and help us.

I decided I'd try to catch up with the march, since the people told me I had just missed it. I went back to Broadway and ran into another OccupySFer who I had worked with on the Welcome Team, a real solid, stand up guy who I won't name for security issues, but you know who you are. At that point, I was already scared because the steady stream of people heading towards 14th street were saying the march had been kettled again, and everyone I knew was up there, so it was great running into this guy. Even though he wasn't a Medic, he was a buddy and I wasn't alone. You must not Medick alone if at all possible, because the police, especially Oakland Police, target medics for arrest.
 
The kettle at the YMCA was one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life. So many police, so many screaming, crying people and confused onlookers who wondered why the cops were going crazy. Happily, I ran into another friend, who had the luck to run into a compassionate officer who let a few women through the lines. I kept hoping that they'd let everyone out and we could all go home. This is where things get a little foggy and things got a little dangerous for me. What happened next is pretty much why a lot of things went the way they did and what allowed the second half of this blog post to even happen.

A few minutes after I got to the police line, I ran into a medic who was non-marked and didn't have any supplies. He was also at work and heard about what went down, so he came to do some bike scouting. Based on what he told me, we figured I was the only marked medic not kettled, which really bothered me. I had one bottle of LAW and enough water and milk of magnesia for one more bottle. What the hell was I going to do if the crowd got tear gassed again? I had a few bandages and ice packs, but what the hell was I going to do if the cops shot the crowd that was building at 23rd and Broadway? The projectiles are called 'Less than Lethal' rounds, but they will shred you if you get in their way. They are metal wrapped in a little bit of hard foam or rubber. Your guts are pudding if you don't have enough padding. I wasn't worried about myself, but about the bystanders and the smaller statured protesters. It's the United States, we shouldn't have to deal with this. I find the State out of date and increasingly unable to deal with realities of modern life. That's why I'm attracted to radical politics and anarchy. That's why people came out last fall, because many of them realized it as well. Even those who came to work for reform of the state knew it couldn't continue what it was doing in its current form. Does that mean we deserved to get tear gassed? Shot at with rubber bullets?


I'm not sure how long I was standing, mostly in disbelief, at the police line. There's a lot of black holes in my recollection that may or may not ever come back. Such is the nature of trauma and the psyche and based on what I do remember, I'm ok if it never comes back. Really. Oblivion keep those memories, please.


The Alameda Sherrif sent over their nice big army tank infantry assault vehicle for "crowd control purposes" the one cop bragged to what looked to be a reporter. Purchased with delicious DHS dollars, the sight of it caused worry from some, anger from others, and I remember one black woman just crying out with her hand out towards the tank, almost pointing at it.

 At some point, these two kids dressed for a black bloc came up to me and told me to watch myself, that the "fat cop" was pointing at me. And sure enough, a few seconds after they said, it, five or six cops came at me. They didn't run, but they weren't walking either. I'm not gonna lie, I ran. I may have made some weird whimper/groan in fear. I remember thinking "I CAN'T GET ARRESTED, I WORK TOMORROW!" and "I CAN'T GET ARRESTED, WHO IS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF ALL THESE PEOPLE?" at the time, I was somewhere between 330 and 340 pounds. I had lost weight during Occupy and was happy and keeping that weight off, and I outran those cops. In retrospect, they didn't seem too interested in pursuing me, as when I got to Grand and Broadway, I looked back, they were walking back from the halfway point and it looked like their friends were arresting people where I was just standing with those 2 guys. Did people get arrested instead of me? Because of me? Would they have been arrested if I wasn't standing there? Jesus fucking christ.

 There was a small woman. I'm not sure for what, but the cops grabbed her. She probably weighed 90 pounds, maybe 100 pounds wet. Five or six cops, it's hard to tell how many, because they were acting as a mass, basically enveloped her and I heard her scream and then she was on the ground, not moving, and clearly in pain. 3 of the cops, easily two or three times her weight, had their knees on the back of her knees, her stomach (Gods I pray she wasn't pregnant!) and ON HER FUCKING NECK. the whole time she's not resisting and they're cuffing her and she's scream-weeping. Do you know what that sounds like? Sometimes at night, that noise will come back to me in a random dream, or I'll hear a child scream while playing or seeing a butterfly and I'm right back there that night, chills and tears and everything.
 
There was a guy, maybe 150 or 200 pounds. Restrained and sitting on the curb. I remember it looked like he was asking one of the cops something and this other cop hit him in the chest with his baton and I watched him fall over and watched his head bounce off the pavement. This point was all blurry to me, because I kept walking back towards the kettle, leaving when a cop looked or walked my way, twice I started back towards Oscar Grand Plaza at 14th and Broadway, because I heard that there was a reconvergence, but I was alone by that time and didn't feel it was safe with all the cops on the road and in the way. They were arresting people at random at that point in the night, snatch and grab bullshit and that scared me more than getting arrested by the kettle. There were no livestreamers, there was no crowd. This was some dark back alley arrest shit and I was scared for my life. This is when cop gangs beat the shit out of people, and how funny a story that'd be in the locker room; about how they beat the shit out of the fat gay guy who was crying when we kidnapped him on Broadway. I'm thinking this about the police, ya know? The ones who are to 'protect and serve' us? Crazy you say? What I saw was crazy. What I remember was crazy.

 By the time I finally got to OGP, City Hall had been entered. They didn't break in, because the doors were left open. It was a trap and they fell for it and an American Flag was burnt and Jean Quan was more upset about the smashed snack machine that the egregious abuse of power and violence that they had unleashed on their own people. There were rumors of another medic showing up, people wanted to organize a "Fuck the Police" march and there was a standoff at 14th and Broadway with the cops threatening tear gas and physical violence and injury. They really do say "chemical weapons" and "serious injury", and I knew they meant it. That girl's bloody face told me all I ever needed to know.

 Then this wave of realizations hit me. I never got badge numbers. The cops were too far away for me to even do that. I'll never know who these people are, what happened to them, I'll never be able to thank them for what they've done or hug them and tell them we'll do our best to make sure everything would be OK. Survivor's guilt. Grief. I've never felt grief before in my life because I have a peculiar outlook on death and the afterlife, but suddenly I was awash in it. I remember I left Oakland and headed back to San Francisco, but not remembering much about the trip. I wasn't unconscious, but I wasn't here either. I remember being at the Stud at some point, in my stinking and dirty Medic Gear, showing up just to say hi and so my friend knew I was at his party. I remember some twink looking at me going saying some snotty comment about "fat doctor" and laughing with his friends like he said something witty and I remember wanting to punch, but not hit him, just punch so hard he stopped existing.

 And then the fun started.

 I have panic attacks at loud noises sometimes, I get edgy and aggressive when cops are around, especially in public settings like a coffee shop or bookstore. I don't feel safe anywhere. I'm depressed. Nihilistic at times. I wonder if anything I've ever done or will do will be worth the sacrifices some of those people made that night. I have survivor's guilt. If only I could have done more, was smarter, was faster, was thinner and more athletic. If only I could have broken through police lines somehow and rescued those people! This triggered an eating disorder that I'm in treatment for. I went from 340 to over 400 pounds and I'm only just able to talk about this now, after six months of pretty intense therapy and support groups. The night I realized I needed help was when I had blacked out from binge eating, and I had a night terror reliving that night and I woke up running to the bathroom pissing myself and whimpering. It's not always the visuals that haunt me, but the sounds too. The sounds of that woman screaming with all the cops on top of her. The sounds of the guy grunting after his head bounced off the pavement. The sound of me whimpering because I couldn't help them without getting arrested, I couldn't help them even if I was arrested, and it was happening too far away to see badge numbers or faces. I continually break down whenever I feel helpless. I used to be strong! I used to be a rock people turned to in their tough times. Now I have to pep talk myself into getting out of bed every goddamn morning. I don't feel safe around my friends or even my lover, I worry that somehow I'm going the horrors in my brain crashing into their life. It's an everyday battle not to overeat, to battle that food addiction, that compulsion to bury myself in a carb coma or swill pints of ice cream until that hole in my heart goes away for a while.

 I'm angry. All the time. I'm angry that this happened. That people laugh about it or don't get it. I would never wish this on my worst enemy, but I wish I could share my pain and memories so you could get it. Because you can't get it until you've lived it. And people have been living this for decades. I'm angry that the State uses violence as a tool to repress political movements and keep people in line. I'm angry that it works. Some people are afraid and don't come out anymore. Some people are too shell shocked and are still dealing with the emotional and spiritual fallout from this. People I know and care about have PTSD from the police. People were mistreated in jail. Hell, two months ago I had to leave an innocent and tame march in Oakland, barely breathing down a panic attack because there was a cop car and a truck at an intersection next to each other and I just couldn't deal with that. When you see me posting angry screed into facebook and saying "REVOLT!", "Fuck the Police!" and the FTP/ACAB stuff, it's because I really feel that. I don't have my life anymore. I'm not that Scott you used to know and love. That hopeful innocent part of me died that night, and I'm not being histrionic about that. It's gone and hard as I might try, good works and faith and love that I might have, it might not ever come back, and that's part of the reality of this struggle and the reality of state violence. This is why they do it, because people just go away. There were times when, while I wasn't suicidal, I was definitely thinking it'd be better to just die than carry these memories. And you read what I'm going through and all I saw was some kids gettin beaten. Imagine what some Iraq or Afghanistan Vet is going through? When you see me rail against rape culture and patriarchy, try to imagine what a rape victime is going through. If you take one thing from this, let it be compassion. It's extremely important you remember how to feel and you don't lose that. Don't let this system make you see suffering people as Unpersons. They're Us's. They're you.

 So after all that, I don't want to end this on a bad note. While it seems all bad, there's a silver lining. The need for therapy actually helped me address the eating disorder that alwas creeps into my life when I'm stressed or depressed. This has got me writing and reading and organizing against police brutality and violence. Rather than be another victim, I chose to be empowered by this, and I recognize that I have the privilege to do so. I found Feminism and am learning to be a better person and smash Patriarchy which keeps us all down. I choose to find ways of organizing and working around, and in recognizance of state violence against protesters, people of color, women, trans, gays, lesbians, sex workers, all of the Others and Underdogs and Everybodies we should be celebrating this one life we get with. Everyone has the right to speak your mind, to assemble. You have the right to housing, food, water. These are not entitlements, you cannot live without these. No, Mr. Piggie, I will not go home thank you. Not while children go to bed on the streets, while they go to bed with no food in their stomachs, while schools crumble and people have to suffer and die without health insurance in the richest nation on the planet. I'm going to keep on fighting, and I'll fight until every last battle is won or until my final breath is drawn, because you don't get equal rights and social justice by asking for permission and waiting. If there's one thing my parents taught me growing up, through all the viewings of Red Dawn, Legend of Billie Jean and Return of the Jedi, it's that you absolutely must fight. Fight for yourself and your loved ones, and fight for those that can't fight for themselves.

 So I was going to write a big sappy ending about how thankful I am and how much I love everyone, but you know what, it's 3:15 AM, there is a spider dangling over my computer monitor and I fucking hate spiders. They're almost as bad as cops. So I'll leave you with a smile and the knowledge that I'm doin' alright, so let's all try to make sure we're all doing alright and then smash shit up until the world works better.

 Thanks. Seriously, you have no idea.

 Scott

 * RIP Laura Roslin

PS -- As always, with any and everything I post, feel free to share far and wide. Especially with shit like this, because you never know who is suffering in silence.

Defensive Voting?

FIrst Report on #S17

"Unfuck the world!" NYC today!

Appears now on Kasama, written by me.

Occupy anniversary party rocks Downtown NYC
An Occupy organizer, a woman named Lisa, asked for a show of hands: “Who was here a year ago?” A few dozen hands shot up.
“Who wasn’t?” Hundreds more shot up.
All of a sudden it didn’t matter that there weren’t thousands of people sitting in this circle: it was clear that a real movement had been born that in the space of a single year had rocked our worlds. Something tangible had been created from nothing, and it was gathered on a beautiful late-summer night to talk about mass anti-capitalist action on the streets of New York City.

read the rest here.

Another World Is Possible! Happy Anniversary #OWS!

Today, September 17 is (only) the first anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A day of actions and civil disobedience is planned (full details on the S17 website). I've been busy at rallies and assemblies all weekend and intend to fully participate in the day's events. I'll be posting reports and photos in the days to come. It's been an amazing year!

¡Victor Jara Presente!

Victor Jara was murdered by the U.S. backed-Chilean junta 39 years ago today.

Follow Me on Twitter!

I have joined the Twitterati! You can now follow me on Twitter, @CahokianISH. It's going to be a big exciting weekend of mass action in New York City. #S17,  the one year anniversary of #OWS, here we come! There should be plenty to tweet about. And yes, sorry, but I still think of annoying yellow birds not blue ones when I hear the word "tweet." #mygeneration.

The Other September 11th

September 11, 1973: The Bombing of the Moneda, Santiago, Chile (Corbis)

It's a strange irony that before 2001, the date September 11th was already etched into the history of infamy by another act of brutal violence. For on that date in 1973, working in collusion with the U.S. government, the Chilean military overthrew the elected Popular Unity (UP, or Unidad Popular) government of President Salvador Allende, bombing the presidential palace, murdering Allende himself, and beginning a dark chapter of repression resulting in the murder of thousands of Popular Unity supporters, leftists, trade unionists, and regular working people.

¡Crear Poder Popular! Create Popular Power!

Allende, a socialist, had risen to power not through a revolution but through an election. With broad popular support from the Chilean left and the Chilean working class, he attempted the socialist transformation of Chilean society without first overthrowing the capitalist state. It's easy in retrospect to criticize Allende, and important in many ways to do so. Indeed, in my opinion he and the leftist parties that backed him committed serious errors that paved the way for their own destruction. But at the same time the Chilean experiment in a new road to socialism is filled with important lessons for people seeking a path to a new world. Some of these lessons were brutal and hard, but others inspiring. In the end I think history marks Allende as a hero, even if a tragic one. He fell in combat for a better world.

Chile in the early 1970s became a kind of crucible where the struggle between the classes became super-heated. As working people took to the streets, the upper classes responded in kind, playing havoc with the Chilean economy. While thousands of students and middle-class people joined the workers and the leftists parties in the struggle for economic transformation, thousands more formed outright fascist organizations to combat the restive working class. As working people occupied farms and factories to support the socialist and communist dominated government, other working people challenged its rule. Indeed some leftist parties distanced themselves from the Allende government.

New forms of workers autonomy, and workers and community control sprung up everywhere. "Create Peoples' Power!" became the watchword of the people out in the street. Despite some conciliatory efforts toward the propertied classes by the Allende government, the workers' movement in Chile became a speeding train, clearly approaching a collision with state power. To see how the Chilean population radicalized and politicized in the course of revolutionary events is awe-inspiring. Regular people understood the importance of acting together: it became obvious how they themselves had the power to change Chilean society: how politics seeped into the daily acts of living. The workers were miles ahead of Allende himself.

While Allende was freely elected, he was never able to achieve a majority for UP in the Chilean parliament, and always forced to make allowances with professedly progressive factions of the bourgeoisie and their military. And this, of course was his undoing.

The Popular Unity made much of a nonviolent path to socialism, but this proved to be a pipedream. Violence, or the threat of violence, is the underpinning of class society. Marx and Engels made this clear long ago in The Communist Manifesto, and the events in Chile were a like a blank slate waiting for the violence to fill itself in. Fatally, Allende and Unidad Popular failed to disarm the military, the instrument of potential violence of the ruling class, and failed to arm the people and create workers militias, the force necessary to meet the (unwanted) violence everybody could see coming. The propertied classes and their allies would defend the capitalist state to the death against those who sought to dismantle it. It was not necessary for the Chilean revolution to advocate violence, merely to soberly prepare itself against the building threat.

Allende thought he had split the allegiance of the military: Pinochet, the man who became Chile's military dictator, was among the supposedly "loyal" officers who Allende rallied to defeat an earlier coup attempt in mid-1973. But the military was just biding its time, all the time plotting and colluding with the CIA and the US government. The Chilean ruling class wasn't sitting idly by waiting for Allende or the workers to expropriate them: they were organizing and building their own counterrevolution just as surely as the people were building their revolution. But in the crucial moment the ruling classes had the jets and the bombs and the tanks and the machine guns.

And they held the stadium that was turned into a giant concentration camp into which leftists were herded and murdered: there perished the legendary musician Victor Jara, proud supporter of the UP, who had his hands smashed and broken by military torturers before they made him play one last song before they killed him.

It's no accident that after the success of the coup, when all the manifestations of people's power were smashed, Chile became an economic labratory for American economists of the ilk of Milton Friedman and his cothinkers, the forerunners to the trickle-down theorists so beloved by American conservatives. They wanted a Chile with a docile, pacified population, with subdued or eliminated trade unions, and a disappeared political opposition. Thousands were murdered, and the blood of those martyrs is on the hands of the U.S. government and all those civilian economic vultures as surely as it on the hands of the fascist elements in Chilean society.

Salvador Allende's distinctive glasses, recovered from the rubble, preserved in a museum in Chile

Allende took to the radio from the Moneda Palace while it was under attack by those jets and tanks: "Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society." Within a few hours he was dead, and the Chilean experiment was crushed by a U.S.-backed fascist jackboot. While today the military dictatorship is a thing of the past, the struggle for poder popular continues in Chile, and for people around the world who dream of that better world.

Strongly recommended: "La Batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas," Patricio Guzmán's extended black-and-white documentary study of the end of the Unidad Popular government. A must-see: readily available on DVD.

The 12 Steps

via facebook.

Revolution Is Art

 

Some random graphic design:
"Another World Is Possible: ¡Luchar Crear Poder Popular! (Struggle To Create People's Power!)"

 

Annual Candy Samples Video Break!

Yes it's that time of year again! A new video from my favorite drag queen, the immortal Candy Samples, actress. This year's video is a tribute to the gay "bear" world, with a new song entitled "Bear Season." Once again yours truly has several background color roles, though my adorable boyfriend may be seen here as the guitar player. The videos are always a hoot to make, and this one was no different, though the extensive "green screen" filming meant that those of us in the cast had no idea whatsoever what the final product would look like. Bonus points to Candy for the Sarah Palin references!

If Communism Is Dead, Why Are They Still Afraid of It?

Jodi Dean discusses the "Communist Horizon." From New York City's Brecht Forum. This is some dense Marxist philosophy but stay with it.

Revolution in Our Times?

The following statement is reposted from East Coast Renegades:

We are in an historic moment. The economic crisis is deepening the poverty gap and its racial disparities, expanding and intensifying police repression, and causing the political system to waver and fracture. It appears this process will continue, giving rise to more radical and extreme struggles nationally and globally. Yet despite its potentials, the Occupy movement has failed to sustain and grow into a revolutionary mass movement. Now is the time to regroup, re-strategize, and commit ourselves to taking action as best we can in the outbreaks that are coming.

The authors of this statement are forming a network on the east coast, and we hope others will join us. Our network brings together old and new militants to share analysis, strategy, tactics, resources and methods of struggle. Together we want to open up a space for principled debate, in which we respectfully challenge and develop each-other’s ideas about revolutionary practice, and push each other to do better than we are doing. We want to develop our ability to intervene in crises, whether they be cases of police violence, community violence, austerity cuts, housing occupations, prisons strikes, labor struggles, etc.

We believe our central task is to seek out the revolutionary elements of people’s everyday experiences, to support and push this self-activity in ever more radical directions. At the same time, we must ruthlessly critique everything that holds it back: both the racist, sexist, reactionary elements within it, and the liberals and self-appointed leaders who co-opt it, such as politicians, nonprofit staff, and union bureaucrats.

While working toward the worldwide overthrow of the capitalist system, many in our network are currently agitating and organizing in urban neighborhoods of color, and feel this work will be central to any revolutionary strategy in the U.S. In order to build local popular power that can challenge the existing order, we must connect a wide array of labor, immigrant, student, feminist, queer, rural, and other struggles. We understand that many of these categories overlap with each other, and are prevalent within neighborhoods of color.

We hope our efforts will move us closer to a form of organization that is useful for our time, different from the vanguard parties and structureless networks of the past, and we think this grouping could serve as an embryo for such an organization down the road. Together we will study and critique past revolutions and current movements, and undertake serious political education. We will grow together as committed militants, analyzing and acting in the world around us, and working toward revolution in our time.

The above statement was written by some of the same folks who put out the Con Ed flyers I reposted earlier. The graphic is one of the brilliant works of agitprop art produced by Emory Douglas of the Black Panther Party way back in the day. I'm not sure I'm as negative about the Occupy movement having already "failed," but I think this statement makes some great points I completely agree with.