The Cinema Committee: “Bosses Hang from Luciferian Towers”

On the night of October 1^st, 2017, the second worst massacre in US history took place. A wealthy gambler and landlord smuggled two dozen assault rifles into the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada and proceeded to open fire on a nearby country music festival, killing fifty eight people and wounding hundreds more. While the media and law enforcement seem at a loss for explanation, everyone agrees the shooter was a white man. Coincidentally, the single worst massacre in US history was also perpetrated by white men. In 1890, four hundred white soldiers executed three hundred indigenous civilians at Wounded Knee, the majority of them women and children. The media never mentions this fact when ranking domestic massacres. To them, Las Vegas is as bad as it gets.

Crimes against the indigenous extend from the shorelines of Alaska to the coast of Patagonia in southern Argentina. It was here the authorities raided an indigenous Mapuche occupation on land legally owned by the Bennetton Group, creators of Italian high-fashion and enforcers of cultural hegemony. During the August 1^st raid, the Argentinian police kidnapped and disappeared Santiago Maldonado, a nomadic anarchist and friend of the Mapuche. Like the police who took him away in a truck, Santiago Maldonado was white. Unlike the police and the state, Santiago had chosen the side of the indigenous.

In the two months since his disappearance, the streets of urban Argentina and Chile have been filled with discord. Argentine politicians scramble to pass the buck as their Chilean counterparts pray the tumult doesn’t spread over the Andes. Both nation states are guilty of repressing the Mapuche whose territory spans across their borders, just as both states have a history of US-backed fascist dictatorships. Oddly enough, both governments like to insist those days are over. Demonstrations and disturbances continue to take place in the Argentine capitol of Buenos Aires, the latest occurring on October 12^th where two anarchists were detained. Multiple solidarity actions have spread the name Santiago Maldonado from southern Argentina to the walls of Vienna and the streets of Panaji.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the home country of Luciano Benetton, the Italian police have been busy repressing the anarchists of Firenza (Florence). Operation Panic was launched by the authorities in January 2017 after a bomb planted in front of a fascist bookstore exploded, causing a cop to lose a hand and an eye. In addition to this, someone had the audacity to molotov the facilities of the local Carabinieri, Italy’s fascist-saluting federal police force. In August, after months of arrests, searches, and detentions, the authorities eventually raided and evicted Villa Panic, a long-standing squat on the outskirts of Firenza. Unsurprisingly, few outside Italy have heard about this wave of repression.

In a case that perfectly illustrates the breadth of international anarchism, Chicago-squatter and trans-anarchist Kara Wild. After leaving her home in the ruins of the Damen Silos, Kara made her way to Paris where she was swept up into the labor riots of Spring 2016. During a demo on May 18^th, a police car was burnt by a crowd of people in masks. Along with several others, Kara was charged with abetting the arson by smashing out the window. While their trial was taking place on September 21^st, 2017, an anonymous group burnt a Gendarmerie auto-garage in Grenoble, completely destroying multiple vehicles and expensive pieces of equipment. In their communique for the arson, the group explained it was in response to the trial of Kara Wild and her comrades. Despite this solidarity, Kara received a further two years imprisonment, while six others received sentences ranging from one to seven years.

The communique for the solidarity arson was posted on Indymedia Grenoble and Indymedia Nantes, after which it spread to the Telegraph UK and several other French news sites and blogs. Because their servers are located in France, the two Indymedia websites received a message from the Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (OCLCTIC), stating if they did not remove the communique, they would be furthering the spread of terrorism. In order to prevent their infrastructure from being seized, both Indymedia sites complied. All of this comes less than two months after the German state shut down Linksunten Indymedia for furthering violent extremism. This global repression has become the norm, from the Philippines to Argentina to Mexico, and the ranks of traumatized, tortured, and incarcerated anarchists slowly increases. Despite all this repression, the movement has only continued to grow, especially in the corpse of the United States.

Like our comrades in Greece, the US movement is facing a fascist menace supported by members of the democratically elected government. This state-sponsored fascist movement, the Golden Dawn, ordered its minions to stab immigrants, leftists, and anarchists. All of this violence reached a peak when Golden Dawn members stabbed the anti-fascist Pavlos Fyssas to death in September 2013. Less than two months after this murder, the previously unknown Militant People’s Revolutionary Forces claimed the assassination of two Golden Dawn members in front of their Athens headquarters. It was only after this first outbreak of civil war that the Greek state decided to arrest the Golden Dawn ministers in its own parliament, similar to the way US liberal-media decided to call the alt-right as Nazis only after the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. Four years later, Greek anarchists and antifascists marched to the Golden Dawn headquarters on the anniversary of Pavlos’ murder. The building was surrounded by the riot police, the rabid guard dogs of Greek fascism, and riot soon broke out filled with molotovs and teargas.

Back in the United States, anarchists and anti-fascists have flocked to the Texas communities ravaged by Hurricane Harvey in order to set up autonomous-mutual aid networks. These networks move faster than the state and are concerned with individuals, not numbers and forms, and have been able to provide quick relief to those affected by the hurricane. One group that has been particularly active is the Houston Anarchist Black Cross, a branch of the organization established in Russia in 1905. The Houston Black Cross and their comrades from Austin have organized brigades of first responders to bring supplies and aid to devastated areas. In the midst of these efforts, the local fascists attempted to storm the Houston Anarchist Bookfair in September 2017. Apparently, these white-shirted morons have nothing else to offer in the middle of a disaster.

Similar brigades of relief and reconstruction sprang up in Mexico after an earthquake leveled buildings from Chiapas to the Districto Federal. In the city of Oaxaca, the earthquake was preceded by riots against the visit of Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. In states like Oaxaca and Chiapas, the federal state is a hostile agent riddled with corruption, greed, and barbarism. Only those tied to the ruling party have any expectation of aid, relief, or assistance from the state. The indigenous of Mexico have long known this fact, and have organized themselves into the Indigenous National Congress (CNI), a body that is now running a candidate for Mexican president. Backed the EZLN, Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez is calling for everyone to band together in this campaign and destroy the system that is killing indigenous people and stealing their land. As one communique stated, “we do not seek to administer power; we want to dismantle it from within the cracks from which we know we are able.”

The CNI and the EZLN are not alone. Up north in British Columbia, the Unist’ot’en Camp still stands in the way of an oil pipeline, with its leaders now calling for multiple wooden cabins to be built in the way of the pipeline. This tactic is similar to modular houses being constructed by the Tiny House Warriors to obstruct the Kinder Morgan pipeline planned between Alberta and British Columbia. The territory of these tribes is crossed with fictitious property lines and national borders, much like the Kurds in the Middle East.

With the Iraqi army now assembling around the territory of Kurdistan in order to prevent their regional autonomy, the majority-Kurdish SDF has finally succeeding in liberating the city of Raqqa from the clutches of Daesh. As we write these words, the last of the IS fighters have finally surrendered. We hope this inspiring event will set the tone for the following months of struggle. With the NAFTA agreement on the verge of being scrapped by Trump, the whole of North America is anxiously awaiting the further dissolution of neo-liberal global capitalism. None of us wanted to reach this point, but here we are, wishing you all the best. Capitalism will end anyway. You decide when!