Strengthening our Resolve: An interview with Alex Hundert
by Dawn Paley
vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/strengthening-our-resolve

In the wee hours of June 26th, Alex Hundert awoke to the sound of police breaking down his door with a battering ram. Members of the gang unit entered his home in Toronto with guns drawn, arrested him and his partner, and took them to the now infamous temporary jail set up in an old film studio.

By the time the mass arrests started on Saturday evening, Hundert had already been transferred to the Maplehurst jail in Milton, Ontario. Over the next days, over a thousand G20 arrestees were put behind bars, including 16 more organizers and activists from Southern Ontario and Quebec who continue to face a variety of serious and trumped-up charges.

All of this might seem like a far cry from the life of a self described former “ski bum” who grew up the oldest of two boys in a middle class Toronto home. But Hundert, who was released on bail July 19 and today faces various charges of conspiracy related to G-20 organizing, can trace a line from his early activism right through to today.

While studying at Wilfred Laurier University, Hundert’s early forays into organizing were typical of many university students. “I was thrust into situations where these big, very effective organizing efforts, like doing campus fundraisers for popular causes such as AIDS, were happening and we’d get hundreds of people involved. But then everyone one would go home and feel that they’d done their part and everything was okay,” he said. “I felt that no matter how much money we raised on a university campus, we were not really contributing anything to the solution.”

Doing support at the blockade in Grassy Narrows opened Hundert’s eyes to a far more holistic form of activism, and deepened his analysis of capitalism and colonialism. “In Grassy Narrows, I got to see first hand the extent to which many of the things we’re told about this country are flagrant lies, and the extent to which the exploitation of resources and labour is synonymous with the destruction of communities,” he said.

Judy Da Silva, Asubpeeschoseewagong Anishinabe (Grassy Narrows First Nations), who has worked closely with Alex since 2006, attributes the growing movement of non-natives in support of Indigenous land rights to the work of Alex and others in Southern Ontario. “Alex Hundert is a patient generous person who works tirelessly on environmental & social issues on behalf of mother earth and her inhabitants,” said Da Silva. “He has continued to supports us in our struggle to protect our boreal forest from logging and pollution and to raise awareness about our issues to non-natives.”

But instead of being out on the land in Grassy Narrows or elsewhere, Hundert remains under house arrest at his father’s home in Toronto. He jokes that he’s been reading too much Chomsky, but says being jailed confirmed events he’d been witness to through activism in support of Indigenous struggles.

On the inside, it was other prisoners who helped him do the simple things, like fill out forms and navigate the prison system, which Hundert says is designed to dehumanize prisoners and their communities. But he thinks the attempt of the state to quash dissent through repression will have the opposite effect.

“I think in the long run, its going to have the same effect that cracking down on legitimate dissent and the public voices of communities always has,” said Hundert. “The effect is strengthening the resolve of that very voice.”

Already, people with no interest in political radicalism have been radicalized, said Hundert. “For every person that they are pulling out of the movement, to the extent that they’re able to do that through criminalizing and incarcerating us, there are several people to take our place,” he said.

Hundert doesn’t want a focus on the criminalization of activism to obscure the reasons people are in the streets.

“Whether its remote-controlled airplanes dropping bombs in Pakistan, or whether its the OPP attacking Six Nations land defenders, or whether its the Integrated Security Unit criminalizing so-called anarchists, its all about the attempt to break people’s resistance to an imposed order,” he said. “It is important to question just how democratic or legitimate that order is, and lots of people know that, and hanging on to that conviction is just as important as being honest about the experience of criminalization.”

Though this has been a difficult time for Alex’s friends and allies, they remain firm supporters of his work. “Alex’s family and friends are proud that he is putting his future on the line in service of social justice,” said Amy Rossiter, a Professor at York University.

Asked how people can support those still in jail and facing charges, Hundert says beyond giving to the legal defense fund, making space for people to create new alternatives and imagine their own forms of resistance is vital. And although the Crown will appeal Alex’s bail conditions next week in a move that could put him back in jail, he’s clear about what steps organizers can take.

“I think the most important thing we can do is to make space for those communities that have been most silenced in shaping the current system to facilitate a process of transformation with their voices, visions, and practices,” he said.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Community Center for Social justice, which Hundert helped found, is one example of creating that space. “Once we make space it is a lot harder for them to take it away, and no matter what they do to us, other people can join that community and culture of resistance and fill it with what they want.”

By Darius Mirshahi

Recently, a few people decided to set fire to an Ottawa branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, completely gutting it. Nobody was injured, and they posted a video of this action online, stating their reasons for taking such a bold action; primarily RBC’s financing of the Tar Sands and sponsorship of the 2010 Olympics.

Since then there have been various responses. Some politicians and police officers are calling this destruction of property “terrorism.” The corporate media is hyping up the threat of violent protesters while ignoring the ongoing violence and devastation being caused by their advertisers. Some high-profile activists are trying to distance themselves from this action, and are even going so far as to publicly denounce it, fearing it alienated the average citizen from their causes, and that their privileged positions in society might be threatened.

But the average citizen doesn’t feel much pain for corporate property, especially banks. Banks are being burned all over the world at an ever-increasing rate as the poor are forced to pay for the global financial crisis created by the greed of the rich. Only the rich mourn the loss of banks, the rest of us know banks are the biggest thieves of all. They lend us made up money at high interest rates, and then evict us from our homes when the corporations they bankroll outsource our jobs. They invest in anything financially profitable no matter how much environmental damage or human suffering it causes.

That said, this particular act of sabotage is the first of its kind in the current struggle against the tar sands’ and definitely an escalation in the tactics activists have used against Royal Bank. For the past several years Royal Bank branches from coast to coast have had dozens of windows smashed in, their locks glued, and multiple ATMs sabotaged, all while a public above-ground movement organized all types of protests, disruptions, direct actions and awareness campaigns to draw attention to Royal Bank’s investments.

Royal Bank of Canada continues to be the largest financier of the tar sands, even though it is causing death and disease to the indigenous communities downstream, and is the most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. Obviously they don’t mind enriching their stockholders, but the moment someone sabotages one of their banks in response it is condemned as terrorism and labeled extreme. The double standard is blatant.

Unlike the day-to-day dealings of RBC, burning an empty building is not terrorism. The arson in Ottawa was simply a signal of frustration and genuine anger against the violence and injustice caused by RBC. Affected communities have been pleading for years with Royal Bank to stop funding the ecocidal tar sands to no avail. RBC shareholders have been confronted on the issue multiple times as well, and have continued with their business- as-usual. They cannot plead ignorance any longer; they are now deliberately desecrating this planet in the name of profit.

An RBC going up in flames blew away any chances that RBC could continue hiding its acts. Thousands of people who might not otherwise have cared are now interested in the motives of this attack. They want to know the “what and where” and naturally need to know the “why and who.” This is a classic example of propaganda by the deed. All it took the vigilantes was a camera, a computer, a getaway car, and some homemade incendiaries to send their message out to millions, and explain why RBC deserved it.

Now millions of people not only know some truth about the tar sands, but understand that there is militant resistance to this ecocidal project. Even though no actual violence has occurred yet, aboveground activists who’ve been organizing against RBC can use the famous civil rights line “those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” Activists engaged against the tar sands may now take more radical action because nothing less than firebombing a bank is considered the extreme element of the movement. These types of actions open up space for others to escalate their tactics while still remaining ‘moderate.’

However, we must all still be very wary of outright military conflict with the state and corporations. After all, they are the ones with actual militaries, nuclear arsenals, and super-prisons. During times of social unrest, there is a concentrated effort to push pro-revolutionaries underground towards clandestine militancy in order to isolate them and cut them off from aboveground support networks.

Divide and conquer is still their tactic. Their goal is to have an isolated underground that atrophies as it becomes more clandestine, and an easily managed above-ground that is non-confrontational, ineffective, and disempowering for participants. They want nothing more than aboveground and underground activists to attack each other over tactics than actually developing diverse strategies in which all types of actions reinforce and support each other’s efforts.

My words are not enough to create change, but neither is their fire. Militant clandestine actions are a dead end without support from a broader social movement. The most effective social movements are decentralized and diverse, offering the widest range of activity, and points of entry to participants. If our movements are ever to succeed we must use every tool in the toolbelt. The forces we are struggling against sure are, and they have a much bigger belt.

For a world without banks, for diversity in struggle.

Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance, or SOAR, is the name some people are using to organize actions around the G20 summit in Toronto. We are anti-capitalist, which means we reject an exploitation-based economy and the ability of the rich to control the things the poor need to survive. We are anti-colonial, which means we challenge the ongoing conquest and exploitation of this land and of its original inhabitants by the canadian government and corporations, and that we stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples against the many faces of colonialism and cultural genocide. We recognize colonialism not as a historical phenomenon, but as an ongoing process of the canadian state and corporate apparatus.

The canadian state was founded through acts of genocide, and can only continue to function with ever increasing amounts of violence. In Toronto and around the world, people find themselves in conflict with the canadian state just for standing up for their right to survive.

canadian mining companies destroy the land and intimidate those who resist in Central America and in territories across this land. canadian police maintain a campaign of repression against marginalized communities, as demonstrated by a string of murders of racialized youth over the past years. Meanwhile, the environmental racism of the canadian government condemns already marginalized communities across the country to a slow death-by-poisoning, because their existence is inconvenient. All around the world, canadian financial interests are attacking people’s basic needs. The list of atrocities is without end, but that does not mean that they are forgotten or forgiven.

As anarchists, we stand in solidarity with those who are on the receiving end of capitalist and colonial violence. For this reason, we too see ourselves as in direct conflict with the canadian state. And we – along with oppressed people around the world – refuse to be forever on the defensive, to fight simply to survive against the systemic violence. The machinery of this system grinds on, and if we can’t throw a wrench into it, someday we will all feel its teeth as keenly as do oppressed and exploited people everywhere.

This June, when the orchestrators of the worldwide system of exploitation gather in Toronto to congratulate themselves and plot their next move, we will take to the streets and fight back.

The state’s violence is routine and deliberate. It is not an accident. This violence is necessary for the capitalist, colonial system to continue. The mainstream media presents each killing, each oil spill, each military coup, each case of corruption as being an isolated incident, as an exception. They make all the right sounds, feigning outrage and regret, and sometimes they show us some lone scapegoat getting punished. They make excuses for the system, lulling us with sweet lies even as the system lurches already towards its next victim.

And when we rise up to demonstrate our discontent, the mainstream media faithfully make a few broken windows seem like unacceptable violence. But it doesn’t take a lot of thought to see who the truly violent members of our society are. Are a few broken windows more important than the growing pile of corpses left by the occupation of afghanistan? Than entire communities stamped out by canadian mining companies? Than ecosystems and habitats destroyed by oil spills? Than yet another racialized youth murdered by cops? This system is built on violence, and as communities of resistance we must respond.

The ruling elite, using the mainstream media as a tool, counts on us forgetting about the past obscenities by the time the next one rolls around. They count on us to have short memories, to not recognize the patterns, and certainly not to follow those patterns back to their root. And when we resist, they tell us that we’re the ones in the wrong. Then they carry on reporting about the world and about communities as if violence was not in every aspect of our modern civilization. But the destruction of the earth is far more violent than sabotaged machinery, and the presence of armed uniformed thugs enforcing capitalist rule in our communities is far more violent than the destruction of corporate property.

By taking to the streets, we are rejecting the power of self-proclaimed leaders to control our lives and to go on destroying the planet and enslaving its inhabitants. We are not asking the G8/G20 to change their policies – we do not want a kinder, gentler system of oppression.

As anarchists, we build the alternatives we want to see – we organize grassroots community services, create spaces for education, publish media, grow our own food, and explore direct democracy and alternative models of conflict resolution. And as well, we use direct action to protect ourselves and our communities from destruction when they come under attack. We seek to build communities based on freedom and mutual aid while actively resisting the violence of the state. We believe in a diversity of strategies and tactics, and we stand with all who resist.

The capitalist system is, and always has been, a constant attack against people everywhere. The G20 represents this system of destruction on a global scale. We do not accept Stephen Harper or anyone else’s power to make the decisions that will affect us all. The capitalist, colonial, racist, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic Canadian state is totally illegitimate – we reject it completely, and want to remove the state and capitalism entirely from this land, along with all the other G20 regimes.

This is why we fight – because the only other choice is submission. We can either beg for the scraps of our freedom, or we can take our power and create freedom ourselves.

Forever and everywhere,

Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance

Brand new video from radical hip hop mc’s Test Their Logik, just in time for the G8/G20 in Huntsville and Toronto.

By Ward Churchill
You don’t have to have the preponderance of the population engaged in some sort of a final campaign to bring down the government. What you do need is the ability to cause an increasing number of people to withdraw consent from some key sectors that keep the system functioning. And if an appreciable number of those people are going into more active forms of resistance and are supportive, at least to the extent that they won’t give you up to the cops and that maybe they will make a contribution, be it monetarily, or by providing you sanctuary, I think that’s attainable over the long haul. You have to have a much greater weight in order to take the structure intact and then rearrange its organization, than you need to have it begin to unravel and collapse, and that’s actually the aspiration that I hold.

You also have to create counter-models that people can look at, that they can be attracted to: “Oh yeah, there is another way of doing this and maybe I’d be more comfortable in that context. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t lived in it, but it looks like something I might like to explore.” That leads to withdrawal, and creates doubt as to the inevitability of state structures and that’s what you’re trying to create.

Not that you’re going to supplant the structure of the state with co-ops, or little land occupations, collectives and so forth. In the 70s in particular, there was this whole notion that you could simply create a society that you want within the shell of the old one, and eventually the old one will wither away. Well that ain’t going to happen either. You’re going to reach a certain threshold and then the state will begin to actively repress you and try to crush you.

The Black Panthers’ breakfast for children program, their community clinics, alternative educational institutions, job placement programs, housing initiatives, and all the rest, when viewed as a package in and of themselves may seem like a very liberal agenda. But it was framed in terms of a very coherent program of self-determination, of self-sufficiency, that sought to remove those service delivery sectors of responsibility from the state, and to place them in the hands of the community.

You don’t see a lot of that happening these days. For most people in the anarchist community who organize in their little collectives and get together and eat their bean sprouts and shit, it’s only for themselves, at the present time. If you want to talk to factory workers, you need to connect with them where they are, not where you think they should be. You need to get over your prohibition on ashtrays. You keep asking me why nobody shows up, except you, when you organize an event - there’s the answer. I’ve answered the question about 15 times. You may have ideas, you may have counter models and they might be constructive, but if people - coming from the bowling alley or something - have to spend 15 minutes reading your fucking signs about what they can or can’t do in exchange for the privilege of entering your sacred premises, they’re going to go bowling instead. Get over your bicycles and go down and bend a wrench with a gear-head for a while. Do what he’s fucking doing.

Maybe he’ll learn how to talk to you and vice versa.

But that’s like shedding the black uniforms. It’s a real psychological barrier to some anarchists, because they’ve got the solution to the world’s problems somehow in code form in their minds. They posit an implicit demand that people are supposed to acknowledge the superiority of their vision as the price of admission. So get the fuck off the university campus and down into a union hall. Put ashtrays on the goddamn tables. Make some babysitting services available. And try to package it in a set of terms that can appeal to the people you’re trying to reach. Call it spin if you will, call it packaging, call it Madison Avenue - but how you pedal it, how you try to reach people, is really important. They’re probably not about to put safety pins in their eyelids and all the rest of that shit. I understand why you’re doing it, and I’m not objecting: it’s just that you’ve got to realize that there are some other people out there you need to reach if you’re going to be successful, who don’t feel that way. And you need to respect that. Because you’re ultimately demanding that they respect you. That’s a reciprocal proposition.

From Indigenism, Anarchism and the State: An Interview with Ward Churchill
(Upping the Anti # 1)  http://www.uppingtheanti.org/

With the close of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, much of the media was quick to declare them a total success. This goes against the mounds of journalism produced before and during the games by the Vancouver Media Co-op, the city’s newly launched independent media center. Believing that there might be more than one answer regarding the success of the games, and one of those should come from the host communities, The Real News spoke to Franklin López, Video Producer with the Co-op, to find out more about the legacy of the 2010 Olympics for the people of Vancouver.

Hundreds of anarchists block the Olympic torch route and forced torch bearer Carrie Serwetnyk out of Commercial Drive.

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Editor’s Note:

The following is a copy of a communique released by the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) prior to the start of the RBC and Coca-Cola sponsored Olympic Torch Relay, which called on activists across Canada to mobilize and organize protests as the torch passed through their towns, cities and communities. As the following pages will show, the call was answered by people all across this country - with many of the grievances outlined in this document echoed in cities from Victoria to Montreal. Iconoclast congratulates all those who took the time to organize and participate in these protests, which were often maligned or ignored by the country’s corporate media outlets, led by CTVglobemedia (owners of the Globe and Mail and a large number of Canadian television stations) - themselves an important Olympic sponsor.

CALL FOR CROSS-CANADA MOBILIZING:

EXTINGUISH THE OLYMPIC TORCH!

From October 31 2009 - February 12 2010, the Olympic Torch Relay “A Path of Northern Lights” will be traveling across Canada. The Olympic Resistance Network, based in Vancouver, Unceded Coast Salish Territories, is calling on and encouraging our allies to coordinate efforts in over 2000 communities to oppose and resist the Torch Relay.

The origins of the Torch Relay lie in the dark history of the 1936 Games in Berlin, where it was devised as a means to spread Nazi fascism and to promote the Third Reich. The Royal Bank of Canada and Coca Cola are the main sponsors of the 2010 Torch relay. RBC is the top financier of the environmentally devastating Alberta Tar Sands, while Coca Cola has been responsible for health degradation as part of the junk food industry, massive depletion of groundwater and toxic waste pollution in India, and involved in hiring paramilitary groups to violently repress union organizers in Colombia.

It is becoming increasingly evident that far from being simply about sport, the 2010 Olympics is rooted in displacement, corporate greed, militarization, and repression. While Olympic corporate sponsors are getting bailed out, Indigenous lands are being stolen, more people are becoming homeless, thousands are losing their jobs and access to public services, the environment is being destroyed, and civil liberties are being eroded as over a billion dollars are being sunk into security and surveillance measures.

This Torch Relay will be the longest in-country relay in Olympic history, giving us the chance to make some anti-Olympic history! No Olympics on Stolen Native Land!