This post will contain material from Edinburgh AFA.
This post will list material from Birmingham Anti-Fascist Action/Alliance.
It’s 11.00 on the 11th November as I start writing this. The campus has just slipped into observing a two-minute silence to mark Armistice Day and I’ve slipped into the silent rage that these celebrations of imperialist slaughter always provoke in me. To shift my mood a little, I remember instead two rituals of remembrance that I associate with the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy back in the 1980s.
Remembrance Sunday was always a tense day on the Non-Stop Picket. Situated in Trafalgar Square it was less than a mile away from the Cenotaph on Whitehall, the focus for state rituals of remembrance. Sometimes the hordes of passing former servicemen and women passing the Picket on their way to or from the ceremony at the Cenotaph could be antagonistic towards the anti-apartheid cause (although that was not universally the case). Those retired soldiers were never the real problem, though. The threat posed to the Non-Stop Picket on Remembrance Sunday was the annual parade passed the Cenotaph later in the day by the motley membership of the neo-fascist National Front and/or British National Party. They definitely didn’t like anti-racists protesting against apartheid, and had a tendency to either try to launch full on assaults against the Picket or, more ‘subtly’, attempt to provoke violent arguments with picketers. In response, each year on Remembrance Sunday large numbers of City Group supporters and other anti-fascists would mobilise and gather on the Non-Stop Picket to defend it against potential attack. On 13th November 1988 in particular, hundreds gathered outside the Embassy in response to heightened fear of fascist attack. In parallel to these mobilizations, activists from the Non-Stop Picket would often patrol the area with Anti-Fascist Action to spot and head off groups of fascists heading towards the Picket.
These anti-fascist mobilizations to defend the safety and integrity of the Non-Stop Picket once again highlight the ways in which, for the members of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group, the politics of anti-apartheid solidarity activism could never be separated from anti-racist and anti-fascist work in Britain.
Weaving flowers into the Embassy Gates, Summer 1986 (Source: author)
There is one further way in which I want to remember rituals of remembrance associated with the Non-Stop Picket. That is to consider the ritual practices that City Group developed to remember those freedom fighters killed by the apartheid regime. When apartheid prisoners were executed, anti-apartheid activists were assassinated by South African agents, or the South African Defence Force (sic) massacred youth in the townships, City Group would respond to witness that act of state violence. Very often this involved a ritual of placing flowers on the imposing, monumental gates of South Africa House. Sometimes this would be a modest and spontaneous act by the protestors gathered on the Picket for a particular shift, but during the weekly Friday night rallies or other large gatherings, a dignified queue would form as scores of protestors waited to add their flowers to the Embassy gates until they were bedecked in flowers of remembrance. More often than not, the picketers would sustain the haunting melody of Senzenina, a song sung at political funerals in South Africa, throughout this act of witness, mourning and remembrance.
If poppy-wearing and the official two-minute silences of Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday serve as nationalistic rituals that reproduce public support for continued military intervention around the world through the remembrance the fallen soldiers of past wars; then, the laying of flowers on the gates of the South African Embassy and the singing of Senzenina renewed the commitment of the picketers to stand in solidarity with those resisting apartheid in southern Africa.
This article is from the fantastic Non-Stop Against Apartheid blog.
This post will list various literature from Red Action.
This post will list literature from the Independent Working Class Association.
Also see the IWCA’s Filling the Vacuum document.
Another update. New pictures, new videos and new literature.
I am hoping to pick up the Red Attitude collection tomorrow, so the next update will be uploading the rest of the fanzines.
In this update you can find:
World In Action goes inside the National Front and the BNP to reveal the violence and deception behind it’s patriotic public face. The film includes sworn statements from a police infiltrator and from defectors – some in hiding – and reveals the contents of confidential files and private documents.
Thanks to antifascist45
Firstly I’d like to say a massive thank you to the person who donated £10 to the Archive.
A number of New Essays have been added, these include:
Last update saw a lot of material on the 1997 International Conference AFA held. A Fighting Talk Special which was published prior to this conference has been added.
A second part to the scrapbook has been uploaded. This contains more newspaper articles on fascism and its enemies.
From the Scrapbook Part Two I have added new fash stickers (15-19).
I have made an edit to my thesis on the request of an interviewee. This can be found on page 33.
Yours,
The Archivist.
More additions have been made to the Archive, again thanks to SM.
The publishers of Beating the Fascists, Freedom Press, have got into hot water regarding the cover picture used on the book. Whilst this post isn’t strictly about the history of AFA, I think it warrants a post on this archive.
Now that we’re bust and what we’re going to do about it
As many comrades are aware, Freedom has continued thanks to a significant donation in 2005. This not only enabled us to keep the paper going, but also to publish large print runs of important anarchist classics and undertake work to the building such as moving the shop downstairs. It has also meant that we have been able to pay people (albeit at very low rates) who are doing work which prevents them getting gainful employment elsewhere. This has enabled the political transformation of Freedom Press from a group with a particular viewpoint within anarchism to a resource responsible to the broad movement. We don’t want to return to a situation where Freedom is run simply by those with spare time or money who then determine its politics.
While we can’t have an ideal accountable structure (the undercover cop federation would end up in charge) the Freedom collective includes comrades from The Anarchist Federation, The Solidarity Federation, Corporate Watch, Anarchist Black Cross, Liberty and Solidarity, Advisory Service for Squatters, Action East End, Anti Fascist Network, Legal Defence and Monitoring Group as well as non-aligned comrades – be fair you can’t expect Donald to set up a new group at 84.
However, the 2005 donation has now run out. This is not unexpected of itself, but it has happened sooner than we anticipated because of the Beating the Fascists photograph saga. When we published this book in 2009 it was illustrated with photographs supplied by the authors. Unbeknown to us, these included pictures taken by David Hoffman which were still under copyright. We have ended up paying him £4,000 for the use of these pictures rather than face legal action. While this was a stupid mistake by us, it’s very disappointing that someone who claims to support anti-fascist politics and made money from their photographs, while enjoying protection from the far right on demonstrations, should chose to extract money from a radical publisher for a genuine mistake. The result is that we have had to reconsider the future far sooner than we thought.
We will still be able to carry on at 84b with the shop and distributing books and, of course, all the offices, meetings and other activities in the building. However we are going to look seriously at continuing producing a hard-copy paper. Freedom is (and for a long time has been the only) regular paper of the anarchist movement in this country, yet the number of subscribers (around 300) and groups/individuals distributing it (about 10) is tiny. The exact size of the anarchist movement is known only to the Box and the Branch, but given that the London Anarchist Bookfair attracts around 3,000 people, they can’t all be undercovers. Thus we know only a minority want to read and an insignificant minority distribute Freedom. This could be because printed newspapers have had their day as a form of propaganda, or it could be the paper’s rubbish. Nothing we can do about the former, but fixing the latter will be down to more comrades writing better stuff. However before considering shutting the paper down we want to explore the possibility that the majority of the movement simply haven’t considered the possibilities of using Freedom to spread the anarchist message. Even if comrades don’t want to spread the anarchist message, they can at least make a few bob selling it. Freedom is printed for free by Aldgate Press out of their historic loyalty to the movement. However we still have to pay for layout and folding, admin and postage. Subscriptions would need to rise to around 500 to break even, or raise the UK subscription to £36. It seems a shame to give up such a resource as free printing for the movement, so if we discontinued the hard copy of the paper we would ask Aldgate if they would be prepared to do any other stuff either free or discounted.
In reality. The only test that we can do to decide whether to continue with the paper is to see if there is practical support in the movement for it. This has two elements. Financially, at the current level of subscriptions we would need £4,000 in donations a year to keep the paper going. Obviously there are many good causes competing for comrades’ money and if you or your group think that the cash should be spent on other projects then that’s well and good. More significantly, does the anarchist movement think that producing and distributing Freedom is beneficial to the anarchist cause and is it prepared to do so. If the situation remains as it is now we will end the hard copy version in October on its 125th Anniversary and put out some guff about it transforming into a digital entity for the online age.
Appeal and public meeting at the Bookfair
Hence we are launching an appeal for donations towards keeping the paper going and to get more people to take the paper on sale or return. We will keep comrades informed both in print and on the website how it’s going. We are having a meeting at the London Anarchist Bookfair so comrades have a chance to discuss the future of the paper face to face.
This article appears in the July 2012 issue of Freedom.
Anti-Fascist Archive 