Workers Solidarity Movement

Last week some of the Ireland to Calais refugee solidarity convoy were on the road in the vicinity of the Calais migrant camp when they witnessed and recorded a pepper spray drive by attack by the French police on a group of women standing by the road side.

Graffiti has appeared at the site of the bomb explosion in Ankara yesterday that reads "It was not terror that killed us, it was the state." This is reflecting the widespread belief that the true origins of the bombing that killed around 100 people at the pro Kurdish peace demonstration are to be found in Erdogan's AKP party desperate attempt to intensify conflict in the hope of polarizing the electorate ahead of Novembers elections. The same process in other words that those killed yesterday were demonstrating against.

Shorting after yesterday's bombing of a pro-Kurdish peace rally in Ankara, the capitol city of the Turkish state out friends in DAF released the statement below.  Since the release the death toll from the bombing has gone over 100 people and is expected to rise further.

CAN’T BE FORGOTTEN, CAN’T BE FORGIVEN

A few kilometres away from the small Serbian border town of Sid, a dirt track through corn and turnip fields serves as passage to tens of thousands of women, men and children seeking refuge and lives of more possibility.

The unofficial border crossing between Serbia and Croatia is surrounded by sun-lit verdant fields, apple orchards in the distance and a calm that brings temporary respite to those who have been on the road for weeks or months. The threat of militarised borders and recent memory of dehumanising conditions along the way is temporarily kept at bay as those walking stop to drink freshly pressed apple cider handed out by a local farmer, chat and rest before they continue on.

Lots of people think anarchism is a far-out thing, but really most of it is just common sense and there are surely far more anarchists out there than consciously identify as such. Read this (non-exhaustive) check list and see what you think.
 

WSM recently held our first Facilitation and 'Conversations about Anarchism' training day in Dublin. The photo shows the problems attendees had already encountered in meetings they had participated in. How many of them have you come across?

The purpose of the training was to give people the basics of facilitation that can avoid or at least minimise these problems.
At the end of the training all the 11 people who had taken part were very positive about it. One said “It was good to meet new people, I learned a lot about facilitation and would now be more confident now, I also learned about anarchist process” while another said “It was very comprehensive with detailed techniques about how to facilitate.” Everyone said they would be interested in future trainings.

"Although the EU is not new, and its role in determining the economic and political development of Europe is both substantial and well established, critical analysis of the EU is sorely lacking. Most of what is written on the EU is uncritically liberal and focuses on diplomatic and legislative detail. What little critical literature exists often simply interprets the EU in terms of the function it plays for neoliberal globalization. When analyses of the EU go from what it does to the larger questions of what it is and why it exists, analysis often becomes completely un-rooted."

Europe Forged in Crisis: The Emergence and Development of the EU - discussion with the author Oisin by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

The cartoon on the left is from a few months ago but expresses how Kurds saw the role of the Turkish state towards ISIS and the conflict in Syria. Considerable evidence of support for ISIS from the Turkish state has been published in the international media over the last months. An ISIS commander told the Washington Post on August 12, 2014, "We used to have some fighters -- even high-level members of the Islamic State -- getting treated in Turkish hospitals."

This Sunday the Observer revealed details of a US Special forces raid on an ISIS compound. “One senior western official familiar with the intelligence gathered at the slain leader’s compound said that direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now “undeniable”.” Oil smuggling was what that ISIS leader was co-ordinating with the Turkish officials and ISIS were getting an “estimated $1m-$4m per day in oil revenue”

Eighty years have passed since the publication in the pages of the Russian anarchist monthly Delo Truda of the Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but the question of anarchist organization remains an open one even today, a question which sparks off ferocious debates with frightening ease.