STATEMENT FROM 12 OF 61 RICO CO-DEFENDANTS: Anarchism Must Not Be Criminalized

From Scenes from the Atlanta Forest

This statement was written before the Al-aqsa Flood, during which Palestinian fighters broke through the fence around the open-air prison known as the Gaza strip in 29 locations. We condemn Israel in the strongest terms, & support the liberation of the Palestinian people. We know that the same weapons and tactics that have been and continue to be used to colonize Palestine have been and continue to be used to colonize Turtle Island, as we can see in the GILEE Program (Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange) where the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) soldiers share “best practices” with police in Georgia. The proposed  Cop City [in Atlanta] will be the military base from which the occupation of Atlanta is furthered, and we oppose their progression of the genocidal project  known as the United States.

This RICO indictment is an attempt by the state to not only criminalize dissent, but a specific set of ideas which leads to dissent and offers an alternative framework to the state and capitalism. Anarchism, solidarity, mutual aid, and collectivism are specifically named in the indictment to make people afraid of these ideas, when the only people who are actually afraid of these collective ways of organizing are the politicians, cops, and corporations who seek to preserve their absolute power over humanity. If we had ways of living more collectively, satisfied our needs through mutual aid, and had solidarity with each other, people may realize they don’t need the state or capitalism, and they may realize that the greatest causes of human suffering and barriers to freedom and security are the state and capitalism. The state wants us to be atomized consumers who cannot survive without selling ourselves to someone wealthier than us, who rely on alienating, impersonal judicial systems and violence from a gang of armed outsiders to resolve our conflicts, who outsource the production of our food to invisibIlized, mostly non-white, non-citizen laborers, and who outsource our decisions to a corrupt, unaccountable politician class. The state wants us to be terrified and paralyzed into allowing the continuation of its sordid legacy through the land grab, the plantation, and the prison farm which haunts the Weelaunee forest and all the state’s territories to this day. This critical analysis of the state is an important part of anarchism, and it is what the state and corporate media want to scare us away from and criminalize.

Acting autonomously and directly to shape our world is a good thing. Solidarity means seeing our siblings in the human species as people with the same intrinsic value as ourselves. A society which depends on endlessly competing, undercutting, exploiting, dominating, and selling each other out is going to be scrutinized and resisted by anyone who believes in solidarity. Mutual aid means providing for each other and collectively gaining from the construction of mutually beneficial interpersonal/inter-community relationships. A society which depends on depriving us of the ability to meet our needs for food, water, shelter, and healthcare and then selling them back to us is going to be seen as unjust and worth changing/rejecting by anyone who believes in mutual aid. Fowler’s description of collectivism is a bogeyman meant to imply that anarchists intend to force everyone to give up their personal autonomy and sacrifice their needs for the collective, but in fact a core goal of anarchism is to empower people to have more autonomy, and a core goal of the state to force everyone to sacrifice some or all of their autonomy for the continuation of systems which enrich a shocking few and are making the Earth uninhabitable. Do you feel free when you go to work? When you pay taxes? When you pay rent? When you pay for health insurance? When you pay for groceries? If people had more solidarity maybe they wouldn’t allow the US to invade and exploit other countries with impunity. Maybe they wouldn’t allow the US to imprison millions of people, tear apart families at the border, or let people starve to death while throwing away half of all the food. If people learned about mutual aid maybe they would start to solve these problems themselves, start to mitigate the damage done by the state, and demonstrate that none of it is necessary.

If the state succeeds in prosecuting this case it will do lasting harm to all of us. Just as the RICO law was ostensibly written to take down the mafia and has expanded to taking down anarchists, it will expand to take down any social movement which demands substantive change from the state. The law does not need to find you guilty of any crime, only of “conspiring” with people who are, with “conspiring” now meaning as little as sharing beliefs or goals. If you believe the state is doing something wrong or have a goal of making it stop doing that thing, you could be guilty of conspiracy, even if you never met anyone who committed a crime in furtherance of that belief or goal.

There is no “Defend the Atlanta Forest” or “Stop Cop City” organization, only the goal of defending the Weelaunee forest from destruction and opposition to the construction of a military base for police. People have chosen a myriad of ways of achieving these goals, but nobody was receiving orders, nobody was initiated into any group, and there was never a singular plan. The fascism of the Georgia RICO statute lies in its enclosure of free social relations into its definition of an enterprise, to include “any unchartered union, association, or group of individuals associated in fact although not a legal entity.” By this logic, a group of friends can be a criminal enterprise — or a group of strangers. “Governmental as well as other entities,” “licit as well as illicit”? Anyone and anything, then, can be demarcated as existing within the Georgia police state’s cage of “the enterprise” — it just depends on what the state wishes to domesticate. Under the Georgia police state, “it shall be unlawful to participate,” “directly or indirectly,” in the fight for life, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with those who share our fight inextricably. We cannot be disentangled, and we won’t be. Mutual aid and solidarity are intrinsic to how our Earth and its inhabitants survive – in spite of systems of permanent suffocation, we all breathe the same air – a conspiracy with the trees. Loving one another is how we live and fight in tandem. We don’t need a centralized “organization,” “entity,” or “enterprise” for our fight, because it belongs to all of us. We are all forest defenders.

The struggle that each of us is taking part in is the struggle against imperialist, white supremacist, cis-normative heteropatriarchy. This struggle may feel chosen, depending on the privileges each of us has. To stand tall in solidarity is to contend with the history of this struggle. The state is attempting to equate any individual’s personal actions and definition of anarchy, collectivism, mutual aid, social solidarity as either domestic terrorism or racketeering. By doing so the state intends to sow division among individuals that all desire to stop cop city for whatever personal reason each of us has. This strategy has been used time and time again by oppressors.

Instead of lying low & keeping our heads down in hopes that the state will, “go easy on us,” we are choosing to stand tall in our solidarity with each other as well as the idea, lifestyle, & practices of anarchy, & life-supporting actions of mutual aid.

Mutual aid is what we do & solidarity is how we relate.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Solidarity is our shield, anarchy is our sword.

 Solidarity From so-called Atlanta to Palestine

There are 36 Comments

"ANARCHISM MUST NOT BE CRIMINALIZED" is just a nonsense, we are inherently criminal, by definition,

But, it gets worse, for instance, comparing atlanta to gaza is disgusting, but the examples are endless.

including:

"The struggle that each of us is taking part in is the struggle against imperialist, white supremacist, cis-normative heteropatriarchy. This struggle may feel chosen, depending on the privileges each of us has. "

fuck, anarchism has been drained of all anarchy

i get how everyone is predisposed to hate on this shit but do you honestly not understand the distinction between illegal activity that happens in an anarchist context (already a thing) versus the efforts to criminalize the existence of anarchists?

those are significant legal battles for anyone trying to keep track of just how far gone US "democracy" is

I think the person you're replying to is the non-anarchist troll that has no life and just complains on every article about how anarchists are dumb. They wouldn't know anarchy if it was injected directly into their microwaveable frozen tendies that their mom made them come all the way upstairs to reheat themself. SHE'S SUCH A BITCH!

It's not that US democracy is far gone but that this type of repression is entirely possible and normal in the context of bourgeois liberal democracy. Social anarchy that doesn't violate the law theoretically should be allowed to exist e.g. book stores, cafes, legal protest etc. Now the state is going after it's ideological enemies by criminalizing culture, ideas and symbols not just crimes in the usual sense. We really are in an Orwellian times.

What else do you expect from our enemy, the State? More food stamps?

Legalism and anarchy have always been strange bed fellows. And social anarchy is their fucked up love child.

Birds don't get laid with cats for a reason, duh.

"legal battles" are what we're supposed to be focused on now, Lumpy?

was pretty careful to clarify, anyone who doesn't want to just live under a rock and keeps track of world events a bit ;)

not only is it disgusting to compare whats happening in Gaza to what's happening in Atlanta, but this whole schtick of projecting our values on people who do not share them is just absurd!

"cis-normative heteropatriarchy"???

Do white american leftists not understand that palestinians in general do not share this politic? The joke on the internet rn is that there's not enough tall buildings left in Gaza right now to throw gays off of.

Like, you do realize that it is Israel, not Palestine, where gay culture is protected right? You do understand that people in Gaza by and large do not share this value, right?

"Gays for Gaza!" (an actual group) is like saying "Chickens for KFC!"

The problem is that white liberal americans (which describes most of the "anarchist" space) ultimately want EVERYONE to share their unquestionable values...

And Stirnerians, because they are anti-Christs, and like, everyone hates them cuz they don't fit into any spooky molds!

You say "homophobic and transphobic palestinians... as if that didn't refer to like 98+% of all palestinians. Your comment should just read:

"are you cool with palestinians in general?"

I hope it's clear that I by no means want them "genocided"....I just think "insurrectionary" and "combative" anarchists should be careful about who they get in bed with...If anything, the whole situation over there is WHY I'm an anarchist: because I DON"T want my life ruled by power-seeking, armed political gangs.....

Here, let me edit this for you:

Are you cool with thousands of Palestinian children being murdered?

Does it change how you feel about thousands of Palestinian children being murdered if some of them are homophobic and transphobic?

pause for rhetoric check:
anyone saying they're cool with anything, much less anyone's murder?

seems to me that people are checking the knee jerk labelling of anarchist as anything activist. not that activism is always bad, but it's certainly not always (or even usually) anarchist...

You're either confused about the fact that you're on an anarchist site, or you're a bot. show some evidence that Gaza feels the way you're claiming about gays. Or shut the fuck up.

fuck you, i don't care that you believe most gazans hate gay people, pick anywhere on the globe and there's a big chance they hate gays too. how many gay palestinians have died in bombings, or have been walking miles with no food and water, maybe they're the only ones who don't deserve to die? you are disgusting for generalizing an entire people going through a GENOCIDE right now, even referencing a joke making fun of their destroyed homes and lives and turning it around, saying "at least they can't kill any more gays!" just start saying they're all terrorists next. fucking disgusting. suck israel's colonizing dick more

I think by "anarchism must not be criminalized" they mean "if just the use of the a word makes things worse legally thats gonna suck"

Fuck people can we stop calling the blood thisty individuals that participated in the 7th atrocities "freedom fighters"?

I asure you, these guys are not part of a "struggle against imperialist, white supremacist, cis-normative heteropatriarchy" - as you call it.

the attack on the 7th was largely against military and organized far right israeli settlers.

oops forgot to take off my trolly name from last time i left a comment

Yeah, all those young people at the music festival were military targets. To the theocratic fascists of Hamas, all citizens of Israel are military targets. Their conception of collective guilt is the mirror image of the secular and theocratic fascists of the Israeli state.
Right wing settlers live on the West Bank, not the south inside the Green Line.
You can keep trying to excuse war crimes because the victims were mostly Jews, but I will most certainly call you out and denounce you as a reactionary POS.

There's no evidence these Israeli civilians were Far Right, and if they were 100% military, they were definitely not in service. Adding to that, many of the victims that were filmed were not "White", by Euro Caucasian standards.

Always fun to see Lefties and other indoctrinated political tools accuse Israeli settlers of being Far Right when so much of the Palestinian national liberation movement is the result of Nazism and post-war Nazis.

Go back to Germany.

I'm sure that the only reason all those Palestinians don't like being killed by the thousands and being oppressed non-citizens in an ethno-state is because some Nazis stirred them up. Otherwise, I'm sure they would be well-behaved little colonial subjects.

Or at least, that's your story.

They definately ARE NOT...but every "anarchist" can't wait to play amateur historian or amateur foreign policy commentator or amateur "revolutionary"

So tell me, 11/11 at 01:49 anon, what are your thoughts on the Nate Turner rebellion? Or the Haitian Revolution?

What are your thoughts on the Hebron Massacre and the Arab Revolts of the late '30s? What are your thoughts on the Muslim Brotherhood's bank was co-founded by a notorious Swiss Neonazi, and Hitler being presented as a hero in the Palestinian education system where also the Holocaust is presented as a Jewish lie? What are your thoughts on the very Palestinian flag being formerly the flag of the "Holy War Army", a paramilitary corps dressed in Nazi uniforms and led by a pro-Nazi Mufti that called for the extermination of Jews?

Lemme know later, but won't be holding my breath too long. Thanks!

What are your thoughts on nearly 5000 Palestinian children being murdered in the last month? You don't care, right? You like it! That's why you're trying to change the subject!

Everyone can see where your politics are at.

Yeah, Hamas should've held up "Free Palestine" signs and held up more watermelons, that'll show Israel! Btw, the Hatian revolution was based, right?

*puts bong down and and blearily stares at keyboard,,,,,types*
-Has world war 3 started yet?-

Hamas and the state of Israel are BOTH terrorists; Sorry, but that's how complicated (or simple) the situation actually is....

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