news – Page 17

BAD NEWS 34 – Angry voices from around the world

Posted on May 16, 2020 by Anarchistisches Netzwerk Dresden

Welcome to the 34nd episode of “B(A)D NEWS – Angry voices from around the world”, a news program from the international network of anarchist and anti-authoritarian radios, consisting of short news segments from different parts of the world.

This issue is naturally concentrated on topic of corona-virus and it’s influence on our struggles. Unfortunately we have inputs only from one continent this time, but it is special due to the presence of voices of people struggling at Rojava, at Moria refugee camp and prisons in Greece. For us it’s very important to give this voices a chance to be heard.

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Symbolism on the streets

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Anarchistisches Netzwerk Dresden

We started this section because a lot of people were confused about anarchist symbols. Some believe that black flag stands for antifa. Other are getting confused about hammer and sickle. We even did a short research on twitter with 7 people out of 58 believing that circled a is a symbol of antifascist movement and 2 thinking that it stands for anti-capitalism. So there is still a long road to go to establish anarchist symbols in German political scene.

However this chapter of circle-a we will dedicate talking about right-wing symbolism. We are not going to explain to you what swastika stands or how does AfD logo looks like. It seems to us that most of the people actually know right wing symbols better than many of their own. It is a captivating dynamic. For sure AfD is quite present in the society with their aggressive advertisement. However the right wing party is also present in progressive parts of the city through its critics. People make a lot of critical visual art that actually incorporates AfD logo into it.

The reproduction of logo, even with critical perspective, is still reproduction of a brand. In modern world we all know that “there is no bad publicity”™. So every time we reproduce symbols of conservatives, extreme-right or straight on nazis we are somehow making their presence in our society bigger even if don’t want that. I believe the place with biggest AfD mention on the walls of the streets is Neustadt in Dresden. In other cities it’s other alternative neighborhoods, where we write “Smash AfD” and so on. The silliness of this situation goes as far as people painting swastikas just to cross them and show their affiliation to the antifascist movement.

We believe the good way to counter this reproduction of enemy propaganda is through positive messages: write slogans that are standing for certain things that anarchist or socialist movement represents. Make it stronger with some nice symbols that can be incorporated to promoted your ideas. You don’t like art that exists around your local resistance movement? Get together with you friends and make new things up. Fight back and create revolutionary symbolism.

But for fuck sake don’t go around painting hammer and sickle or some other reactionary shit!

See you on the streets!

Elect them all – green party joins ruling coalition in Saxony

Posted on March 7, 2020 by Anarchistisches Netzwerk Dresden

This text was originally written for Circle-A #10

By the time you read this text it’s been 4-5 months since last elections in Saxony. AfD became the second biggest political party in the region and Michael Kretschmer got his seat back in Parliament most probably out of pity. Many were counting that Kretschmer would leave (after all for CDU this was the worst election since collapse of the wall) and CDU would finally admit their affection to AfD.

Linksunten Indymedia – to the recent demo in Leipzig

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Anarchistisches Netzwerk Dresden

Independent Media Center is now 20 years old. The project that was started during protests in Seattle is not in a great shape internationally however in some countries it’s role is still quite important for the anarchist, left and liberal movements. With riots in Connewitz attracting a lot of media attention and relative silence in the left circles on the topic we decided to write our own perspective on what is going on right now with indymedia in Germany and where can it go further.

To the students – anarchism and students

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Anarchistisches Netzwerk Dresden

The reason for this article came up several years ago when I had a chat with a good comrade of mine. We were talking about the current situation with anarchist and socialist movement in his country, and he pointed that students were in long run actually a counter revolutionary part of the society. The person who said that was not a one-day anarchist rather a comrade that was fighting for revolutionary ideals for years. One of the main points of our discussion was the background of those students that are getting involved in the struggle – mainly this is the people from financially successful families that have little troubles in their lives. Most of them work for the pocket money but their life till the end of university is organized. Of course there are exceptions to those who are the first generation of students in their families, however those are in many cases exceptions in the left and anarchist movement. Apart from that distance from the serious economical or social problems gives them an easy way in and easy way out of social struggles – in case you are giving up your current group, collective or organization there are little consequences of that step. Together with this point comes the issue of short attention span – as a student you can jump to the hot topics as soon as they pop up and switch easily because of the previous issue. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to have a deeper discussion, but this conversation pushed me further into the topic although i never came back to talk to my friend about it. The irony of it was that he was considering doing several more years in university as a student (in his age he would rather fit as a professor than a student).