from Instagram

from Instagram
Submission
[PDF for reading]
[PDF for printing]
Making this zine started for me as a vague desire to know how Assata Shakur escaped from prison. I had enjoyed reading her autobiography “Assata” and I was left wanting to know more. One chapter ends with her declaring that she was done with being locked up, and the next begins with her living in Cuba if I remember correctly. I mostly moved on, focusing on other things. More recently a friend mentioned that they had heard of a book about the Shakur family that went into the details of the liberation. The book in question was An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs And The Nation They Created by Santi Elijah Holley. I sought out the book and found a text that not only went into the details of Assata’s liberation but provided context about who all took part, the social movements and underground networks they were a part of and a whole set of histories that intrigued me.
I decided to only reprint the parts that explicitly deal with the liberation of Assata Shakur from prison and her transit to Havana, Cuba. The rest is worth reading in my opinion, as well as Assata’s own autobiography which gives context to Assata’s life path and freedom struggle, and Russel Maroon Shoatz’s I Am Maroon which also documents prison escapes, life on the run, and life underground from a Black liberation perspective. The idea that prisons are impenetrable, inescapable is demonstrably false and these histories are proof of that (as are the escapes that continue to take place today)! This bootleg reprint is only a snippet of a larger history of experimentation in collective and individual liberation that I feel Black anarchists and other revolutionaries could benefit from familiarizing ourselves with and learning from.
In the wake of the genocide taking place in Palestine at the hands of the zionist entity numerous calls have gone out for escalation and also — though less well circulated — for (re)building the underground in today’s movements for decolonization and liberation. Today’s undergrounds will look different from those of the 1970s and 1980s, yet there is still much we can learn from them. We are already seeing waves of political repression attempting to capture, pacify, eject, and domesticate rebels from the George Floyd revolts, the struggles to stop the construction of cop city in Atlanta, and the struggles in solidarity with Palestinians fighting for liberation. Unfortunately we are already seeing a new generation of political prisoners and exiles. Of course it is inevitable that some will be locked up as long as liberation struggles haven’t destroyed the cages. By learning from the struggles that came before us we can be better equipped to make the state’s work as hard as possible. Some of my goals for reprinting and circulating this account of Assata Shakur’s liberation from prison are to exercise our collective imagination of what is possible and contribute to dialogues about escalation, building undergrounds, and facing state repression.
Another goal of spreading this story is a fear that many stories of this kind, especially the illegal ones, will be lost. Either buried with the aging revolutionaries who made them happen, locked behind tight lips to ensure the safety and anonymity of the guilty, or neatly entombed in academic or historical literature that few will have the patience and position to read. To me these histories are not meant to be left in the dirt or hidden away in sleepy archives accessible with a student ID, they are part of our struggles today, weapons to be used to free ourselves, and by freeing ourselves free the dead who wrote these histories with their own sweat and blood. We can remember and tell these stories as part of our own race toward liberation and freedom now.
More selfishly, I am exciting to be adding a little something to a growing tendency of Black anarchist struggles. Anecdotally it seems there are more Black anarchists than before and that more approaches to Black liberation are imagining freedom through an anti-authoritarian lens. The former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army soldiers who advocated anarchic visions of freedom and struggle, during and after the decline of the Black Panther Party have paved the way for Black radicals to understand anarchy as a vision of freedom we can hold as our own. Russel ‘Maroon’ Shoatz, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, and Martin Sostre are coming up more in the anarchist space, as well as the dialogues of Black revolutionaries. The last decade has seen a number of anarchically oriented Black liberation groups and projects that explore the synchronicity between Black freedom and anarchy. Salish Sea Black Autonomists, Afro-Futurist Abolitionists of the Americas, various zines, a handful of small gatherings, dialogues across geographies, increased interest in anarchists in Africa generally.
The text below is part of a longer book that goes into the history of the Shakur family. While I do not agree with the author’s position that the Shakurs aimed to improve amerika I have found the information useful nonetheless. I have added a few of my own notes to the text and added complete names in brackets to give context to readers who may not be familiar with the history of the Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur, or other aspects of the struggles taking place at the time of Assata’s escape from prison. Again I encourage readers to dig deeper, to learn about the Black liberation struggles, guerrilla groups, and social movements that the people involved in Assata’s liberation were part of.
Submission
Download PDF to print (front/back), cut in half, hand out: https://tinyurl.com/recuerdan
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.
(Blackened/improved from a previous document shared early 2025.)
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 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!
Look for those pushing and help them push harder.
Move together. Be water.
They can control a march of 10,000 — they can’t control 10 marches of 1000.
De-arrest. Don’t let people get grabbed.
If they do, don’t let their cars or busses leave.
They only care about money, so causing monetary losses is your only vote.
On the inside, the demonstration is an organism of care and support.
On the outside, it is ferocious and uncontrollable.
Without their toys they are powerless.
No one is coming to save us.
Everything is at stake.
www.notrace.how
[PDF Here]
‘The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’:
Covers & Spine for Printing (8.5x~11.58″, color)
Paperback, ~5.25″ x 8.25″ x 0.58″, 266 pages
“A Mano Armata (Excerpts)”:
Covers for Printing (8.5×11″, b&w)
Pamphlet, ~5.4″ x 8.25″, 51 pages
Limited amount of physical copies available, email reekingthickets@proton.me to check availability and get yours – $5 for the book, $2 for the pamphlet (just to cover part of the cost of printing) plus shipping if not local (book weighs ~1lb) If you’re a reading group or bookstore, infoshop, think you can get it into a prison, etc., inquire about possibly reduced cost or free books! We’re still working out the kinks of our very small-scale production process, and this edition is somewhat rough, with some edges trimmed on a slight slant, the occasional smudged or faded line of text, and the possibility of some toner rubbing off over time.
To our knowledge, The Unexpected Guest, A Mano Armata, and many of the included sections of Palestine, Mon Amour haven’t been properly translated into English, and this primarily machine-based translation – though we feel is sufficient for some purposes – certainly can’t be considered as such. Translation was carried out by Nim Thorn, a non-speaker of Italian, using various translation programs with the results then checked for apparent mistakes or divergences and the offending passages re-translated in context with dictionaries and using other translation programs. Short stanzas (such as the section “Untitled” in Palestine, Mon Amour) or metered sections (such as the Faust excerpts in The Unexpected Guest) were also translated word by word using comparisons of multiple tools. The introduction to the second edition of A Mano Armata is a particularly bad translation, of a difficult text in the first place, though some parts of it still shine through quite clearly, and the subject matter – in part about the desire to engage with the word backwards by constructing semio-cognitive labyrinths to reflect absence and help bypass the recuperating tendency of the will and language – feels ironically relevant.
No authorization was sought for this independent, not-intended-for-profit project and, for our part, further printing or distribution is welcomed.
`The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’ brings together a new, rough translation of the 2010 book L’Ospite Inatteso by influential Sicilian insurrectionary anarchist, robber, poet, and philosopher Alfredo Bonanno (and as he reminds us, former motorcycle racer, professional poker player, and business executive) with similar, mostly previously untranslated sections from another book of his, Palestina, Mon Amour, and some relevant excerpts from his essay, “E noi saremo sempre pronti a impadronirci un’altra volta del cielo: Contro l’amnistia” (trans. – “And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again: Against the amnesty”).
An accompanying 51pg. pamphlet, “A Mano Armata (Excerpts)” collects more topical sections from that book of his (the title of which translates as `with armed hand’, or `at gunpoint’ and is part of the Italian legal name of offenses analogous to armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon, with `a mano‘ also having the sense of a tool ready and available for use, or of `hand-made’, `manually’).
The sharply echoing, often numbered and diary-like stanzas that make up much of the book are a remembrance of the deadly, pro-liberatory armed struggle Bonanno took part in during the `60s and following decades, including alongside Palestinians in the Levant (relating also his experience of torture for this by Mossad in 1972), in Greece against the junta, in Ireland, Algeria, Uganda, and Italy. Written mostly during various later-life prison stints in Italy and Greece for robberies and seditions (both real and fabricated), these poetic, searingly honest tracings of formative, difficult memories grapple with suffering, monstrosity, humanity, and ghostly normality, the silent, irreversible and all-transfiguring singularities of death and of ending the lives of others, and the irresolvable tension between the quantitative and qualitative. The paradoxical, messy engagements with the often deeply flawed, recuperative, and quixotic but sometimes critical aspects of clandestine revolutionary warfare come deeply into play, alongside those with the projects of memory, theoretical and personal understanding, and the word itself. Bonanno refuses to shy away from the stark insights and puzzling question marks born of having closely shadowed and struck at torturers, informers, provocateurs, traitors, cops, and soldiers, and does so without hiding behind either moralism or trite anti-moralist cliches. Reaching us like an esoteric, late medieval folk heretic, Bonanno in these texts feels perfectly attuned to apprehend his and our current moments (in particular their real incomprehensibility), even through such unlikely lenses as his highly ambivalent exegeses of Saint Augustine or Goethe’s Faust.
Footnotes, selections, typesetting, back cover text for the book (the back cover text of the A Mano Armata pamphlet is taken from excerpts of the text), and cover designs are also by Nim Thorn.
from Instagram
Submission
🤖🐶
It is unclear what the struggle for Palestinian liberation will look like in the coming days. At the time of this writing a ceasefire has just been reached between Hamas and the Zionist entity, at the same time the Zionist entity continues to devastate Gaza and the West Bank. Last year a specific struggle against a local technology company connected the dots between Palestinian liberation, local gentrification, education, militarism, and borders. The company in question, Ghost Robotics, has come under fire for creating robot dogs used by the Israeli Defense Forces. That struggle may well be ongoing and this zine is not meant to push struggles into the safety of history, its aim is to inspire revolt, specifically against Ghost Robotics and generally against all aspects of domination. The struggle against Ghost Robotics has taken many forms, from spreading information and popular education, to organizing demonstrations, to destroying property. By reflecting on the past struggles we can better imagine and carry out our struggles today. This zine brings together writings about Ghost Robotics, a timeline of publicly documented action against Ghost Robotics, communiques from anonymous actions, a few photos. All information is taken from sources listed in the Resources section at the end.
Philadelphia, Occupied Lenapehoking,
Winter 2025
[PDF] [PDF For Printing]
from Never Sleep
PDF: APEM 2025-02
Anarchists are going to make explosives. In Greece and Russia it is regular, but a lot of the recipes easily available online are either quite dangerous (like TATP) or outdated (like most of the US Army Improvised Munitions Manual). The recipes I have compiled are found with a little bit of digging but are often garbled and not easy to understand due to a lot of tweaking happening on the forums they are posted in. My sources are primarily sciencemadness.org and various YouTube chemistry channels, as well as some rocketry sites and occasionally reddit. (With a little work you will be able to verify all the instructions I have put into this document.)
**It is my hope that by the compilation of this guide anarchists who are going to make explosives will at least make safer ones** that will not lead to injuries, arrests, or deaths.
Submission
from O.R.C.A.
Join us on March 16th at 6:15pm at ORCA for the release of the book `The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’, the pamphlet “A Mano Armata (Excerpts)”, and a screening of the film ¡G.A.R.I! (2013, 1h 23 min, French with English subtitles), by Nicolas Réglat, followed by a discussion if the mood strikes us. For location and accessibility info, email orca.philly@protonmail.com (note that ORCA is not wheelchair accessible and heating in the space can be spotty). There will be free books (somewhat limited quantity, somewhat crudely printed and bound) and pamphlets and the event is also free, with no RSVP necessary. Masking is encouraged and expected, and there will be an air filter running. There will be a box you can drop contributions to Reeking Thickets and ORCA in, but only if you really feel like it. After the event the full reading and printing pdfs will be uploaded, and a somewhat limited further quantity of physical copies will be available (email reekingthickets@proton.me) for $5 each to cover some of the costs of production, or, possibly, for slightly more at local radical bookstores.
`The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’ is a 266pg. book from Reeking Thickets Press bringing together a new, rough translation of the 2010 book L’Ospite Inattesso by influential Sicilian insurrectionary anarchist, robber, poet, and philosopher Alfredo Bonanno (and as he reminds us, former motorcycle racer, professional poker player, and business executive) with similar, mostly previously untranslated sections from another book of his, Palestina, Mon Amour, and some relevant excerpts from his essay, “E noi saremo sempre pronti a impadronirci un’altra volta del cielo: Contro l’amnistia” (trans. – “And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again: Against the amnesty”).
An accompanying 51pg. pamphlet, “A Mano Armata (Excerpts)” collects more topical sections from that book of his (the title of which translates as `with armed hand’, or `at gunpoint’ and is part of the Italian legal name of offenses analogous to armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon, with `a mano‘ also having the sense of a tool ready and available for use, or of `hand-made’, `manually’).
To our knowledge, The Unexpected Guest, A Mano Armata, and many of the included sections of Palestine, Mon Amour haven’t been properly translated into English, and this primarily machine-based translation – though we feel is sufficient for some purposes – certainly can’t be considered as such. Translation was carried out by Nim Thorn, a non-speaker of Italian, using various translation programs with the results then checked for apparent mistakes or divergences and the offending passages re-translated in context with dictionaries and using other translation programs. Short stanzas (such as the section “Untitled” in Palestine, Mon Amour) or metered sections (such as the Faust excerpts in The Unexpected Guest) were also translated word by word using comparisons of multiple tools. The introduction to the second edition of A Mano Armata is a particularly bad translation, of a difficult text in the first place, though some parts of it still shine through quite clearly, and the subject matter – in part about the desire to engage with the word backwards by constructing semio-cognitive labyrinths to reflect absence and help bypass the recuperating tendency of the will and language – feels ironically relevant.
Footnotes, selections, typesetting, back cover text for the book (the back cover text of the A Mano Armata pamphlet is taken from excerpts of the text), and cover designs are also by Nim Thorn. No authorization was sought for this project and, for our part, further printing or distribution is welcomed.
The sharply echoing, often numbered and diary-like stanzas that make up much of the book are a remembrance of the deadly, pro-liberatory armed struggle Bonanno took part in during the `60s and following decades, including alongside Palestinians in the Levant (relating also his experience of torture for this by Mossad in 1972), in Greece against the junta, in Ireland, Algeria, Uganda, and Italy. Written mostly during various later-life prison stints in Italy and Greece for robberies and seditions (both real and fabricated), these poetic, searingly honest tracings of formative, difficult memories grapple with suffering, monstrosity, humanity, and ghostly normality, the silent, irreversible and all-transfiguring singularities of death and of ending the lives of others, and the irresolvable tension between the quantitative and qualitative. The paradoxical, messy engagements with the often deeply flawed, recuperative, and quixotic but sometimes critical aspects of clandestine revolutionary warfare come deeply into play, alongside those with the projects of memory, theoretical and personal understanding, and the word itself. He refuses to shy away from the stark insights and puzzling question marks born of having closely shadowed and struck at torturers, informers, provocateurs, traitors, cops, and soldiers, and does so without hiding behind either moralism or trite anti-moralist cliches. Reaching us like an esoteric, late medieval folk heretic, Bonanno in these texts feels perfectly attuned to apprehend his and our current moments (in particular their real incomprehensibility), even through such unlikely lenses as his highly ambivalent exegeses of Saint Augustine or Goethe’s Faust.
¡G.A.R.I! (2013) by Nicolas Réglat is a documentary about the affinity groups of French and Spanish anarchists who briefly gathered under that acronym (trans. – `Revolutionary Internationalist Action Groups’) in France from 1973-1974 for revolt and to join with Spanish anarchist and autonomous rebels in combat with the far-right dictatorship of Franco and the broader capitalist, authoritarian order, who were then under real threat of judicial or extra-judicial execution. It included the participation, alleged in some cases, of many influential figures including Jean Weir, Lucio Urtubia, Floréal Cuadrado, Jean-Marc Rouillan, and Octavio Alberola. Operating between various regions of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and coordinating with rebels in or exiled from Spain, and with groups across Europe, GARI carried out a kidnapping of a Spanish banker and numerous non-lethal arsons, bombings, acts of infrastructure sabotage, machine-gunnings, robberies and fraud, while carrying out creative counter-information and aiding in the smuggling of arms and fighters to and from Spain. In the ambit of groups like the Angry Brigade or the First of May Group, GARI embraced an aggressive and strategic transnational armed struggle while remaining in touch with the spark of situationism and the autonomous movements, and resisting the vanguardism, organizational fetishization, and authoritarian variants of anti-imperialism so prevalent then and now. Though only existing as such for a short period before diffracting in countless directions across the constellation of struggle in Europe (including some arguably non-anarchist directions, such as the later path of Action Directe) which they contributed to spreading, GARI was an important node and precedent in the experimenting millieu from which contemporary insurrectionary anarchism was then emerging. Taking as point of departure a never-published comic book created by the GARI kidnappers in 1976, Réglat sets out to `save from the dustbin of history’ the stories of those involved, which includes that of some of his own family members. Consisting of archival footage and present day conversations with people involved in the events, and made possible by the expiration of statute of limitations, the film is a refreshingly human look into complex experiences from a chapter often glossed over, yet the consequences of which still ripple strongly in our struggles today.
Submission
A new short zine (The Responsibility of Criminals) questioning how one acts under political persecution and certain risks of being a political criminal.
Submission
On Thursday, Philadelphia city council approved 76 Place, the downtown basketball arena threatening Chinatown. Are we surprised? Philadelphia government has been auctioning off neighborhoods of color to the highest bidder for generations.
Less than 24 hours after the vote, while billionaire developers and their lackeys were still congratulating themselves on the buying off local government yet again, some autonomous artists dropped a multi-story banner off of a Center City parking garage with a reminder that the fight is just beginning. “76 Place Will Never Be Built,” it read. “From Philly to Palestine, stop land grabs.” The three billionaire housing moguls salivating at the destruction of Chinatown are the architects of gentrification and settler colonialism from the Black Bottom to Palestine. We’re just getting started. They will fail. Solidarity means attack.
Submission
flyer .png: https://upload.disroot.org/r/hUBqVExC#PhuSmVKBegubTa6qLs72At5lyIHGsK3aX6at31YXjIU=
flyer PDF: https://upload.disroot.org/r/DfteY0Wu#BVshmlG7jvVnbolWTfoSUAylk+Dm7KAf4m97jB1/HEg=
How can one live freely in the shadow of a prison?
There are moments, like today in Syria, when we can only rejoice. See the statues of Bashar and his relatives looted, the crowds in the streets, the open prison doors. These moments that remind us that all regimes, including the most authoritarian ones, can fall.
If there is a constant in the revolutions, it is that of freeing prisoners. Symbol of power, of who can decide the freedom of its subjects, prison is one of the nodes on which rests submission to the State and acceptance of social norms.
One of the worst prisons in the world, Sednaya, has apparently been completely emptied of its prisoners, allowing people to see their relatives whom they had not heard from for many years or even meet them for the first time. But let’s not be mistaken, while the «rebels» are emptying the prisons of the fallen regime, those under their control are already filled with opponents.
Revolutionaries have already fallen in the trap of supporting pro-State organisations, by third-worldism, against imperialism, seduced by kurdish communalism or the romanticism of the guerrilla. Unfortunately it is more a religious alliance, wishing to give direction to “the will of the people” than the insurgents in Syria who managed to overthrow the regime. Such structures using military practices will never be desirable. We want to carry an anti-authoritarian and without borders solidarity with the revolted in Syria, because our hopes in the Syrian revolution go beyond the perpetuation of a society held by arms, subjected to a celestial power as earthly, which requires prisons to exist.
While we welcome the liberation of syrians from the shackles of Assad’s clan, we can only hope that what was in seed during the 2011 insurrections can go even further, towards a self-organisation of all spheres of daily life, attack and the total questioning of power and property.
Here as there, so much remains to be destroyed. Prisons, Religions, States.
Happiness to the reunion of the freed, force to the ones locked up all over the world!
Anarchists, confident as wary,
France, December 9th 2024