Communiques

Understanding Repression & Counter-Repression

2024/10/19
abolitionmedia

This week, the fascist counterinsurgency against the international anti-imperialist, anti-zionist movement escalated to a new phase. It is more important than ever that this movement prepares for a strong counter-repression strategy and studies up on ongoing and historical counterinsurgencies.

In recent days and months, the imperialist ruling class has designated Samidoun Palestinian Political Prisoner Solidarity Network as a “terrorist” entity, threatened Unity of Fields with a “domestic terrorism” investigation, raided the house of Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley in the UK, detained other journalists including Richard Medhurst, Richard Lofreddo, and Scott Ritter, restricted the 🔻 emoji and the word “zionist” on Meta, banned Resistance News Network in the EU, martyred Palestinian resistance leader Yahya Sinwar, and more.

The purpose of all this repression is to scare us, to intimidate us, to break our souls and crush our spirits. The imperialist ruling class is cracking down on our movement because we are strong, because we outnumber them, because they are paper tigers.

Let repression breed more resistance!

Unity of Fields shares these resources, for educational purposes only:

[1] Facing Charges

[2] Grand Jury Resistance

[3] Ongoing & Historical Counterinsurgencies

[4] Digital Security

FACING CHARGES

  • A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant. “The Tilted Scales Collective presents a comprehensive guide to facing charges in the criminal legal system to help defendants not only figure out how to handle their legal cases, but also how to think about their cases. Rather than being a how-to guide, this book offers a way of thinking about criminal charges that is based on defendants’ goals: personal, political, and legal. This book was written by dedicated legal support activists and draws on the wisdom of dozens of people who have weathered the challenges of trials and incarceration.”
  • How to Survive a Felony Trial: Keeping Your Head up through the Worst of It. “This zine is for anyone facing prison time as a result of participating in the struggle for a socially and ecologically sustainable future for the planet we live on and the beings that inhabit it. It may also be relevant to anyone engaged in that struggle whose activity is likely to lead to a collision with the massive edifice of inertia that is the legal system. I can only speak from my own experience as a young white man navigating the criminal justice system. I hope that some of what I experienced can be useful to other people as well. I am not a lawyer or legal expert. The first version of this text appeared in 2004; I wrote this in a different era and some of the advice I offer may be outdated. Take everything with a grain of salt, but be assured that my thoughts are with you, whoever you are. You are not the first person to go through this and you won’t be the last. You are part of a long and proud tradition that reaches around the world and stretches forward and backward through time.”

GRAND JURY RESISTANCE

  • Grand Jury Investigations, FBI Harassment, and Your Rights. “This zine is a compilation of articles from the animal liberation magazine No Compromise designed to help activists better understand and resist grand jury investigations. The topics addressed include tips for dealing with FBI and other law enforcement, an explanation of subpoenas and how to deal with them, protocol for dealing with snitches and informants, and how to organize against grand juries. While the texts are aimed at the animal liberation movement, the information is helpful for a wide range of activists.”
  • Infoshop.org Guide to Federal Grand Jury Investigations. “This Guide presents a summary description of what a federal grand jury is, what to do if you get served with a grand jury subpoena, the Fifth Amendment right not to testify against oneself and how the government can compel you to testify by granting you immunity, what happens when you testify, and what a joint defense agreement is and how it can be useful to people who are being investigated. Many political activists have read “Know Your Rights” and “What To Do If The FBI Shows Up” pamphlets distributed by the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, and/or radical legal collectives, but most folks are not very familiar with the grand jury process. So, this Guide is designed to demystify that process a bit, and to offer some thoughts about how to protect your rights if you get drawn into a grand jury investigation.”
  • Surviving a Grand Jury: Three Narratives from Grand Jury Resisters. “This zine collects stories from three people who dealt with the consequences of a Grand Jury investigating their communities. These include 2 people who chose to resist the Grand Jury and chose not to cooperate (one went to jail and one went on the run) and a partner of the person who chose to go to jail rather than cooperate. It’s a powerful set of stories that does an excellent job of exploring the human consequences of what happens when people chose to resist a Grand Jury. It’s essential reading for anyone in radical communities of any kind as we’re better able to both collectively and individually resist these forms of repression when we have thought about them ahead of time.”
  • Resist Grand Juries: The Front Line is Everywhere. “This zine explores the Grand Jury that was convened in response to the Standing Rock encampment. It consists of an interview from The Final Straw with an anarchist legal worker who was involved in providing legal support for the hundreds of people who faced legal consequences in the aftermath of Standing Rock. The zine does a good job of talking about the importance of never cooperating with a Grand Jury, establishing a cultural of non-cooperation and refusal, and providing a clear explanation of how that can be done. This particular conversation breaks down the attempted veil of secrecy that grand juries cast while highlighting the many forms of resistance to this particular grand jury at Standing Rock.”

ONGOING & HISTORIC COUNTERINSURGENCIES

  • Understanding the RICO Indictments Against Stop Cop City Activists. “National Lawyers Guild Atlanta, NLG International Committee and NLG National hosted a discussion on Monday, September 25, 2023: “Understanding the RICO Indictments Against Stop Cop City Activists.” Panelists and moderators were Stanley Cohen, Devin Franklin, Mo Meltzer-Cohen, Don Samuel and Azadeh Shahshahani, and the webinar was hosted by Suzanne Adely, Susi Durán and Sarina Larson.”
  • The Freedom to Resist: Censorship and the Movement in the Imperial Core. “…the functionaries of repression must weigh the relative value of suppressing resistance speech against the underlying necessity of maintaining the ideological narratives that justify ruling class hegemony. The “Law” is no barrier to repression. Only the possibility of damaging the political and ideological support the ruling class requires to maintain state power can compel restraint, but even this has limits. At the point when resistance ideas are grasped by the people and become a material force of sufficient gravity to truly threaten the integrity of the imperial project, all pretense is dispensed with and the naked violence that backstops the entire system is revealed. We are currently sitting at that boundary.”
  • Anatomy of a counter-insurgency: Efforts to undermine the George Floyd uprising. “The defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain social control in the wake of the largest and most militant protests in recent memory…What I want to do in this article is to examine the dimensions of how this defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands. I argue that the massive effort to defang the George Floyd Uprising should be understood as a deliberate counter-insurgency operation, combining the (sometimes coordinated) efforts of: various police forces, the capitalist media, the American military, NGOs, the Democrats, both state and federal governments, and other liberal establishment figures.”
  • 12 Years of Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five. “Author and activist, Miko Peled, hosts a discussion with the sons and daughters of five Muslim community leaders (known as The Holy Land Foundation Five) who have faced relentless political persecution and ultimately imprisonment in what is one of the most egregious cases of domestic injustice committed in the name of America’s war on terror.”
  • Green Scared? “At the end of 2005, the FBI opened a new phase of its assault on earth and animal liberation movements — known as the Green Scare […]. This offensive, dubbed Operation Backfire, was intended to obtain convictions for many of the unsolved Earth Liberation Front arsons of the preceding ten years — but more so, to have a chilling effect on all ecological direct action. In the following analysis […] we review everything we can learn from the Operation Backfire cases, with the intention of passing on the lessons for the next generation of environmental activists.”
  • Reflections on Victor Serge’s “What Everyone Should Know About (State) Repression”, James Yaki Sayles. “There is no such thing as “legal, anti-imperialist struggle,” or “legal, national liberation revolution.” The opposition moves on the belief that there are, or that there will soon be, connections between “public” and clandestine anti-imperialist, revolutionary activity.”

DIGITAL SECURITY

SourceL Unity of the Fields