Tag: politics

Forcibly mobilised and then killed by drone: the murderous logic of war in practice

anarcomnet

Original Article by Anti Militarist Iniative (AMI) – https://antimilitarismus.noblogs.org/post/2025/08/27/how-many-forcibly-mobilized-people-will-your-drones-help-kill

The mainstream media publishes articles about how terribly the Russian army treats deserters. “Chained to trees, locked in metal tanks, or dragged behind off-road vehicles—this is the reality for Russian soldiers who refused to fight in Ukraine,” they note. (1)

As usual, there is not much written about the equally horrific massacres of Ukrainian deserters. One thing is certain, however. The combat capability of both armies is partly based on violent mobilization and torture techniques designed to discourage desertion and force even those who do not want to go to the front to do so. While thousands of soldiers are trying to desert, others are being sent to the front against their will, hoping to live to see another day. That is, unless a “suicide” drone armed with explosives happens to fly into their heads. On the internet, we can see videos of such drones belonging to the Ukrainian army massacring Russian soldiers on motorcycles, in trenches, on roads, in forests, plains, and elsewhere. (2)

In most cases, footage of these events is accompanied by articles that celebrate them and cynically dehumanize the victims. They never ask who these people are or how they ended up in a place where they were mercilessly killed. It is impossible not to notice that even the anti-fascist and “anarchist” movement is organizing collections for drones for the Ukrainian army. And because — like the pro-Western mainstream — this “radical left” environment also presents the war as a defensive action against occupiers, it probably doesn’t worry too much about the fact that its drones may well be massacring Russian soldiers who were forced to the front under threat of punishment. In the logic of a “defensive war,” every Russian soldier on the front line is a Putinist and an occupier. (3) Thousands of deserters and forcibly mobilized soldiers are nothing to the supporters of this logic and can be mercilessly eliminated. (4) But what such an approach has to do with the declared struggle for freedom and justice is something that the proponents of this line will not explain to us. After all, most of them do not have to face fire on either side of the war line. They simply send a financial contribution from time to time from the safe haven of the pampered petty bourgeoisie (or their descendants) and then write an ideological shitstorm full of vague phrases about the struggle for freedom and self-determination of the Ukrainian people.

Footage of terror in the eyes shortly before the drone exploded

In contrast, soldiers on both the Ukrainian and Russian fronts are largely proletarians who do not have access to these privileges. Yes, they are proletarians, because the proletariat has not ceased to exist just because some individuals have decided to remove this word from their vocabulary. The truth is that many proletarians are on the front lines involuntarily and under duress (5). Very few have the means or documents to flee abroad. Many live in illegality: they avoid banks, leave big cities, hide in forests. If anything makes sense from an anarchist perspective, it is to provide them with support, not to build drones that will massacre them or track them down so that someone else can massacre them.(6)

Solidarity with deserters and those forcibly mobilized!
Resistance to those who build machines for their killing!
Class solidarity against the murderous logic of war!

NOTES AND SOURCES:

(1)
Ruští dezertéři jsou brutálně mučeni. Svědectví přináší CNN | Newstream

(2) For example, here
https://cnn.iprima.cz/ukrajinska-droni-elita-v-akci-madarovi-ptaci-vyzobali-rusy-na-motocyklech-ti-zkaze-neujeli-479487
https://cnn.iprima.cz/zabery-ukrajinske-likvidace-okupantu-ruskeho-vojaka-zachranila-lopatka-467046
https://cnn.iprima.cz/zabery-hruzy-v-ocich-kratce-pred-vybuchem-ukrajinske-drony-likviduji-ruske-okupanty-475517

Also here:
https://www.msn.com/cs-cz/zpravy/other/ukrajinsk%C3%A9-drony-ude%C5%99ily-na-rusk%C3%A9-voj%C3%A1ky-v-lese/vi-AA1JzxmT

What do we see in this video? A man in uniform with a backpack is walking through the forest when suddenly he is shot by a drone. To the viewer, it is presented as a sensational video of how Ukraine’s defenders stopped the occupier. However, it is not at all clear from the video who he was, why he was there, and whether he wanted to be there at all or was forced there by officers under threat of punishment. He is dead, and no one will ask him.

(3) Reality speaks for itself. Forced mobilization and high desertion rates in the Russian army prove that not every soldier on the front line is a Putin supporter. On the contrary, many are victims of Putinism, just like those who are being shelled in Ukrainian cities. https://antimilitarismus.noblogs.org/post/2025/02/04/over-russian-18000-soldiers-desert/

(4) The Solidrones initiative, which reportedly manufactures “drones for anti-authoritarian fighters in Ukraine,” states: “Defenders consume tens of thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles every month, because a precise drone strike can take out a significantly more expensive tank and cripple the occupiers’ advance.” https://www.afed.cz/text/8191/solidrones

There is no doubt that they operate drones, which are weapons designed for destruction and killing. But even if someone wanted to argue that they can also use supply or reconnaissance drones, it is important to clarify one thing. Even in such cases, drones serve as a means of support for senseless killing. There is no significant difference between a forcibly mobilized soldier being shot down directly by a drone and being tracked down with the help of a drone and then killed by infantry (often also supplied by drones), artillery, or the air force.

A number of other questions are also relevant.

Can the so-called “anti-authoritarians” who manufacture or operate drones decide how and against whom they will be deployed? That might be conceivable in the case of guerrilla warfare organized autonomously outside the state and against the state. However, this is not the case with these people, who, as they themselves acknowledge, are integrated into the official state army of Ukraine. It is therefore the army authorities who determine how the drones will be used by the “anti-authoritarians,” and there can be no question of autonomy of action. What will these “anti-authoritarians” do when their officers next order them to use drones to track down deserters attempting to escape? After all, this is one of the agenda items of the Ukrainian army, which they voluntarily serve.

(5) According to statements by surviving Russian soldiers, they were not allowed to evacuate because a blocking unit guarding them from behind would not let them leave their positions on the front line and would shoot if they attempted to retreat. Forcing soldiers to advance may therefore be less risky in some cases than retreating and deserting. This cruel tactic was used by the army during the Stalin era, and today the Russian army is returning to this practice.

(6) The forcibly mobilisation and subsequent killing by drones is also well known to the population in Ukraine. However, we do not know of a single case where the production of drones by the Russian army has been financed with money by so-called anti-authoritarians or anarchists. In any case, we must condemn the forcibly mobilisation and murderous use of drones against the working class, whether these practices are used by the Ukrainian, Russian or any other state army.

CAMPAIGN OF SOLIDARITY WITH UKRAINIAN CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS AND DESERTERS

anarcomnet

We are not criminals. We are people. Men and women who refused to become casualties of the war of two regimes. We refuse to be held hostage by political contracts and military plans. The Ukrainian government is currently preparing Law No. 13673, which criminalises everyone who has escaped the mobilisation. Anyone who refuses to return to the trenches faces a risk of imprisonment, deportation, and a forceful conscription into the army.

This law entails: 

• mass criminalisation of deserters and conscientious objectors,

• automatic placement into registers,

• collaboration of secret services and courts,

• threat of extradition back to Ukraine.

• This is not a defence of freedom – it is its end.

Ukrainian deserters and conscientious objectors of military service need our solidarity. Their struggle is also our fight for:

• a right to live,  

• a right to not be sent to a battlefront,

• a right to refuse the state and its war.

Therefore, we urge you:

📢 Let’s flood Ukrainian embassies and consulates with protest letters, petitions, emails, phone calls, and faxes. (See the sample of protest letter at the bottom of the article)

📢 Sign an online petition (the link will be posted here: https://www.petice.com/…ku)

📢 Let’s organise public solidarity events in front of Ukrainian embassies and during the visits of Ukrainian politicians in your country.

📢 Download the posters and flyers and hand them out to your Ukrainian colleagues and neighbours – let them know that they should not return to Ukraine and that we approve of their decision not to fight. (The PDF poster is available to download at the bottom of the article, or you can get it by contacting us)

📢 Express your support to Ukrainian men and their families who have left their country so that they would avoid mobilisation and recruitment into war (In Czechia, the estimate is about 150 000 men, in Slovakia it is about 50 000. In the entire EU it concerns approximately 750-800 000 people!)

📢 Translate the appeal into other languages and organise a similar campaign in your country. Keep us informed!

📢 Let’s stand on the side of those who say NO to militarism and war.

Each day of silence is a step further to deserters being deprived of their future. But together we can be the voice that cannot be silenced.

Glory to the deserters! Glory to conscientious objectors!

No to war – never, nowhere.

Anti-militarist journal DEZERTÉR

contact: dezerter@riseup.net

LETTER OF PROTEST SAMPLE

Send a letter and/or email to Ukrainian embassies and consulates in your country. Use both options to increase the pressure.

Subject: A protest against criminalisation of Ukrainian conscientious objectors and deserters

Dear Ambassador,

We are addressing you on behalf of the citizens of [your country] who disapprove of the war and who stand on the side of human dignity. It is with great concern that we observe the Ukrainian government preparing and promoting repressive measures in the form of Law No. 13673, directed against those who refused to be drawn into war. The draft of such laws criminalising conscientious objectors of military service and deserters is an attack on basic human rights.

We reject the idea of sacrificing human lives in an endless war conflict. The people who decided to leave Ukraine in order not to kill or die are not criminals. They are the people who had the courage to say NO to the war.

We ask you to convey our concerns and dissent to the Government of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Parliament, with a demand for:

1. An immediate halt to the preparation of the laws that threaten conscientious objectors and deserters, specifically Law No. 13673.

2. Respecting the right to refuse military service as guaranteed by the International human rights treaties.

3. Ensuring the protection of those who refused the war – whether in Ukraine or abroad. 

We perceive the solidarity with Ukraine as solidarity with its ordinary working people who want to live in peace – not as a support of militarism and repression.

Sincerely,

[Your signature]

Original article/post: https://dezerter.noblogs.org/post/2025/10/02/campaign-of-solidarity-with-ukrainian-conscientious-objectors-and-deserters

Farce followed by Vicious Oppression and Further Exploitation?  Or Class Wide Liberation?

anarcomnet

Report from Newcastle upon Tyne and Hull, 27th Oct

A mass of flag waving was threatened to descend upon the people of Newcastle last Saturday, as thousands upon thousands were promised to be led / manipulated by xenophobic nativists.

This claim, through the convergence of UKIP, Advance UK and the so-called ‘Great British National Protest’, didn’t seem as quite as ridiculous as past such threats.  For the far right has been buoyed up nationally by a number of recent governments, hell bent determined to be an enabling force at every turn.  While the likes of the very wealthy, journalists and social media, endlessly platform their claimed grievances and “othering” of members of our class.

The recent result, a very large and concerning turnout in London, beamed into our homes for all to see and to be nauseatingly endured by that city’s residents. 

Concurrently, there still is the flying of seemingly endless daft bits of material on a variety of streets up and down the country but mostly around roundabouts going nowhere.  Then there’s the spraying of graffiti, mostly on bins for dog waste, if local experience is anything to go by.  All this together provides a further intimidating feel for working class communities, both locally and wider afield.  Dog shit politics, anyone?

However, in Newcastle, as midday arrived, rumours / excuses(?) spread of “coaches breaking down”, one wannabe leader living it up, lounging about on the continent – yet again, another failed one / “actor” turning up desperately trying to appear relevant, and a march planned ironically in the middle of a boat race; maybe all was not as could have been or as feared?

In the end, on the day, the far right mustered a paltry 300 in the Toon, compared to the counter demonstration’s number of around 12 to 15X that.  Only stopped from being run out of the city by numerous lines of uniformed agents of the state, the far right was reduced to trying to claim “victory” by carrying out a mini march in undercover of near darkness as their main planned one was stopped, countered, re-routed and countered again, several times over.

Meanwhile, a number of those on the counter in Newcastle, shouted about the rightists, “Not being even able to stop a boat race!”   This too embarrassed smiles and nervous laughter from some of the less hardcore, probably more confused younger ones with national flags?  Whilst others on the counter demonstration asked the nationalists where they thought their flags were made and didn’t that show the whole thing to be at best, ridiculous?

Then, on the day, there were a handful of Kippers with religious crosses seemingly knocked off from some crap car boot sale around the MAGA movement in the US.  More nationalists, with endless flags, engaged in strangely dull monotone speeches, lacking both wit and intonation, polluting the aural experience for those just out an about in town.  One of these Tannoy based characters is known for being detained recently, for, “nutting their own side”.  To top it all, spectators of the boat race had joined in the opposition, telling the wannabe marchers to “piss off”, for disrupting their viewing pleasure of the Tyne. 

Much to the relief of many on Tyneside, the whole thing appeared at times to be pure farce!

Yet not only were several people arrested on the counter demonstration in Newcastle, some for apparently not telepathically understanding orders to disperse but the underlying pressures, locally and beyond, remain intensely difficult.

This is shown by those endless vitriolic attacks upon refugees by both government and national commentators throughout the country.  It was also shown locally by the fact that those owning the venue that eventually hosted the Advance UK launch near the Quayside by the Tyne, also own the refugee hotel near the city centre that has been subject to demonstrations by the far right and naive, week after week after week.  Where there’s muck and dirty dealings, there’s brass alright for those with capital, in this system.

Locally through to internationally, years of attacks upon our class, crises in capitalism, atomisation, quietism on the class struggle front, immiseration / flatlining or even falling living standards, have enabled a vacuum and space to appear for the hard and far right to exploit.

Having no scruples about empowering a divide and rule agenda to deflect from not offering an optimistic future, state and capital have opened up a chasm to be occupied by those who even appeared to want a 21st century style nation-wide pogrom against refugees last year, as decaying occupied hotels were set alight.

This all then further fuelled by social media, their billionaire owners and ever tweaked algorithms, so the forces of intense reaction have hit new heights – both electorally and also now as a (re)emerged street force, based on nativism, nationalism and bitter xenophobia.  Throughout the UK, continental Europe and beyond, this appears the case. On the day however, the situation in Newcastle offered some very welcome optimism and the opportunity to catch up with and stand with comrades and our wider community.  It provided at least, that collective sigh of relief.

This situation though will likely be only temporary.  As comrades on the same day in Hull reported, the reality, countrywide, is variable at best.

For in Hull, the counter gathering was unfortunately outnumbered as a far-right rally hit the city.   Around 100 far right gathered although accurate figures were difficult to assess, as the area also had a large number of the public around, wondering what all the fuss was about?

The static counter demo by Stand Up To Racism had around 30 people.  Despite this, 6 comrades who refused to join the static counter demo stood firm whilst also mingling with the far right and public, chatting to some people nominally on “the other side”, to try to get them to peel away.  This then, those who were on the edges of the right rally and who were perhaps still able to question what is happening and see through how they are being used and manipulated?!  The far-right stewards (feeling important in the high-vis waistcoats) were not happy with this and kept rushing over to try and bully both our comrades and those they were talking too.

It is one thing to stand there with confidence as you vastly outnumber the opposition, it is quite another to try and positively confront the situation in your local area, when you are clearly outnumbered yourselves.

As both last weekend and recent events throughout the country and beyond have clearly shown, as a class we cannot rely on those in power, nor on our current socio-economic system, to offer us any solution.  In fact, they and this current system fuel the attacks we face.

Let’s face it, the far right internationally are fake rebels and represent literally a defence mechanism for capital and state in times of crises.  Fantasies about liberal democracy being any kind of answer to this, are clearly that, fantasies!

To effectively confront and resist, we must unify as a class, locally and internationally.  We must stand with our communities, especially those on the sharp end of being attacked and “othered”.  We need to meet, discuss and stand with comrades and potential comrades, and help enable where we can, others in our class to resist a disastrous agenda.

It is a massive task but still not an impossible one.  Whilst we may appear small and relatively weak at the present time, the struggle can take twists and turns, and our class can still show impressive determination in the face of those who dream of further oppressing us. 

Wherever we find ourselves, we must collectively turn the tables now by organising, discussing, meeting, and standing firm on a definite anti-capitalist, internationalist basis.  It is only with the ending of capitalism and state internationally, that the threat of the far right will be ended and our prosperity and even existence ensured.

Locally, nationally and internationally, we must engage with offering a far more optimistic future, where we are able class wide, to challenge exploitation, resist manipulation and confidently stand together in solidarity; stand for a world of liberty and equality. 

A failure to do so hardly bears thinking about!

Article by Bloque-Ade

The Downfall of a Right Charlie

anarcomnet

Hyperbole around the assassination of the right wing Christian fundamentalist agitator Charlie James Kirk has made the removal of a footnote to the current populist chaos seem bigger than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps in an embryonic form, this demonstrates the endemic unease about the ripples across our current social fabric.

As if waiting for the brink of some fascist apocalypse, this has been widely described as a “Reichstag” moment – a reference to the murky ignition of the German parliament building in 1933 that acted as the pretext for the Nazis rolling out the seizure of power via democratic Parliamentary instruments.

The rest, as they say being history.  In this case, there is no replay.  This is now and the lessons are not the product of cosplay voyeurism but a pulsing Zeitgeist cautionary tale.  Whatever the motivation turns out to be, it inevitably feeds into the right’s strategy of tension to divide and rule.

The myth about Kirk at the moment is that he was speaking his beliefs and martyred on the crucible of free speech for doing so.  This fascist fantasy / liberal apologia is not the case, though it uncomfortably demonstrates the uneasy alliance between these two capitalist expressions.

He’s been speaking his beliefs for 13 years.  A juvenile debating school tirade of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and toxic masculinity masquerading as speaking truth to power.  His targets, as those of the ideological populist Right he represents, are the most marginalised, excluded and vulnerable in US society.  The diasporas of an atomised working class. 

His hate speech has moved beyond the expression of his belief.  Recently he’s been articulating, validating and fuelling the policy of social violence against minorities currently being enacted in the United States.

This makes Kirk not a dystopian visionary to disagree with, but a fascist street fighter.  Trump’s Horst Wessel, an extinguished nazi thug lionised to inspire others. 

His death’s utility to the reactionary project has been used with immediate effect – despite the lack of clarity re. motivation.  His image used as a central rallying theme to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s “Unite  the Kingdom” mobilisation of the right, the ignorant and the inarticulately frustrated on the streets of London.

Alarmingly attracting in excess of 100,000 people, most feeling understandably a great sense of disenfranchisement in the current era, they were addressed and incited by the world’s richest man, multi billionaire Elon Musk.

Channeling a chilling message through the convicted violent thug convening the rally, Musk said:  “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you…you either fight back or you die.”  A warning perhaps to the meagre 5,000 to 10,000 counter demonstrators from ‘Stand Up to Racism’.

And where is the Labour government’s real anxiety about this demonstration? Where do they stand on the assault on minorities and the dispossessed? Why is it that they felt it necessary to deploy new dystopian facial recognition technology for the Notting Hill Carnival yet not for the largest far right demonstration in British history?

The liberals and their Trotskyoid-Leninite allies in Stand up to Racism want you to think this is a choice between totalitarianism and democracy.  Your rights versus ‘their’ dictatorship.  This is a lie.  Liberal democracy took us to war and both want to crush us for power and profit.  Two cheeks of the same arse!

Liberalism like Fascism wants and needs capitalism, having throughout history betrayed the working class if capitalism was under threat, (from Spain 1936 to the other 9/11 – the anniversary of Pinochet’s US sponsored militarised junta/fascist coup in Chile 1973, for example).

It is not the fascists (yet) locking us up for protesting genocide and their warfare state but a Labour government.  This, the party of partition, strike breaking, numerous regressive immigration acts and the atom bomb.  Our enemy and our focus is capital and state in all their forms and their relentless drive to war, be the general’s democrats or fascists.

The rise of the right at the moment measures the scale of the challenge to a weakened and as yet, fragmented working class.  A weakness used for exploiting and manipulating fear and insecurity to preserve the agenda of the warfare state and its lust for profit. 

Ultimately, only class unity through class struggle can put an end to the abuse of the far right and our inevitable annihilation at the hands of the warfare state – whatever its political hue.

While we may at times have nostalgia for the days gone by when generals, presidents, Kings and Parliaments would genuinely fear the retribution of ardent members of our class, the actions of one cannot replace the action of us all.

As revolutionists we know that demonstrative acts of propaganda by deed are no substitute for the mass action of a revolutionary working class.   Changing the faces of the tyranny in power changes nothing and can easily reduce us to mere onlookers and passivity.  Yet that does not mean that we hypocritically condemn. 

We don’t slate our class; those exploited, repressed and now sometimes seriously living in fear of being targeted by violent nativist xenophobes, if they raise a smile when they see it as one of the bastards getting it.  For whatever reason transpires.

Article by Dreyfus

Putin trumps Zelensky

anarcomnet

From Roosevelt and Stalin’s “Big Two” to Putin and Trump’s ‘Odd Couple’, history might not be repeating itself, but it does feel like it’s having a laugh at our expense.

What happened in Alaska felt less like the deliberations from an encounter between two warring figureheads, and more the choreographed delivery of a joint position statement long held and worked out.

A big reveal of the commonality between capitalism’s war mongers usually lost in the facade of rival narratives.  As such, an actual sneak peek behind the veil. 

Is it conceivable that Trump is imagining an axis with Putin ultimately against China?  Disregarding Europe, already treated as a backwater on the one hand and aligning their own strategic objectives on the other, may well be the best last-ditch superpower throw of the dice for Russia and the necessary counterweight the US needs to fully pivot East.

Together, they meet on a strategic level over their relationships to Europe, and Putin cannot regain the central Asian ‘Stans against Chinese opposition without US support. 

Similarly, detaching Russia from its Chinese chaperone leaves the latter surrounded and alone to face the US in the Pacific.  In this region and potential future conflict theatre, the US has just concluded its biggest war game since the cold war, it involving hundreds of aircraft and 50 locations thousands of miles apart.

The former ‘partnership’ of Europe has seen the writing on the wall.  It has not been idle, though possibly futile, in its efforts to respond.

It has been buying time telling Trump what he needs to hear.  While talk of increased defence spending and rearmament might look like dancing to the US tune, they are more likely a gallop towards an attempt at defence autonomy in the anticipation of the abandonment that is their likely fate.  The realities of the global power competition they’re about to confront alone.

Back to the future?  “Thank God for the French army!”, Churchill said in 1933.  History tells us we are really in trouble when the Anglo-French entente is the answer to a crisis!

Yet here we are again.  Prime Minister Starmer and President Macron held in early July what was effectively billed as a nuclear summit.   They declared a mutual combining of their nuclear capacities against unspecified yet forthcoming, “extreme threats”. 

French President Macron declared this both, “.. a message to our partners, and our adversaries”.  This begging the question: is an Anglo-French nuclear deterrent a salvation or does it bring us closer to war?

If a pragmatic alliance against populism and multi-polarism could find its own slogan of provocative militancy, it might be:

What do we want?  Pragmatism! When do we want it?  Within an appropriate timescale when circumstances are optimally aligned!

Now maybe, the circumstances are urgently aligning for Starmer and Macron.  A patriotic toast in the last chance saloon of Europe making its last mark as a global defining entity.

Each successive conflict seems to dwarf the other in horror.  From Ukraine to Gaza, from Gaza to Sudan; to name only a few.  Whilst they all risk becoming sidelined footnotes on the march to a superpower reckoning.  The horizon of which could be accelerating towards us. 

There will be no history nor analysis after that.  Tragically, given all the potential we have as a species, here will exist, just the ashes of tyrannical hubris.

Whatever our analysis or speculation, we are revolutionaries not journalists.  It is not our role to idly conjecture or to excite the debate.  Our purpose here is to emphasise that whatever the twists and turns may appear to be, no matter how unlikely, the trajectory remains the same.

Capitalism and war are two wheels of the same bike driving inexorably towards global destruction in a compulsive competition for power and resources.  Its detail becomes secondary to the primacy of our solution: Class war!

The focus for their rivaling attentions may chop and change.  Ours, however, remains the same – them and this existing nightmare of a socio-economic system!  Them, the exploiting capitalist class who run the economies and nations in their interests and at our expense.  The system that has no interests except profit, and which exploits and oppresses us to this end.  

We are the world’s producers, the global working class. Without frontiers and beyond borders, we are used as the cannon fodder of their wars of exploitation and domination.  Without us, all wealth and our world, would not exist.  Without them as a ruling class – war, famine, environmental degradation, exploitation and oppression will cease to exist.

Our choice and our task is a fore gone conclusion.  It is also in reality no choice at all. Fight for survival but also for the creation of a truly human community beyond exploitation and destruction.

Article by Dreyfus

We oppose Palestine inaction with class war against imperialist war!

anarcomnet

Gaslighting Gaza: Hunger, hypocrisy and history all over again…

If media promoted photographs are to be believed, crowds of desperate Palestinians surrounding aid convoys in the Gaza Strip have now joined the Great Wall of China as one of the few earthly human spectacles visible from space.

It is an instrument of torture to revive the victim, sustain their capacity to live sufficiently to draw out the terrible suffering inflicted on them, as a warning, revenge, or punishment.

This is the context in which the current rush to drop crumbs from the air into a starving caged mass and the temporary short-term pauses in their exposure to horrific violence in Gaza could be seen.  For survival, dignity or resolution, it is neither use nor ornament.

A 1000 people at least have been killed in the sadistic “hunger games” conducted by the Israeli state and US mercenaries over the last few months, to the increasing ‘tut-tut’ of an apparently disapproving world. 

The fact that a pause has occurred at all is not a measure of the commitment and efforts of Israel’s allies to reign it in, but of their complicity, having clearly always possessed such power but refused to apply it for the sake of their global imperialist goals. 

The ruling socialites of the Labour Party have proved themselves again as one cheek of the capitalist arse as Shammy Lammy and Starmer Chameleon perform the full pragmatic masquerade to serve their master Trump.  They will never serve the interests of the working class they rob. 

It might be better, observed President Lincoln, to avoid such treachery by choosing somewhere “…where despotism can be taken pure… without the base alloy of hypocrisy”.  He was referring to Russia verses the US, we might well ask today, what’s the difference?

The far-right administration of the Israel state continues to squander the last of its historic good will or guilt credits, still peddling the line that the hunger it has created doesn’t exist. 

This while juggling between military pauses and renewed bombing costing around 30 lives a day – double that currently caused by the induced famine.  That any in the West can seriously claim this as a success is again masking a cynical complicity. 

Hamas, meanwhile, the ‘state-aspiring’ anvil on which the Palestinian working class is being hammered, unapologetically continues to feed the meat grinder at the other end.

The western governments continue to supply Israel, block refugees fleeing war zones and suppresses even the flimsiest internal descent against their Israeli ally as antisemitism. 

The banning of Palestine Action as terrorists for their nonviolent direct action has fooled no one, not even the usually supine United Nations which has called for the ban to be lifted. 

We don’t support the ultimate goals of Palestine Action as we believe none of the artificially divided sections of the worlds working class should be subjected to the brutalising local policeman of capital that is the state, Palestinian or Israeli. We do however acknowledge this as a sign of greater repression to come and raise the alarm against it on that basis.

We have seen the seeding of periodic challenges to the power of Hamas brutally repressed by the Palestinian state-in -exile, while in Israel resistance is beginning to emerge to both genocide and forced military service.

While this initially appears small and far from the reality we are seeing elsewhere on the ground, we must counterpose it by asking what have those marching in their millions have achieved over the last three years other than sore feet and burnout. 

Objectively they have bought time for the slaughter to continue by refusing to confront it with vigour and class interest with which this slaughter has been perpetrated.  So far, our focus on the horror abroad has served to divert our attention to how it is paid for – by our increasing exploitation at home through austerity.

We must continue to argue that capitalism’s Social Peace at home is its violent immiserating pause enroute to the next generalised global bloodletting for profit, whose pathway is being paved almost everywhere we look at the moment. 

The frontiers of capitalism are ablaze in preparation for our destruction; it’s destruction through the global struggle of our Class War is our necessary response.

Article by Dreyfus

Glastonbury and the Warfare State – Know thine enemy

anarcomnet

Ironically, in the face of capitalism’s accelerating drive towards its global war of destruction in the ‘national interests’, the flags of ‘other patriotisms’ are coming back to hide the existential struggle of our class and humanity behind the claims of those nationalists who want the ‘states in exile’ like a United Ireland or Palestine to take over from those ‘states in power’.

The keyword here is the State.  The bourgeois political entity that’s become the local franchise of international capitalism, it inevitably siding with one imperialist bloc or other.  

Taking sides here has its own appeal.  You can blow up a political relationship and achieve the illusion of change.  Social revolution, however, is not a change of management and rearranging of deckchairs.  It is the abolition of an exploitative social and economic relationship that cannot be reformed but requires our liberation and the solidarity of class struggle. 

The flag of any nation will only ever lead us to one or other imperialist camp to die for.  All claims pushing us to take the side of one state, bloc and camp or another are a betrayal of the historical internationalist interests of our class

Whoever broke woke is now haunting the political playgrounds of bourgeois Bohemian liberalism, the performance and the festival.

Who is this Glastonbury that now so openly opines on the political partisanships of the capitalist state and who must be obeyed?

A direct inheritor, if not usurper, of the free festival movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it has long been a haven for leftist and liberal ideas.  It used to be joked that breaking into Glastonbury was mandatory training for the peace movement!

Its organisers have promoted this with pride.  Its founder, Michael Eavis, stated as recently as the current festival, “people that don’t agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else.”  To follow this by endorsing the establishment voices in condemning Bob Vylan’s sloganeering against the IDF (the 170,000 conscript Israeli army) appears to be a response to external political pressure.

The Guardian newspaper observed that, “the Gaza discourse has been Vylanised” as a diversion.  However, that was clearly not working given the number of voices mobilising in its favour – the duo’s album miraculously climbing the charts again!

Starmer then, condemned the allegedly antisemitic chants of, “Death to the IDF” as, “unacceptable hate speech”.  Yvette Cooper with similar timing banned Palestine Action’s peaceful (if injurious to the deity of property) protest against the mass indiscriminate targeting of people with devastating high explosive bombs and bullets, including the massacre of noncombatants, as “terrorism”.  This, ironically just as the Yoorrock Justice Commission in Australia found Britain guilty of genocide against the indigenous First Nations of Victoria during colonisation.

Not to be outdone, journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil took the festival accusations one step further, for he stated, “I was going to say that they (Glastonbury) seem to have more in common with the Nuremberg rally,” though even the Nazis didn’t say, ‘Death to the Jews’”.  This prompting some conservatives to even call for the prosecution of the BBC simply for showing the festival!

So, Bob Vylan, Kneecap’s Gaelic republicanism and even Palestine Action are cast as the villains in the fog of war, predominantly as a diversionary tactic.  Not just from an ongoing mass slaughter but from the state’s shared interests with its enemies to not undermine its monopoly on the use of violence.  And if ‘your army’ questions whether “right is actually on its side?” and then falls for the desertion argument, so could ‘ours’.  “We (they) can’t be having that!”

However close one might be to the strictly defined legal characteristics that name a mass slaughter a genocide, the horrific trauma of Gaza is an atrocity by any measure.  Consensus amongst experts is between 60 to 90,000 dead and perhaps treble that wounded. This represents in excess of 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza. 

Vylan’s error is not in trying to find one enemy to accuse, but to find the wrong one and find itself colluding with the state’s tactic to avoid the real significance of the commentary.  “Death to the IDF” is no more antisemitic than ‘death to the Nazis’ is calling for the killing of all Germans.  It does however pitch us as one state entity against another – one side of the prospect of imperialist slaughter.  Supporting the killing of our class to oppose the other side where our class is also dying!

The cycle of war doesn’t end because our class has died in sufficient numbers to support our state in killing our class in the enemy state. The prospect of war ends when our class flat out refuses to fight for both the state and for appointed leaders within capital and instead fights the very system and barbaric ruling class which wants to pit us against and murder each other.

Far from calling for the death of the IDF conscripts, revolutionists should be calling for the working class treated as canon fodder, as the producers of wealth who have nothing in common with those who control and manipulate that wealth through its extorted acquisition, to see what they have in common with the repressed and exploited working class conscripts of the fundamentalist bands of Hamas and its Iranian backers in the anti-western camp.

War ends when the fighting stops forever. That can only be brought about in the long-term by the internationalist action of the world’s working class, refusing all sides but its own and the negating of the power and wealth of capitalism and imperialism for a free world commune.

While there may be an increasing number of voices criticising the ‘Vylanising’ of the Gaza debacle, that voice yet needs to find its target against the warring factions of this imperialist conflict, against the system of capitalism and state, and not upon workers dying because of it.

Article by Dreyfus

Health poverty is the challenge; Labour is the disability!

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‘Two-Tier Kier’ is no longer a smear following the compromise made with his back benchers to only do over one section of disabled people in the UK.

Like some inverse promo for loan deals or Internet packages, the government will lay off existing disability claims in exchange for duffing up people with the new ones.    ‘Get it while it lasts – new customers only.’  *Although a relevant change of circumstances such as a change in your condition classes you as a “new claim” and therefore under the new rules.

Despite it being only five years since the worst global pandemic in a century affected half the UK population killing quarter of 1 million, the government proclaimed its surprise that the numbers of people with long-term health issues have increased at all since 2020. Another example of them paying zero attention to people they would rather clap than pay during the pandemic.

That fatigue, respiratory issues and depression are running riot apparently has no link to what an ill-prepared society and our class had to survive under their watch. 

That the scale of benefits is so high, if nothing else, tells us what an unhealthy ‘shitpit’ surviving capitalism is. Ironically, maybe only a Labour government masquerading as the people’s friend could carry out such an assault on such vulnerable groups and hope to get away with it.

The financial reasoning of such decisions is of no interest to us as revolutionists. The well-being of our class versus the protection of the interests of the rich and their wars is always a political decision and, as such, we find no justification ever in the latter outcome. Democracy serves us no better than dictatorship on this.

It is however another irony that a decision driven by the desire to send us to war and increase the manufacture of disability is to be funded by the starving of the existing disabled communities.

We saw such a strategy fail already in the plan to cut winter fuel payments.  While at first glance significantly different demographics, there are some striking similarities: Both ‘passive’ recipients of hard fought for state benefits – though now deemed less entitled; both largely seen as passive politically – physically limited and without economic muscle.  Consequently, both are not just seen as vulnerable but beatable. 

What the state failed to notice is that elder people and people with disabilities are not discreet entities like trans people, migrants, or asylum seekers, but diversely dispersed throughout every house and community in the country. Embedded enough for every sinew of our class to scream no!

That such opposition to injustice can be seen and shared on such a widespread level needs extension to those truly vulnerable communities made invisible by prejudice. The lesson of the response to disability and the elder community should be extended to every section of our class because we are all targets for elimination to facilitate and finance the coming war.

Division is diversion! Labour didn’t invent that.  The state requires all its political representatives to divide our class in whatever way it can to divert us from seeing the importance of our unity in our struggle against it. 

At times it tries to get us to participate in this by ‘othering’ the other dispossessed of our class, on race, gender, origin, sexuality etc.  Each time we fall for this ruse we widen the opening of the avenue of attack back to the main targets of class and vulnerability in all its diverse forms again. 

Racism breeds attack on disability, disability discrimination breeds attack on our class made workless by capitalism, et cetera.  The cycle of division and defeat begins and ends with the ‘isms’ and the targeting of difference.

The partial defeat of Labour in power was led by activist mobilisation and opposition of our class. The scale was small but indicative of potential. To upscale we need to link struggles of one community with another and identify the ultimate challenges that confront us – growing austerity and impoverishment to meet the war aims of the state’s imperial ambition. 

Hunger and austerity are about war and our opposition must oppose war with the energy it refuses division and poverty.  Resistance, survival and victory are both the right and obligation of our class.  It is our necessity not just to survive from day to day but to abolish an economic class system that offers us no better way of survival. 

The class struggle is the peace movement, and victory on the Homefront is its defeat of their plans for war!

Article by Dreyfus

Too many wars to notice…

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Compassion fatigue is being replaced by stress and trauma as people can no longer bear to focus on so much misery and potential fear. In the wars around us there is a sense that we are not just witnessing the terrible lives of others, but the future that awaits us and gets closer each day and with every news broadcast.   We prefer to notice that we did not change the curtains as the grenade crashes through our own window.

Are we moving from passive voyeur to active anticipant?  More than half of the world’s nuclear powers, six nations, Russia, North Korea, Israel, recently Pakistan and India, and now the US are strutting on the battlefield.

Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites has changed the rules of the diplomatic game, perhaps to the point of no return. Foreshadowed by Israel’s surprise attack under the smoke screen of forthcoming US-Iran negotiations, the US’s second ‘Pearl Harbour’, punching through the false security of a two-week window for Iran to reconsider its position, has put all of us on an exponential path to military destruction.

This lesson will not be lost on China, which suffered the greatest casualties at the hands of imperial Japan’s 20th century wars, prefigured by the surprise attacks of Port Arthur and Pearl Harbour.  Trump’s new IED – improvised explosive diplomacy – risks detonating the Pacific region in the struggles over Taiwan and strategic sea lanes.

Not lost on other belligerents, Russian strategists observe that, “… on a tactical level there are pluses [for Russia] from the conflict between Iran and Israel”, including, “higher global oil prices and distraction from Russia’s war in Ukraine” (Moskovsky Komsomolets).

The business daily, Kommersant, continued that:  “Any escalation in the Middle East distracts from Ukraine and alters the priorities for Western military assistance,” adding incredibly: “Russia could…play the role of impartial arbiter, helping if not to resolve the crisis, then at least to de-escalate it.”!  Perhaps more realistically it laments conversely that it, “…was unable to prevent Israel’s mass strike on a country with which five months ago, Russia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement.”   That fact will also not be lost in China.

The unclaimed banality is – if you want war, prepare for war!  On the Home Front, “battle ready and armour clad… “, is the Labour government’s echoing of George Washington’s now ubiquitous militaristic slogan, “peace through strength”.  Whose peace whose strength?

In the late 15th century at the birth of European colonial expansionism, Italian military commander Marshal Trivulzio expressed the military maxim for the next 500 hundred years:  “To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money and yet more money.” 

Cue more austerity and an internal conflict against the enemies within, not just the unions but politically prefigured by the banning of such group groups as Palestine Action. Already the status of people with disabilities, gender dysphoria, social and eco-dissidents of all kinds is being downgraded and rights rolled back. 

As we prepare military bases for migrants or North American nuclear weapons, this hunt for enemies will grow.  That soft fascist echo of reason, “If you have nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear” is the ‘arbeit macht frei’ of our time.

In the era of Trump, populism, fascism, never has this phrase been more terrifying. Have you ever identified your gender identity, sexual preferences, political allegiances in official documentation or social media?   Times are changing. Tolerance was always an insidious form of oppression and has paved the pathway for the direct repression to come.

Hypocrisy-a return to traditional values.

While the Israeli state’s slaughter of Palestinians is possibly the greatest self-inflicted reputational damage done to a nation in modern times, despite its own experience of genocidal harm, its double standards rival one of the greatest hypocrisies of war in the Iranian theocratic dictatorships’ condemning of the death of civilians as a war crime and a breach of the rules!

Not because the death of civilians or anyone else for that matter in war is not abhorrent, but that if no one had ever coined the term ‘war crime’ before, the Iranian regime has given them plenty of reason and opportunities to invent the phrase in its near 50-year existence.  Now seen as ‘the good guys’ by the liberal partisans of ‘some(any?) wars before the class war’, those, who would be first up against the wall in the fundamentalist dictatorship, choose to ignore its generational atrocities.

Perhaps less well known than its bulldozing of walls onto homosexuals, its stoning of women for religious infringement and running of mass torture centres, is its mass murder of long-held political detainees.  In 1988, in more than 30 cities across the country, 30,000 political prisoners, many of whom had been in custody for years were taken out and murdered by the Islamic regime, the Godly guardians of Islamic fanaticism.

Despite this, the Trotskyists and the Stalinists – 2 cheeks of the same arse – make companionable bed fellows as they call for the ‘left’ to support Iran and defeat for Israel and USA.  This position dubbed, “revolutionary defencism’, is the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus’s obligatory anti-working-class side-taking with the bourgeoisie.  They offer us nothing other than an alternative imperialist camp to die for.

While such crises feel shockingly new on our own front doorstep, we’d do well to remember that patriotic calls to commemorate the last great imperialist slaughter of 70 million souls, the older generation still with us remembers well and we should heed their warnings.  As a recent veteran of the Burma campaign commented:

“I’m not here celebrating, I’m remembering.  The biggest crime is war itself.  If there was no war, there would be no more war crimes.”

When we, along with others, say, No War but the Class War, it is a plea for survival.  Everywhere, the tsunami of global conflict is rising inexorably towards the last great imperialist global configuration that will wipe us out as a species.  Classes for businesses on how to survive or plans to resurrect dad’s army and leaflet every home are mocking the graves they are digging for us.

Only the class of producers who make all wealth, the working class, which has no common interest with those who steal the wealth that we produce can either ultimately prevent this war or perish with it.  War or Revolution!  When we say, No War but the Class War, it is a call to arms for the liberation of ourselves, the producers, the vast majority, against the existential crimes of capital and the ruling class, that tiny parasitical minority.

Article by Dreyfus

Statement from the Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan condemning state wars

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We, the anarchist front of Iran and Afghanistan, reaffirm our unshakable and principled position:

Every war – on every scale and on every excuse – initiated or sustained by states, must be unequivocally condemned.

Countries, regardless of their shape or appearance, use war as a tool for survival and control. And in this process, the lives, dignity and future of ordinary people are trampled under their feet.

At a time when the world is once again plagued by violence, bombs, death, displacement, and insecurity, we insist on this ongoing truth: the real victims of war are always the people—not the countries, not ideologies, not borders.

Our fight, as always, is not for the redistribution of power among the elites, but against the institution of the state itself and all forms of organized control.

We stand in solidarity – carefully and decisively – alongside the people of Iran, Afghanistan and the wider region.

What we are witnessing today is, on the one hand, the blatant crimes of the Israeli regime, targeting civilians in Gaza and elsewhere with wild cruelty. On the other hand, we see the Islamic Republic of Iran manipulating public fear, playing geopolitical games at the cost of the lives of Iranians, and imposing the burden of war on society.

We see the Islamic Republic not only as the outbreak of a regional war, but as part of a global chain of control and oppression – a regime that has for decades been attacking the Iranian people with censorship, poverty, imprisonment, torture and execution, and recklessly endangering millions through military provocations.

While we condemn the atrocities of the Zionist regime in the harshest terms, we also state that the struggle against the Islamic Republic is part of our broader struggle against all states and structures of control – a struggle that will continue.

We fight for a world without borders, without countries, without armies or authorities – a world in which humanity, life and freedom are at the center. Our main war has always been the war against political authority, totalitarianism and the state itself.

Iran and Afghanistan anarchist front

June 13, 2025