On June 20th, in order to gather data on a Riseup user, our fiscal sponsor in the EU was raided by the Bavarian police. This extreme overreach included raids on several homes, a hackerspace, a social center, and a lawyer’s office. The police took all the computers, cell phones, disks, and records that they could. Several people were arrested and are now out and safe. However, as a consequence of these raids, the police have filed a number of unrelated charges. Read More
In the years since the end of the Cold War many new social movements have started peacefully, only to adopt a diversity of tactics as they grew in strength and collective experiences. The last ten years have revealed more clearly than ever the role of nonviolence. Propped up by the media, funded by the government, and managed by NGOs, nonviolent campaigns around the world have helped oppressive regimes change their masks, and have helped police to limit the growth of rebellious social movements. Repeatedly losing the debate within the movements themselves, proponents of nonviolence have increasingly turned to the mainstream media and to government and institutional funding to drown out critical voices. The Failure of Nonviolence examines most of the major social upheavals following the Cold War to reveal the limits of nonviolence and uncover what a diverse, unruly, non-pacified movement can accomplish. Critical of how a diversity of tactics has functioned so far, this book discusses how movements for social change can win ground and open the spaces necessary to plant the seeds of a new world. Read More
Call to Action
We will go camping against prisons and punishment from the 26th to 30th of July at the Faetzig-Camp, near Görlitz
The “Faetzig-Camp” is a mixture of a Summer camp with political focus and a festival.
Why oppose prisons?
We live in a society of punishment. All of us have experienced the principle of punishment, whether in our families, at school, at work, at the job centre or other agencies, in hospital or in psychiatric institutions. Read More
March 25 was planned by some liberal opposition leaders as the day of the biggest protest against Lukashenko’s policies this year. The biggest one on the wave of the recent anti-governmental demonstrations that started in February this year. It ended with the biggest police mobilization in years bringing thousands of riot cops to Minsk and detaining hundreds of people preventively and during the demonstration. This Saturday capital of Belarus looked like a war zone created by the police. Read More
The 16 march was a marathon of trials in Belarus. Over 50 court hearings took place indifferent cities and 52 protesters are jailed. After the violent detention of the anarchist block, its supporters and bystanders after the demonstration on 15 march in Minsk and the detentions of people after demonstrations in other cities yesterday 52 people were sentenced from 12 to 15 days in prison, at least 25 anarchist among them. Read More
In Belarus last weeks people took to the streets to fight the law against social parasitism – law that was signed by dictator Lukashenko in 2015, but started troubling population only at the beginning of the 2017. Thousands took to the streets in Minsk, Brest, Gomel and many other smaller cities all around the country, to show their discontent with the law and the current regime. The protests seems to have little influence from “official” opposition- instead of that people previously not involved in the politics are organizing together. In several places anarchist played quite a big role in the protests. Last week belarusian government started repressions against those on the streets – up until now over 48 people were detained and prosecuted for different violations. Read More
