Saturday, January 16, 2016

January 15 1838 the Battle of Jupiter Inlet Seminole Indians - Seminole Negro and the United States Navy


On January 15th in 1838 the Battle of Jupiter Inlet took place in Florida. A United States Navy led boat expedition to the Everglades encountered a Seminole village and mounted an attack. The Seminole warriors, although outnumbered and out-gunned, defeated the Navy. It began when the expedition of 200 soldiers, sailors and marines under Lieutenant Levin M. Powell discovered a trail along the side of Jupiter Inlet. Fifty-five sailors and twenty-five marines and soldiers were landed to attack the Seminoles who were encamped nearby under the command of medicine man Ar-pi-uck-i. Five Americans were killed in action and another twenty-two others were wounded, Seminole casualties are unknown. The Navy troops left in defeat.

Reject #OpIsis and the Co-Opting of Anonymous: Jeremy Hammond shares his views on Anonymous, #OpISIS, and the recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that has been sweeping the nation.

Shared from Reject #OpIsis and the Co-Opting of Anonymous | Courage Hammond


The attacks in France were a terrible but unfortunately predictable response by desperate people who, after a decade of war and occupation, want the west to taste what we have been regularly dishing out. But we cannot allow them to be used to justify more war.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the Western governments are provoking Islamophobic hatred in order to escalate military operations in the Middle East and push police state powers. It’s a familiar script, and from prison, I’ve been following these developments, disturbed about the attacks on immigrant and Muslim communities and the resurgence of the fascist right.

I remember in the wake of 9/11, the waves of blind patriotism and xenophobia that the war-mongering politicians used to push police-state laws, mass surveillance, and rampant militarization. It was never about fighting terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, but about US empire: control over land, oil, and drug production, like all wars. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were murdered by the US military over the longest war in our history while we escalated drone warfare elsewhere in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, creating the conditions which gave rise to ISIS in the first place.

That same post-9/11 hysteria is back and all the war-mongers are again frothing at the mouth with hate for immigrants and refugees, pushing for national Muslim registration databases, and for regime change in Syria. But I never thought Anonymous would join in on their frenzied call for war. Apparently, GhostSec and others purportedly associated with Anonymous have been DDoSing forums, taking down Twitter accounts, and reporting IP addresses to law enforcement in collaboration with shady military contractors like Kronos Advisory. The naïve fools behind the operation are being manipulated by intelligence agents taking advantage of the emotional reaction to the Paris attacks to harness our skills to fight their hypocritical “war on terrorism.”

As someone who hacked with Anonymous and marched against the war in Iraq, I completely oppose #OpISIS and any attempts to co-opt our movement into supporting the government’s militaristic agenda. Escalated US military involvement is certainly going to result in more civilian deaths, as it already has. All deaths of innocent civilians are a tragedy, and we cannot value one life over another. (And you are still more likely to be shot down by police than in a terrorist attack.)

The same intelligence industry that runs their own NSA hacker operations against ISIS uses the same counter-terrorism justification to spy on everyday civilians with no regards for rights to privacy, encryption, or anonymity. They have always targeted Anonymous and other dissident groups as terrorists, and when they aren’t trying to discredit or imprison us, they are attempting to co-opt us – sometimes openly by attending conference like DEFCON, seducing us with promises of money or calls for patriotic duty, other times covertly lurking around IRC channels attempting to steer us unwittingly into supporting their agenda. Remember, Sabu asked me to hack government websites of Syria and Turkey, among others, which I did, unaware he was an FBI informant. They didn’t want to talk about it at my sentencing hearing, but they did condemn my attacks against police and military contractors at length. The agents out there encouraging you to “hack the terrorists” will have no problem turning around and locking you up for years if you are not useful to their agenda.

We won’t let Anonymous be unwittingly used to further the military industrial complex’s imperialistic operations around the world. We don’t work for the government – we are against all governments. We are on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressors. We support the victims of war, not the war-makers. If you want to report membership lists and IP addresses of suspected terrorists, go join the CIA or hang out with wannabes like Stratfor or the th3j35t3r. Call it state-sponsored hacking, patriotic hacktivism, whatever – just don’t you dare call yourselves Anonymous.

I urge my comrades still out there in the trenches, sitting on some hot 0day, ready to loot databases and trash systems. If you want to stop war and terrorism, target who Martin Luther King Jr. called the “largest purveyor of violence in the word today” – the US government. So Anonymous, get to it – drone manufacturers, white hat infosec contractors, CIA directors, Donald Trump, and your local police department – they all have blood on their hands, they are all fair game.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

In support of Vegan Hip Hop Movement and against Facebook Censorship

We recently found out that our friend at Vegan Hip Hop Movement has been harassed repeatedly with censorship lately. This doesnt surprise us because when white supremacy is challenged by folks like Vegan Hip Hop Movement which such power and intensity, some white people are going to get a little afraid. So in solidarity with upsetting the settlement with Vegan Hip Hop Movement, us vegans of color and white vegans at The Feral Space would like to share a post from VHHM that caused them to be harassed and censored for a week. White supremacy is no over-exaggerated lie. It is real and there is no denying its existance anywhere.

Original blog post and screen shots of Facebook harassment of VHHM.

http://veganhiphopmovement.blogspot.com/2016/01/facebook-censored-and-blocked-me-for.html

Dakota Bracciale [author of the following letter]

"An Open Letter to People of Color:
Please do not trust white people.
Every single one of us is racist, it's something we were born and raised into, we were and are consistently indoctrinated into white supremacy. Indifference and apathy towards systemic racism and it's horrific results is not just more comfortable, it is incentivized; we are actively rewarded by white supremacy in it's many forms for ignoring people of color and their cries for injustice.

Our bones are riddled with it, it's everywhere. We were taught the the history of our nation through textbooks written by white men with a vested interest in how the story was and is being told. So we think that MLK Jr is the patron saint of polite black folks (to be invoked against the angry ones), peanut butter is the extent of black excellence, and according to the newest textbooks, slaves were just unpaid interns.

We were brought up being given medicine designed for us by white men, men who historically tortured black women and murdered black babies to found gynecology, men who performed surgeries on black people without any anesthesia and no precautions because it was believe that black people can not feel pain.

And you wonder why we do not sympathize when black children are gunned down by police?
Nothing stopped, the framework of systemic racism just keeps getting dressed differently, yesterday's fire hoses and attack dogs are today's cultural appropriation, tone policing and respectability politics.
We are the ones who committed genocide, stole this land, and now, generations later, think it's cool to dress up like the folks we massacred.

We're the ones making fun of people who can't speak "perfect" English, we're the ones who've come up with every single racial slur used in this country. We're so much more concerned about you questioning us, telling us no or calling us out than we are what you're actually experiencing at our hands.

We will spent countless hours just poking at you, trolling you just to prove you're this less intellectual, overly emotional animal, to get you to fail a standard we set for you without ever clueing you in on it.
We are the ones who built this country on the blood, the bodies and the backs of people of color and then built Mt Rushmore, statues, monuments to white men.

We rigged the economy, the government and the schools, created the ghettos, set you up for failure and then we blame you for your not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.We are still making you defend yourselves, over and over ad infinitum. We make you defend your personhood, your autonomy, your agency, your decency, your humanity because when you keep minorities on the defensive, when you keep them explaining who they are and justifying their right to life - nothing real ever gets done.

Even though I'm queer, even though I'm trans, I still get to sit in the "Whites Only" section and I have heard what gets said and I'm begging you, please don't trust us."
by
Dakota Bracciale 





Wednesday, January 6, 2016

An Indigenous Anarchist Against Intoxication Culture by Sarambi

An Indigenous Anarchist Against Intoxication Culture

by Sarambi

  The process of refusing intoxication is one that is long and arduous as a queer indigenous POC. The intense interlinking and bound together issues of being indigenous to land known as South America, a land being ravaged by major crop production of moncrops, but also of tobacco, coca, marijuana, and other chemicals being taken at a large rate out of context and out of balance like how people from off that land treat ayahuasca and other plants. As a queer individual now in the gilded, imperial terminal capitalist monstrosity known as the US, I see for what reasons our lands are being destroyed: it's for temporary pleasure, to numb from our suffering, because we have been told that how we exert liberation, freedom, and our sexuality and gender fuckery is at the bottom of a glass or end of a rail. I have also had to bear witness to the history of alcoholism en mi campesinx, mixed indigenous but not mestizx, familia.  I have watched too many people end up in the clutches of the state for abusing or pushing drugs only because they had nothing else to gain or lose in their eyes so they listened to what was given to us. I speak to folx about why them spending what energy, resources, and capital on substances is not liberation, it is continuing genocide, ecocide, extinction, capitalism, colonial imperialism, and is keeping them from moving beyond themselves to actually get free.


    This is a message for my indigenous relations and others: stop listening to the colonizer, stop trying to please our oppressors in every form they take. They feed off of our dead lives. We have resisted for 523 years, and often that has included abstaining from the intoxicants they push on us so we are easy and don't feel our destruction. We tell them to keep alcohol away from us, and though people die from saying no, we go on. We push governments, no matter how "leftist" or down they seem they are all gaming on maintenance of keeping nations/labor/trade for capital/systems that benefit them and must not be trusted, and narcos from lands, and even with armies against us we persist in the name of not having the substances destroy our land and people further. They have already written and foretold their demise. 

            
    To everyone else who is not yet on the same page: this is for you. You who seek to end the world and dance in the quick wild waters ready to erode the mutated fallowed earth. Why does your liberation cost the planet, other species and other humans far from you and your spectacle? Why are you seeking out making the spectacle yours instead of shedding it to embrace a real existence as an individual and collective instead of a walking dead existence? How do you justify your revolutionary revelry, subversions, or social revolt when you are still not embracing the agony and suffering of your own life let alone what your choices to consume do away from you? If you're not about capitalism, why are you acting as a consumer? If you are about decolonization, why are you promoting colonial land grabs, genocide against indigenous bodies, and destroying our connection to the environment we have always learned from? What is your cognitive dissonance with seeing suffering, extinction, and factual affects on things that you do see like the war on drugs and the incarceratory state, the military and medical industrial complexes, white supremacy, colonization of the land we are on in the US, etc.?


    This is real talk. This is the problem. There is no conscience consumerism, as we all know hopefully, because of the mechanisms that make capitalism flourish. You cannot promote use of substances without participating in the justification of capitalism, you cannot produce many ofthe recreational substances used in North America, Europe, and amongst those with the capital ability to use without the exploitation and genocide of an ecosystem. We as humans in this age have seen it in both the proxy colonial wars through the Fertile Crescent and colonially termed Latinoamérica within the last 30 years. Within the warfare against US defined "terrorism"and hunting for oil in Iraq, what gets left out is the US's want of the opium poppy fields in Afghanistan when they entered. It also happened to coincide with the increase of opiate painkiller prescriptions doled out to Americans by primarily pharmaceutical company backed doctors and the continued rise in popularity of opiates as a recreational drug. This market still exists, as does the continued occupation, where people of the land are growing and being "raided" by the US but the opium gets oveseas. Similar drug pushing and coerced production for the US was seen anecdotally in the Golden Triangle as the US was fighting in Vietnam, and committing secret operations in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Drugs benefit the US as an empire, sorry.


    But if it wasn't clear enough, look just south of the US colonial line from Mexico to Argentina - the US controlled and backed War on Drugs is not only meant to create the conditions to justify genocide in the US against Black and Brown, Indigenous and arrivant bodies, it is also a strategy to continue the legacy of the Dirty Wars, juntas, and white supremacist/Casta driven, colonially based neofascism that not even Leftists in charge and adored by American and European socialists can be found not falling under. Many people are no longer able to access their generational homelands due to violence related to the purest capitalistic motives of those who have "moved  up", forced to take work as runners, pushers, guards, etc since there is nothing else because the land is poisoned or monocropped, the water is poisoned from mining residue and pollutants or is stolen to produce alcohol or soda or to be bottled as is for resale, and all other avenues are limited due to racially backed classism and anti-indigenous sentiment, strict morality, gender and sexuality guidelines brought out by colonizers and neo-colonizing missionaries from the US (I see you Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Evangelicals), and purposefully underdeveloped status in the world. When we are given nothing, we turn to what we are granted, it seems.


   But we do fight back, Xyha people kick marijuana growers off their land before the paramilitary can come into their territory. The Emberá of Panamá, the P'urépecha of México, the Bribri of Costa Rica, the Nahua of Colombia all have fought back and have even kicked out other foreigners or outsiders as they are aware how they could be blindsided by cartel movement if they are interfered with. Autodefensas and Zapatista communities throughout Mexico not only abstain from intoxication but also fight off cartels and the paramilitary government forces who are hand-in-hand with the cartels and the US. This type of armed resistance and pushback has history in the Americas to even earlier colonial periods and to this day, even in North America, autonomous and/or sovereign indigenous lands fight and die over preventing more damage and death done by intoxication. Though this has not always been and does not need to be the case either in indigenous lands producing or in occupied lands where it is consumed.


    We can choose, and some of us do, to negate the existence of these intoxicants for political and decolonial reasons. By refusing to play into not only what pacifies but what comes up and promotes systems that are inherently based in imperialism and capitalism as well as used to bolster kyriarchy all around, one feels all the agony they should: for themselves to do what they chose or must for existence without being lulled into any false pleasure of this civilization, for other beings and the planet being destroyed near and far from them, and for the future as this continues. When you actually feel every painful aspect of living, you are more apt to resist at your fullest because you are able to sense how unyielding and sickening parasitic everything is. If you can feel that, and feel it always at the level as it is, then you have a stronger will built up to fight back as nothing is cushioning the blows any longer. Nothing is keeping your head above water, until you take the boat that civilization has given to some and smash it to bits, and float on a board. Nothing is numbing you, making you forget, making you feel pleasure when you, those around you, and other on the periphery are dying or are already dead as you are walking dead. In a framework that is against all oppression, against all control, against all passiveness, it continues that one should negate the interests of civilization and gilded pleasure at the cost of everything you think you fight for. You cannot destroy your masters without going all the way.

Back from a looooong break.







We would like to apologize to everyone for a long break we had to take to stabilize our living situation in a way that continued to facilitate our projects and resources. It has been a long and stressful break and we want to thank everyone who supported us through it. We are back. And so will be some new posts!