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An establishment view of the referendum that won Repeal – In the Shadow of the 8th review

Book length histories of the Repeal referendum have started to appear. That this second one is an autobiography is in itself a testament to how long the 8th Amendment ruled over us. The 8th amendment takes up about half the space of Peter Boylan’s ‘In the Shadow of the 8th’. Boylan was an obstetrician who retired from Holles St in 2016, he was a prominent spokesperson for Repeal in the referendum of 2018 and was then central to the implementation of abortion access in the aftermath of winning that referendum. In telling the story of his medical career he tells the story of how the 8th shaped it.

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It’s a Yes – review of an account of the campaign that won the abortion referendum in Ireland

The publication of the co-directors history of the Together for Yes (T4Y) campaign is an important step in building an accessible collective history of the final stage of the long struggle to repeal the hated 8th amendment to the Irish constitution. It along with the forthcoming Together for Yes review of the referendum campaign should probably be read by everyone who worked for Repeal, if for no other reason than to get a better understanding of the ‘big picture’ of what we were involved in.

 

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Winning Repeal – capturing the lessons of a successful struggle

On 25th May 2018 Ireland voted by 2 to 1 to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution. This massive victory came after years of grassroots campaigning demanding that the government call such a referendum and then a very intense 68 days of campaigning where 1000s of volunteers threw everything they had into winning. For 30 years before that I campaigned and wrote about that struggle and in the years since I’ve started to try to capture the learnings from that moment of change from a specifically anarchist perspective. This is an index of that material and an appeal to those anarchists who were involved to consider doing an audio interview with me that can further add to this story.

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Transport needs and Climate Breakdown – collective not individual action is needed

As part of the global climate strike about 25 thousand students marched through the center of Dublin city. This was one of many demonstrations that took place around Ireland, even the small dormitory towns around Dublin like Maynooth had their own demonstrations. So the actual numbers protesting in Ireland was probably in the region of 40,000.  In this piece Andrew looks at how collective action can halt Climate Breakdown using the example of the need for transport to illustrate why individual consumer choices cannot fix things.

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Exploring Violence, Non-violence & Extinction Rebellion – where XR gets the research wrong

Disagreements about the role of violence in political movements is at least as old as those movements. Extinction Rebellion have tried to short cut such discussions through reference to a piece of research they suggest shows non-violent movements are twice as successful in achieving their objectives. In this episode of We Only Want the Earth I examine what this paper actually claims and use this as a way to talk about non-violence and recent radical political movements.

 

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My alarm about Climate Change & Extinction Rebellion – WOWE1

The overwhelming evidence of Climate Change is causing me significant alarm, Extinction Rebellion is a response that has gained some traction but as I show here its ‘beyond politics, declare a climate emergency’ solution cannot deliver what is needed because capitalism and colonialism are the very political problems that caused Climate Change in the first place. [video]

 

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Pushing back fascism and building the left – where KaN got it woefully wrong

The US fascist movement, like most fascist movements, is subject to vicious infighting.  If you observe their chatter you will see the expression ‘don’t punch right’ used frequently. This means focus your attacks on the real enemy. For them this is the left. Kill All Normies while providing a somewhat useful introduction to the new internet driven fascism unfortunately punched left and down with far more intensity than it punched right. Its taxonomy of the alt-right was sabotaged by often mean spirited attacks on the author’s (Angela Nagle) left enemies. Throughout the book she attacks women game developers who dare to insert feminist themes, obnoxious tweeters, intersectional feminists, gender rebellious Tumblrs and even anti-fascists who recognise the need for physical confrontation. 

Kill all Normies is thus best understood not so much as a book about the alt-right but as a collection of polemical essays, mostly directed at the radical left, making use of the moment of crisis that was the Trump election.  This piece should not be seen as a simple ‘is it worth reading’ review.  Instead I use KaN as a starting point for a number of important discussions for the left and to explore modern fascism as well as looking at some of the events involving the US far right that occurred after it was published and what they have to tell us about the real weaknesses of that movement.

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Identity Politics is a Four way Conflict

Discussions about Identity Politics (IdPol) absorbs a huge amount of energy across the political spectrum.  Discussion on the left however is often complicated and made overly hostile because they take place along the single axis of oppression which means proponents of IdPol get lumped in with Hilary Clinton while opponents get lumped in with Donald Trump.  This understandably encourages bad faith discussions that throw a lot of heat and very little light. Here we are going to argue that a much more useful exchange can happen when we instead create a plot where one axis is oppression and the second is exploitation as that puts both Trump & Clinton a good distance away from socialists. [Audio of this article]

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Was winning the Repeal referendum inevitable?

 The vote to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution in May 2018 was overwhelmingly carried, with almost 2 out of every 3 voters voting Yes remove the ban. The margin of victory was such that some post-referendum polemics made the mistake of arguing that victory was always inevitable, that the campaign didn’t matter. Such arguments tended to be made by opinion writers who never liked the Repeal campaign and in some cases published pieces during the campaign arguing that unless whatever aspect they disliked was dropped the referendum would be lost.

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A-infos; Keeping the torch burning for the 24th year

In 1994 Class War organised an international anarchist gathering in London under the heading of ’10 days the shook the world’. It provided a location that brought together a number of anarchist who had been working on the promotion of the anarchist idea online and set off a string of collaborations that would last in some cases to the present day.