culture

Afghanarchism

Don't fall for the propaganda.

from Counterpunch by Nicky Reid

What American Radicals Can Learn From the Pashtuns

There is a narrative commonly held by observers in the west that the Afghans are a people defined by perpetual warfare. Like many stereotypes, this one comes with a cornel [sic] of truth. After all, the people of Afghanistan just got done throttling the bare hind quarters of the greatest empire Satan ever devised for the last twenty years with little more than rusty Soviet junk and raw grit. The rural highlands of southern Afghanistan have certainly fostered a distinctly martial culture that has aided its people in resisting generations of conquest, but to simply sum these people up by the wars they’ve fought completely misses the context of why they fight and what they were fighting for.

Announcing: Rulerless Issue 1

e-begging is cheugy

From Rulerless, Rulerless, Issue 1, Summer 2021

A Letter from the Editor

Considering I’m a writer, I always seem to have an astounding lack of ability to come up with what to say in response to amazing events happening to or around me. What I can say is that when I was given the idea for an anarchist poetry magazine in early 2021 (which of course soon expanded into the idea for an anarchist poetry, short fiction, and visual art magazine), I had no idea that just a few months later I would be putting together 25 incredible literary and artistic works into an issue to be released at the start of August that same year.

Solecast w/ Erda: Insurgent Emo Rap

insurgent | emo | rap

From Solecast

Erda makes emo inspired rap music with an anarchist bent. Their music expresses both the existential angst of our epoch and the spirit of resistance. Based out of NY, Erda has a background in various genres of music, and this lends itself to a very unique aesthetic and approach to hip-hop. In this conversation we talk about bridging the personal with the worldly, Erda's background with farming and permaculture and life under the algorithm.

I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

Star Wars, Intellectual Property, and Cultural Expropriation
by Peter Gelderloos

To say I am a Star Wars fan would be an understatement. In high school, I could win the Star Wars Trivial Pursuit board game in one turn: I didn't get any answers wrong and kept going around the board until I had collected all the tokens (yeah, not many friends). Of course, as I got older, I realized that the Jungian archetypes, Daoist philosophy, and tale of rebellion against authority that had so enchanted me were mixed in with a democratic storyline of restoring a “rightful” government, along with plenty of racial stereotypes and settler tropes. Nonetheless, it is hard to disavow the fantasy worlds one grows up with. The total conversion of Star Wars into a “franchise” is occasion enough to comment on how we might respond when capitalism eviscerates an imaginary world we love. The kind of cultural resistance I want to explore also offers some tactics for dealing with problematic aspects of the original movies.

Anarchy Bang: Introducing Episode 46 – OK Boomer

From Anarchy Bang

Aging. In the nineties it seemed the average age of the anarchist horde was in the late teens/early twenties. By the WTO (happy anniversary) it was more like college aged or mid twenties. Today the bell curve is flattening out and an average seems well into the thirties. I remember a friend opined that as the economy stopped absorbing people the age range of an anarchist would continue to rise. Whether it is politics, the economy, or a change in counter-cultural norms the anarchist is aging. What does this mean? Does it mean that generation gaps are occurring in the anarchist space? Does it mean we have more money and conservatives in our midst? Are we experiencing the same OK Boomer moment the rest of the culture is? This is the second of the last four episodes of this show and we hope you can join us in conversation!

Margaret Killjoy on Creating Culture, Anarchism, and her New EP

Margaret Killjoy on Creating Culture, Anarchism, and her New EP

From The Final Straw Radio

This week I had the opportunity to sit down with Margaret Killjoy to talk about her new EP called Every Breath Our Last out this October from her one woman project Nomadic War Machine. Margaret is a writer, musician, and anarchist based in Western North Carolina. We got to talk about a lot of things in this episode, including her new EP, what went into making it, Nomadic War Machine as a project in general, and her new anarchist fiction podcast called We Will Remember Freedom.

Emma Goldman's Cheese Blintz Recipe

Having been starved for so many years, he now ate ravenously. It was extraordinary what an amount of food he could absorb, especially of his favourite Jewish dishes, of which he had been deprived so long. It was nothing at all for him to follow up a substantial meal with a dozen blintzes (a kind of Yiddish pancake containing cheese or meat) or a huge apple pie. I cooked and baked, happy in his enjoyment of the food. Most of my friends were in the habit of paying court to my culinary art, but no one ever did so much justice to it as my poor, famished Sasha. - Emma Goldman, Living My Life

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