July 12, 2010 - Vancouver Media Co-op

The public denunciation by celebrity leftist activists and "civil libertarians" validates the state's position and weakens the defense arguments of those comrades who face serious jail time. While in state custody, our comrades face beatings, torture, intimidation and extreme fear. As someone who's had a family member and several friends in government cages, I have zero tolerance for those who would endanger the freedom of people working for a better world.

July 13, 2010

I’m feeling pretty frustrated and concerned at the moment with a tendency I’m seeing more and more in local activism[:]...[A] censorious and...quite vicious attack from a small group of people on anyone and everyone who puts forward a critique of the black bloc. Derisive and offensive, this response has become all too common in recent months and is entirely incompatible with any meaningful resistance or community-building.

In 2007, veteran journalist Michael Richardson began writing a series of articles for OpEdNews.com about Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, who are two Black Panther political prisoners known as the Omaha Two. Richardson argues that they were framed for the 1970 murder of a policeman as part of the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, dubbed “COINTELPRO.”

By Kristen Hanson - July 9, 2010

The police kept saying to her, "I bet you'll never protest again!" and it is funny because it is just the opposite. She recalls people who were arrested getting ice cream -- they weren't protesters before but they are definitely activists now. The experience of the G20 has only reinforced what she already knew, "the system is broken, and if we don't struggle to fix it, no one will."

By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER - July 12, 2010

The response by the Oakland Police Department...has been predictably overblown: alarms have been triggered in major buildings downtown to force evacuations, and the fear of God has been struck into the heart of every corporate and government employee in a ten-block radius. The police, it seems, are expecting a war, and are preparing accordingly.

By Niki Thorne - July 8, 2010

In the past two weeks, I have experienced much that I feel has been designed to break me, to silence me, and to scare me into submission...Despite all this, I will not be intimidated. I will not stop calling for equality and anti-oppression. I will not stop standing in solidarity with those who's rights are trampled for profit.

By Ben Powless - July 5, 2010

Police carried out a dangerous form of collective punishment that tarnished everyone who publicly chose to disagree with Emperor Harper as violent criminals who needed locking up. And with those burning cars, the police would have us believe, went up in smoke the constitution, the bill of rights, international human rights law, and all common sense.

By Alison Henderson - July 2, 2010

Summit protest on Saturday June 26, 2010. I attended the protest to fulfill my democratic obligation as a concerned citizen of this interdependent world, to speak out against injustice. I attended because the G20 is an illegitimate and undemocratic body through which imperial corporate powers solidify and perpetuate social inequality and injustice in the world.

By MATT SHULTZ - July 2-5, 2010

Let me be very clear on this: the point of this exercise was two-fold, first, to traumatize the activists...second, to normalize this kind of thing with the cops. And let me also be clear: Many, even most of the cops seemed totally fine with it. The casual, collaborative, efficient and impersonal sadism of it was really appealing to some of them and everyone in this country wants to ask themselves if Torontanamo is something they'd like to see more of in Canada because make no mistake, it's in the planning stages.

By DAVID Ker THOMSON - Counterpunch

Not all of us who are fighting in the streets here in Toronto are despondent, but a great many of us are...We are experiencing in our neighborhoods what brown people have experienced for centuries around the world at our hands. It has come home to roost...Our children are attacked by troops openly in the streets, openly in so-called “free speech zones”...My ten-year-old was almost fucking killed when he was attacked by police in a free-speech zone. My fourteen-year-old and I were chased for two hours. Does anyone out there care?

By DAVE LINDORFF - June 16, 2010

“In addition to several people I saw who were killed, I saw several dozen wounded people. There was one older guy who was just propped up against the wall with a huge hole in his chest. He died as I was taking his picture.”

By Courtney Desiree Morris - Sunday 30 May 2010

...[W]e need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants...use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations...have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles.

By Norman Finkelstein - April 27, 2010

For most of the time in Gaza, our delegation was guarded by young Hamas militants...I felt moved and obliged to state publicly that...none of them was deserving of the death Israel has attempted to inflict on them...[T]hese young men have chosen to defend their homeland from foreign marauders with weapon in hand. Were I living in Gaza, still in my prime and able to muster the courage, I could easily be one of them.

London, Ontario, Canada celebrated 'Fossil Fools Day' by organizing blitz actions against 3 branches of RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada), as well as a Critical Mass bike rally, in which a breakaway group took over a highway!

When I was released from the disciplinary segregation unit one day at the stockade in Ft. Dix (New Jersey) and the army the following day I thought my nightmare was over. But it was just beginning a lifetime of recurring nightmares and flashbacks brought on by certain smells and sounds. In a near daily routine, [we were], one at a time, stripped of our only clothing, a tee shirt and briefs. Our cell was then searched. All that was in there was an army blanket and bed, which consisted of 3 2X12's nailed together. Then we were marched to the end of the unit and told to spread-eagle against the wall...