Thanks to reporting from Colorado Springs Independent, it is now public knowledge that Colorado Springs Police infiltrated the Chinook Center and a number of orgs that organize there such as Colorado Springs DSA and Colorado Springs Tenant Union, using a pink haired cop named April Rogers who went by Chelsie Kurti and pretended to be a sex worker.

This zine explores how identity can provide camouflage that allows for intentional or incidental disruption of radical circles and organizing, and how the security culture we’ve developed to mitigate many threats can clash with the anti-racist, anti-sexist, and otherwise progressive norms within our movements. What this zine is not is a full review of the glaringly obvious ways that our organizing can be disrupted by direct defamation from State and State-adjacent actors or through the abuses committed by members of our radical communities with dominant identities who wield (white patriarchal) power. Those threats exist, but they are also the ones most frequently addressed.

Informant: a person recruited by police to provide information

This pamphlet was written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers – and is offered in deep solidarity with anyone committed to ending identity-based oppression and exploitation materially. By “materially,” we simply mean that we do not believe that consciousness raising or vague changes in personal attitudes can disrupt, delegitimate, and ultimately dismantle systems of domination.

La vita non è che una ricerca continua di qualcosa a cui aggrapparsi. Ci si alza al mattino per ritrovarsi, uno stock d’ore più tardi, di nuovo a letto, tristi pendolari tra il vuoto di desideri e la stanchezza. Il tempo passa e ci comanda con un pungolo sempre meno fastidioso. Le prestazioni sociali sono un fardello che non sembra ormai piegare le spalle, perché lo portiamo con noi ovunque. Obbediamo senza la fatica di dir di sì. La morte si sconta vivendo, scriveva il poeta da un’altra trincea.

La vita non è che una ricerca continua di qualcosa a cui aggrapparsi. Ci si alza al mattino per ritrovarsi, uno stock d’ore più tardi, di nuovo a letto, tristi pendolari tra il vuoto di desideri e la stanchezza. Il tempo passa e ci comanda con un pungolo sempre meno fastidioso. Le prestazioni sociali sono un fardello che non sembra ormai piegare le spalle, perché lo portiamo con noi ovunque. Obbediamo senza la fatica di dir di sì. La morte si sconta vivendo, scriveva il poeta da un’altra trincea.

Life is no more than a continual search for something to cling to. One gets up in the morning to find oneself in bed a mere matter of hours later, a sad commuter between lack of desire and fatigue. Time passes, spurring us less and less. Social obligations no longer seem to break our backs as we have got used to spreading the weight. We obey without even taking the trouble to say yes. Death is expiated by living, wrote the poet from another trench.

Wat volgt zijn de aantekeningen van een lezing gegeven in Berlijn, Athene, en Marseille in 2020.

Es folgen die Aufzeichnungen zu einem Vortrag, der 2020 in Berlin, Athen und Marseille gehalten wurde.

Nel corso della traduzione di questo opuscolo, mi sono soffermatx per la prima volta a pensare davvero alla dimensione della coppia come a una gabbia. Sebbene si tratti di una metafora abbastanza diffusa, non l’avevo mai trasformata prima in un’immagine mentale con una sua concretezza. Ho immaginato una gabbia in cui si trova rinchiusa una coppia di uccellini, che vi si erano introdotti inizialmente perché cercavano un posto caldo e confortevole in cui consumare il loro amore. Dopo qualche tempo, con l’acquietarsi della loro passione iniziale e la continuazione del loro amore, quella gabbia è diventata la loro tana, un rifugio confortevole e sicuro da cui è diventato sempre più difficile uscire. Se la loro relazione ha assunto una forma esclusiva ed escludente, la porta della gabbia è stata chiusa a chiave. Il mondo fuori continuava a esistere, vi era ancora interazione con gli individui che si trovano all’esterno, ma quest’interazione avveniva spesso in coppia e veniva sempre mediata dalle sbarre di ferro che costituivano le pareti della struttura che li conteneva. Con il passare del tempo, a quella sensazione di comfort rassicurante poteva accompagnarsi una sensazione di soffocamento e reclusione, che i due uccellini tendevano però a ricacciare in un angolo della mente… almeno fino al giorno in cui uno dei due, rimasto troppo a lungo rinchiuso, decide all’improvviso di sfondare la porta della gabbia e di uscirne per sempre, spesso con modalità drammatiche di rottura e incolpando l’altro di una reclusione che era prima di tutto autoimposta.

What follows are the notes of a talk given in Berlin, Athens, and Marseille in 2020.

Ciao.

Hello.

Anarqxista Goldman — self-named after Emma Goldman — was (allegedly) an anarcha-feminist sex worker, writer, and activist who used the handle @Anarqxista on twitter.

A couple of days after the From Embers podcast aired the episode, “Quebec Nationalism and Settler Futurity – Refusing Innocence,” someone posted a thoughtful and engaging reflection about this discussion. As one of the guests on this episode, I’ve taken some time to sit with the concerns shared in the post and decided to converse further with the reflections offered on the topics of uncertainty and settler futurity.

When we talk about security culture, people tend to have one of two kinds of experiences. The first is of building walls and keeping people out, the second is of being excluded or mistrusted. Both of these come with negative feelings – fear and suspicion for the former and alienation and resentment for the latter. I would say that they are two sides of the same coin, two experiences of a security culture that isn’t working well.

It’s been a very intense and revealing week since Hamilton Pride. We helped our friends heal, debriefed our strategies, and circulated as much information about the people who attacked us as we could. The videos and statements have gone viral, the outrage is visceral. Homophobic white nationalists attacked Pride, they were confronted by a huge group of queers, the police did nothing and then took credit for stopping the attack, the mayor backed the police despite hundreds of witnesses, and the homophobes walk free. While the helmet-wielding maniac who smashed our faces continued his crusade in Toronto, posing for celebrity pictures with a new helmet and brutally attacking at least one more person (you can watch the video here: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2019/06/violence-after-pegida-march-northern.html), the police were busy banging on the doors of known queer anarchists in Hamilton, lurking in backyards, and shaking down our entire community.

Anmerkung der Übersetzer:innen: Dieser Text wurde im Jahr 2013 in englischer Sprache verfasst. Wir haben versucht, ihn originalgetreu ins Deutsche zu übersetzen, wobei wir besonders auf einige Begriffe geachtet haben, die die Originalautor:innen bewusst gewählt haben. Wenn sich Begriffe komische oder veraltet anfühlen oder wenn es „modernere“ „politisch korrektere“ Begriffe gibt, die stattdessen hätten verwendet werden können, bitten beachten, dass wir sie absichtlich verwendet haben, um möglichst nah am Originaltext zu bleiben.

We’re fucking sick of disclaimers. We resent having to provide apologies and justifications for our words before we even speak them. We’re bitter about how specialized discussions of rape, sexual assault, and abuse have become. We feel insulted and embarrassed that we have to constantly point out that we aren’t speaking on behalf of all survivors, as though that were even possible. Sure, we appreciate a well placed trigger warning. It’s just good etiquette. But when fanatical attempts to avoid triggering each other serve as tools to relegate discussions of interpersonal violence to the margins, to wrap the issue in a neat little box which is only brought out on special occasions, when an illusion of “safety” can be guaranteed, well…then we start to get pissed. If we only speak of our oppression from the position of safety, we’ll be forever silent. If we can’t learn to work through being triggered amongst friends and comrades, we’ll be ill equipped to work through it in their absence. An atmosphere of nervousness permeates the discussion, and we confer to the advice of specialists partly out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But all we’re talking about are our own experiences, a topic on which we are all experts. So we long for the day when we won’t need to place ourselves under disclaimers, or any other banner for that matter.

For far too long have radical communities and their discourses treated domestic violence and abuse as external from the considerations of revolutionary struggle. Abuse is seen as simply an interpersonal issue, springing from individual pathology which we must address by correcting certain behaviors and teaching better communication skills. The intervention tools of choice are frequently limited to restorative or transformative justice practices, with the ultimate aim of protecting and maintaining the abuser’s place in the community, often at the cost of survivor safety, participation, and empowerment. There is a fear that ousting abusers and challenging them as adversaries to revolutionary struggle rather than as wayward members of it will ultimately weaken us collectively, because, after all, they are still our comrades.

In quest’analisi, Tom Nomad presenta un resoconto dell’ascesa dell’estrema destra contemporanea, tracciando l’emergere di una visione del mondo basata sulle teorie del complotto e sulla politica del rancore bianco ed esaminando la funzione che serve a proteggere lo Stato. Nel corso dell’articolo, descrive come le strategie di controinsurrezione liberale funzionino insieme alle pesanti strategie di “legge e ordine,” concludendo con un approfondimento su ciò che l’estrema destra intende per guerra civile.

In this analysis, Tom Nomad presents an account of the rise of the contemporary far right, tracing the emergence of a worldview based in conspiracy theories and white grievance politics and scrutinizing the function that it serves protecting the state. Along the way, he describes how liberal counterinsurgency strategies function alongside the heavy-handed “law and order” strategies, concluding with a discussion of what the far right mean by civil war.

Acéptalo, tu política es más aburrida que la mierda.

Postav se k tomu čelem, tvoje politika je kurva nudná.