Communique from the community in resistance, El Rebollero, San Pablo Cuatro Venados, Oaxaca, denouncing another armed attack against their community.
To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
To the Indigenous Governing Council
To the National and International Sixth
To the Free and Autonomous Media
To the Press in General
On May 28, at approximately 6:00am, a group of more than 100-armed men entered the community in resistance of El Rebollero, San Pablo Cuatro Venados, Oaxaca.
They began shooting at the community forcing the population to flee seeking safety. Afterwards, the armed men began to burn our houses and our personal things.
This attack occurs just days before the inauguration of our health center and our chapel. Two buildings which are a symbol of the reconstruction of our homes. In 2019, 500 armed men with heavy machinery entered our community destroying everything.
On previous occasions, we have alerted the three levels of government about these attacks and they have ignored us. For this, we hold responsible the state government of Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, the federal government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the authorities of Cuilápam de Guerrero. We also hold responsible Flavio Sosa Villavicencio and his brother, who belong to the Morena party, for these actions and the damage caused.
Never More a Mexico Without Us!
Sincerely,
Inhabitants of El Rebollero, San Pablo Cuatro Venados, Oaxaca
It’s so important that the public have no real say in US politics that the empire not only set up two oligarchic puppet parties which pretend to oppose each other, but also set up fake populist movements within each of those factions which pretend to be fighting the establishment within those parties.
It’s a very clever illusion that sucks up almost all real opposition. If you don’t fall for the first kayfabe conflict and realize the game is rigged for the powerful, you can still end up buying into the fake populist movements set up to oppose them. I fell for them both early on in this commentary gig. But after a while of watching what they do (as opposed to just listening to what they say) and seeing where they actually stand and fight or refuse to fight, you see it’s all an Inception-level fakery. The opposition is controlled, and so is the opposition to the opposition.
It’s like when you dream you’re waking up from a dream but you’re actually in another dream; you awaken from the liberals-vs-conservatives puppet show and then turn to the fake progressive Democrats or the bullshit MAGA camp as a solution, but you’re still asleep.
This all sounds like an awful lot of work to go through until you remember that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on the ability to prevent the American public from either (A) voting in a disruptive government or (B) fighting a revolution. So much power rides on their ability to do this.
❖
Ever since the school shooting in Texas we’ve been watching an entire country learn that it’s not actually cops’ job to save anyone or risk any danger and the only reason they assumed otherwise was because of movies and TV shows.
❖
Idea for an action movie: The Rock needs to rescue his kid from an elementary school where there’s an active shooter, but first he needs to fight his way through an army of cops trying to stop him.
❖
You end mass shootings in America by ceasing to have America serve as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by violence and nonstop mass media psyops. It’s not impossible. It’s not even difficult. It’s just not an option anyone in charge would ever consider.
❖
I’m finding myself having less and less patience with people who think the US is an innocent little flower regarding the Ukraine war. It’s like, come on. Grow the fuck up.
❖
Friendly reminder that for a fraction of the cost of funding a world-threatening proxy war against Russia the US could simply have protected Zelensky from the neo-Nazi militias who were threatening to lynch him if he tried to make peace with Russia and prevented this entire war.
❖
The airhead mainstream narrative that Ukrainian forces have been destroying Russian troops and humiliating Putin in epic win after epic win has become unsustainable:
Russian troops are making steady progress in Ukraine’s east. That's sparking fears they could be poised for a bigger breakthrough, and leading to increasingly panicked calls from Kyiv for more powerful weapons https://t.co/TbneLP3ABF
Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against #Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front. https://t.co/YLu9M28Cx8
Another shout out to all you big brave sofa warriors who’ve been screaming that a negotiated peace settlement is unacceptable and helping the US empire throw Ukrainian lives into the gears of a stupid proxy war for US unipolar hegemony while you sit safe at home eating Doritos.
❖
If you’re more hawkish than Henry Kissinger, you’re too fucking hawkish.
❖
Whenever I try to talk about the risk of the Ukraine war escalating into a nuclear holocaust I get people telling me if that happens it will be Putin’s fault. Like that would make it okay somehow. Like that would somehow validate all the steps our leaders took to get us to that point.
Of all the intensely stupid ways team loyalty and partisanship can express itself, I really don’t think you could come up with one dumber than “Our nuclear brinkmanship isn’t a problem because it’ll be the other side who launches the first nuke” if you tried.
Even pretending it’s certain that Russia would be the one to initiate a nuclear exchange, would that thought actually comfort you when you feel the earth shake? Would you feel any better about the decisions which gave rise to that moment by telling yourself Putin started it? I mean if there’s any time when it doesn’t matter who “started it”, it’s surely when the “Mutual” and “Destruction” part of Mutually Assured Destruction goes into action? I think at that point all our dopey team sports cheering and booing pretty much goes out the window, no?
❖
Nowadays whenever there's an agenda that's of high value to the US empire there is a 100% chance you'll soon see shitlibs using woke-sounding jargon to promote it. pic.twitter.com/KD56cBI4wo
Hollywood lies about what American journalists really do in the same way it lies about what American soldiers and police really do, and it has just as disruptive an effect on people’s perception of reality.
❖
People who accuse you of having Kremlin loyalties when you question or criticize the US empire are admitting that they don’t care whether statements are true or false, only whether they demonstrate loyalty to our rulers. That’s the lens through which they examine the world, and it’s pure brain poison. How can people think lucid thoughts and engage in lucid discourse about ideas and events when they are continuously measured not by how truthful they are but by what loyalties they appear to demonstrate? They cannot.
❖
Empire loyalists have exactly two arguments:
1. “That foreign leader my government dislikes is comparable to Adolf Hitler.”
2. “If you object to what my virtuous government has planned for that leader it means you love and support that leader.”
❖
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can stay abreast of the day-to-day depravity of the oligarchic empire without a daily practice geared toward inner peace. Things are so insane and confusing and only getting more so; you’ve got to have a regular discipline to form stability.
Meditation, self-enquiry, healing and energy practices, whatever gets you there, but surely you’ve got to have something before you can stare into the face of the beast continuously without going mad. I can’t imagine looking at this thing every day without any kind of a practice.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Neither Republican calls for more guns and policing nor Democrat demands for more gun control can put an end to the epidemic of mass shootings in the United States. The problem runs deeper than either of these approaches can address.
A week and a half after an 18-year-old white supremacist murdered ten Black people in a mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket, another 18-year-old killed nineteen children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas attended by predominantly working-class and Latino/Latina students. The husband of one of those teachers subsequently died of a heart attack brought on by grief.
The town of Uvalde budgets almost half a million dollars for school security and monitoring services, augmented by $69,000 from the Texas state government for metal detectors, barriers, security systems, “campus-wide active shooter alarm systems,” and the like. Despite receiving almost 40% of the city budget and an additional half a million dollars of state grant money, the Uvalde police dragged their feet for an unusually long time during the massacre while parents begged them to do something.
Decades of police militarization since Columbine have not only failed to stop mass shootings, we frequently see police put their own safety above that of the people they are supposed to protect as State repression + brutality proliferates. An analysis. https://t.co/O8S13YOLSj
As anarchists have documented, militarizing police has done nothing to protect people from mass shootings. In 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the United States. Police killings were already among the leading causes of death for young men.
Creating a society based on coercion and control does not protect us. All the money that city, state, and federal governments have channeled to police departments has made them a more powerful force in our society, but this has made us no safer. They don’t use those weapons to stop people from harming us, but to protect themselves, pursue their own interests, and dominate us.
According to the courts, police officers have no duty to protect students from being killed in the first place. That’s not what police are for.The role of police is not to protect, but to control. It is not to prevent crises, but to determine who suffers in them. The footage of police physically restraining parents while their children were murdered speaks volumes about this.
Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are taking advantage of this opportunity to repeat their talking points about who should or shouldn’t have guns. But neither of them are acknowledging the root causes of the problem. Both of them are proposing responses that can only feed into the vicious cycle that produced this tragedy in the first place.
The Republicans…
Republicans, long tied to the National Rifle Association and the gun industry, have responded to this massacre by calling for more police and more guards at schools. They have consistently sought to defund schools and to limit what can be taught or even said in them, but they are eager to funnel ever more resources towards the security industry. Of course, flooding our society with even more weapons will not cut down on the number of shootings, whether by on-duty police, off-duty police, or others who have access to their guns.
Some Republicans have written mass shootings into their playbook, weaponizing these tragedies as an opportunity to spread disinformation and hatred. Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, known for participating in white nationalist conferences, claimed that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien,” repeating a lie that had appeared on the far-right recruiting platform 4chan. Right-wing media personality Candace Owens also spread this lie. It was no coincidence that a group of bigots repeated this claim as they assualted an underage trans girl shortly afterwards.
CW: An underage trans girl was assaulted by a group of men in #Texas who repeated the false claim pushed by pro-white nationalist Republican Paul Gosar + MAGA grifter Candace Owens that a "transsexual leftist" carried out the #Uvalde massacre. https://t.co/5eCoilNPV3
Some rank-and-file Republicans may be credulous enough to believe these lies, which are constantly updated to keep ahead of fact-checkers in the news cycle. Other Republicans surely recognize them as falsehoods—but in a world of fake news, boldly proclaimed falsehoods are interpreted as a show of force.
This cynical strategy creates a feedback loop. The worse things get, the further society descends into self-destructive violence, the more opportunities there are to blame this violence on an Other—whether trans, leftist, undocumented, or Black—against whom ever more violent force is required. This is why no amount of mass shootings—and there have already been 214 this year—will discredit the Republicans, as far as their base is concerned.
…The Democrats…
Democrats, on the other hand, have called for more gun control. Some Democrats on the left are even coming around to understanding that no amount of policing is going to put a stop to mass shootings. But the problem is—who would enforce stricter gun laws? The police, of course. And they would enforce those laws just as selectively, and with just as much racism and violence, as they enforce all the other laws on the books.
There are more than 400 million privately owned firearms in the United States, well over one per human being. Now that those are in circulation, it will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Buy-back campaigns might have some small impact, but as long as there are armed white nationalists and armed police, other people will be rightly hesitant to give up their guns. Until our society is ready for multilateral disarmament—including the state—those guns are going to stay in circulation, and police efforts to control them will only lead to more imprisonment and police violence.
Cops stood outside the school while the killer rampaged inside.
Onlookers yelled at them to go in. They didn’t. One parent urged bystanders:
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to.” @AP story: https://t.co/l2CqPCzmAf
If, at the end of an unprecedentedly invasive crackdown, only police retained access to firearms in the United States, that would not put an end to white supremacist mass shootings like the one in Buffalo. Police are disproportionately involved in white supremacist movements—even if we don’t count the murders they commit on the job.
Even when Democrats criticize the behavior of police—for example, their cowardice in Uvalde—this always serves to rationalize directing more resources towards police and their surrogates. As long as the logic of the punitive justice system remains unquestioned, even the fiercest criticisms will be used to justify calls for new police training compounds and programs.
Republicans don’t want to hinder white vigilantes’ gun access, because they see white vigilantes as essential to preserving the prevailing social order. Democrats want the state to have a monopoly on force, because they believe that this is the best way to preserve that same social order. Under Biden, Democrats have done everything they can to rehabilitate the image of police while falsely associating the steady increase in violence and desperation with movements to abolish police and efforts to abolish the disparities in wealth and power that the police exist to impose.
…And Us
What is the solution, then? What can we do to put a stop to mass shootings?
If the police exist to protect the wealthy (and themselves), then as disparities in wealth and power increase, the police will protect fewer and fewer people. This is not a sign of their failure; it is precisely what they have always done.
The gulf between the wealthy and the poor has steadily increased for decades now, alongside police violence and mass shootings. The resulting desperation and despair contribute to people becoming mass shooters. The same goes for the scapegoating and demagoguery that arise in such a profoundly unequal, fearful, and acrimonious society. If we want to stop the shootings, in the long run, we have to abolish all the mechanisms that create these inequalities, and all the forces that preserve capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. In this regard, the fight to stop mass shootings must set itself much broader goals if it is to succeed.
During active shooter drills at schools across the United States today, children are taught that their best bet in the event of a shooting is to fight back—to throw textbooks or chairs or whatever they can get their hands on at the shooter. This is the response of a society that doesn’t intend to protect children, that never has protected them. It indicates that we really are on our own. We have to understand this and start organizing accordingly, rather than putting our faith in politicians of any party.
Post-9/11 policy was one of the worst things to happen to human rights in the US and worldwide in recent history. It's no model for how to respond to a tragedy. It gave us fascist agencies like ICE, legalized war crime, and much much more atrocity we're still fighting.
One of the fundamental roles of police is to discourage us from solving problems ourselves, so we defer both our own safety and the resolution of conflict to the authorities. Yet most parents will risk more to protect their children than the police ever will. What would have been necessary for the parents in Uvalde to have been able to successfully address the shooting themselves, in defiance of the police? What grassroots institutions would need to exist, what resources and skills would need to circulate? It’s horrifying to acknowledge, but we are in a situation in which more and more of us really have no better option.
If it’s up to us to address these shootings, then rather than looking to the Democrats to tighten gun control via legislation and police action, we might begin by asking what a direct action campaign targeting the gun industry itself might look like. What if we could sidestep the Rube Goldberg machine of party politics entirely to cut into the profit margins of the corporations that have been making a killing selling firearms?
There is no safety without self-determination. To be safe, we have to be the ones who define what counts as safety, and we have to have the power to shape the conditions of our lives. So far, the most effective participants in the movement against mass shootings have been the students who have staged walkouts from their schools. Another starting point is to make sure that student organizers have all the support and resources they require as they figure out for themselves how best to preserve their lives.
“If school has taught today’s students anything, it is that those who make decisions on their behalf do not always have their best interests at heart. In the world that they are entering—fraught with tremendous disparities, threatened by climate catastrophe, and wracked by civil conflict—the most important thing they could learn is how to act collectively to defend each other. That is the skill they are going to need, more than any prerequisites or job training.”
While everyone’s focused on the latest mass shooting in the US, The Washington Post published what may be the first major acknowledgement from the mainstream western media that Ukraine’s war against Russia has not been nearly the cakewalk they’ve been leading the public to believe.
In a new article titled “Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned,” WaPo reports that contrary to the triumphant narratives the western world is being spoon fed, many troops in eastern Ukraine have been surviving on one potato per day and deserting their posts because they feel their leaders have turned their backs on them and they’re being sent to certain death.
“Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end,” The Washington Post reports, citing multiple named sources.
“Ukrainian leaders have projected and nurtured a public image of military invulnerability — of their volunteer and professional forces triumphantly standing up to the Russian onslaught,” the article reads. “But the experience of Lapko and his group of volunteers offers a rare and more realistic portrait of the conflict and Ukraine’s struggle to halt the Russian advance in parts of Donbas. Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.”
Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against #Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front. https://t.co/YLu9M28Cx8
WaPo reports that volunteer troops in that part of the country “quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive.”
“We are being sent to certain death,” said one volunteer. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”
“Hours after The Post interviewed Lapko and Khrus, members of Ukraine’s military security service arrived at their hotel and detained some of their men, accusing them of desertion,” WaPo reports. “The men contend that they were the ones who were deserted.”
Some commentators have remarked on the fact that at long last we’re seeing some realistic coverage of this war in the mainstream press.
“First major US media I’ve seen to report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces, collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in,” tweeted journalist Mark Ames, a frequent critic of the mass media blackout on conditions in the Ukrainian military.
“This might be the first article in a mainstream publication that punctures the PR spin and secrecy of the foreign military that the US is subsidizing. Two commanders were arrested after they spoke to the Washington Post, painting an extremely grim picture,” tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.
This is indeed a major break from standard mainstream reporting on this conflict, which is normally more in line with this recent Newsweek article titled “Putin’s Elite Soldiers Getting Wiped Out as Russia Makes Mistakes—U.K.,” sourced entirely in unevidenced claims by the British government and the military industrial complex-funded neocon think tank Institute for the Study of War.
First major US media I've seen to report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces, collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in.https://t.co/sYYwdm1p62
So anyway, there it is. That’s the reality on the front lines of this conflict that westerners have been cheering on from their comfortable homes while calling anyone who advocates a negotiated peace settlement a Putin apologist and a Kremlin troll.
These big brave sofa warriors have been on social media demanding that Ukrainians keep fighting in this way until they’ve secured total victory over Russia and reclaimed Crimea and the Donbas, tweeting “Slava Ukraini” with their little blue-and-yellow flag emojis during the commercial breaks of their favorite TV show in between mouthfuls of Funyuns.
Westerners would be a lot less cavalier about demanding a foreign population keep fighting until total victory if they truly understood the horrors of war. Unfortunately there’s a propaganda machine of unprecedented sophistication that has spent generations preventing them from obtaining that very understanding.
That’s why they’re so happy to throw endless Ukrainian lives into the gears of the imperial war machine, and that’s why the WaPo article we are discussing here is receiving very little mainstream attention online as of this writing. It will be dismissed and ignored by empire managers and their brainwashed flock with a “Hmm, you just can’t hire good cannon fodder these days.”
"So you think Ukraine should just GIVE Putin the Donbas and Crimea and neutrality, to end a war Putin started??"
No I think Ukraine should sacrifice rivers of blood serving as US proxy cannon fodder for years to drain Moscow while you sit at home eating Pop Tarts and tweeting.
There’s no real reckoning with exactly what’s happening and exactly what these people are being called on to put themselves through. In the children’s crayon drawing version of this war that lives in the heads of western so-called centrists, this is a team of heroic Good Guys righteously beating the tar out of hordes of Bad Guys because that’s what happens in the movies and on TV.
But this is not the movies, and this is not TV. People are dying in a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US-centralized empire, and behind all the narratives and spin they are ultimately doing so for nothing more noble than the agenda to secure US unipolar hegemony.
Many of the blue-and-yellow flag wavers are well-intentioned, and really do think they are advocating for Ukrainian freedom and sovereignty. But in reality all they’ve been cheering for is Ukrainian subservience and enslavement to the empire, Ukrainian death, Ukrainian suffering, and the continuation of a dangerous proxy war between nuclear superpowers that threatens the life of everyone on earth.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Report on ongoing encampment defense in so-called Minneapolis, MN.
Minneapolis encampment defenders sought to “strike” back against camp sweeps on Tuesday 5/25 with a, “You Sweep? We Strike!,” breakfast and bowling event at a longstanding encampment. Defenders of camps have been organizing weekly morning get-togethers to defend against potential evictions, and display to the city that camps have popular support as the safest alternative for unhoused neighbors while the city refuses to provide housing.
Mayor of What, Jacob Frey, adorns a bowling pin for an early morning bout of dirt ninepins. pic.twitter.com/QFFBP4dQ2X
— Twin Cities Encampment Responders (@TCparkresponder) May 25, 2022
Sweeps split up communities and families; cops and public works employees allow residents only a short time to spare whatever meager belongings they can from the bulldozers. The city recently shifted responsibility for camp evictions to the Department of Regulatory Services, whose director Saray Garnett-Hochuli recently gave a tirade before the city council in which she declared camps “will not be tolerated” in the city. Hochuli also falsely claimed that a police officer had a leg broken by camp defenders, whom she portrays as violent outside agitators. We demand Hochuli and city departments stay in their lane, stop playing gutter politics and leave camps alone.
— Twin Cities Encampment Responders (@TCparkresponder) May 24, 2022
The You Sweep, We “Strike” bowling event was inspired by a copaganda hit-piece on KSTP Channel 5 last week, in which white supremacist reporter Jay KKKolls (known for such stories as claiming antifa was behind the 1/6 US Capitol storming) decried a flier that threatened retaliation against city property for encampment sweeps, and gave the names of city officials who have encouraged and facilitated the sweeps. The segment was a continuation of a smear campaign by Mayor Jacob “The Eviction Guy” Frey, backed by conservative council members like LaTrisha Vetaw, to manufacture alarm about alleged incidents of violence against city staff, attempting to pin such isolated incidents on encampments.
A short video was released in response, juxtaposing the KSTP segment with lived experiences of camp residents at evictions:
Jacob "Eviction Guy" Frey, with the help of a copaganda hit by KSTP, has been stoking fears of violent camp defenders.
How does the city's fear of retaliation stack up to unhoused residents' lived experience of repeated camp sweeps and displacement? Let's take a look. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/p4VotmTfLW
— Twin Cities Encampment Responders (@TCparkresponder) May 23, 2022
(Part 2/2) If camp evictions seem more cruel and violent to you than the flier in that KSTP hit piece, then:
–Tell the council and city eviction bureaucrats to leave camps alone
–Come out in the mornings to support & defend unhoused folks
–Give time or $ to @SupplyDepotMPLSpic.twitter.com/Tk8jKQatsY
— Twin Cities Encampment Responders (@TCparkresponder) May 23, 2022
At the same time as city officials manufacture these stories, a group of BIPOC city employees and white accomplices are organizing against the confirmation of Heather Johnston as city coordinator, arguably the most powerful unelected position in city government. The city staff have accused Johnston and other city leaders of fostering a racist and toxic workplace culture – showing that the biggest threat to city workers is coming from inside the house, not from activists defending their neighbors from displacement and state violence.
Joy Marsh served as @mplsgov's Director of Race & Equity and says the CCO is the "most insidious and toxic work environment [she] experienced in nearly three decades of professional work."
On Monday, an email from Johnston obtained via public data request was released, showing how she chided city council members who showed up at Near North camp in January to oppose a pending eviction attempt. In the email she called the actions of police and other workers who conduct sweeps “caring and compassionate,” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Johnston’s confirmation vote is expected to take place on Thursday May 26.
‼️OPPOSE HEATHER JOHNSTON AS MPLS CITY COORDINATOR‼️
This email from a city data request shows Johnston reprimanding CMs for opposing encampment sweeps, urging them not to "arriv[e] on site" nor interfere with "communications before the event."
Next week, a potential sweep of a south Minneapolis encampment on MN Department of Transportation (MNDOT) land is expected. Many of the residents were displaced by the massive eviction involving 120 MPD officers of the 5th and Lake camp just over one month ago. MNDOT follows a different process than the city of Minneapolis, and was responsible for clearing, “The Wall of Forgotten Natives,” camps in years past, where the land is now intentionally littered with industrial debris and fenced to prevent re-occupation.
As the summer heat and more potential evictions approach, Minneapolis camp supporters can use all the help they can get to provide for basic needs (connect with the Sanctuary Supply Depot, continue to put political pressure on the city, and resist evictions.
A zine with anecdotes from Minneapolis encampment defense, but perhaps also useful to other cities seeking to build defense capabilities, was recently released here. The authors of “So You Want to Stop an Encampment Sweep: 4 Lessons From Mpls Camp Defense 2021-2022” hope that all those seeking to defend neighbors in tents, whether in Minneapolis or somewhere else, will discuss, refine and adjust the lessons learned and put them to use where they live.
