Articles by Andrew N Flood
The Bolt is an abandoned hostel for the homeless that has been occupied and brought back into use by an alliance of 6 housing groups in Dublin.
In this video Solidarity Times interview one of the organisers in some detail about the building, support from local residents and what has been going on with the council.
This is a by email interview Andrew did with Black Άκυροι from from Thessaloniki Greece in April 2015 about the Dublin anarchist bookfair, squatting & policing in Ireland, Syriza and horizontalism. At the end you will find a link for the interview as published.
17th May and ISIS capture Ramadi and with it another huge stock of modern US weaponry. Something like 6000 US trained Iraqi soldiers have fled the city without putting up much of a fight. From all accounts the ISIS force was considerable smaller and reliant on a waves of suicide car bombs for its final attack. It’s not hard to see why ISIS had been successful in establishing the idea that it was indeed an unstoppable force carrying out gods will.
But on the same day to the north west ISIS suffer yet another major defeat at the hands of the YPG and YPJ in Rojava. The YPG/J unlike the Iraqi army is a force almost starved of heavy modern weaponry. Photos have circulated online of self constructed armoured vehicles, often tractors with steel boxes bolted on, that for all intents and purposes are identical to the home made anarchist armour of the 1930s Spanish revolution. And no match at all for the captured US armour ISIS have.
Austerity was never going to be defeated by the vote. We don’t live in an economic democracy, we live in an economic dictatorship where only those with vast wealth determine its course. Parliament provides a useful illusion, one that limits our dreams and stops us acting to make them a reality. The real defeat in Greece will not be the capitulation of Syriza but rather if that capitulation is broadly accepted as the end of the road of struggle.
Last night (2 July) the IMF in effect put its weight behind the Syriza government and the call for a No vote (OXI) in the referendum. An image of Chile’s socialist president Allende, murdered in the 1973 US coup ‘backing’ the No vote captured for us both the contradictions and dangers of Sunday’s vote in Greece.
It now appears that the Syriza’s insistence that the severe nature of what the Trokia demanded meant that the Greek people had to directly decide through referendum on whether or not to comply has been replaced with the more standard ‘We can decide for you’ of electoralist politics. That is unless the letter from Tsipras offering a deal that the Financial Times has leaked is a forgery, which seems unlikely.
According to how uncritical individuals and organisations are of Syriza they are currently taking one side or another in an argument as to whether this indicates a sell out or is some new master stroke. But it reinforces our criticism of the hopes placed in electoralism and Syriza. Once more the people who elected them and those in solidarity with them across Europe are reduced to being spectators in something akin to an episode of West Wing.
The ideas of each age tend to become that of the ruling ideology and we are seeing an extraordinary example of that at the moment. As a response the ECB/IMF attack on Greek democracy an online fund it campaign has been set up to fund the 1.6 billion interest owed and so far 1,863 people have contributed.
The first problem is the obvious practical one that the 1.6 billion if raised only represents the latest interest instalment on an unplayable debt over 300 billion. So even if successful such a project would only kick the ball down the road for a month or two.
The terrorist white supremacist suspect behind the Charleston murders has been identified as Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old from Lexington County, S.C. In this photo he is wearing the apartheid-era South African flag and the flag of the racist Rhodesian state on his jacket. Another photos shows that his car had a ‘Confederate States of America’ racist flag license plate.
The murders were carried out almost on the anniversary of June 16, 1822. That was the date in 1822 when Denmark Vesey planned a slave revolt in Charleston in order to liberate those enslaved, and sail to the black revolutionary republic of Haiti. Vesey was one of the founders of the church where yesterdays murders took place. The revolt was originally planned for July 14th, the anniversary of the storming of the bastille during the French revolution but was brought forward because of a fear of informers.
Irish government policy is creating a fresh property boom that is once more driving the most marginalised onto the streets and into insecure accommodation. The deliberate creation of housing scarcity has seen huge numbers being evicted by greedy landlords, normally making use of the rights stripping clause that allows them to claim they are intending to move a family member into the property. Right now in Dublin who doesn’t have friends being evicted under that clause?