Feb 11, 2011

2011: Embrace the Resistance, It’s Time to End Injustice

By Ab Irato / guerrillanews.wordpress.com

The riots of 2010 are over and a new year is upon us. It has been over seven months since the convergence against the G20, which saw grassroots organisations and anti-authoritarians mobilize in a groundswell of active resistance, only to face a brutal counterattack by the state. And while we have suffered the loss of our comrades’ daily presence to the grasp of the state’s repressive legal institutions – a fact that no doubt delights those who seek to oppress and undermine our movements – our resolve has only been strengthened.

In these seven months, we have waited and watched. With seething rage we have watched as the police and prosecutors have relentlessly targeted our friends, comrades, and partners. We have watched government bureaucrats, in an unsurprising display of hypocrisy, break their own publication bans to demonize beloved community organisers. We have watched as the black bloc, a (de)generative and self-organising outburst of anger, has been falsely depicted as under the command of alleged “ringleaders” (the fictional “masterminds of mayhem” and “queens of destruction”). We have watched with outrage as the closet fascists controlling the country perpetuate plans for the expansion of the prison industrial complex. We have watched as racist governments intensify their demonization of new immigrants and all those who do not fit neatly within its exclusionary colonial framework. We have watched as rich white men continue to enable the raping of the earth for capitalist greed. And, throughout this all, we have seen fierce and widespread resistance against the G20 austerity programs.

We have stopped silently watching.

The state’s scapegoating of a handful of individuals continues to demonstrate their utter misunderstanding of our movements. We are not a movement of individuals. We are a movement of ideas; ideas cannot be imprisoned, they cannot be killed, and they do not require leaders. While some of our allies remain trapped in the labyrinth of illegitimate legal processes, many more have stepped up to take their place in the struggle against tyranny and injustice.

It is from the rain of such state repression that the flowers of our collective resistance bloom. While we understand the systemic violence of this state as an everyday reality for many, we take comfort knowing the seeds of future resistance have been sown by the “democratic” brutality this state displayed for the world to see on the streets of Toronto in June 2010. In the hearts of millions of people across the world, burns an intense loathing of police, politicians, and the collaborators who enable their control. More and more of these same people internalized the serious limitations of scripted protest, and the dire urgency of the situation our communities face. So we see student riots in Western Europe, directing rage specifically at the debt that uncaring elites have saddled the world with. We see mass insurrections defying tyranny in northern Africa. We see intensifying resistance in Greece and Italy. Across the world, it is becoming clear that the capitalist system is in its death throes, and that it must be put out of its misery before it takes us down with it. As this is our inherited system, we increasingly understand our responsibility in its dismantling.

We have learned much during the past several months of watching. While the RCMP, CSIS, and their political masters studied our movements in order to hurt us, so too have we been studying them. We have learned from our first hand experiences with infiltration, surveillance, and incarceration. We have refined our methods and our tactics, broadened our skills and our reach, and we forged new networks of resistance while solidifying the old.

While the Toronto G20 summit has nearly passed from the public memory, the ideas that brought us together against its agenda still remain. The authorities spent 1.2 billion dollars trying to stop dissent, to stop us, and they failed miserably – we are still here. There was a time where they know where we were, when they knew our movements; that time is now over, and now we are everywhere.

This is our declaration: In 2011 the earth will be engulfed by the intensifying flames of popular, radical, and insurrectionary global resistance against dominant, capitalist, and colonial states – we embrace this resistance as our own.

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