A Practical Security Handbook for Activists and Campaigns was originally published in the United Kingdom in 2004. While part of this handbook is now outdated, we believe some of it is still very relevant.
This document is a partial re-edition of the original handbook. We have freely adapted its contents, leaving out sections that we deemed outdated or irrelevant to this re-edition, improving wording, and changing a few details, while trying to stay as close as possible to the spirit of the original text. We have also added footnotes to point the reader to up-to-date information on DNA, CCTV, and other topics.
This re-edition contains a wealth of information to help anarchists and other rebels analyze their security needs, plan and carry out direct actions, and detect or evade physical surveillance. We hope it will help you defeat the State and achieve your goals. Good luck!
We are witnessing the most documented genocide in history in Palestine and the consolidation of a fascist regime in the United States. Many of us are wondering what to do about it. Here’s a conceptual framework for understanding what’s going on and how we can respond. This synthesis draws upon material from Kelly Hayes and her Organizing My Thoughts blog, the thinking of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie of Interrupting Criminalization, Ejeris Dixon and his podcast Fascism Barometer, Scot Nakagawa’s The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook blog, Anne Archet’s blog flegmatique, the YouTube channel Thought Slime, and Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, among other sources.
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Some Basics
Fascist movements, parties, and regimes can be recognized by:
an authoritarian trajectory aimed at dismantling democratic structures, eliminating dissent, and maintaining their leader’s power.
blatant lies that do not undermine their support.
a propensity for instrumentalizing crises or creating them out of thin air to enrich themselves and to restrict civil liberties, including freedom of movement and assembly, the right to demonstrate, freedom of the press, and the right to a fair trial.
idealized representations of race and nation, articulated in terms of purity, unity, and loyalty.
a desire to dominate and/or eliminate marginalized groups (women, migrants, 2LGBTQIA+ people, Black people, Indigenous people, religious minorities, people with disabilities, the poor, autistic people, etc.) that takes the form of dehumanizing rhetoric and repeated attacks on their fundamental rights.
a conviction that inequalities do not stem from social conditions but are natural and biological, and that this hierarchy is entirely legitimate.
references to a fictional past where all of the above was allegedly the case.
a fetishization of violence as the response to the humiliation of failing to entirely dominate marginalized groups.
a dual objective of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Fascism can seize state power through elections, a coup d’état, or a combination of both, as in the case of the Trump administration, which won the election and used its ascension to power to carry out an “administrative coup”—the illegal usurpation of congressional power and various state department powers by Elon Musk and the DOGE.
Once in power, fascism uses a well-known operative approach: criminalization. It passes laws that make certain activities criminal and deploys the police, the justice system, and prisons against the people who engage in them. For example, it criminalizes:
giving or receiving certain types of care (abortion, gender-affirming care, and possibly care for people with autism and people with disabilities. . .).
providing information (by transforming the definition of pornography so that the laws sanction any book dealing with queerness, by transforming the definition of antisemitism to include any denunciation of the genocide of the Palestinian people, by arresting lawyers who give legal information to migrants. . .).
simply existing on its territory (the mass revoking of visas, cancellation of status, criminalization of the homeless. . .).
Beyond laws, criminalization is politicized to designate entire groups of people as threats:
trans and intersex women are a threat to cis women in sports and more generally.
demonstrators are a threat to the rest of society.
migrants undermine job security and the housing market and threaten the working class.
Muslims threaten national security.
These threats are nurtured by fascist narratives and presented as existential threats to the nation’s future, thereby:
dehumanizing targeted groups.
pre-emptively stripping them of their fundamental rights.
portraying them as “others” who must be violently controlled, punished, and eliminated.
using them as scapegoats for all the evils of capitalism and fascism.
It is through this process of criminalization that fascist regimes create popular consent for the violence deployed against certain groups (physical and psychological violence, disappearances, forced labor, denial of care, murder. . .). People are made to believe that:
those target by hatred are not victims but are being punished for their crimes.
violence is both justified and completely normal.
those targeted would have been left in peace it they hadn’t committed a crime.
However, what is defined as a crime continuously grows.
This process also exists in so-called liberal democracies, which have developed expansive judicial and prison apparatuses. Fascists need the infrastructure and the legitimization that liberal democracies readily provide for the industrial-carceral system to function.
Keep in mind that:
police and prisons are a legacy of slavery and colonization.
Indigenous peoples in Canada have been the targets of genocidal violence.
their dances, rituals, and languages were criminalized.
they have suffered mass sterilization, forced displacement, and far-reaching abuse in residential schools.
Fascism is not so much a break with liberal democracies as a form its panic takes. As a result, the fascism currently consolidating in the United States and taking shape in Canada and Québec is characterized by:
panic in the face of recent advances in social justice, which they call “wokeness,” and which threaten their domination.
panic over the climate crisis and the efforts to mitigate it, both of which threaten access to the resources that underpin their dominance.
a tense alliance of Christian fundamentalists, a racist and sexist grassroots movement, a political elite, and ultra-rich big tech oligarchs.
Here are a few other important facts about fascism:
The fascists want us to waste our time. They will tell all sorts of lies so that we spend hours trying to prove our point, deconstructing their rhetoric, and clarifying facts. Then the next day they completely change their tune forcing us to do it all over again.
For fascists, certain (mythical) truths are more important than reality. If reality doesn’t agree with their truth, reality is wrong. Their relationship to reality is substantially undermined, so reality won’t convince them that they’re wrong. Reality has no bearing on their truth.
Above all, fascists want power. That’s what motivates them. They will adjust their rhetoric and values as much as is necessary to acquire and maintain power.
Fascists want survival of the fittest, based on a cartoonish Darwinian vision of evolution. They want to dominate. As they see it, anything that keeps them in power is justified. Their domination proves them right, and that’s all they need.
Fascism is not the work of a few outsiders hovering above the population. People participate, cooperate, and then become acculturated to fascism. It becomes their reality, their way of understanding the world.
How to Deal with Fascism
Historically, state apparatuses, opposition parties, the justice system, and the mainstream media have all failed to prevent the rise of fascist regimes. The neoliberal elites who run democracies may appear to oppose fascism, but faced with an increasingly unlivable world in which it becomes impossible to sustain both capitalism and liberal democracy, they too will adopt increasingly fascistic policies. For neoliberals, the criminalization and/or abandonment of ever-larger groups of marginalized people will be articulated as a matter of pragmatism and inevitability, while fascists will present it as the desirable return of a violently unequal natural order. In short, don’t expect the support of the neoliberal elites.
Popular organization is the best form of resistance. If the normalization of police, prisons, and mass surveillance has made this effort more difficult, presenting these tools of control as necessary, even natural, there are nonetheless multiple avenues for collective resistance.
Where to start:
Openly resist the consolidation of fascism. Clearly identify what is happening in the United States, Palestine, Canada, and elsewhere. Talk about fascism with those closest to you. Don’t let it be surreptitious. Force it out into the open.
Act locally against events organized by fascist groups. Attack them in every possible way. Physically prevent them from spreading their hatred.
Call bullshit what it is. Don’t get sidetracked by their lies. Don’t waste your time arguing with them. Don’t get caught up in their way of framing the situation. Bring the discussion back to what they do, to the horrors they commit, to the hatred that drives them.
Above all, don’t immediately fall into line if fascists come to power. When faced with authoritarian power, people tend to anticipate what a repressive government would want, and immediately cooperate, to make sure they don’t anger those in power and to protect themselves. This anticipatory obedience tells the regime what compromises people are willing to make and enables it to go much further much faster. This way of adapting harms everyone. It’s essential not to reflexively obey.
Maintain solidarity. Fascism normalizes human suffering and the jettisoning of groups of people designated as negligible or insignificant. Fascists want us to fall back upon our survival instinct, to get caught up in our personal preoccupations, to be isolated and weak. Solidarity is our strength.
We must build and maintain collective people’s power: the power to keep our communities safe; the power to prevent any of our own from being disappeared; the power to make sure everyone has food. We must begin by exploring all the ways in which we can participate in building this power, for example, by working to:
block fascist advances (e.g., by fighting anything that increases the scope, capacity, resources, and power of the prison state and fascist movements, such as building new prisons, militarizing borders, new identification systems targeting certain groups, etc.).
break their alliances and links with local groups and organizations (e.g., links between workers’ unions and organizations representing the police, links between the police and far-right militias, links between the mass media and transphobic activists, etc.).
minimize the impact of their policies (e.g., build and support a strong community network, self-help groups, secure communications networks, community defense infrastructures, gathering spaces, etc.).
build bridges between the communities affected (e.g., trade unions, women’s groups, anarchist gangs, anti-colonial movements, abolitionists, disability rights activists, etc.).
develop resources (e.g., organizations dedicated to sharing the history of struggle, transformative justice organizations, as many spaces as possible where we can gather, debate, digest all of the available information, have block parties, organize workshops, conferences, and marches, etc.).
To explore this issue further, I suggest the zine Block and Build: But Make It Abolitionist by the Interrupting Criminalization organization. Then it’s a matter of determining what makes sense for us, what we’re able to do, and how we understand our social context and the overall situation. For this, I recommend the zine Making a Plan, also an Interrupting Criminalization publication.
It could start with a union, a local chapter of Food not Bombs, a group that organizes people’s assemblies, a housing committee, a group of friends who make engaged art, a women’s group, and so on. All of it is relevant. these groups must:
develop a common language and an overall assessment of the situation.
coordinate in a decentralized way that encourages autonomous action as part of a larger whole.
develop a security culture commensurate with the level of risk.
prepare for repression by setting up a support system in advance.
Then, when the time comes, it will be possible to fight a fascist regime on a large scale thanks to:
a large enough mass of people committed to noncooperation, people who forget to deliver a letter or to forward an e-mail, who slow down some construction project, who don’t remove books from the shelves, who continue teaching history to children, who sabotage bureaucratic processes, who give false information to the police, who continue making music outside and at night, all of it to disrupt the smooth functioning of the regime.
diversity of tactics, including mass demonstrations, a general strike, industrial sabotage, alternative health care networks, etc.
If we join forces to fight fascism and the criminalization process that underpins it, anything is in our reach.
Comments Off on A Response to the Commentary on “When There Are Many of Us, We Do What We Want”
Apr252025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Following the repeated failures of so-called “combative” demonstrations in Montreal between 2023 and 2025, two militant texts sought to offer, on the one hand, a strategic analysis focused on massification through autonomous structures, and on the other, a skeptical critique of that orientation, denouncing the fetishization of demonstrations and militant voluntarism. Both texts share a common diagnosis: our collective weakness in the face of the state, our isolation, and the routinization of our mobilizations. The present text is a critique of the second piece, written by N.
The Fetishization of Spontaneity: A Critique of Anti-Strategy
The core disagreement between the two texts seems to me to hinge on a central strategic question: how can we explain the fact that the majority of the working class—including its most exploited segments—does not spontaneously respond to calls for radical mobilization, and instead, in advanced capitalist countries, remains largely passive or aligned with various forms of reformism?
N. rightly points out the routinized and sometimes performative nature of certain activist practices. However, in attempting to explain this passivity, his response leans into a kind of mechanical determinism that legitimizes a cynical skepticism—one that dismisses any form of political mediation as a futile avant-garde project: “It is the social contradictions themselves that produce struggles, not a group of revolutionary evangelists trying to convince proletarians dulled by capitalism one by one.”
If it is necessary to break with the “fetishization of the demonstration”—the idea that it constitutes the core of our political practice—it is equally important to be wary of the fetishization of spontaneity, which consists in rejecting the necessity of organization in favour of a passive expectation, based on the illusion that the contradictions of capitalism will mechanically trigger a mass uprising. This posture amounts to a strategic retreat that cloaks political powerlessness in the mystique of spontaneity.
The Passivity of the Exploited Classes
The passivity or reformist orientation of the working class is largely explained by the fundamentally episodic nature of the class struggle. The contradictions of capitalism are not, in themselves, sufficient to make workers revolutionary. As Charles Post argues, class consciousness does not arise mechanically from exploitation, but rather emerges primarily through the lived experience of self-organization and collective struggle—experiences that open space for receptivity to radical ideas.
However, this foundational condition for the development of class consciousness—active participation in mass struggles—can only ever be partial, rare, and temporary. Structurally, the vast majority of workers cannot sustain long-term engagement in the struggle, since their position within capitalist social relations requires them to sell their labour power in order to ensure their own material reproduction. The imperative of individual survival therefore limits, under normal conditions, the possibility of sustained collective engagement.
In the absence of collective struggles, capitalist logics, reformism, and the institutional forms of liberal politics tend to regain hegemonic status. Workers are then less inclined to seek a transformation of the system and instead aim to secure what they perceive as a fair share of it—without challenging its underlying structures of power. Worse still, when reformism fails and no credible radical alternative is available, capitalism is able to produce the very material conditions for its own ideological reinforcement: individualization, social fragmentation, and competition among the exploited. In this vacuum, reactionary, racist, and patriarchal movements flourish—even within segments of the working class itself.
It is therefore deeply irresponsible to abandon the self-organization of direct action and the construction of alternatives—whether in the name of reformism or out of a fetishization of spontaneity. The contradictions of capitalism, on their own, do not generate class consciousness, nor do they lead to human emancipation.
The Avant-Garde
The inherently episodic nature of class struggle means that only a small minority of the working class remains durably engaged in militant activity. What we might call an “avant-garde”—without any dogmatic overtones—refers here to those who, in the lulls between waves of struggle, strive to keep alive practices of solidarity and confrontation, whether in the workplace or within communities.
To avoid any misunderstanding, this is not a classical “Leninist” or “Trotskyist” notion of the avant-garde as an enlightened minority bearing a political truth to impose upon the masses. Rather, it is a way to designate a concrete role: that of individuals who, despite isolation, exhaustion, and defeat, persist in sustaining institutions, practices, and imaginaries of struggle—often invisible, yet essential to the reproduction of a militant collective memory. This role can—and should—be debated, renamed, and critiqued. But to abandon it altogether would be to surrender to strategic disarmament.
It is true that some militant figures, in certain contexts, become the social base of a working-class bureaucracy, detached from the concrete realities of waged labour and prone to the logic of reformism: distance from sites of production, freedom from the constraints of wage labour, and the adoption of organizational jargon and apparatus-driven practices.
But there are many others who continue to organize while living the contradictions of capitalist work: precarity, alienation, subordination. These are militants embedded in the everyday life of the class, patiently organizing their co-workers, neighbours, and communities.
Any organization, no matter how well intentioned, can generate its own inertia, rigidity, and hierarchical tendencies. But this should not serve as a justification for rejecting political mediation altogether. The fetishization of spontaneity, which draws a strict line between conscious militancy and popular authenticity, runs the risk of discrediting organic militant activity—that is, the kind of organizing that emerges from the lived experience of the oppressed—by reducing it to a suspicious form of avant-gardism, or even to a so-called “revolutionary racket.”
N.’s article illustrates this tendency when it cites contemporary movements perceived as spontaneous—such as the BLM/George Floyd uprisings, the Yellow vests movement, or the social revolts in Chile—highlighting the absence of mass organizations guiding them from the outset. However, it is highly unlikely that these movements emerged without the active involvement of a core group of experienced individuals, shaped by various militant traditions, whether or not they explicitly identified with a revolutionary consciousness.
Moreover, despite their strength, these movements did not articulate a clear revolutionary project—which might in fact serve as an argument in favour of the initial text. In the absence of autonomous mass structures grounded in explicitly anti-capitalist practises and discourse, social conflict tends to express itself in reformist, incoherent, or contradictory ways. Had a structured revolutionary counter-power existed over the past two decades—one rooted in collective memory, political culture, and autonomous forms of organization—it is likely that the political consciousness emerging from these popular movements would have been more clearly oriented toward systemic rupture.
Post-Industrial Society and Class Consciousness
Social classes are historically dynamic relations, and their political expression requires both a shared experience of exploitation and an organizational effort to build a collective force conscious of its own interests.
Yet many activists today resist the project of constructing class consciousness, often drawing on assumptions rooted in post-industrial society theories. According to these perspectives, the expansion of the service sector, the growing complexity of professional structures, the rise of theoretical knowledge, increased living standards, and the emergence of state regulation have reshaped social conflict around the control of information. This, in turn, is said to have enabled the emergence of a new middle class composed of managers and skilled employees. For these approaches, contemporary society is no longer structured primarily by class conflict, but rather by identities and discourses capable of defining themselves. As such, our societies are seen as less constrained by socioeconomic factors like class, and as offering greater room for individual agency—unlike the more rigid industrial societies of the past.
Nevertheless, these analyses tend to overestimate the impact of changes in the division of labour on relations of exploitation. As Peter Meiksins aptly puts it, “capitalism has never, not in the past, and not now, generated a homogeneous working class. On the contrary, it has consistently created a varied, highly stratified working class, and capitalists have had an inherent interest in making sure that it is as divided as it possibly can be.” Likewise, the increasing complexity of the contemporary division of labour does not eliminate the structural conditions of reproduction for the working class—namely, the obligation to perform surplus labour by selling one’s labour power on the market.
Although specific relations of exploitation characterize particular sociohistorical conditions and shape class formation, class consciousness has always been a contingent, relational, and collective process—constantly in flux between formation and disintegration. In this sense, class consciousness is not a mechanical product of socioeconomic factors, but the outcome of conscious agents acting within given social, political, and economic conditions. In the past as today, the development of a collective class consciousness has been a difficult and demanding process, forged through sustained and deliberate efforts of militant organization.
In short, capitalism still generates “fields of attraction” that polarize society into lived class positions. Sociohistorical processes can—and have—led to the emergence of groups becoming conscious of themselves as a class opposed to another. The challenge today is to bring about such a process through sustained organizational efforts, as was achieved in previous periods.
Self-Organization as a Conclusion
The lack of people in our demonstrations is a symptom of the current passivity of the working classes, in the sense that the street is an extension, not the centre, of social conflict. This passivity is rooted in the absence of collective struggles that provide an alternative to individualized or reactionary responses.
To claim that we should avoid organizational efforts for fear of becoming “revolutionary evangelists” is irresponsible. It condemns us to remain what we have been for the past three decades in Quebec: a radical fringe within reformist social movements; a weak political mediation with no real capacity to constitute a social force capable of threatening the existing order.
What is needed is not a dogmatic return to a rigid form of organization, nor a moralistic conception of militancy, but a materialist strategy for rebuilding the autonomous social power of the working class. This is not about imposing a universal model, but about affirming that without durable forms of mediation between experiences of exploitation and a political horizon, no counter-power can take shape.
A coherent revolutionary politics today should:
Identify the sites where exploitation is most intense, visible, and collectively experienced;
Build struggles that aim to democratize and repoliticize production and social reproduction;
Make the street an extension, not the centre, of social conflict;
Focus on the patient construction of class consciousness as a historical process;
Build popular organizations capable of demanding democratic control over economic spheres, through the unification, not the mere juxtaposition, of struggles.
Comments Off on Among the Fragments – A Response to Inaction
Apr252025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Struggle isn’t a puzzle we solve by sharpening definitions.
It is mud. It is cold dawn. It is the door that must be knocked on twice because the first knock was fear and the second is a promise. Like we’ve always been told.
He insists: “We must write, because only then will we be able to tell who is serious and who is not”.
We need theory that walks like the body does: limping when we limp, sprinting when sirens grow, picking glass from its heel after the march, then laughing about it around the kitchen table while the kettle shrieks.
Remember how it felt when the names were lighter? We called ourselves anarchists, autonomist, anti-authoritarian, some remained nameless, only to be used as a shorthand for the impossible promise we carried like contraband in our chests: that no hierarchy is eternal and that ordinary people can and should arrange their life without overseers.
We were meant to be the crowbar; we were meant to pry open rooms we were locked out of. Then the rooms multiplied, each declaring itself the only legitimate sanctuary. We became curators of micro‑identities: anti‑authoritarian but not anarchist, autonomist but not left, insurrectionist but suspicious of the autonomists. Language then turned itself into something heavier than the deeds it was meant to inspire.
Writing is not the enemy. Writing is a whetstone — but the blade must leave the house. Let pamphlets circulate, but let every pamphlet end with a time and place: “Meet here. Bring tools. No Phones.”
Let zines be passports that expire unless stamped by action.
Our word need be scrawled on cardboard, rehearsed in networks, corrected in practice, revised by failure, annotated in bruises, and eventually sung — without copyright — by crowds that forget who wrote the first verse, by crowds we won’t be apart of.
Hold the pen lightly, hold one another firmly, and hold no illusion that theory absolves us from the necessity of risk that is expected from each of us. Our pages must be worth the dirt that clings to their margins. So dirty them.
Fred Hampton claimed that only revolutionaries die, not revolutions. Yet, I can’t help but smell the reeking odor of formaldehyde off of both me and those around. Our rallies feel like wakes: we chant slogans that sound like last rites, we smash storefronts like mourners breaking dishes, hoping the clatter will bring about the insurrection, the revolution, le grand soir. The streets reply with sirens, batons, no red sun. Insurance replaces the window, we keep the bruises, lose momentum again.
Meanwhile, the rest of us exchange theoretical love letters across online boulevards where eye contact is impossible. We scroll, applaud, eviscerate, scroll again, waiting for the curtain to fall on the academic pageantry. If the pen must be hoisted like a holy relic above all else, I would sooner snap it, scatter the ink into garden soil, let it nourish tomatoes for me to eat, as only then would it be of use to me.
To the comrades in our Montreal milieu, who walked away, who have been seduced by the glow of theory, who are disillusioned, your absence gapes like an open ravine; it’s filled with ritualized quarrels. We keep circling the same questions — what now, how, with whom — discovering each time that the void is expanding because we have no base, no ground compacted by shared labour, no community. Inaction does not merely leave a space; it deepens the chasm that now threatens to swallow what little remains of our common ground.
To those who’ve departed: where are you now? Will we only cross paths under tear gas, silhouettes lit by dumpsters on fire? Will we be worthy of your presence then? Must devotion be visible only in the strobe of police batons? Will your labour be lent for barricades only? Come argue across the table while the coffee burns, scream at me in raw disagreement, have an unexpected laugh.
When you are all satisfied after the ink is finally dry, close the laptop, lace your boots, find the fraction of the faction you cannot stand and invite them to hash this out over a beer no obscure webpage can overhear. Let our factions braid themselves into something sturdier than agreement — into familiarity, into a landscape where contradiction is welcomed and nobody is exiled. Only dialogue, stubborn and messy, can weld practice back onto principle until sparks fly and the metal holds.
Writing is a spark, not a furnace. The furnace is built in kitchens, meetings, late night phone calls, and beer soaked arguments that end with a workable list of next steps, and a solid plan.
Respond to this post if you must, but understand I won’t scroll back to read it. I only seek a tap on the shoulder, a chair pulled out for us to sit.
Comments Off on Three Murders in 24 Hours. Night Attack on Police Training College. Justice for Abisay!
Apr182025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On Monday night, April 14th, anarchists entered Collège de Maisonneuve, which hosts the police training program, Techniques policières. The entrance was painted with “MINI COPS = FUTURE KILLERS” and “JUSTICE FOR ABISAY CRUZ” as well as other tags like “3 STATE MURDERS IN 24H” and “MAKE FASCISTS AFRAID”. A fire extinguisher filled with paint was very helpful, and a window was smashed. We do not forget the murders and abuses committed by the Montreal police over the last few weeks; readers, please spread the popular vengeance. To the students of the Techniques policières program: drop out and change paths, it is not a safe future, neither for us, nor for you. This program trains people who will be the future of state violence. The police is a force that punishes the poor, immigrants and racialized people, that beats and shoots protesters, that arrests and kills people like flies. This society is sick and the sickness is capitalism, the State, and hierarchy, and the guardians of this terrible social order are the police. We will never forget the injustices committed against us. Long live the memory of Abisay Cruz and that of all those killed by the police.
In this video, we can see the curious looks of passersby the following day.
For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.
\\\\\\\\\\\\ FRONT & BACK TEXT BELOW \\\\\\\\\\\\
REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN
Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.
Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.
2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.
1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.
Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.
« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres. In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder. Peace By Piece (A) »
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! ¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!
Comments Off on What’s Happening in Turkey — From an anti-Authoritarian Perspective
Mar312025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Why the current uprising in Turkey deserves our support.
Background
The Republic of Turkey, which was founded on the genocide of the Armenians in the region with a nationalist and murderous leaven, has not changed much in the past century. For non-Muslims, Kurds, Alevis and women who did not hold the majority and power in their hands, the state and its successfully constructed society were always a source of oppression. But starting in 2002, as a consequence of Erdoğan’s dictatorship, oppression, poverty, violence and exploitation started to be felt also by the majority of the society. In 2013, after increasing bans and oppressions, millions of people stood up for their freedoms in the Gezi Park riot that took place in cities all over the country. The months-long resistance ended with unprecedented national-scale police attacks in which eight young people aged 15-22 were killed and thousands detained. Since 2014, the Turkish state has become a police state, and after the 2016 fictitious coup attempt, it has been ruled with absolute authoritarianism under the state of emergency. Since 2021, as a result of the economic crisis that has escalated with great momentum, 60% of the population now lives below the hunger line.
Millions of people, forced into more misery every year, believed that the government and this situation would change in every election, but Erdoğan, who controls the media and the justice system, has never allowed this to happen through fear and manipulation. In the meantime, in order to prevent oppressed groups from coming together, he created a deep hatred within society, labeling each day a new community as terrorist-enemy-foreign agent: Kurds, Alevis, university students, syndicators, lawyers, journalists, academics. While these people were imprisoned on terrorism charges through state courts, those who were still out of prison were fooled by the propaganda that those imprisoned were terrorists. ‘Terror’ became a magic word for Erdoğan to maintain his power, while people who challenged authority ended up in prison, exile or death. In this way, he created zombified individuals and society that is losing its power day by day and collapsing politically, economically and morally. It is exactly in this context that the current uprising is being driven by the youth, who have never seen a mass uprising in their lives, but who have taken to the streets saying ‘nothing can be worse than living this way’. Millions of young people who have been brought up with the teaching that the previous rebels were terrorists and that the state and the police were friends, at least in theoretical terms, are now facing a different reality. Let us take a closer look at these protests.
Towards the 19 March ‘coup’
On the morning of 19 March 2025, hundreds of police arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu from his home – the mayor of Istanbul, who is believed to be a presidential candidate in the next election and to defeat Erdoğan- on terrorism and corruption charges. While the incident sparked widespread outrage in Turkey and around the world, Imamoğlu was not the first metropolitan mayor in Turkey to be dismissed and detained by the Turkish courts. Since 2016, many elected mayors from Kurdish cities have been dismissed, arrested and replaced by a government official in similar operations. The fact that these Kurdish mayors have been accused of these magical terrorism offenses has convinced the majority of Turkish public to legitimize this and not to oppose it. The silence against this injustice in Kurdish cities empowered Erdoğan to do the same to other mayors run by the CHP (second largest political party, turkish-nationalist centre-left) and prepared the ground for this ‘coup’ on 19 March. The detention of even this highly popular, politically powerful, rich, Turkish, Sunni, privileged man on magical terrorism charges for opposing Erdogan has caused great shock and outrage. Now the honour of being a terrorist could be awarded not only to marginalised people, but to anyone who did not take Erdoğan’s side.
While the public dissent was being destroyed a little more every year, the people who had kept silent in deference to the state, the media and the courts had now found themselves in the target list. Thus, thousands of young people who had even forgotten how to dream under poverty, restrictions and oppression, and who had not yet been labeled as terrorists, suddenly woke up from their sleep or finally exploded in anger and took to the streets in many cities across Turkey on 19 March to start protests. Although it is difficult to say that the protesters are homogeneous, it is possible to say that the majority of them are gen-z who have no previous protest experience for the reasons described above, who have not been able to get out of the fear bubble created by the government, who have been exposed to the very intense social engineering of the Turkish state through institutions such as school, media, family, etc., but who are now unable to breathe out of despair and want change. Although the detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu was a spark for these young people to take to the streets, they started to express their anger and demands on many issues by saying ‘the issue is not only about imamoğlu, have you not understood yet?’.
Encountering the state and overcoming the fear wall
Like almost every other gathering in Turkey, these protests were responded with massive violence by the police. For the first time, the protesters encountered the police, who not only wanted to disperse the crowd, but also to make everyone there pay a price for being there; who saw themselves as having the authority to punish people without the need for judgment, who were arrogant, bully, brutal, who had a personal hatred for the protesters and personal pleasure in torturing them, who were sure that they would not be held accountable for any of their violence. The protesters, who until then had regarded the police as a regular job like teaching, nursing or engineering, were unaware of how the police had become more mafia-like and monster-like every year, by hunting down ‘yesterday’s terrorists’. Thousands of youth seeing enemy law being applied to them too were brutally attacked by the police using an unbelievable amount of tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons in one night. Faced with a massive attack, the majority of these young people did not know how to protect themselves in such an attack, how to care for each other, how to organise themselves. For some of them, responding to the police would mean being a ‘traitor’ or a ‘terrorist’, so they just froze, while a larger number, thinking that they had nothing to lose, broke the legitimacy of the police and responded to police violence with resistance. Having had the opportunity to express their anger for the first time, they covered their faces and threw everything they could at the police, danced in front of the water cannons instead of running away from them, and discovered that the power and legitimacy of the police was something that could be overcome. They did not seem to have a strategic plan for where this protest was going, nor did they seem to have a well-thought-out political consciousness. But the night was dominated by anger and a sense of having been heard for once, and this in itself was highly political, and the night ended with many injuries and arrests.
It was the first time since 2013 that there was such a massive protest with hours of resistance against the police. Although the protests were not shown on any TV channel, they were followed by many people through social media. The wall of fear was crossed for many people who realised that it was possible to oppose, to challenge the state, to rebel. The next day, more and more people took to the streets in more cities in Turkey to protest. At the same time, the Turkish state nationwide restricted the internet bands, taking minutes to upload even a ten-second video to the internet. Experienced protesters who supported the protests both at the streets and online informed people that this problem could be overcome with a VPN. And this time, the Turkish state blocked access to about 200 X accounts of journalists, legal associations, media collectives and political parties through Elon Musk. On the same day, the High Council of Radio and Television (RTÜK) prohibited any live broadcasts on TV channels. Again on the same day, although not directly related to the protests, the Board of Directors of the Istanbul Bar Association, known to oppose Erdoğan, was dismissed by a court decision.
At the same time, many lawyers from different cities who wanted to defend the detained protesters were also detained in police stations and courthouses. The number of detainees was increasing all the time, and some were ordered to be imprisoned or house arrest. The mayor, Ekrem Imamoğlu and around a hundred politicians, who had been detained the previous day, were still being questioned at the police station. All this oppression and fear did not discourage people from protesting in the streets, but only fueled it. During the protests, MPs who took the microphone and gave speeches hoping for help from the election and the law were booed. The youth were pressuring the MPs to make a call to the streets, not to the ballot box, and this was accepted. This moment itself was another threshold point because ‘calling for the streets’ had been recognised as illegitimate in the law and society fabricated by Erdoğan for years. The fact that MPs who were engaged in ‘legal’ politics dared to do so was itself quite surprising for everyone. It was as if thousands of people, one by one, were crossing the invisible wall that the whole society did not know whether it really existed or not, but no one dared to go beyond it, and they were looking around in bewilderment in this land they had never set foot in, wondering what would happen to them.
Nothing is more horrible than living this way.
Strategy of the Turkish State
Many long-established social opposition actors in Turkey made widespread calls for these protests, condemned the arrest of imamoğlu, supported the youth’s legitimate demands for justice, democracy and freedom, and stood up against police violence and bans. On the other hand, the Kurdish political movement (DEM Party), one of the strongest established actors of street protest, chose to limit its support to its high-level party leaders. Only party representatives made a symbolic visit to the centre of the protest, and released a statement declaring Imamoğlu’s detention as a coup d’état. The DEM Party’s support for such a large and widespread uprising, where ‘ordinary citizens’ were able to protest for the first time in years, could have been a game changer for the fate of the country and could have put Erdoğan in a harder position than ever before. From today’s perspective, it is not difficult to guess what was behind Erdoğan’s intention to start a peace process with the PKK in the past few weeks. However, why the DEM Party took such a stance remains a more complex question, the answer to which is left to be answered by history. Nevertheless, at this stage I think it is more important to talk about the results rather than the reasons, because the DEM Party’s distance has had two important consequences. The police on the street as well as Erdoğan in the political Arena, managed to escape from a very important threat. The participation of the DEM party and the Kurdish youth in the protest could have make Erdoğan’s job very more difficult. Compared to the Gezi Park riots, the lack of experience, resilience, organizational skills and determination that the DEM Party and Kurdish youth could have brought in the protest was clearly noticeable.
I think that if Erdoğan and his police had one single wish for this time, they would use it to keep the Kurds away from these protests. The second of the results explains this better: The absence of the Kurds as a collective in this field gave more space to the nationalist and statist tendency, which was already quite strong among the protesters. Leaving aside the argument that this is both a cause and a consequence of the absence of the DEM Party, it should be noted that this crowd, which was uniformised in terms of ethnic identity, tended to be uniformised in other issues as well, with the result that those among the protesters who struggle with an intersectional approach, such as Kurds, feminists, LGBTI+s, socialists, anarchists, animal rights defenders, etc., became even more ‘marginalised’ in the protests and were understandably hesitant to be visible with these identities, for example, to hold up a rainbow flag, for their own safety. In most cities, LGBTI+ people did not feel safe to come to the protests collectively, nor an individual queer could figure out with whom they would feel safe at the protests. If Erdoğan and his police could make a second wish, they would definitely choose to wish that an intersectional struggle would not emerge from these protests. Because intersectionality, both in terms of the number and the quality it would bring, was Erdoğan’s worst nightmare. Because the future, the sustainability and the direction of this legitimate anger that emerged in the protests and whether it would ever threaten the state or not depended on its intersectional character. As explained at length above, Erdoğan had manage to achieve his current absolute authority through his precise policy of destroying the grounds of intersectionality. There was no doubt that the joining forces of all the oppressed in these protests would benefit all the oppressed and disadvantage their common enemy. However, I regret to say that Erdoğan and his police seem to be having good luck and their two most desirable wishes are being realised in the uprising that has been taking place since 19 March.
Happening now: widespread resistance against a very violent repression
As of today, 27 March, the protests still continue with the character I mentioned above. In the past week, queers, feminists, anarchists, socialists… have made significant progress in becoming more visible and giving the protests a revolutionary character. Simultaneously, the launching of a massive boycott campaign against many government related companies caused a great panic. On the same day, seeing high-ranking government officials giving pose in boycotted companies and advertising their products in support of these companies proved once again that we were officially at war: The Turkish state criminal organisation and its capital had declared a war against everyone they perceived as a threat to their interests. Apparently, their priority was not even to arrest people in this war, but to collect data on who was on the opposing front. It was not for nothing that the police, who surrounded the demonstration at the universities yesterday, said that they would release the protesters in exchange for removing their masks. Meanwhile, several guides on personal data security posted on social media by those who have been on the streets for years have been life-saving. While Erdoğan’s professors at some universities have been sharing attendance sheets with the police to mark students who are not attending classes these days, many professors who supported the call for an academic boycott have already been dismissed from their posts. Although I have said that arrests are not the first priority, the prisons around Istanbul have reached their capacity and new detainees are expected to be sent to prisons in nearby cities. It is surprising only for those who do not know the real function of the law that dozens of people have now been arrested for the minor offense of ‘violation of the law on meetings and demonstrations’, which was not taken seriously in previous years because most of the time people did not even receive a fine as a result of the trial.
Resist queer!
The necessity to take the side of the stone thrown at the police, not the person who throws it
We are at a point where it is once again clear that the approach taught to us by classical justice system and politicians, that we should unconditionally take the side of one of those in conflict, or that the status of victim and perpetrator should be two different people/identities that are strictly separated from each other, is leading us into a trap. It is so striking to watch how so many of 16-24 year old protesters, who are ready to threaten and expel Kurds or LGBTI+s who would come to the protests with their open identities and visibility, based on the mandatory education they have received from Erdoğan’s school, media and family, become perpetrators and victims at the same time. Since 19 March, as victims of the state in this uprising, if more than 2000 people have been detained, thousands of people have been injured – some of them fatally -, dozens of people have already been put in prison, unknown numbers of people have been kicked out of their families’ homes, universities, jobs, and have been labeled as terrorists by the intelligence services, this is partly because of the power they have lost as a result of their role as perpetrators. I see that this trap has caught on among some ‘yesterday’s terrorists’ and that a significant part of them, in particular in the Kurdish political party, which have spent their lives fighting against the state are at best indifferent to the violence of the state and the justified demands of the protesters. I also interpret the lack of knowledge and the silence of the antifascist movement in Switzerland and Europe in this light. Therefore, I feel a responsibility to explain what is happening in this uprising to other rebels around the world, because explaining that the current uprising, despite its complexity, deserves international support and solidarity can only be possible with an anti-authoritarian perspective that does not fall into the trap of taking sides, which is about to disappear in Turkey. It is possible to support this uprising without victim blaming of someone for being tortured by the police and without excusing the same person as a perpetrator for attempting to suppress the Kurdish banner.
Where to place such a controversial uprising?
This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported, because the protesters are not only nationalist/apolitical generation z. Many queer, Kurdish, anarchist, socialist, anti-speciesist, feminist, people who believe in intersectional struggle… are raising their voices against injustice and resisting the Turkish state in the streets today as they have been doing for years. Despite their fear of the majority of protesters, they prefer to be on the streets and they are bearing a heavier share from state violence. The complexity of this uprising means that they need support more than ever. Backing this uprising is essential for them to come out of it with some regained ground or at least without being further pushed back. This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported because, one by one, the protesters, even if they harbour counter-revolutionary ideas, are legitimate in what they are revolting against, and this is what determines the legitimacy of an uprising: The organs and policies of the Turkish state, symbolised by Erdoğan. It does not matter that the majority of protesters want the dictator Erdoğan to fall and be replaced by the nationalist Imamoğlu. Today, we can stand shoulder to shoulder in the fight to bring down Erdoğan and tomorrow, we can part ways when the demand is to replace him with İmamoğlu. Once we have destroyed the biggest existing power, then we will fight to destroy the second biggest power, and then the third, until there is no power above us. This anarchist point of view calls for the support of any threat to Erdoğan, his state, his police, his judiciary. Criticism of these protests shouldn’t serve to isolate the uprising, but rather to inform the debates that will follow if it succeeds.
This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported because a dictator is using all the power and resources of the Turkish state, which has become a ‘criminal organisation’, to massacre people who do not have these power and resources, regardless of who they are. Not only protesters, but also their lawyers, journalists documenting torture, doctors treating the wounded at the protests, those who speak out about it, those who open their doors to people affected by the tear gas, anyone who is not in absolute obedience is now being punished. In the Turkey of 2025, where the state controls all private and public aspects of life and all our potential support is dismantled, Erdoğan surviving this uprising would mean leaving everyone who has ever questioned his authority locked in a burning building. This might be the first, only, and last chance we’ve had in years to act against Erdoğan’s power. That’s why any support for this uprising or any blow struck against its target, the Turkish state carries vital significance. This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported because for those who do not hold power and the majority, women, Kurds, Alevis, queers, the poor, youth, immigrants, ‘yesterday’s terrorists’, the first step toward breathing, being heard, and gaining freedom is the collapse of the current order. This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported, because this may be the last chance for us ‘yesterday’s terrorists’, who have already been imprisoned and forced into exile for rebelling for years, to see the daylight again in the country we were born.
Early this morning, anarchists attacked SIRCO by smashing windows and spraying paint inside and outside the building. If that name rings a bell, SIRCO was the company responsible for dismantling the McGill Gaza solidarity encampment in July 2024. Since October, they have been employed by the Ville de Montréal to spy on and intimidate unhoused and marginalized folks in the Ville-Marie borough. As Valérie Plante’s administration declares open warfare on the most vulnerable people in society, there is no doubt that this strategy of outsourcing the SPVM’s dirty work to private companies will be generalized to the entire island like EMMIS if nothing is done to stop it.
Comments Off on Statement On Arrest, Police Raid and Dropped Charges
Mar112025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On October 23rd, 2024, at 6:50 AM, I was arrested by the SPVM (Service de police de la Ville de Montréal) for allegedly “uttering threats to burn or damage property”. They forced their way into my apartment, and several pieces of my technology were seized. I was interrogated for hours, pushed to the edge, but despite the state’s efforts, the Crown Prosecutor ultimately failed to gather enough evidence to move forward with any charges, even before a pre-trial was conducted. This is a victory, not just for me, but for all those fighting within the movement, and the broader militant community. The sudden dropping of charges is a clear reflection of the over-policing, over-surveillance, that militants within our movement have been experiencing since the huge surge of Pro-Palestine organizing. My arrest came after a wave of repression that occurred across so-called “Canada”, with house raids being issued against militants in Toronto and the sanctioning of Samidoun, a Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. It is clear, that my arrest was apart of a broader strategy to intimidate and demobilize us, to fracture the solidarity and resistance we’re attempting to build. They believed by targeting individuals could disrupt our efforts. But they failed.
What repression at this level does mentally is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it firsthand. I’m still attempting to find the correct words as I write this. The emotional and psychological toll is immense. The guilt of “being caught”, of sucking up the little resources we barely have and the overall shame still hangs over me. The weight of knowing you’ve been watched, followed, and targeted takes a toll that is far beyond the physical. The trauma of being detained, interrogated, and silenced for so long leaves scars that don’t just vanish with the dropping of charges. I could not speak publicly until now as legal conditions had restricted me, furthering the violence imposed by the state. For months, my ability to express myself was controlled, and it left me completely powerless.
Repression can provoke a range of reactions that only escalate an already fragile situation. Historically, the tactics used by the police to destabilize movements often lead people to act in ways that harm both those who are arrested and the broader community. It fosters distrust, wastes time on petty conflicts, and diverts attention from our true adversaries. When unchecked egos and harmful behaviour take hold, they inadvertently play into the hands of the state and its goals. Our movement is built on trust—without it, we have nothing, and repression triumphs. In the future, I hope that, alongside thinking about what’s best for the movement, we also consider empathy. I hope we can prioritize creating a community that supports arrestees, without infantilizing them or dismissing them based on the misguided assumption that they are “too traumatized” to make sound decisions.
The overwhelming majority of the community supported me without hesitation. I express my deepest gratitude to those who stood by me through this ordeal. To those who brought me groceries, helped put my life back together or gave me a shoulder to cry on — you are the reason I am standing here today. You saved me during the darkest period of my life. Your support was not just a comfort— it was a life line. Without your help, I would not have survived.
Let me be clear: the movement is far from over. The charges being dropped does not mean that this is the end. This is proof of our collective resilience, it is a sign that the state’s efforts to repress us were in vain. What happened to me is not an isolated incident, but a testament to the overall strength among us all. Repression is a temporary setback, a minor bump on the road, not a nail in the coffin. It will not stop us. It will only fuel us.
We will not be broken. We will keep fighting. We will continue to build a movement grounded in solidarity and resistance. The work we do is far from finished, and this experience will only strengthen our resolve to keep pushing forward. I hope my story, can be seen not as some cautionary tale but rather a ray of hope that there is a life after repression. The threat of jail time, being kicked out of school, losing your job, is not the end, it’s the beginning of the next chapter in our fight.
A discussion with two organizers of this year’s New Year’s Eve noise demo in Laval. We discuss how things went, prisoner solidarity organizing in Montreal, the value of noise demos as an anarchist tactic and tradition, and where we might go from here.
