![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/2.jpg\")
A memorial at the site where Carlo Giuliani was killed, not long after his death.
\nOn July 20, 2001, at the peak of the movement against capitalist globalization, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Genoa, Italy to oppose the summit of the eight most powerful governments in the world—the G8. During the massive demonstrations that ensued, a police officer named Mario Placanica shot and killed a 23-year-old demonstrator named Carlo Giuliani.
\n\nThe following text was written by Tomas Rothaus, a fellow participant in the battle of Genoa.
\n\n A memorial at the site where Carlo Giuliani was killed, not long after his death.
\n\n\n\nIf we are speaking seriously of revolution, then we need to take a serious look at history and see what the consequences are, not only if we fail, but even if we are triumphant. Revolutions mean blood, death, and suffering. If we are not willing to accept this, then we should not be calling for them.
\n\n—“The Lessons of Genoa.” Barricada #8. Summer/September 2001
\n
I wrote those words once upon a time, Carlo, when your blood was still fresh on the pavement and your name still in every newspaper and on every television. I published them in our anarchist journal, Barricada, and I continue to stand by them. But please don’t misunderstand them. I’m sorry you’re gone and I experience your death as a tragedy. I think about you to this day more than you could imagine. Hopefully, I’m not alone in that regard.
\n\nFor years and years, as long as I could, I made sure that every July 20, we directed the rage that we carried for you in our hearts against our enemies. In the random cities of whatever country I happened to find myself in, we made sure that Molotov cocktails lit up the night, that it rained stones in the dark against banks, that we ambushed cop cars, that we etched your name upon the walls of Boston, Goettingen, Paris, Berlin. Sometimes, to celebrate your life and not your death (as well as to throw off the cops), we chose to avenge you on your birthday, March 14, rather than the day of your death.
\n\nToday, decades after that 20th of July of 2001, I’m often reminded of you in the most unexpected ways. I’ll see a person in their forties. Decently dressed, tidy, maybe wearing a business suit or some kind of work uniform. A human just old enough to look worn from the inevitable stresses of life, love, and labor, but young enough that their youthfulness still shines through from behind the five o’clock shadow and incipient beer belly. Because when I see this random person, any random person, who is about the age you would be today, I’m reminded of the day when the cop’s bullet took away your life—and your future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/3.jpg\")
\nI’m not as outraged by your death as I am by all the life you were robbed of.
\n\nWe had an affinity in battle, and it was only fate that put you in that particular battle, on that particular plaza—the one my friends and I happened to not be at. The one time on that particular day that the police aimed their bullets not at the sky, but at the head of a human being. Your head.
\n\nFrom what I’m told, if we had lived in the same city, chances are good we wouldn’t have gotten along very well. I’m told you were one of Genoa’s punkabbestia, which (from what I understand) is like the chaos punks or street punks we had in my cities. Not particularly organized, sometimes dropping in on political meetings but definitely not an activist, militant, or any kind of cadre. The Tute Bianche, whose words to this day I’m obviously still reluctant to take at face value, called you “not particularly political.” They said that you used to spend your time at the Piazza Delle Erbe, where you would “beg and hang out with friends and stray dogs.” All of which I have nothing against—but we all know that the street punks and the obsessive young orthodox anarchists often didn’t get along very well.
\n\nNone of that matters, though. What matters is that they froze you in time. You will forever be a young street punk, if that’s indeed what you were, robbed of the opportunity to do whatever it is that brought you joy and made you feel whole as a person in the years and decades that should have still been left in your life. Maybe your youthful rebellion would have eventually faded, you would have finished your university studies, gotten a degree, moved on, and looked back with disdain at your days on the streets as a rebel and an outcast. Or maybe you would have looked at them with wistful nostalgia, as a healthy chapter you went through in your life before assimilating, getting a good union job thanks to your dad’s connections, starting a family, and throwing a coin toward the next generation of punkabbestia as you passed them on the streets that used to be yours. Or, who knows, maybe you would have become an old punk, graying but still free, dog at your side, panhandling on the streets of Genoa to this very day.
\n\nBut you were robbed of a future, so you will never be any of those things. You won’t betray us, you won’t move on, you won’t walk among us. And, even if my adventures hadn’t exiled me from Europe and I could find myself in Genoa once more, we’ll never reminisce together about that hot, sunny summer day when you could have gone to the beach but instead, outraged at the police invasion of your home, joined us in battle.
\n\nYou’ll never have a chance to move on, regret your choices, denounce the excesses of your youth, or spend your entire life staying true to them. You’ll forever be, as your best friend Daniele remembered you just a few days after your death,
\n\n\n\n\n“someone who had that evil inside, the one that is here in the air, that we all have. He didn’t fit in the society, in the system. He suffered a lot, and since he was more sensitive than us, more generous and kinder, he was also more fragile.”
\n
Forever a twenty-three-year-old, just a few short years beyond a teenager, looking at us through an aging photo, or reminding me of the brutal price of rebellion as the picture of you lying in a pool of blood flashes constantly in my head.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/8.jpg\")
\nJust as I’m outraged that you were robbed of whatever future you were yet to choose, I’m alarmed as I see your memory fading in time from the collective consciousness of those who came after you. I don’t even know why I’m addressing you in a letter. I don’t believe in the afterlife, and I doubt you did either. Maybe it’s my desperate way of grasping at a sense of control over what seems inevitable: that time eventually devours us all. That, while the circumstances may be different, both death as well as the passage of time will one day come after me just as they came for you. Still—and here I assume we’re also similar in spirit—just because it’s inevitable doesn’t mean it’s going to stop me from trying to prevent it.
\n\nYet many years have passed, Carlo, and I’ve had to lay down my weapons as well. So, since I can no longer do my part to keep your memory alive with action, here we are: a godless anarchist writing a letter to a dead street punk. Hoping others will read it and inquire about you, and about the conditions, dreams, and adventures that led to the rising tide of our movement, and the wave that swept your life with it that day. It’s the only useful weapon I can find in my arsenal today to fight the idea that you will be forgotten, just a footnote in a distant clash of a long-forgotten movement. Your face, your hopes, your dreams, and eventually your name just fading into the history books.
\n\nWe’ve been fighting the battle for your memory since the day you were killed. We’ve tried our best to be fair to it. To not assign you roles or aspirations you might have rejected. But it hasn’t been easy, and I apologize if we didn’t represent you as you would have liked. In Barricada, we boldly and without hesitation branded you an anarchist, never knowing if you identified with the word. In our defense, you can’t imagine what those hours, days, weeks, and months after you died were like.
\n\nThere were some among us, well-intentioned but misguided, who hallucinated you into an organized anarchist militant. A frontline fighter of the black bloc. They wanted to turn you into a willing martyr who gladly laid down his life for the cause. But I know you didn’t choose this, because you were close to not even showing up that day. More importantly, because none of us do. Unlike fascists, we celebrate life, not death.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/5.jpg\")
“Carlo lives—it is you who are dead.”
\nThen there were the pacifists and the reformists. These days, I try to steer clear of the hyperbolic anarchist sectarian language of my youth, but when I remember them—their actions and their words when talking about you—it comes roaring back. If you could have seen the crocodile tears of the scum of that movement! They invoked your name, pretended to hold high your memory—but they celebrated and remembered you only because you died. Those of us who acted with you, like you, who were your comrades on that day but whom fate didn’t place in the way of a cop’s bullet that afternoon in Plaza Alimonda—they denounced us. They said we were responsible for the violence, that we had brought the rage of the state upon the good demonstrators. That indirectly, we were the ones who were responsible for your death, not the state, not the cop that fired the gun. They spread absurd conspiracy theories that the black bloc and the massive, generalized, dignified resistance were the work of undercover cops and fascists.
\n\nAdrift in the parallel reality that their narrative created, they tried to attack us, tried to expel us from the movement, pushing us out toward the cops, calling us fascists and hooligans. And the next day, as we set out to avenge your death, they directed their chants of “Assassini!”—murderers—at us just as much as at the cops. They, too, made every attempt to claim you as a martyr of their movement, but in their case with the incredible cynicism and hypocrisy of vindicating your memory while denouncing all the others who acted as you did. To them, you were better dead than alive. A hooligan in life, a martyr in death.
\n\nThe ATTAC folks, the Genoa Social Forum, the Tute Bianche, the parties, the reformists, and the whole alphabet soup of aspiring managers of discontent—all of them tried to make you into a victim. A hapless and misguided youth, murdered by the state. They wanted to deprive you of agency—as they often do with those whose choices they can’t understand or don’t respect. I’m still not sure how much of it is cynical opportunism and how much of it is that they actually can’t conceive of any form of struggle beyond political maneuvering and mediated clashes. So every time we put the cops on the run—every time we opened up enough fronts to keep them at bay, so that some of us had a chance to calmly deconstruct the landscape of capitalism and take much-needed and much-deserved breaks between battles, lounging on the bank furniture we had set up in the streets with the leisure of a backyard campfire—they hallucinated some grand police master plan to justify repression against the whole anti-globalization movement. Those of us who lived were fascists, hooligans, and provocateurs, while you, by virtue of dying, became a victim and a martyr. They simply could not accept that the rebellion in Genoa was not only organic and authentic but also successful.
\n\nYou died precisely because, on that day and in that moment, we were succeeding. The cops were retreating. I don’t know if you ever knew it, but it wasn’t just there on the Piazza Alimonda—they were on the run throughout the entire area. I know this will be controversial, but given the circumstances, I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that they “murdered” you. I’ll spare us both the voyeuristic reconstruction of the minutiae of your final moments. There were years of endless discussions about whether the bullet hit you directly or ricocheted off of something, whether you were throwing the fire extinguisher or just holding it. The soldier who shot you was eventually found to have acted in self-defense and acquitted of any wrongdoing. I’m also not so sure that it matters, honestly, aside from the need of many comrades, even anarchist comrades, to seek out the role of victim of police brutality, as if positioning ourselves in the role of perpetual victim in the face of the big bad state would lend us some moral high ground in the eyes of broader society. It’s defeatist and I hate it, as I assume you would too. The justice we were looking for was never that of the state and its courts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/9.jpg\")
Carlo Giuliani Park. Photo by Pinciolola.
\nSpeaking of fear, this is what the soldier who shot you, Mario Placanica, said to the judge shortly after killing you:
\n\n\n\n\n“I fired because I was afraid of dying. I don’t know what happened. I remember they were surrounding us, attacking us, that the jeep was an inferno. My hands were shaking and I fired without looking outside.”
\n
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m definitely no friend of cops or soldiers—but I don’t have any difficulty believing him. At the time, he was twenty years old, barely more than a teenager, sent out into the streets of Genoa that day after being told by his superiors to “be on the lookout” because demonstrators would be “throwing bags of infected blood” and that there would be “terrorist attacks.” He said, “The feeling was as if we were going to war.”
\n\nI’ve been in similar situations, including elsewhere in Genoa on that very same day. I’ve stood in the place you stood, but at a different time and in a different place, and looked into the eyes of the uniformed person in front of me. If I were the cop or soldier, I too would be afraid. Perhaps I too would pull the trigger, especially if I were a young soldier, a believer in God and country, facing an advancing and seemingly uncontrollable horde of masked anarchists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/1.jpg\")
Carlo Giuliani Park. Photo by Pinciolola.
\nFor what it’s worth, the man who killed you is a shell of a human being now. Let go from the carabinieri in 2005 due to psychological problems, today he represents himself as a “destroyed, lonely, and consumed man” who battles depression.
\n\nUnsurprisingly, I have next to no sympathy for his plight. But is he personally a murderer? I don’t know. We could never really make up our minds about that—so much so that the back cover of the issue of Barricada that we published immediately after the battle of Genoa, which was dedicated to you, in which we vowed to avenge you, includes the line “Carlo was not a victim of police brutality” while also proclaiming, “They murdered an anarchist.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/7.jpg\")
“In Loving Memory of a Fallen Comrade.” Barricada #8. Summer/September 2001.
\nAs much contempt as I hold for the man who killed you, a few years ago, he said something that helps me to understand why I, like so many anarchists, identified so strongly with you and felt your death so personally and passionately:
\n\n\n\n\n“That day for me remains a trauma, trauma for the death of a boy like me, also a victim on that tragic day. I am not an executioner, I am not a vigilante. That day I did not hold the gun for Mario Placanica, I held it for the Carabinieri, for the Italian state.”
\n
For a moment, let’s ignore the wallowing self-pity and false equivalency of how he paints himself as a fellow victim, since we both know that he was a not a conscript but a professional who willingly chose his profession. He is nonetheless correct that it was the Italian state that put the gun in this child soldier’s hand and gave him free rein to fire it against whose who rebelled. They shot you because you were “one of us.”
\n\n“One of us.” We spray-painted that on walls for years. One of the thousands and thousands on the streets of Genoa that day who chose to rebel. One of us, one and the same, regardless of what political label we slap on ourselves, regardless of whether some spend their days editing anarchist journals and plotting actions while others spend their days panhandling and hanging out with their dogs on the streets of their city.
\n\nOne of us. All of us, regardless of our more specific motivations, were there on that day because we saw this world as broken and refused to stand idly. You chose to rebel, just like us, a rock in your hand, your face masked, unbowed in dignity. No intermediaries, no staged or managed or curated spectacle of rebellion catering to the imagined tastes of the masses. Just your body as a weapon and the comrades who stood by your side as your strength. You chose this path not to die, but to live. Because you wanted to live, free and unchained.
\n\nSo free, so unchained, that I know that our affinity probably only existed in the streets, in combat against those who we recognized as our common enemies. I won’t be striking any nostalgic notes here as to what a wonderful human being you were, although your dad says you gave him “the strength of your ideals” and taught him to not judge people by “a ripped shirt, holes in their pants, or colored hair.” There will be no grief voyeurism here; the press vultures did enough of that back in the day.
\n\nOne of us. Maybe not an activist or a militant, not a cadre of any organization or structure, but one of us because you chose to fight. To fight alongside us, side by side. One of us—and that’s why they shot you. We all know that the bullet that found you could just as easily have found any one of us. It was meant for any one of us, for all of us.
\n\nOver the months and years that followed your death, I came to understand just how painfully and viscerally true this is—as comrade after comrade fell to the bullets of the state or the knives of the fascists. The same year you died, the state unleashed a storm of bullets that killed dozens in Argentina. I couldn’t help remembering you as I took cover behind our improvised barricades, not knowing if the bullets speeding towards us were rubber or lead. Years later, when a cop murdered a fifteen-year-old anarchist in Athens, many of us who shared the streets with you in Genoa rained fire on the cops outside the occupied Polytechnic. You were on our minds then, as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/4.jpg\")
\nWhat I’ll say next might sound contradictory, but it will make sense to other combatants. After many years, I’ve concluded that that is what we are—combatants. Of course, we don’t go to war, and I don’t pretend that we are things that we are not. It is true that there is no comparison between the risks associated with the conflicts we participate in and the conditions of actual warfare. But my life experiences and the experiences of those around me involve constant proximity to death, prison, serious injury, exile. These are not the experiences, the traumas, that most civilians experience in this part of the world—at least, not yet.
\n\nAs a combatant, I believe two things simultaneously, even as they sound contradictory.
\n\nFirst, your death was tragic. I wish it had never happened. We have tried desperately to avenge you—both out of principle and also as a matter of basic self-defense. To send the message to the state that the blood of rebels, of anarchists, carries with it a steep price.
\n\nBut at the same time—and this is where a lot of people didn’t see eye to eye with us—was your death unexpected? Probably not. Should we call it murder? Maybe in the broad sense, but the question seems almost irrelevant. Above all: was your death a reason to stop our efforts? Absolutely not. Rebellion is important. But rebels die, particularly when rebellions start to succeed and the state begins to take its enemies seriously. And when the state takes their lives, I miss them, and love even those I never met.
\n\nIt sounds like demagogy to say you miss a person who you’ve never met, and who you probably wouldn’t even have gotten along with well. But I do. I miss you like I miss Dax and Carlos, taken by fascists’ knives in Milan and Madrid; like I miss Clement who fell fighting fascists in Paris; like I miss Pocho Lepratti in Buenos Aires, Alexis in Athens, and Tortuguita in Atlanta, all taken by the bullets of the police. Or like I miss that kid in Goettingen who came into our info shop one day, whose name I can’t even remember, who I’m ashamed to say I never took seriously, who went on to lay down his life fighting against Islamic fascism and for revolution in Rojava, like so many other international volunteers. I miss them and every other comrade gone, because those bullets and knives were aimed at all of us. I miss them because they were all part of the struggle for a common idea. I miss them, as I miss you, because while I may not know the person, I know the kind.
\n\nCarlo, I didn’t know you, but I’m sorry you’re gone. I never met you but I miss you. I’ll forever be holding high your memory and trying to avenge your death, because the blood of our comrades does not come cheap. And while I still can’t find the optimism to believe in a conveniently beautiful afterlife, I can’t help but hope that you’ve smiled down approvingly upon our efforts.
\n\nThis text is adapted from the book From Riot to Insurrection: The G8 Summit of 2001 & The Battle of Genoa by Tomas Rothaus.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/6.jpg\")
This mural in memory of those killed by police appeared during the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 in south St. Louis, only a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the historic uprising of 2014.
\nOver the course of the second Trump administration, people around the country have developed models for defending their communities from federal agents intent on kidnapping and terrorizing. We have shared guides from organizers in Chicago and the Twin Cities. In the same spirit, we present this guide to following Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, developed in the Bay Area.
\n\nEmboldened by tens of billions of dollars of federal funding and effective impunity, ICE agents are murdering people in the streets at an accelerating pace. In the course of eight days, ICE agents have taken four lives—randomly gunning down men in Texas and Maine, neither of whom were even the target of their operations, killing another person in Georgia by denying him access to his medication, and chasing another to his death in Florida. They will keep killing people until there are significant consequences for them or those who direct them. We should organize to defend our communities, drawing together networks of people who are experienced taking action together, and look for opportunities to go on the offensive.
\n\nHey, you! Yes, you.
\n\nYOU can counter state violence by following ICE vehicles.
\n\nThings are bad. The government is kidnapping and killing people.
\n\nIt is going to get worse.
\n\nWe see in Minneapolis and every other place fighting fascism that average people taking direct action can hinder and stop state terror.
\n\nFollowing ICE is a concrete way to make it harder for them to inflict violence.
\n\nThis guide is a launching point for you to feel comfortable
\n\na) responding to an ICE sighting
\nb) doing ICE watch patrol.
This guide is for you even if you don’t have a car. Cars need passengers. ICE followers need offsite support.
\n\nThe Resistance needs YOU.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/16/3.jpg\")
You can download the original zine version of this article here. It is addressed to the Bay Area context specifically.
\nThis guide is intended to help you to be as confident as possible, not to intimidate you. In the Twin Cities, everyday people did this work without the luxury of being prepared. You can act even without taking any of the steps in this guide.
\n\nHowever, if you have time now, it’s better to become ready so you don’t have to scramble to get ready later.
\n\nUse Signal. You can find a helpful checklist for Signal security here.
\n\nDisable location services on your phone.
\n\nDownload a VPN. A good free option is Proton VPN.
\n\nDisable biometrics. Replace fingerprint and facial ID with a passcode of more than 8 random digits.
\n\nExtra credit: set up a secondary phone or burner phone. We recommend GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8+.
\n\nFor more security tips, start here.
\n\nRemember:
\n\nConsider:
\n\nGood things to pack:
\n\nFollowing ICE is not a crime. But it is better to be prepared for arrests just in case.
\n\nEach participant should make sure that a trusted person has the following information:
\n\nIf there is a local jail support hotline, memorize the number. Otherwise, memorize the number of someone that you can call if you are arrested.
\n\nThe ideal configuration is 3 cars with 3 people in each car, and 1 person offsite running dispatch. But people have done this with a lot less! At a minimum, you should aim for 2 people in 1 car and an offsite dispatcher.
\n\nYou can divide these tasks between two people (highly recommended) or, if necessary, one person can try to do both at once.
\n\nPhones Role:
\n\nIf the ICE vehicles park and multiple agents exit, or if you see other notable ICE behavior,
\n\nActivator Role:
\n\nDriver Role:
\n\nBest practices for call with dispatch:
\n\nFor maximum clarity, learn the phonetic alphabet to report license plates over the phone—e.g., “Tango Yankee Charlie 666.”
\n\nYou can run dispatch if you are
\n\nIf you are handling dispatch:
\n\nYou can check plate registration here—if there is a mismatch, that indicates that the license plates have been swapped out, which is an ICE tactic frequently seen in the Twin Cities.
\n\nPeople in the Twin Cities set up this interface to check license plates against their continuously updated database of ICE vehicles.
\n\nUse the “SALUTE” protocol to convey information instead of inciting panic:
\n\nSize—number of vehicles/agents
\nActivity—for example, “idling inside vehicles” or “surrounding a home”
\nLocation—with address if possible
\nUniform—tactical gear and “DHS/POLICE/ICE” identifiers
\nTime
\nEquipment—for example, weapons, armored vehicles
\nSupport needed—for example, “Community responders needed NOW!”
A good use of SALUTE protocol could read as follows:
\n\n\n\n\n3 ICE vehicles, including known kidnap van, spotted driving in the Mission at 8:12 am, Feb 10. Join this chat for more info or to help support. (INSERT LINK TO UPDATES CHAT). Do not forward after 10 am.”
\n
This role is difficult and complicated. Don’t be intimidated—just do your best. In some parts of the country, you should be able to connect with experienced dispatchers for training.
\n\nCreate two Signal chats:
\n\n1)\tActive Following: The first chat is for those who are actively following ICE agents. Choose an innocuous group name.
\n\n2)\tUpdates: This is to connect people offsite to information as it becomes available.
\n\nFollow up after the fact:
\n\nWhen you first start following ICE, they will know that you are behind them. They will be driving erratically, cutting across multiple lanes of highway to lose you. In a “handoff,” a dispatcher finds a second car to take over following the ICE vehicle. The second car gets behind you, and then you pretend to let ICE lose you. The second car can then follow the ICE vehicle undetected for some period of time. This is a key function of a dispatcher.
\n\nIn the Twin Cities, handoffs have been essential in enabling activists to follow ICE agents from their headquarters at the Whipple Federal Building to their destinations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/16/2.jpg\")
\nHere are some tactics ICE has used when people are following them. Assess what risks you are willing to take and discuss everything with your crew in advance so you can respond in a coordinated way that works for all participants.
\n\nRemember, you are not alone—you have dispatch and your trusted team to help you make decisions. All you can do is your best. There is not always a right decision in these moments.
\n\nIt’s important to weigh the risks of the ICE vehicle getting away against the risks of continuing to follow them.
\n\nSome scenarios we’ve seen and decisions you should make in advance:
\n\nYou can find resources for recognizing ICE vehicles in the Bay Area here.
\n\nYou can stake out ICE at a building or garage and follow their vehicles when they leave. Doing so can also give you valuable information about how ICE operates.
\n\nIdentify good locations for:
\n\nLocate the nearby bathrooms, while you are at it.
\n\nA picture is worth a thousand words!
\n\nObservers should capture the following details about ICE vehicles:
\n\nSit or stand where you can see the cars moving in and out. Cover your body, face, and hair. Work in pairs so you can take breaks without missing anything.
\n\nTrack vehicle movements. Send messages immediately as they arrive and depart. Note the timestamps.
\n\nTrack people entering and exiting. You can find tips on how to identify ICE agents and vehicles here.
\n\nIf you see a vehicle leaving, enter the vehicle information in the chat immediately, including the direction it is driving.
\n\nContinue observing in case more federal vehicles come out.
\n\nA dispatcher can perform the following tasks to support those staking out ICE at a building or garage:
\n\nMake note of which vehicles have been seen at the scene of abductions and prioritize following those. Not every known ICE vehicle is tasked with Enforcement & Removal Operations. Some of them are for administrators, surveillance operations, Homeland Security Investigations, or other purposes. Prioritize following the ones that have been observed kidnapping people.
\n\nPosition your car where you can follow any vehicle exiting the facility, whichever way it turns. Take note of one-way streets in the area.
\n\nWait patiently: Keep track of the chat and be ready to move. Stay hydrated and well fed but take care not to need a bathroom break at the wrong time.
\n\nWhen you get a message that a vehicle is leaving, follow it! Join the dispatch call. From there on, carry out the regular follow process described above.
\n\nWhich vehicles are worth following?
\n\nHow many cars should follow them?
\n\nWhen should the stakeout end?
\n\nObservation is worthwhile even when there are no followers available, because it enables you to track patterns.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/16/4.jpg\")
\n If ICE agents approach you, record the interaction if at all possible.
\n\nThe law stipulates you have rights when interacting with officers. Unsurprisingly, mercenaries don’t always adhere to the law. Knowing and asserting your rights won’t necessarily protect you. But learning your rights can help you feel confident in asserting them, which could help in a legal case.
\n\nThe 4th Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The 5th Amendment protects against self-incrimination.
\n\nThe ICE officer says that they are not detaining me, but asks me for my ID or to step out of the car. Should I?
\n\nDiscuss these questions with your crew in advance:
\n\nDoes observing ICE put me at risk of being criminalized?
\n\nAll other daily legal risks apply here, including traffic laws and possession of illegal items. The additional risk is that the agents of the state will go out of their way to pursue any charges in retribution for your lawfully following and observing ICE.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/16/1.jpg\")
\n And finally, an important rule of thumb.
\nIn response to the statement we published from Fire Ant Movement Defense,1 we received the following submission from Eric King, an anarchist and former political prisoner who spent nearly a decade behind bars.
\n\nNonconsensually providing information to police, prosecutors, or others involved in the criminal justice industry is one of the most damaging things a person can do, because it exposes people to danger from a vast structure that exists for the purpose of systematically inflicting violence.
\n\nThose who have provided testimony incriminating others must never be trusted with information that can put anyone else at risk again. And because it is not possible to be sure which information falls into that category, that means keeping them out of a wide array of spaces and relationships.
\n\nWhen questioned by police or prosecutors, the only ethical decision is to refuse to incriminate others. When everyone does so, this limits the amount of harm that the state can inflict. Those who consider informing on others must understand that when they do so, they are crossing a line from which there is no return.
\n\nLikewise, no defendant should be compelled to depend on a support committee that supports anyone who informed on them.
\n\nAt the same time, we should trust non-cooperating defendants to decide how best to conduct their defense and how best to engage with those who provided testimony against them. Federal agencies are attempting to use the Prairieland case to both criminalize and divide all who resist. State repression is intended to inflict harm not only at the point of immediate impact but also via the ruptures it opens up.
\n\nControversy about the decisions of the support committee in the Prairieland case must not discourage people from supporting the non-cooperating defendants. Please donate to their support funds, write to them, and spread awareness about their plight.
\n\nWhat follows is Eric King’s submission.
\n\nI’m writing this response to Fire Ant Movement Defense’s recent statement, “Manufactured Betrayal,” not as a confrontation but in the spirit of opening dialogue and clarifying the values we stand on. This is not an attack. I’m sharing my personal views that are based on my personal experiences. I am not an expert or an arbiter on revolution, I am simply someone who has been directly impacted by a loose-lip piece of shit and have seen people I love experience the same.
\n\nPrison is a truly horrible place. It is a place where people can die, brutally. It is a place that forces violences upon you every second of the day. It is a place that activates your fight or flight reaction to the point where it never stops being fight. It is a place that changes you––how you view the world, how you handle stress, etc. It makes you do things that you cannot forget and have to live with. It takes your families’ hearts and smashes them over and over, every day, as they worry if you are OK, if you are still around. I have been free for two and a half years, and I still think about all the circumstances I was forced into and all the trauma that still lives within me to this day.
\n\nThe Fire Ant statement regarding Meagan Morris felt like a insult to everyone who has ever been impacted by the prison system. It was confusing, enraging, and painful. Fire Ant has done great work in regards to prisoners, which is why this statement confused me so personally and hurt me so deeply.
\n\nI will never understand, and I don’t want to understand, the need to be a snitch apologist. Meagan Morris having regrets, or anyone who cooperates with the police feeling regrets, means nothing compared to the lives she helped to destroy. The fact that Meagan ultimately chose not to testify means nothing. She gave the state ammunition to use against us, not just the Prairieland prisoners, but all of us. In every single case against leftists in the future, the state will be able to use her words to portray our friends, our comrades, as violent terrorists, doing the state’s job for them. She gave the state information for HOURS. What the fuck are we doing?
\n\nAs Fire Ant said, many new radicals will join the struggle after the horrendous state repression they are witnessing. And the conversations we are having now are ones that need to be had––but AHEAD of time. What risks are you willing to take? What are the worst possible consequences, even if you think you’re safe and no matter how legal those risks are at the time? What will you do if you get caught up? Who are the most vulnerable? Who are the most ready? These are conversations that should be had. But never should we plan to allow snitches back into the community, never should there be a path of understanding, never should there be the justification that they paid their price and their remorse is enough. Honestly, fuck that. As an abolitionist, I do not want snitches or anyone else to be in prison. I do not want them to be hurt or harassed, attacked online, none of that shit. I do not have time for it. But I also will never comprehend the idea that they should be allowed back into radical communities. Why on earth would we risk the safety of ANYONE, just to appease someone else’s betrayal and guilt? What is the point of that? That is the line I hold. If my best friend became friends with a snitch because the snitch apologized, I would never talk to that friend again.
\n\nMaking space for their re-entry means spitting in the face of every single captive and all of their families as well. It means looking at people who dedicated their ENTIRE LIVES to the movement and saying, “I know that someone selfishly destroyed your life and betrayed everything they said they stood for, but they feel bad.” Ask yourself, would Kuwasi Balagoon be OK with that mindset? Would Emma Goldman or anyone else? We are living at a moment in time where people who are established and in good graces with the movement are making space for betrayers. Those who snitch are cops. They are prison guards. They are judges and prosecutors. They took the lives of others in their hands and tore them to shreds. There is no space in any organization or movement I love for people who would do that. It is unfathomable. Would Fire Ant Movement Defense be able to look my family in the face and tell them that the person who assisted in getting me tortured, sexually assaulted, and hospitalized had actually suffered enough? That it wasn’t fair to have them removed for the safety of others? That their feelings were more important than the brutality they would allow to happen to all of us?
\n\nImagine if the FBI read that statement (we have to assume they read literally all of them), would they be happy that we were contemplating allowing cooperators back into the fold? They would be elated. 1) They already know that those who flipped are vulnerable to pressure and would probably do it again, but also 2) They could easily see it as a continuous open door, without fear of consequences. How much easier it would be to convince someone to “do the right thing,” when they can show folks there are no lasting consequences to their betrayal. It is a complete erosion of trust within our movement as well. How on earth could I ever trust a comrade who has a soft line on something so dangerous? These are life or death decisions they are making. This isn’t a small ideological stance, it is putting the entire community in jeopardy. The door to return after even the smallest cooperation needs to remain closed and people need to know that. It’s the bare minimum that should happen to those who aid the police in ruining our lives and maintaining their fascist status quo.
\n\nI don’t understand the thought process behind writing this statement. The “why” of it all makes no sense to me. It hasn’t even been two months since the Prairieland sentences and we’re already dropping statements of support for the snitches? People can have their own thoughts and live their own lives and I can disagree with that. It was almost triggering, though, picturing the people who alerted the cops to where I was hiding out, and picturing a comrade I cared about and trusted asking me to be the rat’s friend again. The scars on my head, the blood in my mouth, the pain in my heart, would never allow this to happen. Because I have empathy for those whose lives were ruined by snitches, I could never be friends with a snitch. To snitch is to decide that your comrades’ lives mean less than your own.
\n\nThese are my views. I hope I’m sharing them respectfully. But I am hurt. I want to scream, “WHAT WORLD IS THIS?” Some of my closest friends and people I admire and support have been snitched on, and I hope we never see or hear from those rats again. There should never be space for that, in my opinion. It is a betrayal of all I stand for to give them an inch when they took away decades.
\n\nLove and respect to everyone who supports prisoners. I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine.
\n\nTowards Liberation
\n\nEK
\n\nTo be clear, Fire Ant Movement Defense is not the Fire Ant prisoner solidarity collective from Maine, which is another group entirely. ↩
\nOn July 4, 2025, roughly a dozen people participated in a demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center, a facility serving Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At the conclusion of the demonstration, a participant named Benjamin Song saw a police officer aim a gun at a participant named Nathan Baumann and fired warning shots at the ground in response. Since then, police have arrested 22 people on widely publicized conspiracy and terrorism charges, subjecting many of them to long-term solitary confinement and other pressure tactics. The first eight of the 17 non-cooperating defendants went to trial in March; they were found guilty and sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison each, with one of them receiving a 30-year sentence simply for having moved a box of zines.
\n\nThe Prairieland prosecution is a flagship effort intended to criminalize opposition to fascism per se in line with the Trump administration’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. The prosecution’s approach hinges on the idea that the defendants constitute an “antifa cell,” despite many of them not knowing each other at all.
\n\nThis is not unprecedented. On the contrary, it is a strategy of repression that is familiar elsewhere in the world, under even more authoritarian regimes. In Russia, for example, it has become common for officers from the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, to use electrical shock torture to attempt to coerce arrestees suspected of anarchism into signing false confessions affirming the existence of invented conspiracies.1
\n\nThe playbook is to fabricate an association, then pressure defendants to plead guilty, manufacturing evidence of the supposed conspiracy. In Russia, they do this with cattle prods; in the Prairieland case, they are attempting to accomplish the same thing via less flagrant means, including solitary confinement and threats.
\n\nIn the year since the demonstration at the Prairieland facility, federal agents have tried to expand on this precedent. Prosecutors continue to indict new defendants in the Prairieland case; federal agents continue to raid houses. In May 2026, three people in Spokane, Washington were convicted on felony conspiracy charges for protesting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity. On June 16, federal agents carried out aggressive house raids across the Twin Cities, arresting twelve people and indicting fifteen on federal conspiracy charges.
\n\nWhat is possible in Texas will not necessarily work in Minnesota. In parts of Texas, far-right and outright fascist state officials control much of the judicial bureaucracy and police, and have the support of much of the population; in Minnesota and other parts of the country, ICE and other elements of the Trump administration are so unpopular that even grand juries, long known as a tool that prosecutors can use for any purpose, sometimes refuse to indict arrestees. The local culture that prevails within the judicial infrastructure of different districts, the amount of leverage that local social movements exert, and the perspectives of the available jury pool all make a significant difference in the outcome of cases like these.
\n\nThe outcome of the first Prairieland trial should not intimidate us out of organizing and taking action; rather, it shows how high the stakes are. Both direct support for the defendants and general efforts to organize, popularize, and legitimize resistance can play a role in blocking federal efforts to normalize the Prairieland model. Even if the appeals courts show themselves to be just as corrupt as the courts that have convicted and sentenced Prairieland defendants, if we build a strong enough movement, whoever succeeds Donald Trump in power could be compelled to commute their sentences.
\n\nIf we withdraw from organizing, if we shrink from resistance, this will embolden the Trump administration and its supporters and they will intensify their attacks. Rather than permitting them to frighten us out of trusting each other, we must build deep personal ties and widespread community support in order to endure campaigns of repression. We can win this fight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/5.jpg\")
\nThis bears repeating over and over: Never talk to police or the FBI. They wouldn’t ask you in the first place if they didn’t need your assistance to ruin your life and the lives of others. Remember: “I am going to remain silent. I would like to speak with an attorney.”
\n\nWhat follows is a statement from Fire Ant Movement Defense. Fire Ant has revised it since the original publication. You can read a response Eric King wrote to the original version here.
\n\nOn June 23, witnesses across the country watched in horror as the non-cooperating defendants in the Prairieland trial were given staggering sentences in the most blatant case of political persecution in a generation. Like the Haymarket trial, the Red Scare, and the repression of the Black Panther Party before it, the Prairieland case has come to define a new era of state terror intended to crush dissent.
\n\nIt is critical to understand the conditions under which this trial took place. The defendants were humiliated, denied medical care, and repeatedly tortured by state officials throughout the duration of their custody. They were wheeled into court rooms shackled to chairs, forced to clean human feces off of cell walls, subjected to vile human rights offenses that reflect the complete immorality of the American judicial system. The point of these violations was both to punish and to coerce, in hopes that the defendants would turn on one another and abandon their values—the very existence of which this trial was designed to condemn. The majority of the defendants resisted these efforts, demonstrating incredible resilience in the face of overwhelming violence. However, others chose to forsake their values, reject their communities, and betray their comrades in acts of cowardly self-preservation. Without these cooperators, it is entirely possible that the Prairieland trial would have ended with almost all of the defendants winning their freedom.
\n\nMuch of the state cooperation in the Prairieland trial was manufactured through torture and motivated by fear. It manifested in different forms, occurred in different degrees, and, like all matters of political importance, resists simple moral categorization. Of the nineteen defendants facing federal charges, five of them—Seth Sikes, John Thomas, Nathan Baumann, Lynette Sharp, and Susan Kent—took the stand at trial and condemned others to years in prison for their own benefit. Two additional defendants—Joy Gibson and Rebecca Morgan—took plea agreements. While these were non-cooperating pleas, the text of the deals affirmed the existence of a fictional “North Texas Antifa Cell,” which some in the movement have characterized as potentially damaging to other defendants. One other defendant, Meagan Morris, initially gave hours of testimony to federal agents, before rejecting cooperation, refusing a plea agreement, and standing trial with her comrades.
\n\nAll of these cases are materially different from each other. Taking the stand in a courtroom is not the same thing as giving an interview immediately after arrest; full-fledged cooperation is not the same as taking a plea deal that affirms the state’s fabricated narrative. We reject simplistic generalizations that frame all mistakes as unforgivable, rendering it impossible for those who have previously cooperated with the state to change course and restore their commitment to struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/3.jpg\")
\nWe believe that Meagan Morris made an indefensible choice in giving hours of testimony to federal agents. By corroborating John Thomas’s testimony, she contributed to the arrests of Rebecca Morgan, Benjamin Song, and Autumn Hill. After that, she ceased cooperation. She did not take a plea deal. She did not take the stand against her codefendants.
\n\nDespite her initial cooperation, the state was happy to punish her alongside the non-cooperating defendants after she chose to change course. For months, she has faced harassment, starvation, and humiliation like the other defendants. Other cooperators who continued betraying their values received sentences as short as 22 months—but she, rediscovering her courage, rejected that possibility. This does not erase what she did. The depth of her betrayal will be measured by the days, years, or decades that those who once called her a comrade spend in cages.
\n\nMorris has made the strongest course correction that is possible in her position. Her refusal to cooperate further landed her a fifty-year sentence. If we cannot offer those who have begun to cooperate any incentive to stop doing so, that all but ensures that once someone starts cooperating, they will become a permanent addition to the state’s arsenal against us.
\n\nThere are lines that, once crossed, render return impossible. Baumann, Thomas, Sikes, Sharp, and Kent chose their side long ago. There are revolutionary contexts in which totalizing zero-tolerance policies are necessary. But at this moment, thousands of inexperienced new participants are flooding into the fight for liberation. We probably won’t be able to educate all of them before they find themselves in confrontations with the state. Some of them will experience intense repression designed to scare them into cooperating before they fully understand the political implications, the options available to them, or their basic rights. When they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun, some may well say something they shouldn’t. If we immediately make permanent enemies of everyone who do so, this may further endanger others.
\n\nWe face a serious question: do we make demands of those who cooperate, or simply cut them off immediately? Do we attempt to intervene and try to alter their behavior, or do nothing?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/4.jpg\")
\nTwo defendants accepted pre-written plea deals confirming the state’s fictions. The text invents a fictional antifa cell, takes for granted that antifascist activity is “terrorism,” and argues that wearing black is proof of criminal intent, among other absurdities. After the defendants had spent months in torturous conditions, the state pushed a deadline for agreeing to the pleas under threat of still worse federal indictments. Both Rowan Gibson and Rebecca Morgan, who signed those pleas without giving interviews, have been sentenced to 15 years each.
\n\nOn an individual level, signing the pleas limited their options. Their potential defenses in regards to their state charges are weakened, and they could be more vulnerable to certain kinds of targeting in the lead up to the state trials, since the state views them as more pressurable.. The pleas could also be damaging for their codefendants. Some argued that the pleas would be levied against the defendants at trial, cited as proof that some participants agreed to language describing the fictionalized “antifa cell” and supposed plans for an “ambush.” As it turned out, at the federal trial, prosecutors relied more on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, but the pleas remain available to introduce when the state-level charges go to trial.
\n\nIn addition, the pleas are a liability for the movement as a whole. It has been clear since the Department of Justice’s first press release on July 8 that their chief goal is to use this case to set a precedent and establish a narrative. This is the core of their strategy, and these pleas help them to advance it. However, these deals came after the cooperating witnesses signed their initial pleas, which make the same claims. Undeniably, Baumann’s testimony furthers the fiction more than Rowan or Rebecca’s signature ever could.
\n\nRowan Gibson and Rebecca Morgan took these deals, despite the bleak outcomes, primarily because of vile jail conditions, mental and physical health problems, and pressure from their lawyers. In a desperate situation, with cops and feds lying to them and coercing them, they remained principled. They did not give up information, or agree to take the stand. And as of yet, their pleas have not furthered the state’s agenda. Their deals show what can happen in the worst circumstances when defendants do not have enough collective legal support. If their lawyers had been willing to work with the defense committee, take advice from legal experts with a better understanding of the politics around the case, or enter joint defense agreements, these pleas could have been avoided. Rowan’s and Rebecca’s plight demands that we reckon with the weaknesses in the legal infrastructure of our movements.
\n\nThe five testifying witnesses sold out their friends at their most vulnerable. They endangered people in their community who remain free for now, people who lie awake at night, fearing the crash of officers breaking down their doors. They damaged the precious faith built and tenderly guarded by all those brave enough to fight for a new world. They deserted the war against ICE as emboldened goons watch blood pool beneath their boots in the streets. At once shocking and mundane, they have thrown themselves in with all the despicable traitors that history is lucky to forget. Nothing more needs to be said about their morals, as there are no words that would make their ethical depravity and the depth of their betrayal clearer to the world than their actions already have.
\n\nHow the state rewarded them tells us something new. All five of the testifying witnesses have now been sentenced. Thomas and Sharp got just over nine years, Sikes and Kent got six, and Baumann got less than two. Across both of the courtrooms, on both sentencing dates, the conservative judges spoke explicitly about sending a message. As for the nine defendants who went to trial, their total of 500 years of prison time represents a clear threat: associate with this ideology in any way and we will bury you. But what message can we read in the disparities among the sentences of the five defendants who testified for the state?
\n\nSentencing for cooperating defendants has traditionally been based on the criminal acts they’re accused of, the timing and extent of their cooperation, and the amount of new and actionable information they provided. This case diverges from the historical precedent.
\n\nThomas was not present in Alvarado, Texas on July 4, 2025. He began cooperating very early in the investigation after his house was raided, and consistently provided evidence following his arrest. His interview on July 12 led to Sharp’s arrest on the 13th, and his subsequent interview on the 14th led to the arrests of Song and Morgan on the 15th, as detailed in the criminal complaints against Rebecca Morgan and Susan Kent. Thomas’s cooperation also contributed to the arrest of Dario Sanchez. Thomas and Sharp pled to one count of material support for terrorism for sheltering Song. Ordinarily, harboring a fugitive can land someone up to a year in prison.
\n\nIn contrast, Sikes was present at the demonstration, armed, and lit fireworks, which the state argued are explosive devices. He began cooperating with the state in October or November 2025. Based on the timing of arrests, it seems unlikely that Sikes’ cooperation provided much additional actionable information.
\n\nBaumann was present at the demo, stayed through the arrival of police lieutenant Thomas Gross, admitted to bringing spray paint, and is the only person on video damaging any property. He agreed to cooperate very early on, but knew none of the participants and could provide very little identifying information.
\n\nPrecedent would suggest that Baumann would get the heaviest sentence, while Sikes and Thomas would get less. In fact, the reverse occurred. Their sentences set a precedent overwriting the old norms, replacing the old criteria with a loyalty test. In testifying, both Thomas and Sikes willingly betrayed their values. Yet Thomas contradicted the state’s narrative under cross-examination, and Sikes held back on even the most basic key elements, such as the definition of anti-fascism. Baumann didn’t betray his beliefs; he apparently had none. Nor did he betray his comrades—he apparently had no comrades, either. Instead, he proved himself to be an enthusiastic vessel for the state’s most poisonous lies.
\n\nThe state’s legal argument for terrorism hinges on the property destruction that Baumann alone admitted to. In their flagship NSPM-7 test case, they were willing to let him off easy because he helped them to advance their agenda. NSPM-7 creates a carveout in the judicial system where thought crimes are more important than material acts.
\n\nEffective repressive strategies are designed to target specific tactics of resistance, such as the emphasis that our political movements place on refusing to cooperate. This era of authoritarianism introduces a form of repression in which action is practically irrelevant, for it is ideology that is on trial. Previous judicial norms, flawed as they were, are being abandoned in favor of litigating the thoughts, beliefs, and orientations that the Trump regime believes pose a threat to its reign of terror. In this legal purgatory, action becomes irrelevant, evidence becomes optional, and cooperators are not rewarded for contributing to investigations so much as for their readiness to affirm outrageous lies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/2.jpg\")
\nThe pages of revolutionary history are full of ordinary people who chose to embody courage, fortitude, and commitment, no matter the cost. They are equally full of people—like the cooperating defendants in this trial—who once claimed to believe in freedom, liberation, and struggle, but later proved that they cared more for themselves than for justice.
\n\nWe are enduring some of the worst authoritarianism that this country has seen in the past fifty years. The actions that people have taken in Prairieland, the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, and elsewhere remind us that even in the midst of killings, torture, and life sentences, radicals across this country will continue to choose the path of resistance, rejecting fear, even if it means risking everything. We recognize that experiencing repression is an inevitable consequence of striving for freedom in a social order that is tightening its grip on us.
\n\nThe Prairieland trial has shown us the very best and worst of our communities. Benjamin Song could die in prison for potentially saving Nathan Baumann’s life. Baumann will soon walk free for betraying Song’s. Neither one of these things had to be. We must hurry to adapt to this new era of repression. We must educate as many people as possible about the crucial importance of refusing to answer questions from police or federal agents; we must build awareness about grand juries and how to resist them; above all, we must establish stronger legal support infrastructure, including media outreach, to put at the disposal of everyone who may end up in the crosshairs of the state.
\n\nFinally, we must continue to support the Prairieland defendants. This case is far from over; the appeals process remains ahead, and how that goes will shape state and federal policy. Repression destroys lives and rips apart families; it is designed to break us. But make no mistake—at its core, their system of violence relies less on what it can do to us than on what it can make us do to each other.
\n\nThis statement has been slightly edited for clarity and in response to appreciated feedback. In the interest of transparency, an archive of the original version of the statement before the edits can be found here.
\n\nFire Ant Movement Defense is an anti-repression collective made up of former political defendants and members of defense committees. We believe in mass defense strategies and advise defendants and their supporters on how to fight their cases from a political angle.
\n\nWe are not lawyers. Through repeated experiences, we have gained skills in media work and in synergizing political and legal strategies. In every case, we work towards building a response to repression that approaches the judicial system as an arena where we can fight—and win.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/1.jpg\")
\nIn August 2025, a powerful uprising shook Indonesia and spread rapidly throughout the region, helping to catalyze a revolution in Nepal. Yet even as it set off further explosions from the Philippines to Morocco, this momentum hit a wall everywhere as governments counterattacked with repression specifically targeting anarchists—in what some in the region have called the “black scare.” In the following analysis, Simoun Magsalin draws on the events in the Philippines to outline the challenges confronting today’s revolutionaries and explore what it will take to overcome them.
\n\nYou can read a full account of the confrontation that took place in Manila, the Philippine capital, on September 21, 2025 here.
\n\nYou can support the black scare detainees and defendants from the Philippines who were arrested at Mendiola on September 21, 2025 through Durian Distro, which is handling international donations via Ko-Fi. Please include a message noting that your donation is for the 9/21 prisoners. Salamat po!
\n\nYou can support Indonesian prisoners via Serikat Tahanan or the Serikat Napi Lintas-Lapas / Inter-Correctional Prisoner Union. Please use the “Donasi” button on their website. Terima kasih!
\n\nThis line of inquiry is equally relevant in North America, as anarchists confront intensifying repression from Prairieland to Minneapolis.
\n\nOn September 21, 2025, a host of leftists, socialists, and pro-revolutionaries marched at the fateful site where the Spanish colonial government executed José Rizal on December 30, 1896. Rizal was executed under false charges for an anti-colonial insurrection he had little to do with but which had proclaimed him as its north star. In 2025, a march of more than 80,000 Filipinos assembled by the monument where his remains are interred to express outrage in response to a massive corruption scandal involving the graft of funds designated for flood control infrastructure projects—the plunder of which through fraudulent projects caused numerous deaths across multiple tropical typhoons.
\n\nFor months before the march, the outrage had led nowhere, as the Philippine left was at an almost-historic nadir after years of opportunism, repression, and dynastic restoration from the previous Duterte presidency and the continuation of Dutertismo in the current administration headed by Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. Morale was so low that a leftist attempt to organize a general assembly in an urban poor community facing demolition apparently drew almost no one. At a factory strike, the workers self-managed their picket to limit and pacify their own actions.
\n\nYet the insurrection that broke out in Indonesia at the end of August 2025 inspired something in Filipinos. Militants from National Democracy organized limited direct action at the beginning of September, involving publicized vandalism and minor street fighting. They hoped to arouse “the masses” from slumber and invoke spontaneity. Alas, such energy did not arise—at least, not at first. Then the insurrection in Nepal bloomed and then withered, and morale rose once again. To know that power is vulnerable elsewhere is to see that it is vulnerable everywhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/6.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nSeveral groups announced a mass mobilization for September 21 at Luneta and at EDSA.1 The Catholic Church was one of the biggest forces that organized mobilizations, followed by various right-wing, liberal, social democratic, National Democratic, and socialist groups. Anarchists of various persuasions were there, too, in our own fashion. Banners of all kinds were on display: the National Democratic Mass Organizations (NDMOs) and Makabayan, the bloc of Sanlakas-PLM-BMP-Oriang, Akbayan, Kilusan, Kamanggagawa, Partido Sosyalista, the Spartacists, Partido Manggagawa, Manibela and other workers’ associations, and university fraternities. The right-wing Duterte Diehard Supporters (DDS)2 were there too, some projecting phrase-mongering into the military base to spontaneously induce a kudeta (Tagalog for “coup d’état”3) among the generals in a vain attempt to oust President Bongbong Marcos, catapult Vice President Sara Duterte to the highest office, and (somehow?) bring former president Rodrigo Duterte back home from his incarceration at the Hague by the International Criminal Court.4
\n\nOn the margins of all these parties was another: the party of anarchy.5
\n\nAfter the protest march program of the Makabayan bloc ended on the way to Mendiola, black-clad youth initiated violent direct action, attempting to set fire to a freight truck used as a police barricade and then lobbing rocks at the police. The police struck back with their own rocks, trapping the militants from Makabayan in the crossfire. At that moment, another wing of the party of anarchy revealed itself, opening up another front in the Philippines just as had occurred in Indonesia and Nepal. The same sigils of the One-Piece straw-hat skull-and-bones flag flew again, raised by those in anarchistic black attire.
\n\nThe spontaneous movement of September 21 (or 9/21) was no party of anarchists, much as we might wish they were. Neither were they self-identifying National Democrats, Maoists, socialists, or communists—nor fascists, though fascists want to appropriate the symbolism and significance of the 9/21 events.6
\n\nThe party of anarchy is not a particular organizational formation, but a spontaneous emergence that cohered at a time of high morale among our class. As in Indonesia and Nepal, it emerged outside the milieu known as the “left.” But how the self-ascribed left relates to this party of anarchy is of crucial importance, especially in view of how quickly some on the left sought to denounce the militants as “anarchists,” fascists, Dutertistas, or (Chinese?) saboteurs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/7.jpg\")
\nThe party of anarchy that emerged at the battle of Mendiola was small. The majority of the (at least) 277 detainees at Mendiola were not involved in the direct action at all or else were not anarchists. Many were innocent bystanders, some of whom were colonized minorities within the Philippine nation-state who didn’t even speak Tagalog and were in Manila for less than a week. Another was a student journalist who just happened to wear black to the protest and was illegally detained only because he looked vaguely like an anarchist. Around or at least 91 of the Mendiola detainees were legally minors. All were beaten on the streets and then systematically tortured, denied legal representation, denied food and medicine, and denied access to their families.
\n\nYet despite not being partisanos of the party of anarchy, they were red-tagged7 (black-tagged?) as “anarchists.” By then, this was a familiar refrain, coming as it did on the heels of the black scare in Indonesia that saw the open hunting of anarchists by Prabowo’s decree, as well as Trump’s criminalization order targeting so-called “antifa” in the United States and the accusations of Nepali politicians that anarchists had “infiltrated” the insurrection there. In September 2025, security forces were conjuring whole parties of anarchists out of the air to explain various riots and insurrectionary episodes across the world, each imagined conspiracy more fanciful than the last. If only such revolutionaries could be born fully armored and ready to fight, like a hundred thousand Athenas born from the mind of Zeus!
\n\nConspiratorial baiting of this kind is not new. In the wake of October 7, 2023, whole battalions of Hamas were identified all across the world. Paragliders in the middle of Britain? Hamas. Students occupying campuses to protest investments in the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine? Hamas. Jewish anti-Zionists? Hamas. Random people on the train who don’t look like me and aren’t bothering anyone? Hamas! As with earlier waves of red-baiting, “Hamas-baiting” and the current black scare serve to delegitimize and criminalize protest and organizing, whether in response to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza or the brazen corruption scandals in Asia and elsewhere.
\n\nWe’ve seen how black-tagging and the black scare has been deployed in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines in much the same way that red-baiting was used in the past. It didn’t matter whether you were an anarchist or a social democrat—you will be red-baited and deported or imprisoned as a filthy godless communist! Non-state actors including liberals and yellow unions have used red-tagging to delegitimize their ideological rivals in the electoral or labor-union arena. Now, in a similar way, just being some kind of leftist, wearing black, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time can get you black-tagged as an anarchist and threatened with subversion charges. We saw this in Indonesia and Nepal and again at Mendiola. In a consistent, predictable way, the party of order uses the black scare strategy to suppress not only the party of anarchy, but all who criticize the prevailing order.
\n\nWhat is the party of anarchy, really? It is not something that can be constructed the way you construct a formal party. It is constituted and coheres on the basis of a social insurrection, or at least the beginnings of one. It is on this basis that the party of anarchy is not merely a threat to the dominant wing of the party of order—the caucus of the existent—but also to the caucus of the false critics, who conduct a two-line struggle within the party of order but remain its loyal opposition. The black scare, then, works slightly differently than the red scare in terms of how the caucus of the false critics uses it to target the party of anarchy.
\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the police repression at Mendiola, another parallel narrative began to form. The direct actionists and the Mendiola detainees were at the pay of foreign agents, or of Sara Duterte—or so many commenters said. Liberals and leftists alike repeated this ad nauseam. The caucus of the false critics is constantly negotiating their place within the party of order and within the broader effort to reimpose normalcy. The black scare is used by these false critics to dissolve the party of anarchy in order to achieve that purpose. We have seen this before: for example, in the peace police who branded direct actionists “agent provocateurs” and handed them over to the police during the George Floyd rebellions in 2020. Through such actions, the false critics position themselves as a legal, legitimate, and loyal opposition within the prevailing order.
\n\nIn addition, the false critics also use the black scare to legitimize their own activism and organizations at the expense of the insurrection and the party of anarchy. They do this by tagging the party of anarchy as “saboteurs,” “provocateurs,” Dutertistas in disguise, and so on, but also by taking advantage of the efforts of the partisanos and insurrectos of the party of anarchy to build their own organizations using pragmatic pacifism and legalism.
\n\nThe black scare represents a dual threat: the obvious threat from the dominant caucus of the existent of the party of order, but more dangerously, an additional threat from the caucus of the false critics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/8.jpg\")
Photograph from the report “Mendiola, September 21, 2025,” written by Kenneth Roland Guda and published by AlterMidya.
\nNormalcy is what we have today—the regime of work, gender, money, capital, the state, racism, ad nauseum. The party of order imposes and maintains normalcy by keeping our class dependent upon its functioning. If, as The Communist Manifesto proclaims, the workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains, why do we cling so hard to them? The prospect of our chains loosening opens us to immense risk because normalcy renders us dependent.
\n\nWe all have material interests in maintaining normalcy and much to lose from its rupture. This dependence on normalcy constrains many from becoming active pro-revolutionaries. My own disabilities, for example, tie me to normalcy, forcing me to have a material interest in the stability and predictability of medicine and healthcare. Millions of people and their families likewise have similar material interests that ties them to normalcy. Even something as basic as access to food can be disrupted by the interruption of normalcy. Such dependence on normalcy constrains us in what we can do.
\n\nUnder these conditions, we can talk of revolution and insurrection all we like, but any act of violence against the party of order means risking harsh repression. Those partisanos who cling to illegality and illegibility find refuge in the rebel peripheries. On the margins of society, they cannot intervene in the heat of the class struggle, and must instead strive for revolution from their peripheries.
\n\nThose outside the rebel peripheries operating where the imposition of normalcy is most coherent often find that they can still do some good work through the framework of legalism. Legalism pushes the left and anarchists towards “pragmatic pacifism.” As pro-revolutionaries, we refuse to affirm pacifism as a principle of the class struggle, yet we find we must be pragmatic in our relationship to violence, and even in the extent to which we publicly endorse it. This is why, when we march, the leaders of marches must meet with the police to negotiate time and space for their protest, regardless of permits.8 Even without protest permits, the police understand that informal allowances for such illegal assemblies are pragmatic in the long term. This negotiation is part and parcel of the imposition of normalcy. If we don’t negotiate, we risk repression that will drain vital resources that will have to go towards prisoner support, driving away those with lower appetites for risk, and (perhaps most importantly) being identified as an enemy of order at a time of a lull and retreat in the class struggle. This is not a value judgment: it is merely the reality of normalcy.
\n\nOutside the milieu of leftists, militants, and anarchists, normalcy takes the form of mass apolitical passivity.9 Many a Marxist would cite ideology or hegemony to explain this—yet beyond the ways that commodity relations obscure and alienate the source of the power of our class, our class is not made of sheep, nor are we passive recipients of burgis10 ideology. Nor is this merely a matter of disinterest in politics. People know the world is fucked. This condition of mass apolitical passivity is not merely ideological, but material. Being apolitical is not so much a choice as a condition—the material and ideological imposition of normalcy. Reformers, activists, militants, and pro-revolutionaries establish themselves as such by overcoming the particular material and ideological limits that this condition imposes. But even overcoming these limits does not necessarily mean that one can overcome normalcy itself—hence the necessity of pragmatic pacifism.
\n\nThrough pragmatic pacifism, reformers and leftists can negotiate their position within normalcy and the party of order. This is how the struggle for reform galvanizes many to overcome their passivity. Circles of militants become movements, movements become political parties and NGOs, and political parties run for election while NGOs support reform, and—if all goes well—these parties and NGOs win reforms for their mass bases. This process of reform legitimizes these leftists and ties them to the reigning order. To remain legitimate, they must remain within the bounds of the law, and to do so, they must continue to be pragmatically pacifist. This is how the legal and legitimate left establish themselves as false critics to the party of order, as the “permitted left” and left wing of capital.11
\n\nTo retain this status, it often becomes necessary to denounce the party of anarchy and engage in the black scare.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/9.jpg\")
Photograph from the report “Mendiola, September 21, 2025,” written by Kenneth Roland Guda and published by AlterMidya.
\nThe party of anarchy has constituted itself many times over the centuries of the modern era, from the Reformation to the great revolutions in England, America, France, Russia, Germany, China, and elsewhere. Over the past decade, we have seen it emerge in the Yellow Vest movement in France, in Hong Kong, in the George Floyd Uprising in the United States, and most recently in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Madagascar, and here in the Philippines.
\n\nYet the party of anarchy is dissolved through the imposition of disorganization, by churches, liberals, self-appointed vanguards, the permitted left, social democracy, and other factions within the caucus of the false critics. In the People Power Revolution of 1986 (EDSA Uno), the church and the liberal oligarchs led the Filipino workers to support the kudeta plotters and install the liberal oligarch Cory Aquino as president. In the events of May 1968 in Paris, the Communist Party of France and several other left institutions demobilized the workers and radical students. In the Iranian revolution, the clerics undermined the shura councils of the working class until the Ayatollah was able to consolidate power. In Poland, liberals who wanted to negotiate a place within the Polish state apparatus undermined the self-organization of workers in Solidarność. In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong himself rushed to co-opt and demobilize the very forces he unleashed to regain and retain control over the Party-state.
\n\nThe caucus of the false critics is fearful of mass spontaneity and self-directed activity, rushing to co-opt and demobilize the party of anarchy in order to arrange the resumption of normalcy under their rising caucus. Politicians target the party of anarchy so that the caucus of the false critics can be reconstituted as the new caucus of the existent and ultimately reconstitute the party of order.
\n\nThe logic of this organized disorganization is the crystallization of legality and legitimacy as tamang proseso. Literally meaning “correct process” or “due process,” tamang proseso is invoked in the Philippines as the “right way” or a “legitimate way” to do things, usually in the context of engaging with bureaucracy or procedure. This affirmation of legality and legitimacy permeates all under normalcy, even outside the reach of the state’s law, police, and courts. Harm, for example, has to be demonstrated and proven, if not in a court of law, then via the adjudication of peers. According to the apostles of tamang proseso, “both sides” have to be heard—and this obscures the inherent power relations, whether they be the gender dynamics of rape culture or the hegemony of Israel and Zionism over Palestine before October 7.
\n\nEven in civil war, there must be tamang proseso, with guerrillas both communist and Bangsamoro bowing to the legality and legitimacy of the peace table. The negotiations at the peace table fulfill two functions. First, they represent the negotiated merger and legitimation of a faction as it ascends into the party of order. Second, they serve to demobilize the force of arms of their own faction and delegitimize any participants in the struggle who refuse to accept the compromise. In this context, tamang proseso suggests that there are only two routes to reform: negotiated integration into the party of order, or armed struggle for the purpose of negotiated integration into the party of order. The possibilities of social insurrection, rupture, revolution—much less anarchy and communization—are excluded altogether.
\n\nTamang proseso is the “correct” and “legitimate” way of doing protest, organizing, and politics. It is the mediation and management of the energies that would otherwise have cohered into the grand party of anarchy and communism. The week after the events of 9/21, former presidential candidate and outspoken socialist Ka Leody de Guzman released a solidarity statement affirming the legitimacy of the anger, yet calling for the recruitment of disaffected urban poor into his particular tendency of organizations. Most notably, this statement implied a dichotomy between the organized and the supposedly not-organized—or, to be more precise, those organized under their command and those organized outside it. Never mind that the direct action against the police forces took place outside the command of legitimate left parties, while all parties at Luneta and Mendiola did not intervene to elevate the riot into an insurrection.
\n\nEven the Maoist insurgency of the Communist Party of the Philippines–New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) is structured within tamang proseso, despite the overt illegality of their insurgency. To mamundok (go up the mountain) and join the guerrillas is seen as the “highest form of struggle” within the Maoist milieu. To criticize the brave guerrilla is cowardice—what have you sacrificed that gives you the right to critique them? If they are fighting a guerrilla war, then they must be right! Never mind that the funneling of committed militants to mamundok drains the cities of cadres who could have intervened in the class struggle (setting aside, for now, the problems with Stalinist interventionalism).
\n\nArgumentum ad guerrilla, or the appeal to the guerrilla, frames ideological issues as beyond question because the guerrilla are making a costly, sometimes ultimate, sacrifice. This cult of action takes for granted that the correctness of a strategy can be proven through dramatic deeds and mass recruitment. Yet conservative forces such as Daesh also wage such guerrilla wars—shall we consider them correct because they managed to establish the so-called “Islamic State”? The argumentum ad guerrilla is the other side of pragmatic pacifism: the fetishism of “revolutionary” violence is the inevitable reaction to the timidity of such pragmatism.
\n\nIt is this argumentum ad guerrilla that constrains the choices of those who desire social change to a choice between reformism and armed reformism, between social democracy and social democracy out of the barrel of a gun. Only these options fall within the boundaries of tamang proseso. But when we conceive of revolution merely as one apparatus against another, the notion of class power constituted for the abolition of all classes disappears.
\n\nConsequently, while the Communist Party of the Philippines recognized the events at Mendiola as legitimate albeit badly channeled violence, they called for these partisanos of anarchy to be funneled into its New People’s Army. Similarly, the legal and legitimate left called for the recruitment of the angry partisanos and insurrectos into their organization—simply to build their membership. The idea that the solution to our woes is to “organize”—or even to “mamundok“—is the slightly more radical equivalent of the liberal mantra that the solution is “to vote.” The outcome is the same: the demobilization and dissolution of the party of anarchy and the subordination of its alumni to some apparatus of the caucus of the false critics—mediation, management, and integration into political life.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/2.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nPolitical life and its notions of legality, legitimacy, and tamang proseso is the very lifeblood of normalcy. Negotiation for reforms or for a place within the hierarchy of normalcy is managed and mediated by political life. The party of anarchy, as a party outside all integrated political life, is resolutely anti-political. As such, the party of anarchy must be red-tagged, black-tagged, and subjected to the cruelest black scare because it is through the anti-political that the party of anarchy acts outside the bounds of legality and legitimacy, as it is the greatest threat to normalcy. The social insurrection and revolution abolish legitimacy, that ideology of hierarchy and class society.
\n\nIn this sense, the black scare takes place on three levels, all of which are intended to demobilize the party of anarchy. We have already discussed the first two levels. The first is repressive: the use of force to suppress the party of anarchy and in some cases opportunistically repress the caucus of the false critics as well. The second level is mediative: having dissolved the party of anarchy, to integrate its alumni into the caucus of the false critics under the general management of political life.12 The third level of the black scare is reimpositive: the restoration, resumption, and reimposition of normalcy under the old or new party of order. This reimpositive aspect of the black scare is the most insidious, for it emerges as a consequence of fear of anarchy on the part of the party of anarchy itself, which loses its coherence when the party fails to overcome the limits of insurrection.
\n\nThe repressive black scare is the task of the party of order, specifically under the dominant caucus of the existent. The mediative black scare is the task of the caucus of the false critics through their two-line struggle to become the dominant caucus. The reimpositive black scare emerges from within the party of anarchy themselves, as a consequence of the real material and ideological limits to the insurrection, limits that the insurrectos must overcome if they are to transform an insurrection into a social revolution that engulfs the whole world.
\n\nTamang proseso is the motor of the imposition and reimposition of normalcy. Against the reimpositive black scare, the insurrectos must struggle against the very power to legitimize, developing an anti-politics that rejects even (or especially) the democratic form and the legitimacy and citizenship it implies.
\n\nAside from the obvious repressive function of policing deployed against our class and the party of anarchy, policing serves the tamang proseso. The flood control scandals in the Philippines are being investigated by the Marcos-formed Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI). Such mechanisms affirm the legitimacy of the party of order. The state’s apparatus for policing corruption persuades citizens that the system works. This is how the state manages class antagonisms. That is the ultimate limitation of corruption discourse, via which citizens are reproduced and reaffirmed as such with all the passivity that implies under the regime of democracy. The abolition of legitimacy and tamang proseso starts with the failure of this discourse, the seeds of which can remain dormant for decades; there has been abject wanton corruption for a very long time, but its contradictions did not reach a breaking point until September 2025.
\n\nThe party of order proactively carries out the mediation and management of political life to prevent the party of anarchy from cohering. At crucial turning points within burgis politics, such as political revolutions or major elections, the reconfiguration of the caucuses and sub-factions of the party of order creates new avenues for mediating and managing political life. The People Power Revolution and the EDSA Republic brought segments of the Philippine left into engagement with the ruling liberal oligarchy. Consequently, the laundering of land grabbing under the administration of Noynoy “PNoy” Aquino (2010-2016) by those who called themselves popular democrats led to mass disillusionment, which contributed to the election of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. In Nepal, the dissolution of the people’s governments by Prachanda’s decree and Prachanda’s own ascension to the premiership of Nepal led to the integration of his and other communist parties of Nepal into the caucus of the existent, while the official Maoists enriched themselves. In Indonesia, the contradictions and antagonisms that remained from the Reformasi gave way to the restoration of a son of the New Order through the election of Prabowo Subianto.13
\n\nThe party of anarchy coheres as the abject failure of tamang proseso becomes harder and harder to ignore. More and more become disillusioned, not only with the tamang proseso of the existent, but also of its false critics. Like the church invisible (a church of elect or future converts known only to the true believers of Christ), the party of anarchy first coheres as a party invisible, as affinities form between militants who recognize each other as elect but do not yet even know they are comrades and kasamas in struggle. Then, eventually, the pressure ruptures the dam. The police murder of Affan Kurniawan launched the August–September insurrections in Indonesia; the banning of Nepali social media (and therefore of criticism) launched the September 2025 insurrection in Nepal; and the long-simmering discontent from the flood-control scandals combined with the high morale from seeing insurrections elsewhere inspired the battle at Mendiola on September 21 in the Philippines. The failure to mediate and manage brought together the party of anarchy in all of these countries.
\n\nMarches overcome the limits of pragmatic pacifism and escalated into individual acts of illegalism. Acts of individual illegalism overcome the limits that block the way to collective acts of illegalism, and the riots of collective illegalism give rise to mass illegalism, then to insurrection, revolution, communization, and the unification of humanity. Each level of escalation must overcome its particular limits.
\n\nFundamentally, insurrection and revolution open the horizons to possibilities beyond the world we currently inhabit. Once we catch a glimpse of the possibilities beyond, why should we remain where we are? To remake what has been unmade? Yet our class does not make that choice, or if we have had to, we chose so with grief in our hearts as the ultimate limits of the insurrection broke up the party of anarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/3.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nReaction is inevitable. Revolution is not. As the party of anarchy coheres as a consequence of the failure of politics, pro-revolutionaries struggle to reconfigure themselves in relation to the party of anarchy. The repression from the party of order and mediation from the caucus of the false critics are not the only threats. The reimposition of normalcy becomes inevitable when insurrectos fail to communize social life within the insurrection and are unable to escalate towards revolutionizing the whole world.
\n\nThere will not be an invisible hand of the insurrection like there is an invisible hand of the market—or at least, not initially. Market forces are driven by the invisible hand of the totalizing logic of capital. In contrast, the logic of the insurrection emerges embryonically, as a seedling in an entire hostile ecology. Workers who become insurrectos and partisanos of anarchy stand to lose much by breaking with normalcy. Yet what we gain through that insurrectionary logic can reorganize social life during the rupture. That insurrectionary logic must fight to the death against the totalizing logic of capital, or else be smothered in counterrevolution. This is where the pro-revolutionaries must intervene to nurture and cultivate that seedling of insurrectionary logic of anarchy and communism. This is where revolution creates the revolutionaries.
\n\nIn Indonesia, the insurrection led to mass looting and mass arson of government buildings. Pro-revolutionaries convened parliaments of the streets, creating spaces for insurrectos to talk revolution. Yet they did not seize the arms before burning the police armories. In the end, the insurrectos could not defend themselves, their campuses, and their homes from goons from the party of order or opportunist looters and rapists. The insurrection did not expand into the countryside, nor did pro-revolutionaries link the different sites of insurrection together in a meaningful way. With neither the means to defend nor feed themselves, the insurrectos across the vast archipelago arrived at the same calculus with little coordination: to pacify themselves, to continue to mobilize but in a non-violent manner, to appeal for a compromise with the party of order. Self-pacification was driven by fear of reaction and counterrevolution. Yet the reaction was inevitable regardless. It was Prabowo’s reaction that became the vanguard for the global black scare.
\n\nMany in Indonesia who didn’t intervene or intervened only in a defensive manner found themselves stuck waiting for conditions to ripen, for the insurrection to develop into a feasible scenario for revolutionary intervention. Such attentisme, a “wait-and-see attitude,” is yet another form of tamang proseso—as if the proper order of operations is to consolidate a revolutionary organization before a revolution. In fact, ideal conditions do not exist, but opportunities do, and opportunities for revolution arise regardless of readiness or level of organization. Attentisme traps pro-revolutionaries in an endless loop of waiting for ideal conditions, endlessly organizing and building the movement—patience for patience’s sake. But our class is not weak because it is disorganized, our class is disorganized because it is weak. Patience and prudence were not rewarded at all, for the reaction was inevitable once the horizon for revolutionary action closed.
\n\nIn Nepal, the insurrectos armed themselves as they burned down the old order. The almost-total integration of the various official communist parties into the party of order ensured that virtually no organized pro-revolutionary force (or at least no legible force) intervened in the insurrection. Yet the insurrectos seized arms as they burned down the government, overcoming a crucial limit that the insurrectos in Indonesia had not overcome.
\n\nAfter the dust settled, it was alleged by many, including The New York Times, that a shadowy conspiracy had organized the mass arson. In political revolutions, like the one that occurred in EDSA Uno in 1986, the most organized and coherent political forces have the legality and legitimacy to take state power.14 Had a conspiracy to commit mass arson existed on the scale that many implied, that conspiracy would have been powerful enough to seize state power directly. Yet no such kudeta took power, nor did a Bakuninist-Tiqqunist invisible collective dictatorship prevent the resumption of normalcy. Nor did General Ashok Raj Sigdel use the moment to brazenly impose armed rule or restore the monarchy as many feared might occur. In the absence of a legitimate civilian government, nothing could have stopped Sigdel, not even the party of anarchy, which had failed to overcome particular limits and was in retreat.
\n\nBut while the party of anarchy in Nepal was able to pass from individual acts of illegalism to mass collective acts of illegalism, it failed to transcend the limits of legalism and legitimacy itself. Thus, when Sigdel and the army restored legality, law, and order, the army offered to confer legitimacy upon the infamous Discord election. Simultaneously, the de facto military government used the black scare to suppress the party of anarchy, shooting partisanos in the streets. The anti-political revolution became deeply untenable. How could it be otherwise?
\n\nAnti-politics may burn down the parliaments and the great mansions of the official Maoists, but how are insurrectos supposed to burn down the entire state apparatus without feeding themselves? Looting is only a temporary stop-gap solution, after all. Both Vladimir Lenin and Peter Kropotkin understood (and agreed with Karl Marx) that for the revolution to survive, it must feed itself, overcoming the distinctions between town and country. For Lenin, the solution was the great alliance between the proletariat (and the state) and the peasantry. For Kropotkin, it was free exchange between urban and rural workers. When the Bolsheviks could no longer appease and persuade the peasantry to participate in their class alliance, they resorted to open coercion, thereby triggering countless revolts by so-called “green armies.” The party of anarchy—whose primary weapons are not guns and force of arms, but the subversion of society through the “suicidal” rejection of themselves as men, as citizens, as workers—have no such army to coerce the extraction of food. Many anarchists and communists suggest that the revolution can only succeed only when it is international in character. They are correct—but how can revolution become international if cannot overcome the nearer divisions between town and country?
\n\nSo while normalcy was interrupted, as a consequence of the insurrection’s failure to sustain and socially reproduce itself, insurrectos found themselves with little choice but to seek a political solution in the restoration of the party of order. Sigdel and the army, functioning as a bastion of law and legitimacy, gracefully conferred legitimacy upon the greatest Discord poll the world has ever seen yet. Insurrectos found themselves satisfied with being citizens again, and normalcy returned, along with all the social reproduction that implies.
\n\nMany of the prisoners who escaped in the insurrection in Nepal, finding their squalid cells burned to ash, dutifully reported to other squalid cells elsewhere, for legality within the prison cell was preferable to a life of fugitivity under the weight of the party of order. The prison, including the prison that makes up the whole of society today, can only be abolished as a consequence of the abolition of the law and legitimacy. Without those, how could it even be conceivable to report back to prison? To the resumption of democracy and the order it maintains? Normalcy will be preferable to the harshest reaction. Citizenship will be preferable to uncertainty. And precisely because compulsion under capitalism is the freedom to work or starve (rather than the naked coercion of slavery or death), the grace conferred to legitimize the greatest Discord election is a wholly understandable choice. For the proletariat is revolutionary or nothing, and they are not revolutionary precisely when they reproduce themselves as workers, as proletariat, as the class of capital, persuaded to continue being loyal citizens of the party of order.
\n\nWithout overcoming these particular limits—the reimpositive black scare, reaffirming tamang proseso—things could not have turned out any other way. A grand secret conspiracy to burn down the physical manifestations of government is always insufficient—for the state, much like capital, patriarchy, and other hierarchies, coheres not in locations but in social relations. A parliament can burn down, but its legitimacy will remain intact. Reconstituted as citizens, the former insurrectos rebuilt the parliament on Discord. At that point, under the ever-watchful eye of the Nepali armed forces, the choice was clear.
\n\nHad we faced the same choices, would we be like the maquis who continued the fight against Francisco Franco after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution? Would we go on, like the Sabaté brothers who hid in the forests and mountains and persisted despite the victory and consolidation of Spanish fascism? Individual acts of illegalism, even small collective acts of illegalism—and especially such acts in the peripheries—rarely challenge normalcy enough to inspire mass collective outbreaks of illegalism like what we saw in Indonesia and Nepal.
\n\nInevitably, normalcy is reimposed. This is the result of the material and ideological limits that constrained the growth of the insurrection and smothered its embryonic logic. Tamang proseso triumphs, along with all the legality and legitimacy it embodies. The black scare takes place and insurrectos become citizens, prisoners, fugitives, or guerrillas—it matters little which as long as the party of order reigns supreme. The false critics reconfigure themselves within the new normalcy. The anti-politicized either become politicized or retreat back into passivity. “God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/4.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nThe emergence of the party of anarchy at Mendiola on September 21, 2025 revealed the impotence of all the factions of the left and post-left in the Philippines, including this author. Even without a party conspiracy, urban poor youth took action where many others could not. It is the greatest irony that those involved with party conspiracies (some of which involve armed wings) remained limited to rebel peripheries or pragmatic pacifism. Militants and cadres from National Democracy had engaged in delimited acts of vandalism and light skirmishes with the police at the beginning of September, but it was only weeks later, on 9/21, that the so-called unorganized acted autonomously. In the intervening weeks, between the beginning of September and 9/21, the permitted left shifted from limited violence to pragmatic pacifism, while these direct actionists shifted from apolitical obscurity towards openly-legible violence.
\n\nIt is not a simple thing to demand of those who were present at Luneta and Mendiola last September that they should have thrown themselves into the fray of a riot in order to escalate it into an insurrection. Instead of asking what those on the ground that day could have done differently, we could ask—what would have been required to create a situation in which they could not have acted otherwise? That is to say: what constraints shaped what actions they could take? What material and ideological limits prevented them from intervening to elevate the riot beyond its limits?
\n\nThe skirmishes and vandalism by National Democracy in September 4 involved militants who understood the risk and committed to it. At Luneta and Mendiola, during the events of September 21, the composition of the crowd was different. Many had less appetite for risk, and indeed, were ordered to disperse by those who had convened the marches.
\n\nLegality has its uses. The National Democrats who marched under the banners of the Makabayan bloc acted as the permitted left. Had they made the decision to join the riots at Mendiola, their seats in congress could have been forfeit. To lose their position within normalcy would mean forfeiting their planned reforms. Again, this is not necessarily to pass judgment on their inaction, nor to call their socialist credentials into doubt, but to recognize the limits that normalcy imposes us and to recognize when we have been tied to preserving it.
\n\nNaming our demons is the first step towards exorcising them. We cannot overcome material and ideological limits that go unnamed or unrecognized. Studying why insurrections failed, we can arm ourselves with the knowledge of what to avoid. Intentionality is impossible without cognizance. Our revolutionary forebears provided us with the language to identify various limits: the division between town and country; feeding the revolution, or the Conquest of Bread; breaking with burgis ideology, whether that be workerism, the affirmation of proletarian identity, citizenship, legalism, or legitimacy; securing the logistics of healthcare and medicine; overcoming various divisions of labor, especially the gendered division of labor and social reproduction; defense and the military question; accountability and safety; overcoming peripherality and revolutionary isolation; overcoming ideological and sectarian divisions; overcoming separations, identities, and bigotry in the working class; expropriating the expropriators; dealing with the state; resolving the “crisis of revolutionary leadership”; and many more.
\n\nThe legitimacy of the party of order has its material basis in the smooth reproduction of normalcy: simple things like the logistics of food and medicine, keeping the lights on and the hospitals open, keeping homes and dignities safe from violation. Legalism flows from this, and tamang proseso from that. Experiencing the insecurity of rupture and insurrection, how else would one imagine engaging with the state other than through the legitimate processes? To break with the party of order, then, means to challenge the material basis of its legitimacy and legality—for the logic of the insurrection to answer the hard questions of how to overcome specific limits, communizing food, safety, and care.
\n\nUnder normalcy, yes, we are pacifist because we are pragmatic. But when does pacifism cease to be pragmatic? When the time comes, will our pragmatic pacifism have become so deeply ingrained in us that it is no longer pragmatic? Will we become so used to deferring to limits that we miss the chance to transcend these limits? Our relationship to pragmatism must never be raised to the level of a principle. Pragmatism is not a “value” to uphold or defend, precisely because it is merely pragmatic. It is tautologically true that pragmatism is not principle. Pragmatism itself becomes a material and ideological limit in the insurrectionary process.
\n\nPrevious revolutionaries have made a virtue of necessity and raised pragmatic proposals to the realm of ideology. “We had to do this” on the grounds of contingency and pragmatism became “we have to do this” on the basis of principle. That is ideologization. Many such cases exist: secret police and concentration camps (whether Gulag or Laogai) were justified as pragmatic in a given context, but now pro-revolutionaries have ideologized these and raised them to principle, arguing that the repressive functions of a revolution must necessarily be carceral. Similar examples of ideologization can be found in the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, the vulgarization that is socialism-in-one-country, the dogmatism of democratic centralism. Ideologization is the legitimization of contingency becoming tamang proseso.
\n\nIt is also not the case that the “revolution,” “anarchy,” or “communism” will “solve” issues like the liberation of women—issues that some people wish to put off addressing until after power is won or the burgesya is defeated. This is because capitalism is an alienated system built on our own alienated agency. Market forces and the totalizing logic of the capitalist mode of production both structures our agency and depends on it. It is in this sense that revolution, anarchy, and communism are still conceived in capitalist terms, as alienated agency rather than the reclaiming of our own collective agency.
\n\nThis is why revolution will not “solve” anything, nor will anarchy and communism “eliminate” domination because we will be the ones in charge of our own fate. Revolution, anarchy, and communization are our agency no longer separated from us. The revolutionary process can and will fail if we ourselves fail to overcome the material and ideological limits we face. The revolution will not “liberate” women; women and all who are gendered must liberate themselves and abolish the gendered division of labor and gender itself—to name a single example—or else the revolution will degenerate. Rather than an invisible hand of the insurrection, our own hands will be very much visible in revolution. Consequently, we must have clarity on the mechanics of the material and ideological aspects of each limit we confront, so that we can overcome and surpass them.
\n\nIt is often said that “the end justifies the means.” To this, we reply, “But what if there never is an end? All we have is means,” to quote Ursula K. Le Guin. The distance of the end we desire—nothing less than the full revolutionizing and communization of society and the end of all forms of domination—and the unimaginable gravity of what we are up against forces us to consider that “all we have are means,” at least during periods of normalcy.
\n\nIf all we have are means, then our means ought to be prefigurative15 and generative, helping us to develop agency, autonomy, and ability for self-directed militancy. These tasks are not “revolutionary” in the sense that they can trigger rupture, insurrection, or revolution by themselves, nor achieve the ends we want during periods of normalcy. Rather, they are revolutionary in that they can enable us to organize, resist, fight, and build powers and capacities that will be of use in insurrections and revolutionary situations. The fact that these capacities were severely underdeveloped explains why the recent insurrections in Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Madagascar ended with the demobilization of the party of anarchy and the reimposition of normalcy. In this sense, certain kinds of pragmatism—such as the pragmatism of appealing to a different faction of the ruling class, as occurred after 9/21—are self-defeating, as they accustom us to subordinating ourselves, deferring our desires, and appealing to power.
\n\nFor the ends we want, maximalism is in order—fighting for a “maximum program,” for a maximum amount of change, for anarchy, communism, and the end of all domination. Maximalism is a muscle that we must continuously practice using. As means, maximalism allows us to strengthen our capacities for thinking beyond the current moment. If the ends we seek are not ambitious—if we merely call for reforms (reforms from whom?), for accountability (accountability according to whom?), for vague unities with a different section of the oligarchy—then whatever means we build will not be able to transcend the current moment. During periods of normalcy, maximalism is a practice of political imagination that challenges us to think beyond capitalism, the state, gender, patriarchy, and hierarchy. When normalcy breaks down, it is the clear-sightedness of maximalism that enables pro-revolutionaries to resist the return to normalcy. In this sense, maximalism embodies one of the demands of the French revolutionary episode of May 1968: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”
\n\nAlongside maximalism, we must also cultivate bravery. In the sense that it is used here, bravery is the means by which our class becomes capable of participating in insurrections and revolutions. Bravery is the impetus that overcomes the material and ideological limits of pragmatic pacifism, that enables the party of anarchy to cohere beyond a riot in order to precipitate a social insurrection. Safety in an insurrection is obviously an illusion—it is not a dinner party after all. But like a dinner party, an insurrection must be a time and space for us to finally be ourselves—our rewilding, our self-abolition as proletarianized, alienated, gendered, and separated beings.
\n\nMaterially speaking, normalcy is legitimized is through our collective dependence on its reproduction. Ideologically, this manifests as mass apolitical passivity. The permitted left and the false critics politicize members of our class by cultivating their bravery only to channel it towards seeking meager reforms. Bravery enables our class to demand more and more from the party of order. Bravery is also necessary in escalation, enabling our class to break with the party of order and the imposition of normalcy.
\n\nTo raid an armory before burning a police station can carry greater penalties than arson. What kind of bravery would be required to take up arms at such a moment, rather than reveling in mere destruction, as in Indonesia? And when the reaction inevitably comes, what kind of bravery could enable our class-in-abolition to keep our arms raised against opportunists and goons rather than surrendering them to the party of order, as former partisanos did in Nepal? The assault on our class is what drives our class to yearn for the reimposition of normalcy for some semblance of safety. Cultivating bravery also means keeping food supplies and healthcare openly available while defending ourselves from opportunists and reactionaries. Inevitably, insurrectos will also have to find the bravery to forego money and division of labor altogether.
\n\nThis bravery has to be cultivated under normalcy. One deeply pervasive constraint on bravery under normalcy is rape culture, which forces countless women and queer people out of movements. Ableism and bigotry also drive people away and break up the unities required for more bravery. Will it be our insurrection, the unleashing of our agency, if it cannot include us dancing in it?
\n\nSimilarly, when militants and insurrectos become caught up in the repressive black scare, it is crucial to support them, lest the bravery of all shall be constrained if we see that we will not be supported when reaction comes. Likewise, the fight for carceral abolition, for defunding the police and decarcerating prisoners, is essential to cultivating the bravery of our class.
\n\nA similar capacity for bravery is required in food and goods. It is abundantly clear that solidarity economies and alternative institutional arrangements (so-called dual power) cannot and will not challenge normalcy nor overcome the totalizing logic of capital. But the partial manner of these alternative lifeways can still provide us bravery and foundations for generalization under a revolution. Our intentionality in such matters, then, requires us to be cognizant of the limits of what we can do under normalcy.
\n\nInsurrection will come again, just as it has ebbed and flowed since even before the Reformation. Intentionality, maximalism, and bravery will be required for the next to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/5.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nWe are in a state of world war—from the Russian war on Ukraine to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in Palestine and Lebanon, the US-Israeli war on Iran, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa, the conflicts in the Sahel, the civil war in Burma and West Papua, and the threat of war on Taiwan and the Southeast Asian sea. All of the sides in all of these conflicts are united on the black scare. In the war on Iran, we have seen a new mode of imperial counterinsurgency, in which the imperialists preemptively bomb revolutionary Iranians to ensure that a revolutionary movement cannot cohere. World war signals two possibilities ahead: either the opportunity for rupture and insurrection, or an even more violent imposition of normalcy throughout the world. All governments belong to the same party of order, albeit as competing and even contending factions and caucuses. Our class is not of the party of order; ours is the party of anarchy to come.
\n\nAs partisans of the party of order organize international anti-antifa conferences and intensify the black scare, our task as pro-revolutionaries is to recognize our role in the struggle ahead. Despite the deficiencies of military analogy, one reference might still be useful. In military theory, the vanguard is not the commander of the forces in a field, but the unit that scouts ahead to meet the enemy, delay them, and lay the groundwork for the main forces to advance. In this analogy, the party of anarchy is that main force, but we can open the way by scouting the metaphorical terrain. Laying down the groundwork means cultivating the bravery we all need. But the class struggle is not a war between fronts or apparatuses; it is the proletariat struggling to abolish their roles as proletarians, as men, and women, as whatever identities normalcy imposed upon us.
\n\nAs the current world war intensifies, internationalism will be crucial. Yet, as the insurrections of 2025 have shown, if the insurrectos and pro-revolutionaries have been unable to interlink struggles between town and country—or even to feed themselves—how much more difficult would it be to interlink struggles across de jure borders and states? It is in bridging and partially uniting these various separations and peripheries that pro-revolutionaries can be most effective during periods of normalcy. “It’s not up to the rebels to learn to speak anarchist; it’s up to the anarchists to become polyglot.” It is our task to speak different languages of struggle and translate these into one another. It is in our struggles interlinked that the party of anarchy coheres, from the forging of solidarities before and during the insurrection. The grand unification of various peripheries cannot be done under normalcy, but the intention and bravery to pave the way for it may be possible, so long as we do not succumb to attentisme.
\n\nHere in the Philippines, the situation is critical. There may not be enough electricity to power the most economically productive parts of the national grid in this summer. Summer is expected to be particularly brutal as it is an El Niño season, so droughts, crop failure, and heat strokes may be common. Adding in a fertilizer and fuel oil crisis, the coming crisis could signal a breakdown of normalcy on a larger scale than the COVID-19 pandemic. The black scare in response to the events of 9/21 is still ongoing, with many of those detained that day still facing charges. Yet the party of anarchy can still cohere again. If the answers remain uncertain, we can at least be certain which questions we must ask.
\n\nI cannot presume to prescribe a mode of organization, whether formal or informal, to meet the tasks of cohering the party of anarchy at a point of insurrection. To argue that we must understand the black scare and other material and ideological limits is not necessarily to argue for formal or informal models of organization.16 Here, we have simply reviewed what it will require to overcome the particular limits we have encountered. How to build the organization to fulfill those tasks without being subsumed into normalcy again is up to the coming insurrections.
\n\nThe task of overcoming limits is one that all pro-revolutionaries must undertake as the self-conscious elect of the party invisible. As pro-revolutionaries, we can see this party invisible, the coming party of anarchy, everywhere we look—the jeepney chupers, the mambubukid, kadamay, kamanggagawa, kababaihan, kabaklahan, and kasama.
\n\nAll under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent for anarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/1.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nAll writing is autobiographical, more so with political theory. Dedicated to lovers, comrades, kasamasa, kaoomchies, and kaibigan—to all who persist. D—, K—, P—, T—, H—, N—, H—, I—, R—, H—, I—, A—, A—, M—, R—, B—, J—, K—, P—, A—, M—, A—, P—, L—, G—, J—, I—, M—, A—, A—, V—, A—, 1—, R—, R—, PM, ISE, BI, TDP, A!, PS, MF, and many more.
\n\nOn the wave of uprisings that spread from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, then from Indonesia to Nepal, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, and elsewhere:
\n\nMore material on the Philippines:
\n\nEDSA, pronounced “Ed-Sa,” stands for the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the same avenue where the First and Second People Power Revolutions, or EDSA Uno and EDSA Dos respectively, took place. Similar to Luneta, marching and mobilizing at EDSA is highly symbolic. ↩
\n“DDS” originally stood for the nickname of then-mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s private army, the Davao Death Squad, which Duterte is accused of using to terrorize the urban poor of Davao City. During Duterte’s campaign for president, the fascist Dutertista movement co-opted and embraced the acronym DDS as Duterte Diehard Supporters. ↩
\nWhere appropriate, Filipinisms (words specific to the dialect of Philippine English) are used in this text. ↩
\nFormer president Rodrigo Duterte finished his term of office without much fanfare, having been constitutionally barred from running for president again as a consequence of finishing his term of office. Political dynasties in the Philippines routinely endorse family members and allies to keep power within their circle. The Duterte and Marcos dynasty colluded to run for office, with Bongbong Marcos (the son and junior of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.) running for president and Sara Duterte (the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte) running for vice president as a tandem. It is highly rare for tandems to win, as a president and vice president are elected separately, yet both won. Nonetheless, the two dynasties began quarreling in public, with Marcos ordering the extraordinary arrest and extradition of Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court. ↩
\nThe term is borrowed from Karl Marx, who first used it in what became Class Struggles in France; in this text, we play on his meaning. See Marx’s most famous usage of the terms “party of order” and “party of anarchy” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩
\nThe Kilusang Setyembre Bente Uno (KS21) is a fascist entryist group that appropriated the symbolism of 9/21. We know they are fascist entryists because they are platformed by the usual fascist Telegram channels while claiming to be some kind of patriotic united front. Some of their members were arrested while challenging a Manila ordinance designed to prevent another 9/21. ↩
\n“Red-tag” is a Filipinism somewhat equivalent to “red-bait.” The use of “black-tagging” is a play on words, though that phrase is already sometimes used to refer to baiting or tagging individuals and groups by alleging connection to Daesh-aligned groups (the so-called “Islamic State”) like the Maute group. It goes without saying that I am not using the phrase to refer to Daesh. ↩
\nIn the Philippines, permits are required for most protests. ↩
\nThis discussion on apolitical passivity (which I term “apolicity” elsewhere) is also an intervention into the discussion in the Philippines about the notion that working-class people are “apolitical” and “passive,” which reduces individual agency to a choice rather than recognizing that individuals orient themelves in the context of their material and ideological conditions. ↩
\n“Burgis” is a Filipinism for “bourgeois,” and “burgesya” is a Filipinism for “bourgeoisie.” ↩
\nTaken from “izquierda permitida” (permitted left) discourse used in Bolivia to describe the transformation of MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo) and other ruling left electoral parties from being a radical left (izquierda radical) to a “permitted left” (izquierda permitida). ↩
\nCompare with Phil A. Neel’s notion of an “anti-party” in his works such as “Theory of the Party.” ↩
\nAlmost literally so, since Prabowo is the son-in-law of Suharto, the old dictator of the New Order period, and Prabowo is an advocate of a return to New Order-style of governance. ↩
\nIn EDSA Uno, this force was the liberal-democratic oligarchy organized by the Church and the political-dynastic opposition to the dictatorship. The Communist Party of the Philippines failed to intervene at this crucial moment and lost the momentum for insurrection in what is now called as the “boycott error,” now understood by ideologues as a problem of “ultraleftism.” ↩
\nWhile I no longer believe in the theory of change that prefiguration and its adherents put forward, I still believe it has a place somehow, as suggested in the following paragraphs. This is not the place to expound on the subject in depth. ↩
\nNeither is informalism an inherently superior mode of organization in counterrevolutionary times. We have seen in the Philippines how informalist organization can constrain bravery no less than transmisogyny or manarchism. The dichotomy of formalism versus informalism (as also framed as pro-organizationalism versus anti-organizationalism) is a false dichtotomy. People have repeatedly raised the point against Murray Bookchin that so-called lifestylists (his referred term for informalists/anti-organizationalists) still take part in formal organizations. ↩
\nWhat can today’s rebels learn from the Stonewall riots? Why did the uprising have such an impact? To answer these questions, we explore the previously unacknowledged significance of anarchists in the rebellion and the movements that emerged from it. Along the way, we trace a queer genealogy of anarchist organizing methods in North America from the Stonewall Uprising through the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 to today.
\n\nThis is a massive, meticulously researched historical investigation. It’s a deep dive! For a shorter introduction to the subject, see our previous article, “Stonewall Means Riot Right Now.”
\n\nYou can order a zine version of this article here in order to read it in print.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/1.jpg\")
This image designed by the artist Bum Lung appeared in a book collecting the works of the Mary Nardini Gang in 2019. In fact, it repurposes the same Thomas Nast cartoon as a flyer that the anarchist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker made in the 1960s. This connection gives us a glimpse of a subterranean relationship between queer subversion and criminal anarchism that spans decades.
\n“Be gay, do crime”? Let’s be more ambitious!
\n\nIn 1969, gays and gender rebels were already criminals. At Stonewall, they became revolutionaries.
\n\nAnd if you’ve ever participated in an affinity group at a mass protest, you’ve got them partly to thank.
\n\nHere, we revisit the Stonewall Uprising and its aftermath to trace a queer anarchist history of riots and horizontal organizing. Despite Stonewall being the most famous moment in LGBTQ history in the United States, few have explored the anarchist dimensions of the uprising, nor its influence on subsequent radical organizing and tactics. Until now, queer anarchists who have invoked Stonewall have usually focused on it simply as an anti-police riot, an example of “queer ultraviolence” in which a wide range of sexual and gender rebels including trans people, people of color, and street youth fought back against their oppressors. This is accurate, of course, and were it only that, it would still be worth celebrating. But there is a specifically anarchist legacy at the heart of the rebellion, posing strategic and tactical lessons of interest to contemporary anarchists.
\n\nThe history of queer anarchism has yet to be told. This is one of its riotous chapters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/2.jpeg\")
Queer anarchists around the world march to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising—let’s actually remember and learn from it.
\nIf you, dear reader, are a queer and/or trans anarchist, we hope you’ll find particular pleasure in this account. But there are no identity-based limits on this legacy. All anarchists and rebels should find useful insights in the story that follows. Looking back through this history, it’s surprising how much of it—the discourse about outside agitators, identity, and local knowledge in riots, the debates about leadership and representation versus spontaneity and affinity, the counterinsurgency methods—resonates directly with our own experiences in more recent rebellions across a wide range of contexts.
\n\nRadical history should go beyond simply cheerleading our ancestors and trancestors; we owe it to them to learn concrete lessons from their successes and failures. The best way to honor the courage of the Stonewall rebels is not by putting their images on our walls or social media feeds, nor by squabbling over the proper version of identity politics to govern our thumbnail accounts of history.
\n\nIt’s by drawing on their experiences to revolt more and better today.
\n\n—some queer anarchists
\n\nWe’ve researched this article using a range of primary materials (documents and accounts from 1969) as well as other historians’ writings about the events, plus interviews years later with folks who witnessed them. Where possible, we’ve included links to online sources that you can read yourself; otherwise, we have included footnotes to materials you can access in libraries. Many of the sources appear in the excellent anthology The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary Reader.
\n\nSome of the accounts directly contradict each other. We’ve done our best to sort through the various sources to pull together a well-supported overall narrative, acknowledging the limits of what we can know.
\n\nObjectivity is impossible. Yet our revolutionary aspirations will not be served by upholding mythologies that are emotionally satisfying but neglect the available evidence. A “usable past,” as we see it, isn’t an uncomplicated and inspiring fable full of hero/in/es to celebrate. It’s an analysis of history that offers lessons we can use to realize our own revolutionary dreams in the present.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/27.jpg\")
Yes honey, we know. But what can it teach us about revolt?
\nStonewall wasn’t simply a night when the cops raided a bar and people fought back. The Stonewall Rebellion spanned three nights of intense rioting throughout Greenwich Village over the course of six days. This is critical to understanding why it made such a difference then and why we still remember it today.
\n\nIt has become common to point out that Stonewall wasn’t the first queer riot. Commonly cited incidents include Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles (c. 1959) and Compton’s Cafeteria (1966). We can add to the list the Black Nite Brawl of 1961, also known as “Wisconsin’s Stonewall,” the gay community response to the Black Cat raid in 1967 Los Angeles, and various other pre-1969 rebellions.
\n\nYet our hunger for a usable riotous queer past may exceed what we can actually document. The Cooper Do-nuts incident might have happened, but novelist John Rechy is the only person who claims to remember it (and wasn’t even sure what year it took place). More people claim to remember a tussle at Compton’s, but neither police files, organizational records, media coverage, nor gay nor trans periodicals from the time offer any mention of such an incident. It may have happened, but the details and even the date remain hazy—some time in August 1966 is the best guess. While inspiring to recount as an early example of collective trans and queer resistance, whatever impact such a disturbance may have had at the time was limited.
\n\nOther instances that are better documented, while locally significant, did not spread beyond their immediate geographic or tactical limits. The Black Nite Brawl, while fierce, was essentially a bar fight on a single night. When the Black Cat was raided in 1967, the gay community didn’t riot, though they did organize a nonviolent protest. None of these were widely discussed outside the communities where they took place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/3.jpg\")
After the Los Angeles Police raided the Black Cat bar in Los Angeles in 1967, the gay community assembled to protest… but didn’t riot.
\nSurely there have been many times when queer and/or trans people fought back against oppression, regardless of whether they were documented in traditional archives or community memory. But before 1969, none of those directly catalyzed a deeper transformation in the queer/trans world beyond the immediate participants.
\n\nStonewall was different. One of the reasons why is that it lasted so much longer. The entire neighborhood around the bar became ungovernable for nearly a week, with multiple escalating clashes that centered gay, trans, and/or gender non-conforming people but grew to include a range of neighbors, street kids, and political radicals. By sustaining the disorder for many days beyond the initial bar raid, the rioters shifted what it meant to be gay in the Village—and eventually, the world.
\n\nHad the 2014 riots in Ferguson died down after one night, they would not have catalyzed the international reckoning with police violence that became known as the Black Lives Matter movement. In the years before a police officer in Ferguson murdered Michael Brown, many one-night riots took place in response to police murders—but none lasted long enough to expand into a generalized rebellion. In Ferguson, locals kept coming back to the streets; this afforded supporters time to arrive, helping to sustain the intensity. The prolonged disorder caught the attention of the public, which eventually caused the protests to spread, making Michael Brown and Ferguson into household names. This is a useful analogy for what happened in the Stonewall riots.
\n\nNowadays, people love to debate who “threw the first brick”1 at Stonewall. Actually, the question of how the rioting continued is at least as important as how it started. While the courage of those who resisted on the first night is admirable, it was the persistence of collective militant defiance in the streets over the following week that transformed it from a disturbance into a revolutionary upheaval.
\n\nOne night, however fierce, could be a fluke. Stonewall was an uprising. Let’s see how it unfolded.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/4.jpg\")
The Stonewall Inn before everything exploded.
\nThe basic story of the first night of rioting at Stonewall is widely known, though certain details about who did what remain contested.
\n\nFriday, June 27 was an ordinary night at the Stonewall, a trashy gay bar on Christopher Street in the West Village run by the Genovese organized crime family. The door was staffed by Ed Murphy, an infamous Mafia tough, pimp, blackmailer, and police snitch who later rebranded himself as a gay activist. A mixture of mostly young gay men and trans/gender-nonconforming folks sipped watered-down drinks from dirty glasses and danced, while outside the bar, more queers (including many too young to get in) congregated in the park and on the streets, laughing and camping and cruising.
\n\nShortly after 1 am, police entered the bar and announced that they were raiding the premises. It was the second raid of the same bar that week, in addition to raids on other gay bars and the destruction of trees in a popular cruising area of a park in nearby Queens. As police sorted patrons for release or arrest, targeting trans people in particular, some begin to protest and physically resist. A crowd gathered outside, grumbling at the police and cheering and camping it up as people exited the bar.
\n\nWord spread through the neighborhood. As the police exited and began loading arrestees into a paddy wagon, tension built. A trans woman smacked an officer with her purse; a butch lesbian, struggling against her captors, yelled at the crowd to do something. From the swelling crowd, people shouted, threw pennies (a pun: “dirty copper!”), beat upon the police vehicles, pulled up cobblestones from the streets, and tussled with the officers. Losing control of the situation as the crowd grew larger and angrier, the officers retreated into the bar.
\n\nThe crowd tossed bottles, stones, trash, garbage cans, and whatever they else they could find. They smashed windows, unarrested some prisoners, and pulled up a parking meter to use as a battering ram. Rioters attempted to set the bar on fire. Cops pulled their guns. More police arrived; as riot cops squared off, the crowd camped it up, chanting and dancing a kick line. For hours, the crowds clashed with police, dispersed and reassembled, set trash cans on fire, chanted, cruised, and milled around discussing their previous experiences with police.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/5.jpg\")
Friday night: the police raided and queers fought back.
\nAs Martin Boyce recalled of the morning after:
\n\n\n\n\nMorning came on Christopher, and those broken windows and pieces of cloth inside and diamondlike glass all over. It was a riot, no doubt about it, and there were just exhausted survivors looking dazed. We knew what happened. We all did it… There was a certain beauty to the aftermath of the riot. It was a very extraordinary kind of beauty, something to make art out of later… The beauty of shattered glass and certain kind of fag decorations being blown in the wind, by the window. It was obvious, at least to me, that a lot of people really were gay and, you know, this was our street.3
\n
For all of the ink spilled debating who played what role on the first night, all accounts agree that there were no leaders. No organizations, no formal structures, no representatives: the rebellion was a spontaneous collective outburst of rage and joy. Even attempts to chant slogans such as “gay power” or to sing civil rights anthems like “We Shall Overcome” didn’t take hold in an atmosphere of arch camp irony and fury. While efforts to take control of the riot’s legacy and bend its meaning to serve different political agendas began soon after, the first night expressed an organic, unmediated defiance. An observer writing in the countercultural newspaper Rat remarked on the absence of any effort to exert leadership as the uprising unfolded: “Strangely, no one spoke to the crowd or tried to direct the insurrection. Everyone’s heads were in the same place.”4
\n\nMany of the statements that established activists made early in the rebellion focused on the bars themselves, lamenting the system of mafia control and police payoffs. Craig Rodwell of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop circulated a flyer on behalf of his organization Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN) that declared, “The only way this monopoly can be broken is through the action of Homosexual men and women themselves. We obviously cannot rely on the various agencies of government.” Despite this anti-state sentiment, the demands asserted—for gay businessmen to run bars with “competitive pricing,” a boycott of Mafia-controlled establishments, and an investigation by the mayor’s office—suggested a limited imagination.5 While these conditions created frustration and vulnerability for many adult gay people, young queer people—ironically, precisely the constituency that HYMN claimed to speak for—were excluded regardless of who owned them, and trans/gender-nonconforming people of all ages faced additional legal and social harassment both inside and outside of them.6
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/7.jpg\")
Craig Rodwell stands in front of the Oscar Wilde Book Shop in 1969.
\nHad the riots died down after one or two nights, such demands might have remained the thinkable horizon for many participants. However, the unrest persisted across many days despite the efforts of cops, politicians, and community representatives. The prolonged antagonism with police occupying the neighborhood and the ongoing congregation of angry, rebellious queers on the streets defying authority and sharing their experiences expanded the meaning of the uprising. Over the course of the week, what had begun as a grievance related to the bars became a window into a totally different world.
\n\nIn addition to expressing being fed up and determined to resist, participants began to articulate sophisticated political analyses. One young gay rebel explained to a reporter the function of anti-gay oppression: “We strike at the family, and we undermine all the bullshit about virility that keeps most men in line.”7 These insights emerged collectively in real time as the rioters chatted and developed a shared political consciousness. An observer of the first night recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nPeople hung around till after 4 am talking in little groups. People were excited and angry. In talking to a number of kids who had been inside, it was evident most understood at least rudimentarily what was happening to them. What was and should have always been theirs, what should have been the free control of the people was dramatized, shown up for what it really was, an instrument of power and exploitation. It was theatre, totally spontaneous. There was no bullshit.8
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/6.jpg\")
Day one: the raid and the riots left the bar wrecked.
\nIn a 2019 interview, Jim Fouratt, a longtime gay activist and former Yippie who was present for the entire Stonewall Uprising, recalled a detail that hasn’t made it into the published accounts of the riots. In his account, few radical groups participated on the second night of the uprising, but the Motherfuckers were there:
\n\n\n\n\nDo you know about the Motherfuckers? Straight anarchists, black flag kind of group… I did a lot of community organizing with the East Side Yippies and that kind of stuff. And my friend Ren de Antonio called me and she said, “I want you to know that the Motherfuckers are gonna come tonight and they’re gonna try to start a confrontation with the police.” And I said, “How do you know that?” She told me that there was a closeted gay man that she was good friends with in the Motherfuckers named Superdrill… she said Superdrill told me they’re gonna come.9
\n
Did the Motherfuckers participate in the Stonewall Uprising? If so, what impact did they have?10 We may never be able to confirm with certainty what role the Motherfuckers played, but Fouratt’s recollection suggests a throughline connecting the forms of anarchist organizing on the streets of New York City in 1969 with the organizational forms that emerged out of the Stonewall Uprising. In any case, as we shall see below, multiple witnesses confirm that at least one other anarchist group was definitely involved in the riots.
\n\nWho were the Motherfuckers? Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), also known as the Motherfuckers, emerged in the late 1960s out of organizing involving Dan Georgakas, Ben Morea, and several others. Inspired by Dadaism, Spanish Civil War veterans living in exile in New York City, and the Living Theater, Morea had launched a zine called Black Mask in 1966, turning the radical message of the avant garde against the corporate art world that had defanged it and reduced it to a spectacle. Over the months that followed, he and his companions carried out some of the boldest confrontational direct actions of the late 1960s while modeling a new form of horizontal organization.
\n\nMorea had attended meetings with Murray Bookchin at which they discussed how the Spanish anarchists of the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) had organized in grupos de afinidad during the revolution of 1936. Bookchin went on to circulate influential proposals about affinity group organizing through the writings and lectures of the Anarchos Group at spaces like Alternate U, a countercultural free school in Greenwich Village in New York City. At the same time, UAW/MF began to put a similar model into practice, organizing as a “street gang with an analysis,” forming cells that participated in confrontational actions against the art establishment, the police, and the military-industrial complex.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/26.jpg\")
Ben Morea of the Motherfuckers, c. 1968.
\nIn a leaflet titled “The Brown Bag Theory of Affinity Groups,” UAW/MF laid out their philosophy:
\n\n\n\n\nThe affinity group is the seed/ germ/ essence of organization. It is coming together out of mutual Need or Desire. Cohesive historical groups united out of the shared necessities of the struggle for survival, while dreaming of the possibility of love. For man’s nature is not bounded by necessity alone — Desire appears in all its forms & man desires to desire — he seeks to fulfill himself on every level of his complex life. & it is in this psychological sense that the affinity group is a pre-organizational force, it represents the drive out of which organization is formed & in so far as it fulfills men’s desires it becomes the post-revolutionary form, the organization of satisfaction.
\n
It is striking that the Motherfuckers articulated the logic of the affinity group not only as a response to political necessity or as a way to embody anti-authoritarian principles, but an expression of desire and the longing for love. Establishing collective living spaces, working together intensively, and sharing the risks and pleasures of life in revolt, UAW/MF formed a network they called “the family,” which, as Morea recounted, “shared a tribal outlook and lifestyle.” Deconstructing and replacing bourgeois structures of kinship was part of the group’s prefigurative vision. As the radical historian Caitlin Casey explains, “The Motherfuckers saw the nuclear family as a hopelessly outdated concept but their new family as presaging the postrevolutionary society.”
\n\nMorea later recalled, “The fact that we rejected the nuclear family model and lived collectively was never arrived at in a polemical fashion or laid out as a blueprint. We just had a sense that there were other roots to living other than what the West had to offer.” In this rejection of conventional family values in favor of new models driven by desire, love, and a vision of social transformation, the Motherfuckers—despite being a mostly heterosexual formation—promoted an anti-authoritarian vision that paralleled the queer practices that were emerging a few blocks west, where networks of street queens, queer teenagers, cruisers, and gay couples were building alternative worlds.
\n\nWhile these prefigurative models of alternative kinship overlapped with social realities in the Village, UAW/MF’s tactics were a far cry from any means of protest that organized gay groups had undertaken. Pre-Stonewall organizations such as the Mattachine Society of New York employed conventional hierarchical organizing models and limited their tactics to polite advocacy, which was undoubtedly bold for a time when same-sex sex was criminalized and police harassment bedeviled the community. The MSNY’s negotiations with Mayor Lindsay’s administration and the police department had managed to secure a reduction in anti-gay arrests in the years leading up to Stonewall. But while some individual gays and lesbians such as Jim Fouratt participated in more confrontational New Left or anarchist projects, the organized gay movement remained tactically conservative through 1969.
\n\nAt a time when a broad social consensus, particularly among young people and marginalized communities, strongly opposed the Vietnam War and the US military machine, the first gay protest to take place in the city had been a 1964 picket outside the US Army Building advocating for the inclusion of gay men and lesbians in the military. The famous 1966 “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in the Village involved men in conservative suits identifying themselves as homosexuals and then politely asking to be served in order to challenge State Liquor Authority policies that rendered gay bars vulnerable to closure. While courageous and in some cases effective, the homophile movement showed little tactical innovation. Younger activists’ efforts to propose even minor changes in the scope of actions—such as relaxing the conservative gender-conforming dress code imposed on participants in the “Annual Reminder” picket at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia—provoked fierce backlash.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/9.jpg\")
The famous “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in the West Village, 1966. Dick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, is at center, addressing the bartender.
\nBy contrast, on the Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers were pushing the boundaries of protest with near-constant confrontations, property destruction, and street marches. As former Motherfucker Osha Neumann recalled,
\n\n\n\n\nWe would riot, throw rocks through the windows of the bank, and run through the streets chased by beat cops from the precinct reinforced by the Tactical Patrol Force. Those of us they caught got dragged to jail. Those of us who escaped rushed to our new storefront to churn out fliers calling for new demonstrations, which would invariably result in more riots and more arrests.
\n
UAW/MF organized their own protests, but also appeared wherever social tensions presented opportunities for insurrectionary escalation. According to Morea, “We didn’t operate from any plan, we just saw situations and took our chances. We were edge dwellers.” When entering into a conflict, they did not confine themselves within tactical limits: “Our response would include everything from peaceful protests to not peaceful battling depending on the situation. We were extremely volatile and it often depended on how hard we were pushed.” The city presented ample opportunities for escalation, especially as the temperature rose; as a Motherfucker communiqué titled “Liberation in the Streets” declared, “While the rest tremble, we look forward to the heat of summer.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/10.jpg\")
Black Mask, antecedents of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, c. 1967.
\nYet as summer of 1969 set in, few straight radicals anticipated that the most successful confrontation with the city’s notorious riot squad would come not from seasoned movement “heavies” such as Motherfuckers, Yippies, or SDS militants, but from young gay people in Greenwich Village. Many tough radicals from the New Left viewed the latter with contempt or amused indifference.
\n\nIn fact, all accounts agree that in the Stonewall riots, it was specifically effeminate gays, street queens, and trans/gender-nonconforming people that took the most prominent militant roles. “People are beginning to realize,” one New York Post author quoted the doorman at the Stonewall Inn as saying, “that no matter how ‘Nelly’ or how ‘fem’ a homosexual is, you can only push them so far.” The author continued: “With a battle cry of ‘gay power,’ the Nellies, fems, gay boys, queens—all those who flaunt their homosexuality—have been demonstrating that they have indeed been pushed too far.”11
\n\nDick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, noted, “The ‘butch’ numbers who were around the area and who participated peripherally in the action remained for the most part in the background. It was the ‘queens’ who scored the points and proved that they are not going to tolerate any more harassment or abuse.”12 A graffito on the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall: “BUTCHES, WHERE ARE YOU NOW THAT WE NEED YOU?”13
\n\nAs word spread after the first night of rioting that a rowdy group of street queens and campy young gays with no formal protest experience had successfully squared off against the riot police, militants flocked to the Village to learn from their experience. As gay activist Bob Kohler recounted:
\n\n\n\n\nThe big thing on everybody’s mind, especially the police and movement people, was that these were the only rioters that had gotten the best of the police. So that gave them a special strangeness. I mean, people just [wondered], How could that happen? Because there’d been riots with Yippies and there’d been riots with the SDS and Abbie Hoffman, but nobody had ever gotten the best of the police before. The police were never put on the run, and suddenly they were put on the run by the fairies, so those people were very curious: did this really happen?14
\n
As the day unfolded, radicals and countercultural people of various sexualities and genders converged on the Village, mingling and discussing the events. One lesbian recalled, “Hippies joined the queers & straight places turned gay for the week-end—it was complete madness in NYC.”15
\n\nIn addition to the likely presence of the Motherfuckers, multiple participants confirm the presence of the Crazies, an anarchist cell based in Lower Manhattan that participated in street theater, confrontational protests, and—as came out a few months later—bombings of targets connected to United States militarism.
\n\nAuthor Edmund White reported, “A mad left-wing group of straight kids called the Crazies is trying to organize the kids, pointing out that [Mayor] Lindsay is to blame.” John O’Brien, a Marxist activist with links to various radical groups experienced in street confrontations with police, reached out to the group to ask them to come on Saturday.16 While it is not known which individual Crazies were at Stonewall that night, participants in the group included Robin Palmer and Sharon Krebs, who went on to join the Weather Underground, and Sam “Mad Bomber” Melville. Five months after Stonewall, Melville was arrested en route to a planned bombing due to information passed by George Demmerle, an FBI snitch involved with the Crazies. Melville became a leader in prison organizing at Attica; he died at the hands of police and National Guard troops in the massacre that concluded the Attica Rebellion.
\n\nAs night fell on June 28, the second night of the Stonewall riots, the crowd swelled to include thousands of people. The vibe was at once angry and festively campy. Participants surged into the streets and blocked traffic, chanted, confronted vehicles, and began to throw things. At the nearby Women’s House of Detention, which confined many Black and Latina lesbians and transmasculine folks, detainees cheered and dropped burning pieces of toilet paper out of the windows of the jail to show their support.17 Angry gay and trans people began attacking police cars. Marsha P. Johnson reportedly climbed a streetlamp and dropped something heavy on a squad car, smashing its windshield, while someone else tossed a bag of wet garbage into the face of an officer in another vehicle.
\n\nAfter 2 am, the TPF riot police arrived to reinforce the badly outnumbered officers, advancing in wedge formations in an attempt to clear the streets. Queer demonstrators confronted them with taunts and kick-lines and, when forced out, escaped along side streets to disperse and then reassemble elsewhere. Setting fires in trash cans, attacking police outnumbered by the crowds, and successfully unarresting and freeing some of those snatched by the riot squad, queers continued to flood the streets until after 3:30 am.
\n\nThe success of the crowd in evading police, holding the streets, and sustaining the confrontation for hours likely stemmed from the combination of different demographics that converged on the second night. Gay residents and street queens drew on their intimate knowledge of the local terrain to find escape routes around police blockades, enabling rioters to disperse and reconverge, outflanking police efforts to re-establish control. Anarchists and other militants drew on their experience in street protest to escalate confrontations and defend against police violence and arrests. The gays, Motherfuckers, and Crazies proved a formidable coalition.
\n\nFouratt was thrilled about how the second night went:
\n\n\n\n\nWe learned through the end of it when I, when our little group met again, full of ourselves because it had been more successful than we had expected, many more people came out, it was just wonderful. I remember marching across Waverly Place in the wrong direction, going by Julius’s and shouting, “Come out! Come Out! Come out!” And they’re all raising their drinks, but not coming out! … I don’t claim to be the first person to say, “Come out! Come out!” But on the second night, that was the mantra, the cheer that you heard.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/11.jpg\")
Saturday night: Stonewall belongs to the kids on the streets.
\nOn the third night, Sunday, June 29, large crowds once again turned out, but the fierce confrontations that marked the first two nights did not take place. As David Carter explains, the police had learned
\n\n\n\n\nthat in the aftermath of Friday night’s raid it would take many more police officers than were initially deployed on Saturday to discourage gay men and women and their allies from attempting to seize the area around the Stonewall, which the homosexual citizens saw as their turf; that the police needed to arrive early in large numbers to preempt the gay citizenry from seizing the initiative; and that such a maneuver must be executed in a low-key manner or their mere presence might precipitate the outbreaks they were hoping to end. (At least the police used this approach on Sunday night and it worked.)18
\n
A gay activist writing in the Berkeley Barb also claimed that activists from SDS had promised to lend their support, but failed to show up on Sunday night.19 If the Motherfuckers returned, their presence was not felt. Other factors contributed to muting the rebellion:
\n\n\n\n\nThe second factor working in the police’s favor was that the weekend had passed. Friday and Saturday nights’ events had begun late and lasted until the early morning, something most people could not do on an evening before a workday, especially if they had already done so on the previous night or two. Thirdly, some of the demonstrators felt that they had already made their point and nothing more was to be gained by again repeating what was becoming a predictable scenario. Was it worth risking more injuries and arrests, as well as damage to the neighborhood that gay people were fighting to claim as their own?20
\n
Furthermore, earlier in the day, Mattachine activists had met with representatives of the mayor and police department and attempted to dissuade the gay community from continuing the rebellion. At the Stonewall, MSNY members encouraged people who turned up to go home, posting a sign reading: “WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE—MATTACHINE.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/12.jpg\")
An attempt at counterinsurgency. It didn’t work.
\nMSNY’s actions reflect a familiar pattern of co-optation and counterinsurgency, in which the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed group attempt to pacify their constituency in order to maintain their status as intermediaries with the dominant power structure. This model is familiar from Ferguson to Standing Rock to Minneapolis; it represents one of the most serious threats to the revolutionary potential of social movements.
\n\nHowever, at Stonewall in 1969, the elation at the possibilities opened up by the riots, the limited influence that the Mattachine Society had upon the street youth who comprised the front line of the rebellion, and the hatred that the vast majority of the community felt towards the police combined to limit the effectiveness of this strategy. The crowds remained large, if less rebellious than the night before, and an array of defiant actions took place. As Carter recounts,
\n\n\n\n\nSeveral gay youths took daring advantage of the heavy police presence in the Christopher Street area to make a guerrilla raid on the Sixth Precinct’s headquarters. They went to the police station and slapped Day-Glo blue and fuchsia bumper stickers reading “Equality for Homosexuals” on the police cars, a patrol wagon, and the personal cars of cops who had left their vehicles parked while on duty.21
\n
While the crowds did not march and clash with police as on the first two nights, the attitude remained militant and defiant. One furious young queen tore into a well-meaning straight ally who attempted to defuse the crowd’s anger:
\n\n\n\n\nThe hell you say! You don’t impress me. You are straight and you are my enemy! Don’t give me that phoney liberal bull. You made the laws. Nixon’s silent army. Now we are gonna get you! I was in Vietnam, man, how does that grab you? Huh? Huh? And, man, I’ll screw your daughter. But I’ll screw your son first! 22
\n
While some non-gay radicals did join the rebellious crowds, queer participants remained skeptical of dogmatic leftists whose humorless attempts to impose their analysis on the situation attracted little sympathy. Several sources have remarked on a joke in circulation among the gay youth participants in the uprising: “I’ve become a left deviationist.” 23 The quip picks up on a common authoritarian leftist epithet that Stalinists and Maoists used to condemn a variety of positions, particularly those that promoted more freedom than the party apparatus trusted people with, as well as the Cold War term “sex deviate,” used to denote homosexuals. This rather niche pun indicates the extent to which leftist lingo had saturated youth subcultures and how an anti-authoritarian gay sensibility used humor to mock the pretensions of both homophobes and rigid leftists—groups that overlapped considerably in 1969 New York City.
\n\nWhile full-scale riots did not break out the following two nights, tensions remained high and continued building as riot police stalked the neighborhood, taunting gay residents with homophobic slurs. An observer recounted:
\n\n\n\n\n“Start something, faggot, just start something,” one cop kept telling people. “I’d like to break your ass wide open.” After saying that to several dozen people, one man turned and said, “What a Freudian comment, officer!” The cop started swinging and hauled the guy off to a waiting wagon.24
\n
One officer fell victim to the trolling of “a wildly ‘fem’ queen,” who “sneaked up behind him, lit a firecracker and dropped it between his feet.” The cop squealed and flailed at the crowd with his nightstick; in the succeeding mêlée, a gay rioter made off with his badge. Leitsch recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nThe next day, the badge turned up hanging on a tree in Washington Square Park, stuck into a string of pickled pigs’ feet. When the cops found the badge-stuck pigs’ feet, they didn’t take them down from the tree—they beat the pigs’ feet to the ground, then picked up the badge.25
\n
This mutual taunting reflected the war between gays and police that was generalizing throughout the neighborhood and beyond. The tension ratcheted up further on Wednesday when an offensive article penned by Lucian Truscott appeared in The Village Voice, mocking the protests and the gay community. As night fell on the Village and the crowds swelled, the tension once again reached a boiling point.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/13.jpg\")
Despite the lull, queers remained in the streets—and another explosion was soon to come.
\nWhile the early nights of the rebellion and the days of lull had involved anger leavened with wit and cheerful banter, the mood had turned ugly by Wednesday night. Days of homophobic police occupation, injuries and arrests, mocking news coverage, and efforts by respectability-oriented activists to defuse anger engendered a cold fury among the crowds that assembled on the night of July 2. Likewise, the police were even more brutal: one observer noted, “The cops, who had been caught off-guard and were on the defensive before, had taken the offensive and massive retaliation was their goal.”26
\n\nBy 10 pm, between 500 and 1000 people were seething in the streets. The arrival of a police motorcade to Christopher Street prompted a wave of shoving and bottle throwing. Shortly after, gay and trans/gender-nonconforming participants began to light fires in the street. The crowd discussed burning down the building housing The Village Voice in retaliation for its offensive coverage. Throughout the neighborhood, riot police attempted to snatch members of the crowd, who fought back fiercely, looting shops and smashing windows. A handful of people were arrested; a large number of people were injured, including some officers.27 Although the clash lasted a short time compared to earlier nights—the fiercest fighting lasted around an hour—its ferocity struck all onlookers. One participant concluded, “The word is out. Christopher Street shall be liberated. The fags have had it with oppression.”28
\n\nWhat makes a riot queer? One dimension involves the rupture of gendered expectations about who participates and how. Rioter Ronnie Di Brienza summed this up in a local paper a week later with an elegant audio metaphor: “Revolution is being heard on Christopher Street, only instead of guttural MC-5 voices, we hear it coming from sopranos, and altos.”29
\n\nThe MC5 were a Detroit-based rock band popular among militant New Left activists and Yippies; their manager John Sinclair had founded the White Panther Party and worked with the anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate. On tour the previous year, the Motherfuckers had started a riot at an MC5 show at the Fillmore East, leading to the band’s being banned from a range of venues. By invoking the gruff swaggering masculinity of the MC5 and the street militants associated with them and contrasting it to the effeminacy of the frontline rioters at Stonewall, Di Brienza showed how the uprising not only asserted gay and trans grievances, but deconstructed the entire notion of who could be a revolutionary.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/14.jpg\")
“Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad”—despite the mockery of local media, the effeminacy of the rioters stunned police and butch revolutionaries alike.
\nIn the US today, many leftist commentators presume that people who are disproportionately vulnerable to state violence need to be sheltered from it in militant protest. This can lead to contradictory conclusions. Some assert that those insulated by some degree of privilege should take the front lines and actively participate in militant resistance in order to absorb the brunt of confrontations; others claim that those who have more privilege should refrain from participating in escalatory activity because its effects will disproportionately impact those who have less privilege. Critics of the latter approach respond that only by taking collective risks to defy state power can we do away with the conditions that render targeted communities vulnerable to state violence in the first place. Even well-meaning efforts to police the scope of militant tactics are generally premised on the patronizing assumption that targeted communities have no agency to resist on their own behalf. Ultimately, this framing supports the state monopoly on power.
\n\nThese issues were the subject of strident debate surrounding the Stonewall Uprising, focusing most acutely on the night of July 2. Commentary on the final day of conflict focused on the demographics of the participants, and specifically the relationship between (presumably or predominantly) straight rioters from crews based outside the Village, such as the Motherfuckers and the Crazies, and the gay/trans/gender-nonconforming rebels in the streets. As Dick Leitsch from the Mattachine Society of New York observed shortly after,
\n\n\n\n\nThe composition of the street action had changed. It was no longer gay frustration being vented upon unsuspecting cops by queens who were partly violent but mostly campy. The queens were almost outnumbered by Black Panthers, Yippies, Crazies and young toughs from street gangs all over the city and some from New Jersey. The exploiters had moved in and were using the gay power movement for their own ends. A lot of them were looking for a fight, and had the police not come, they probably would have started the old game of street gangs everywhere, “beating up a queer.” The blacks and students who want a revolution, any kind of revolution, were there to exploit. They swelled the crowd and tried to recruit, but “graciously” let the queens take all the bruises and suffer all the arrests. (If they have no more courage than they displayed on Christopher Street, their revolution is a long way off.)30
\n
This narrative bears uncanny similarities to the accusations lobbed at (and within) many 21st-century North American social movements. An array of presumed outsiders—if white, coded as political radicals, and if Black, coded as apolitical criminals—are portrayed as a threat to whatever demographic is presumed to bear authentic political grievances and entitlement to local terrain. Note the invocation first of the Black Panthers and then of “young toughs” from “New Jersey.” It is almost certain that Leitsch did not interrupt rioters to ask them where they lived and that New Jersey residents were not visually identifiable as such. On the heels of the Black-led Newark riots of 1967, invoking “New Jersey” in contrast to the residents of the almost entirely white Greenwich Village neighborhood served as a racial code for white gay readers.
\n\nIn an effort to prevent people from interpreting diverse participation in the rebellion as an expression of solidarity, Leitsch even concocts a fantasy of gay-bashing gang members so intoxicated by violence that they temporarily forget to attack gay/trans/gender-nonconforming people and instead attack the police alongside them. While anti-queer street violence was a reality in New York City at this time, Leitsch rejects the far more plausible explanation that a wide range of young people, including Black and brown kids, political radicals, and others, had suffered at the hands of the police and came together to fight back against them on account of shared interests and desires.
\n\nObservers who were more connected to the city’s marginalized communities and social movements, while noting the less visibly queer composition of the streets that night, arrived at different conclusions. Bob Kohler, a white gay radical and active supporter of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party, agreed that the crowd was different, but framed this in a broader context:
\n\n\n\n\nYes, there was a difference in the makeup [of the crowd on July 2]. There were more people rioting that could not be easily categorized, and a lot of that had to do with people that came over from other areas. The straight movement moved in heavily that night as a support. I’m assuming it was as a support. They were, of course, using it for their own ends, too… You had, for lack of a better word, provocateurs who were seeing an incident that could be used for the good of their movement or a different movement or a coalition of movements. This was one more. It was the last. There was nobody else left to riot, so people with some foresight, more foresight than I [had] at the time, could see that this could again strengthen the radical movement, that people they hadn’t really thought about were now up there in the front. 31
\n
Although referring to presumably non-gay rioters as “provocateurs” (while questioning his own use of the word), Kohler recognizes the broader participation in the night’s events as a form of solidarity oriented towards building a broader radical coalition that could resist the forms of oppression that multiple targeted communities experienced.
\n\nNeither activist specified how they knew that the rioters on July 2 were not “queens” or members of the gay community. For Leitsch, race certainly played a role, as well as gender presentation; to his credit, although not a “queen” himself, he insistently named and praised the role of effeminate gay/trans/gender-nonconforming people on the front lines of the uprising. Kohler was more familiar with the landscape of multiracial activism in the city; he may have recognized people from elsewhere. But both appear to have relied on a narrowly gendered, and to some extent racialized, interpretation of identity in reading the crowds.
\n\nAt a time when gay identity was still publicly associated with effeminacy and functioned for many as a specific subculture with distinctive cultural styles, many homosexually active men did not register to other gay people as “gay” in a cultural sense. John O’Brien, a white gay left-wing activist who was present from the first night of the uprising, remarked that his more masculine presentation aroused suspicion that he might be a provocateur or police informant when he participated in gay demonstrations.
\n\nAs one commenter on more recent queer riots has argued, one of the radical possibilities of street rebellion lies in how it can open up new ways of being in the world, weaponizing otherwise static identity categories as tools for revolt. We will never know exactly who comprised the crowd around Stonewall on July 2. Rather than asking who they had been, it might be more interesting to ask what they were becoming. Leitsch crafts a narrative in which the most marginalized members of a rebellious mass disproportionately bore the brunt of physical violence and legal consequences due to the combination of escalatory provocation and cowardice on the part of outsiders or more privileged participants. But there is another way to tell the story.
\n\nWith the benefit of historical hindsight, it is clear that the participation of non-gay radical rioters in the Stonewall Uprising constituted a vital act of solidarity. By adding important tactical knowledge, swelling the crowds, helping to free arrestees, escalating and sustaining confrontational energy, and spreading word of the uprising beyond the confines of the Village, they helped to transform the events from a fleeting expression of long-suppressed rage to a rebellion with world-historical significance. Had the Motherfuckers, the Crazies, and other anarchists and rebels subordinated themselves to the prescriptions of contemporary identity politics and stayed home, the riots might have petered out sooner and with less impact. The Stonewall Uprising illustrates the meaning of the slogan solidarity means attack.
\n\nSetting aside the question of whether observers such as Leitsch and Kohler could infallibly read the sexual and gender identities of the rioters, we must ask—were those identities fixed and static? Should those identities have been primary in determining the rioters’ relation to the rebellion? Even in Leitsch’s paranoid fantasy of otherwise homophobic “toughs” temporarily turning to fighting homophobic police in order to slake their thirst for destruction—wouldn’t that be a good thing? Instead of “be gay, do crime,” the Stonewall rioters inverted the script: by doing crime together, regardless of what previous desires they felt or sexual subcultures they frequented, people across a wide range of identities made it easier to be gay. We might even say that they invented a new way to be gay together. What affinities, erotic and otherwise, might previously unconnected people have discovered in the streets? What new possibilities might the ostensibly heterosexual participants in the riots unlocked within themselves?
\n\nThis destabilization of identity through revolutionary struggle became a hallmark of the emerging gay liberation movement, if only briefly. The earlier homophile movement’s major conceptual innovation lay in seeking civil rights for a “minority” by means of interest group politics. In that framework, a more-or-less fixed number of homosexuals existed alongside “other” minorities with their own distinctive issues (rarely, in those pre-intersectional times, did the implicit whiteness of this framework trouble white gay or lesbian activists). However, as one Gay Liberation Front activist explained in 1970 at a gathering of radical movements, gay people were coming to understand gay liberation not “as an oppressed minority fighting for rights but more the process of [creating] a society in which people can come out and be all that it’s possible to be” while rejecting “the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality.”32
\n\nAt Stonewall, rioters put this into practice: rejecting the false categories that divided them, they fought side by side against the police who oppressed them, and in the process changed history.
\n\nWith the Fourth of July weekend pending, both gay residents and police anticipated that crowds would be massive and the riots would intensify. Riot police continued to assemble in the Village, redirecting their attention from the Motherfuckers’ usual rebellious turf, as a local left-wing newspaper observed:
\n\n\n\n\nThe calling in of the TPF had the incidental benefit of taking the heat off the Second Avenue and St. Marks Place area of the Lower East Side, the TPF’s usual stomping grounds, allowing street people there an unusually relaxed July 4.33
\n
However, although large numbers of people assembled in the streets of the village and sporadically confronted police, major clashes did not break out. As Leitsch described the following days:
\n\n\n\n\nSporadic efforts were made to start trouble—by people who can best be described as “outside agitators,” by gay people, and too often by uptight cops who tried to start trouble to give them an excuse to start bashing heads again. Despite those efforts, no major outbreak erupted. It was almost as if everyone had decided that the point had been made and any further action would only bring on a backlash.34
\n
It is not surprising that Leitsch, as a white moderate, adopted the “outside agitator” language first deployed by white supremacists in the South against civil rights and labor organizers and later generalized to target all forms of protest. During the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, this language was so widespread that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent much of his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” addressing it.
\n\nFollowing another half century of seeing this language weaponized to divide and discredit radical social movements, it is easy to recognize such rhetoric as purely reactionary. We should understand that Leitsch’s subsequent accounts of the uprising were shaped by his experience of being marginalized by the younger and more radical participants. Rejecting his attempts to position his own organization, the Mattachine Society of New York, as the head of the gay movement in the uprising’s aftermath, radicals went on to found the Gay Liberation Front, which continued to pursue a confrontational approach and worked to form alliances with precisely the radical groups Leitsch had condemned as “outside agitators.”
\n\nBearing this in mind, let’s consider Leitsch’s description of the looting that unfolded on the night of July 2:
\n\n\n\n\nObviously, little of it was done by people who live in and frequent Christopher Street and environs, because all the most unlikely places were looted. The first shop to get hit was the “Gingerbread House,” a toy shop run by a delightful little lady who is a friend of everyone on Christopher. The other shops broken into were also run, for the most part, by nice people, sympathetic to the gay cause and the plight of the street queen. The really likely places, the “fag shops” that overprice their wares and bleed the gay market for exorbitant prices, were left alone. Shops whose managers complain the loudest about the cruising and swishing in the neighborhood were also, surprisingly, left alone. Observers in the know doubt if the looting was done by gay people.35
\n
Leitsch did not condemn property destruction or looting out of hand; rather, he criticized the looters for the specific targets they chose. His response includes a critique of the economic exploitation of the gay community and the petty bourgeois norms of respectability preached by business owners. While stopping short of validating property destruction as a tactic in service of these critiques, he cites the pattern of which businesses were attacked as evidence that looters lacked intimate knowledge of the neighborhood’s gay geography and the grievances that might prompt radical action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/15.jpg\")
Queer rioters’ intimate knowledge of the West Village helped to sustain the revolt.
\nLeitsch’s critique anticipates the debates over property destruction and “diversity of tactics” that have saturated the anarchist movement over the past three decades—particularly during the mobilizations of the so-called anti-globalization era, from Seattle to Miami to Adams Morgan. On occasion, anarchists who have become exasperated with these debates have dismissed valuable good-faith critiques of confrontational actions. Perhaps, had the Motherfuckers and other rebels who converged on Stonewall taken the time to confer with local gay residents, they might have been able to pick their targets more thoughtfully, thereby achieving an even more seductive riot.
\n\nBut was Leitsch’s representation of the looting of July 2 accurate? Lacking other sources that comment directly on which businesses were attacked and how, it is difficult to say. His rhetoric reflects a common pattern in moderate critiques of property destruction during times of widespread unrest. Knowing that the rebellion was widely popular and reflected deeply felt anger, Leitsch identified the righteous fury that queer residents felt at their economic exploitation, at the scorn targeting femme and gender-nonconforming people, and at the repression of cruising and public sex—but he attempted to redirect some of this fury against imagined “outsiders.”
\n\nPerhaps, then, we should not uncritically read the looting as poorly targeted militant action, but as an expression of outrage so popular that it forced even committed opponents of militant action to frame their critiques as a matter of targets, not tactics. Today, we need not look far to find pundits eager to defuse and recuperate popular anger by praising “our right to resist” in the abstract while criticizing every concrete action as the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong target.
\n\nLeitsch himself and other homophile groups had been organizing for years without qualitatively shifting the sense of possibility in the Village or beyond. Without downplaying their accomplishments, which included a significant decrease in police harassment and entrapment from 1966 forward, we can see that it took a dramatic break with existing forms of activism and the norms governing queer people’s relationship to public space to make the quantum leap into the era of gay liberation. Only by defying the demands of city officials, police, and established gay activists—by remaining in the streets and fighting back over an entire week while refusing to accept the tactical limits that leaders attempted to impose—did young queer people and their comrades render a deeper shift possible.
\n\nWhatever so-called “outsiders” participated in the rebellion, it is clear that the gay, trans, and other assorted members of the community around the Stonewall were ready to embrace more militant tactics. As Ronnie di Brienza, a self-described freak who participated in the first night’s riot, put it:
\n\n\n\n\nI have had a lot of shit thrown my way, but until Friday night, June 27, I was basically a pacifist. However, pacifism is fast going out the window. How many times can one turn the other cheek. There is a limit, and Friday night was it… Poof, it starts. The fags have gone revolutionary… The fags, like the true revolutionaries, have become resigned to fighting for their cause, if necessary by force and with heavier weapons.36
\n
Members of the established homophile groups reacted with ambivalence to the militancy of the riots, which many younger gays saw as a harbinger of their irrelevance. The Insider, the newsletter of the Mattachine Society of Washington, exemplified this discomfort in their coverage of the riots:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Insider does not see this exhibition of militancy as a fluke. Militant open defiance has become the most characteristic mark of the sixties’ protest movements. First used by the blacks in irrational riots, and later used more systematically by hippies and campus protestors who shut down their own universities, militancy has never been characteristic of the homophile movement. Militant protestors rationalize their destructive methods by pointing out that knocking on doors is useful only to a point. When it becomes clear that the doors are never going to open and that door knocking is only a pacifier for the masses, then it is time to knock the doors down. In these terms, the homophile movement is behind the times. It is quite possible that the homosexuals in the streets may well make obsolete much of what the present homophile is doing. For better or worse, militancy is here.37
\n
The conventional racist characterization of Black revolt as “irrational” and anxiety about the “destructive” methods of militants reflected the racial, class, and generational positioning of many homophile activists. Self-described “gung-ho right-winger” homophile activist Foster Gunnison, Jr. lamented, “It is common knowledge that the Commie-pink-anarchist fringe tries to take over any minority cause it can latch on to, and for us it had to come sooner or later.”38
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/16.jpg\")
Conservative homophile activist Foster Gunnison, Jr. condemned the “Commie-pink-anarchist fringe.”
\nWhile less reactionary, Don Jackson of the Los Angeles Advocate scolded the rebels and urged activists to rein them in:
\n\n\n\n\nHomosexuals simply cannot afford rioting and violence. Such incidents solidify straight opinion against them and will surely bring a reaction… It is essential that rational leaders appear who will redirect the anger into more peaceful and successful methods. Otherwise, history and sociology indicate, gay riots on a vast scale with needless loss of life and property damage may occur. This is not the road to equality. Such disturbances will increase the irrational hatred the straights feel toward homosexuals. Every educated reasonable member of the gay community must aid in redirecting the anger and frustrations of the more violent and emotional members.39
\n
In historical hindsight, Jackson could not possibly have been more wrong. In fact, the rioting and violence at Stonewall catalyzed an international militant movement that helped transform the lives of millions of queer and trans people, and remains better known and more widely praised than any other act of protest or resistance in United States LGBTQ history. Yet today, self-proclaimed leaders across a wide range of communities persist in saying the exact same thing.
\n\nOthers, however, broke free from the constraints of homophile timidity and enthusiastically embraced the riots. Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, a prominent gay activist couple who had participated in Mattachine organizing since the mid-1960s, penned a column in Screw that offered a full-throated endorsement of militant gay resistance to police:
\n\n\n\n\nThe revolution is taking to the streets, and it is high time that it did… We were thrilled by the violent uprising in Sheridan Square in which homosexuals put police on notice that they’d no longer accept abuse. For many decades gay people have been afraid to stand up for themselves and have allowed policemen to run over one of their most basic civil rights: the right to assemble in public. Today, however, a new generation is angered by raids and harassment of gay bars, and last week’s riots in Greenwich Village have set standards for the rest of the nation’s homosexuals to follow.40
\n
Over the years that followed, Nichols and Clarke continued to radicalize, while remaining critical of authoritarian leftists who they described as “just as unbalanced on the gay issue as is the far right. Gays get it from both ends, so to speak.”41 By the 1990s, Nichols would be authoring a column titled “The Homosexual Anarchist.” Through the crucible of Stonewall and gay liberation, some homophile activists developed a far more radical critique of the existing world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/28.jpg\")
Jack Nichols: from polite homophile… to “homosexual anarchist.”
\nThe energy unleashed by the Stonewall Uprising produced a wave of organizing that quickly rendered the existing gay activist infrastructure irrelevant. Under pressure from fired-up radicals, Dick Leitsch agreed to form a Mattachine Action Committee, and flyers circulated for a meeting on July 9, one week after the last night of rioting. Around a hundred people, mostly younger gay and lesbian radicals, turned up and made plans to organize a march against police harassment.
\n\nAt the next meeting, a week later, the young radicals made a definitive break with the old guard. When Leitsch attempted to lecture the angry crowd about the importance of pursuing progress slowly via accommodation with the straight establishment, Jim Fouratt denounced him:
\n\n\n\n\n“We have got to radicalize, man! Be proud of what you are, man! And if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that’s the only language that the pigs understand! All the oppressed have got to unite! The system keeps us all weak by keeping us separate.”42
\n
His speech received wild applause. Leitsch’s attempts to regain control of the meeting failed. The radicals agreed to form a new organization that would sustain the energy of the Stonewall Rebellion. This became the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
\n\nOver the years since, the GLF has often been described as “anarchic” or “anarchistic,” but little attention has been paid to the role that anarchists and anarchist ideas in its founding. The founders who assembled in late July 1969 at Alternate U were radicals from across the left-wing spectrum. As Karla Jay recalled, the crowd of around forty at the first meeting included “drag queens, bar dykes, street people, feminists, radical students, leftists, socialists, Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, libertarians, hippies, and former Yippies.”43 As gay liberation organizing blossomed across the city over the following years, regardless of whether its participants used the language of anarchism to describe themselves, the movement relied on anarchist infrastructures, engaged with anarchist concepts and tactics, and adopted a distinctly anti-authoritarian ethos.
\n\nThe location of the GLF meetings is revealing. Alternate U was a radical educational project that hosted a wide range of workshops and teach-ins, classes on a variety of radical topics, social and cultural events, and activist meetings. Located on the second floor of a warehouse at West 14th Street and 6th Avenue, it sat on the northern edge of the West Village, a short walk from Stonewall and the core of the gayborhood where the riots had occurred.
\n\nFounded in 1965 as the Free University of New York, as the Interference Archive explains, it had been launched as “a free university, with no exams or degrees, where they could learn about social struggles and everyday life,” whose participants “strove for a revolutionary experience in education.” By 1969, it had changed its name to Alternate U and was attracting participants from a wide range of movements, from radical psychologists to media collectives to women’s theater groups. The project was coordinated by a collective of radicals that included anarchists and Marxists; the space hosted the Anarchos Group and featured talks by Murray Bookchin and other anarchist thinkers.
\n\nStonewall rioter John O’Brien—a Marxist who had been expelled from the Socialist Worker’s Party’s Young Socialist Alliance for his homosexuality—served on the project’s board; this provided the initial connection that helped enable the GLF meetings to find a home there. After the GLF’s founding meetings in the space in July 1969, Alternate U continued to host many of the group’s activities, including their gay dances, the most popular and widely attended GLF project. The weekly gatherings offered the first public alternative to Mafia-controlled bars at which same-sex couples and trans/gender-nonconforming people could dance freely; this, in turn, provided a critical source of revenue for the fledgling group. Holding meetings and dances at Alternate U brought a wide cross-section of activists and the gay population at large into contact with anarchist and radical ideas.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/33.jpg\")
GLF members prepare for a gay dance at Alternate U, 1970. A poster from the May 1968 uprising on the wall behind them reads “Borders = Repression.” A message for all movements based around identity.
\nPolitical differences emerged within the GLF from the beginning, but a loose anti-authoritarian consensus determined the organization’s structure and culture. A political scientist who interviewed many of the group’s members and offered the closest early reading of the group’s politics characterized the GLF as dominated by “radicals” who “championed anarchy.” These participants coexisted with doctrinaire “revolutionaries” who “looked forward to socialism,” with whom the radicals sometimes collaborated and sometimes found themselves at odds.44
\n\nThese values were reflected in the group’s decision-making practices. According to an observer of the early meetings, “When a decision had to be made, voting was unpopular. After sufficient discussion, a “consensus” was arrived at—the membership, undivided, coming to an agreement. Time-consuming often, but solidarity-building.”45 There were no officers and no formal leaders, though informal hierarchies did solidify around those who were popular, perceived to have revolutionary cred, or sometimes, as critics noted, simply spoke loudly. While the exhilaration of being together exploring radical ideas carried the participants through the early meetings, as more political differences surfaced, clarifying the group’s structure and priorities became urgent.
\n\nMost of the participants in the GLF were gay men, but a few lesbians played prominent roles. One of them was Lois Hart. In her thirties, Hart was older than most members; she had left her life as a nun to explore lesbian identity, radical politics, and alternative spirituality. In the months before Stonewall, she had participated in courses on feminism and anarchism at Alternate U, where Murray Bookchin had spoken about anarchist organizing and affinity groups.46
\n\nIn the fall of 1969, Hart proposed that the GLF adopt a decentralized structure in which the GLF weekly meetings would serve as spaces for autonomous groups to report on their activities and coordinate efforts, while individual cells retained the freedom to work on projects independently.47 The group agreed to adopt this anti-authoritarian structure; separate clusters formed to organize the weekly dances, publish the newspaper Come Out!, study gay oppression through a Marxist lens, and pursue other goals.
\n\nJohn Lauritsen, who brought a dogmatically Marxist approach to gay organizing, dismissed the cellular structure as “some Murray Bookchin inspired notion.”48 Indeed, Bookchin had been a direct influence on Hart through Alternate U. As a gadfly critical of the authoritarian turn of SDS and the New Left, Bookchin represented an anarchist alternative that appealed to many in the feminist and gay liberation movements who were critical of traditional organizing models.49
\n\nOver the following year, fifteen cells developed under the auspices of the GLF. Some eventually broke away to become fully autonomous groups, including Third World Gay Revolution, Gay Youth, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.50 Some of these groups outlived the GLF itself, which ceased to function by early 1972. While the GLF proved short-lived, its influence rippled out across time and space, as the model of horizontal autonomous organizing based in cells and affinity groups generated new collectives and spread around the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/32.jpg\")
Murray Bookchin, who helped translate the concept of affinity group organizing from anarchists in the Spanish Revolution to the GLF’s cell structure.
\nGLF participants reflected critically on the model as it unfolded, arriving at different conclusions about its efficacy. In January 1970, Hart explained in the GLF newspaper Come Out! that “the many mentalities, dispositions, and persuasions of GLF activists and dissenters are finding expression in small groups structured after the needs, goals and philosophies of the participants.” The cell structure, she explained, reflected a commitment to direct action and active participation that necessarily required breaking with the conditioning into passivity that hampered radical movements: “In the knowledge that growth and change occur within individuals and that individuals develop only through active involvement in projects and goals of their own choosing, GLFers chose the rocky road of fluid cellular organization rather than perpetuate older, oppressive structures of Follow the Leader and passive participation by voting.”51
\n\nAs the group grew, attracting a wider range of participants beyond its initial radical core, some who were accustomed to more centralized forms of organizing became frustrated when they could not dictate the activities of the entire group according to their own ideological or tactical preferences. This became particularly pronounced with the arrival of more “well-meaning establishment types who could not conceive of something democratic that did not involve everyone being controlled by the consensus of a voting membership.” As Hart explained, “For them GLF was the Sunday Night Meeting, not groups of activists for homosexual liberation. They did not realize that we are a movement, not a static organization.”52
\n\nThose of us who participated in the Occupy movement may smile with rueful recognition here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/31.jpg\")
Lois Hart (second from right) prepares to participate in a “Lavender Menace” action at the Second Congress to Unite Women with her fellow Radicalesbians, May Day 1970.
\nNot all participants agreed that the flexibility and autonomy of the cell structure served to build the movement for gay liberation—indeed, not even all of the anarchist participants did. One such critic, Arthur Evans, became famous in the late 1970s for his book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, which called for a gay anarchist revolution in which decentralized affinity groups would use witchcraft and direct action against patriarchy and the military industrial state. In 1970, however, his frustration with the group’s chaotic structure and dispersed focus led him to join with others seceding from the GLF to form the Gay Activists Alliance, a resolutely single-issue organization with a more traditional structure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/29.jpg\")
Arthur Evans lets the straight world know exactly what he thinks.
\nRalph Hall, an artist who was to author a series of gay anarchist zines in the following years including Faggots and Faggotry and Revolutionary Limpwristed Faggot, wrote in late 1969 that the GLF’s “structureless structure” granted too much power and influence to unscrupulous authoritarians. Criticizing the members of the 28th of June cell, which took over the publishing of Come Out!, as “a flighty crop of revolutionary dogmatists,” he took them to task for glorifying authoritarian communist regimes (“What does the sexual revolution in Cuba have to do with homosexual oppression in Amerika?”) and for taking advantage of the loose consensus process to “shrewdly manipulate and brainwash the membership.”
\n\n“I thought,” Hall lamented, “we had no leaders or followers, but all participants.”53
\n\nDespite the challenges of the cell structure and participants’ internal critiques, the model spread to other cities. Dozens of GLF chapters appeared across the country over the following months; while not all of them modeled their internal structure on the New York group, many did. As NYC GLF participant Bill Weaver recalled, “There was a real struggle to establish cells. New York went through this ‘cellular’ struggle, and now, when Washington GLF or Walla Walla GLF has it, they assume at the very beginning that they’re going to have cells.”54
\n\nThe Washington, DC GLF’s adoption of the cell structure proved influential far beyond its members—indeed, beyond the entire gay liberation movement—because of the role its participants played in what was to be the largest mass mobilization in US history up to that time, the 1971 May Day protests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/17.jpg\")
A Gay Liberation Front meeting at Alternate U in 1970.
\nThe centrality of gay organizing within the 1971 May Day anti-war mobilization did not come out of nowhere. From its inception, the nascent gay liberation movement had overlapped with the movement to end the US war in Vietnam. The pre-Stonewall homophile movement had largely remained silent on the war, while advocating for an end to the US military’s ban on homosexual service members. By contrast, gay liberationists donned T-shirts reading “Suck Cock to Beat the Draft,” joined anti-war marches, and, according to an account from the notorious queer performance troupe The Cockettes, hung out outside of military induction centers offering blowjobs to draftees in order to help them secure deferrals.
\n\nAfter Stonewall, members of the newly formed GLF took an active role in the anti-war movement. The first non-gay-organized action that members participated in with the GLF banner was an anti-war, anti-draft protest late in the summer of 1969 at Central Park. Television cameras circulated images of the group’s members and materials nationwide.55
\n\n“Through a lot of 1970,” recalled Perry Brass, a member of the GLF cell that produced the newspaper Come Out!, “I must have gone to at least six different antiwar marches where we [gay people] were all joining hands and marching up Fifth Avenue or marching in the park.”56 In the months following Stonewall, gay liberationists in California circulated a flyer riffing off of a famous quote from Muhammad Ali, titled, “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.” The flyer advertised a performance by the Berkeley-based Gay Liberation Theatre, putting both the US military and the homophobic anti-war movement on notice:
\n\n\n\n\nSo we’re not going to fight in an army that discriminates against us, fucks us over, sends us to the front lines or jails us and throws us out dishonorably when we are ourselves and love our brothers. Nor are we going to fight for a country that will not hire us and fires us when we are ourselves and loving our brothers, that puts us out of and puts us down in every phase of its every institution. Nor are we going to fight in a revolution that puts us down.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/34.jpg\")
“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.”
\nAs the gay liberation movement blossomed in 1970, activists in the anti-war movement were beginning to question their model of holding mass marches in Washington, which attracted large numbers of participants and ample media attention but appeared to have little impact on the war machine. In fall of 1970, a range of anti-war groups assembled under the umbrella of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice began coordinating plans for actions in the nation’s capital the following spring. While members of the PCPJ timed a lobbying week for the end of April to plead with politicians to end the war, more radical participants assembled in an informal coalition dubbed the May Day Tribe, including a range of Yippies, anarchists, and other radical protesters determined to shut the city down. The May Day Tribe adopted the slogan, “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”
\n\nAs the mobilization approached, a small core of DC-based activists who staffed the office and worked on coordinating logistics for the demonstration began calling themselves the Gay Mayday Tribe. Participant John Scagliotti recalled, “There were about five of us who were gay, and we sort of ran the office. We immediately became very close and out of that was Gay Mayday.”
\n\nThe group functioned partly as a political collective, partly as an underground cell undertaking a range of illegal activity, and partly as a polycule—with participants organizing, partying, and sleeping with each other. At a time of rampant FBI infiltration of radical groups, the Gay Mayday crew remained impervious to snitches because of its emphasis on queer sexual as well as political affinity. As Scagliotti explained, “They couldn’t infiltrate it, because we were all sleeping with each other. And we were doing a tremendous amount of illegal things, that they could have gotten us all for.”
\n\nBe gay, do crime indeed!
\n\nLike the Stonewall rioter who analyzed the roots of homophobia in the threat that gay men posed to a social structure based in rigid masculinity and the nuclear family, the DC organizers framed gay opposition to the war not in a paradigm of identity politics, but in a broader analysis of how patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism form a single interlocking system. As L.A. Kaufman explains:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Gay Mayday Tribe viewed its participation in the 1971 antiwar action as more than just a matter of mobilizing gays as a constituency or contingent, along the lines of “schoolteachers against the war” or “physicians for peace.” Instead, it sought to draw connections between militarism and social constructions of gender. One Gay Mayday leaflet called the Vietnam War “a straight man’s game,” created by “men who need to gain their masculine identity through the killing of women, children, and their own brothers.” A call to participation elaborated, “We know that the men running the country are very deeply sexist—they relate to each other and to situations in an uptight straight male way. These men make decisions in order to satisfy their male egos and their needs for competition with other men.” The Gay Mayday Tribe offered up an expansive radical vision, in which gay liberation could not only transform laws or lifestyles, but also undermine the very foundations of war. For, they promised, “an army of lovers would not fight.”
\n
The loose collective included members of the Washington GLF, which had adopted the New York group’s horizontal cellular structure. Kaufman attributes the GLF’s structure to the influence of the women’s liberation movement: “The radical feminist influence was also felt in the GLF’s ‘structureless’ organizational form, comprised of decentralized collectives (called, in this case, ‘cells’) with no formal decision-making process, membership requirements, or bylaws.” While Lois Hart, whose proposal had played a significant role in shaping the GLF’s structure, was certainly a feminist and active in the women’s movement, Hart also named anarchist ideas, in particular the notion of affinity groups emerging from the Spanish anarchist movement conveyed via Murray Bookchin, as central in shaping her approach to revolutionary organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/30.jpg\")
Members of the Washington, DC Gay Liberation Front, 1971.
\nThe GLF’s approach represented one of the two major influences on the affinity group structure adopted in May 1971. The other had reached the New Left via the Motherfuckers. Kauffman connects the dots:
\n\n\n\n\nMorea and the Motherfuckers soon introduced the idea of affinity groups as teams for street combat to Weatherman, the faction of SDS that aspired to be a revolutionary fighting force and to “bring the war home” to the United States. It was during the October 1969 “Days of Rage,” perhaps Weatherman’s most notorious action, that affinity groups made their true American debut.
\n
The Days of Rage had turned out disastrously, owing in part to the centralization and authoritarianism of the Weatherman leadership. Yet activists who rejected vanguardist militarism but remained intrigued by the possibilities of decentralized and mobile formations at mass demonstrations revisited the approach in the 1971 organizing. As Kauffman summarizes:
\n\n\n\n\nBy the time the Mayday Tribe put out its call to protest, the concept of affinity groups had begun to blend with the other small-group forms that were rapidly growing in countercultural popularity: collectives, communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups. “Affinity groups at Mayday,” recalls John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, “were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people’s linkages to one another.”
\n
In an effort to prevent the demonstrations from completely paralyzing Washington, DC, police and National Guard troops mass-arrested 12,000 people across three days of disorder—the largest mass arrest in US history. In addition to partially shutting down the city and damaging the Nixon administration’s standing, the format of decentralized affinity groups acting autonomously in coordination with each other proved enormously influential. Afterwards, it remained the preferred means of organizing mass direct action from the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s to the queer-led civil disobedience of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the 1980s to the global justice movement that exploded onto the world stage with the protests that shut down the Seattle summit of the World Trade Organization in 1999.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/18.jpg\")
An affinity group blocks traffic near the Washington Monument, the week of May Day 1971.
\nThe fact that anarchist ideas and models rapidly proliferated in the movements that emerged from the Stonewall uprising lends weight to the hypothesis that anarchists played a meaningful role in the uprising itself.
\n\nThe GLF and the Motherfuckers both drew on the affinity group organizing model that they had absorbed from the Spanish exiles and Murray Bookchin, but each employed it in their own way. Setting out to create a new way of life on the chaotic Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers devised insurrectionary approaches to social conflict while seeking to prefigure a revolutionary society by exploring new conceptions of the family. Gay liberationists, operating in a criminalized sexual subculture involving people linked by desire rather than shared politics, also developed alternative modes of kinship, networks of mutual aid, and flexible organizational formats that facilitated horizontal collaboration across lines of difference.
\n\nOver the course of a week in the hot summer of 1969, they collided with each other as they fought the police side by side. While the Motherfuckers dissolved shortly thereafter, gay liberation exploded and spread around the country. At the 1971 May Day protests, the two threads that converged at the Stonewall Uprising—gay liberation and anarchist direct action—came back together to transmit the affinity group model to posterity, setting the template for affinity group-based mass mobilizations for decades to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/25.jpg\")
A march in 1970. Marsha Johnson is holding the trans sign at the left.
\nEvery June, queers around the world celebrate Pride—the co-opted consumerist shell that remains of the celebrations in memory of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.
\n\nThe first “Pride” was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, launched in 1970 by radical gay and lesbian activists intent on breaking with the moderate homophile movement of the 1960s. Thousands of marchers convened in Greenwich Village and marched north through the city, chanting “Gay power! Gay power!”—”Gay, gay, all the way!”—”Out of the closets, into the streets!” The march was non-commercial, open to everyone, trans-inclusive, and radical, concluding in a massive “Gay-in” in Central Park. As lesbian historian Lillian Faderman summed up the day, “Never in history had so many gay and lesbian people come together in one place and for a common endeavor.”’
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/19.jpg\")
Christopher Street Liberation Day March, 1970—the first “Pride.” Yes, there was a black flag there!
\nToday, looking out over the landscape of contemporary Pride, we could say that rarely have so many LGBTQ people come together in one place while managing to accomplish so little. Depending on where you live, you may be charged admission for the privilege of wandering around and spending more money in a sea of commercial vendors, corporate sponsors, and tables of polite community groups. Despite the waves of resistance to racism and police violence in the late 2010s and early 2020s, you’re likely to see cops marching in the parade. In some states, organizers’ pre-emptive compliance with drag bans has gutted even the playful apolitical entertainment that we used to have.
\n\nOf course, the anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans backlash of the past decade has caused many corporations that opportunistically sought out gay consumers via Pride sponsorships to dial back their efforts. Should we be nostalgic for the days when we had the luxury of complaining about being a target market rather than a target for bigotry, scapegoating, and violence?
\n\nThe history we have explored here offers a different perspective on the legacy of Stonewall, pointing to a long-running cross-pollination between anarchist organizing and queer culture and sexuality. Consulting this, we see that queer anarchism is not just an intersection of discrete identities, but a transformative force that has played a central role in half a century of direct action and revolutionary ferment. Looking at Stonewall through this lens, we see how the queer riots of 1969 offer lessons that are directly applicable to today’s movements for liberation.
\n\nThis account of the Stonewall Uprising leaves no room for consumerism, cops, or hierarchical leaders. According to this version of the story, we celebrate the rebels of June and July 1969
\n\n\n\n\nWhen we help to push riots beyond a single night of disturbances into an ongoing rebellion against the ruling order;
\n\nWhen we resist the efforts of community representatives to defuse our anger and send us home;
\n\nWhen we mingle in the streets against the instructions of riot cops, politicians, and official activists, communicating and finding common cause;
\n\nWhen we evaluate our strategies and tactics to find ways to revolt more effectively and joyously;
\n\nWhen we organize horizontally, rejecting representation and leaders, making space to collaborate while insisting on autonomy;
\n\nWhen we form affinity groups to undertake our creative and destructive projects;
\n\nWhen we prefigure the horizontal worlds we desire beyond the workplace, the party, and the nuclear family in the ways we organize, riot, party, and fuck.
\n
When we do these things, we are truly honoring the legacy of Stonewall.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/20.jpg\")
The spirit of Stonewall: gays smash City Hall during the White Night Riots in 1979.
\nFor oral histories with Stonewall participants and GLF members, see The Gay Liberation Front Foundation and the LGBTQ History Project. Some elders are still living—reach out and talk to them!
\n\nYou can find digital uploads of the GLF’s newspaper Come Out here.
\n\nAdam Nagourney Dudley Cleninden, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America—This is largely anti-radical and obnoxiously transphobic, but includes some useful material.
\n\nHugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: The Queer History of a Forgotten Prison—A queer abolitionist history of the jail a few blocks from the Stonewall.
\n\nFor more about the Motherfuckers, see:
\n\nFor more about the Crazies, see Leslie James Pickering’s Mad Bomber Melville.
\n\nOur analysis of the 1971 May Day actions draws considerably from the brilliant research of L.A. Kauffman in the article “Ending a war, inventing a movement: Mayday 1971”.
\n\nFor a narrative account of May Day 1971, see Lawrence Roberts, Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest. You can also consult the 1971 May Day protests tactical manual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/22.jpg\")
Gay Liberation Front Marches on Times Square, New York City, 1969.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/23.jpg\")
Marsha P. Johnson Hands Out Flyers in Support of Gay Students at New York University, 1970.
\nAs Jim Fouratt, a young gay radical who participated in the riots, later pointed out, the question itself betrays a lack of awareness about the material conditions of the bar and its surroundings: “And who threw the first brick? Where would you find a brick on Christopher Street, unless you brought it in your purse, you know?” Danny Garvin, another participant in the riots, recalled finding a construction site on Seventh Avenue South where retreating rioters found a stack of bricks; in any case, brick throwing was not among the first acts that catalyzed the rebellion. See Carter, Stonewall, 155. ↩
\nThis summary derives from a range of accounts, including Carter, Stonewall, Duberman, Stonewall, and several primary sources. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 181. ↩
\n“Queen Power: Fags against Pigs in Stonewall Bust,” Rat, 9 July 1969, 6; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nHomophile Youth Movement, “Get the Mafia and the Cops Out of Gay Bars,” ca. 29 June 1969, Craig Rodwell Papers, Box 5, New York Public Library; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nAccording to Jefferson Fuck Poland of the Sexual Freedom League, NYC police claimed that when they raid bars, “they are not picking on homosexuals,” but focused on bar employees and on trans/gender-nonconforming patrons: “generally men dressed as men, even if wearing extensive makeup, are always released; men dressed as women are sometimes arrested; and ‘men’ fully dressed as women, but who upon inspection by a policewoman prove to have undergone the sex-change operation, are always let go.” Poland called for direct action against cross-dressing laws through a “Switch In,” in which “a large group of males and females, of all sexual orientations, should appear in clothing unmistakably of the opposite sex. Daring the cops to bust.” Jefferson Fuck Poland, “Lady Inspectors,” Berkeley Barb, 16 July 1969, 17; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nJohn Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\n“Queen Power: Fags against Pigs in Stonewall Bust,” Rat, 9 July 1969, 6; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nInterview with Hugh Ryan, 2019. ↩
\nIn discussion with the authors in June 2026, Osha Neumann, one of the few living New York Motherfuckers, wasn’t sure: “I have no recollection of any MF being involved with Stonewall. That doesn’t mean some folks didn’t go there, but I somehow doubt it. By June 1969, I believe the core of the MFs were already heading to New Mexico.” But digging a bit deeper, it’s clear that the question is still open. In 2006, Motherfucker Ben Morea explained that the Motherfuckers were not a membership organization, but a network of affinity groups that acted independently and a label that any of them could employ: “We never called ourselves Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, although we signed our posters and leaflets UAW/MF, which anyone in the group could produce, with that name… It was essentially a loose confederation of affinity groups.” In fact, a wide range of people, from Mark Rudd and Spain Rodriguez to the Jefferson Airplane, dallied with both the organization and its tag line; there appear to have been autonomous chapters of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker as far away as Austin, Texas. Some people outside Motherfucker circles likely used the term to describe a wider range of people than Osha Neumann did. All of this is squarely within the anarchist tradition of informal organization. Regardless of whether members of the affinity groups specifically associated with Morea or Neumann directly took part in the Stonewall Uprising, it is certain that anarchists took part, and probable that some of them overlapped with the crews that identified—or were identified—as Motherfuckers. ↩
\nJay Levin, “The Gay Anger behind the Riots,” New York Post, 8 July 1969, 36; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nD. L. [Dick Leitsch], “Gay Riots in the Village,” Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter, Aug. 1969, 1–2, 4; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nBob Kohler, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Come Out! 1, No. 2, (January 10, 1970). ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 202. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 183. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 302, note 21. ↩
\nHugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: The Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 196. ↩
\nLeo E. Laurence, “Gays Hit NY Cops,” Berkeley Barb, 4 July 1969, 5; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 196. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 197. ↩
\nTom Burke, “The New Homosexuality,” Esquire, December 1969, pp. 178, 304–18. ↩
\nLucian Truscott IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” Village Voice, 3 July 1969, 18; John Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History ↩
\nD. L. [Dick Leitsch], “Gay Riots in the Village,” Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter, Aug. 1969, 1–2, 4; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\n“Cop Injured 5 Seized in Village,” New York Post, July 3, 1969. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 205. ↩
\nRonnie Di Brienza, “Stonewall Incident,” East Village Other, 9 July 1969, 2; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 201-205. ↩
\nKiyoshi Kuromiya quoted in Marc Stein, City of Brotherly and Sisterly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–72, 334. ↩
\nJohn Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nDi Brienza, “Stonewall Incident.” ↩
\n“Gay Power Explodes,” The Insider: Newsletter of the Mattachine Society of Washington, Aug. 1969, 1–3; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 95. ↩
\nDon Jackson, “Reflections on the N.Y. Riots” The Los Angeles Advocate, Oct. 1969, 11, 33; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLige [Elijah Hadyn Clarke] and Jack [John Richard Nichols], “Pampered Perverts,” Screw, 25 July 1969, 16. ↩
\nClarke and Nichols, I Have More Fun With You Than Anyone, 147. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 216. ↩
\nKarla Jay, The Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation, 77. ↩
\nToby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, 90. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 101. ↩
\nMarotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, 87. ↩
\nDudley Cleninden and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, 43. ↩
\nTerence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York’s Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971,” 116. ↩
\nLate in life, immediately before renouncing anarchism, Murray Bookchin published a screed excoriating what he described as “lifestyle anarchism,” even sneering, in passing, at “gay faery circles.” Ironically, the queer liberation movement did more than any institution to spread what is useful in Bookchin’s contributions to anarchist practice. ↩
\nDavid Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution, 127. ↩
\nLois Hart, “GLF News,” Come Out 1, no. 2 (January 10, 1970), 16. ↩
\nHart, “GLF News.” ↩
\nRalph Hall, “Gay Liberation News,” Gay Power 1, no. 9 (1969), 8. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 101. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 52. ↩
\nL.A. Kaufmann, “Ending a War, Inventing a Movement: May Day 1971.” ↩
\nFor June 11, the day of International Solidarity with Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we want to offer a glimpse of the repression that the anarchist movement is facing in Greece and the ways that people are resisting it. For that purpose, we present interviews with members of two groups, the Solidarity Assembly for Imprisoned Fugitives and Persecuted Combatants and the Squatted Community of Koukaki.
\n\nThe neoliberal immiseration of Greece is taking its toll. The descendants of those who collaborated with the Nazis are in power once again here.
\n\nThey are out of touch with the lives that most of us lead in these precarious lands. They imitate the fascist narratives that are at work in the United States, pushing for the same “quality of life policing” and “law and order” doctrines while enjoying corruption and excess at our expense.
\n\nThis is taking place all across the world, and everywhere, relentless judicial repression plays an integral part.
\n\nBecause of this, for the sake of our integrity, it is critical that we engage in solidarity, learning from each other’s struggles and preserving our revolutionary communities and bonds. These are victories in and of themselves that we can grasp, even if they don’t always leave us smiling.
\n\nSolidarity is not just a means of self-preservation, but a thread connecting everyone across the world who seeks liberation rather than settling for a society dictated by domination, exploitation, and an unrelenting death cult.
\n\nSolidarity is our weapon!
\nAll we have is us!
—Anarchists
\n\nIntroduce the project you’re involved with.
\n\nWe are members of the “Solidarity Assembly for Imprisoned Fugitives and Persecuted Combatants.” Our group is an anarchist assembly, in the sense that it functions according to the principles of self-organization and without hierarchy. We are also open and have met publicly every week for the past seven years.
\n\nOur aim is to provide political support to comrades who find themselves in the hands of the state and to elevate the various battles that take place in the courts and prisons against false indictments, abuses from the guards, or for general political solidarity.
\n\nWe strive to make the demands of those inside the prisons known and to show the inherent connections they have with struggles that take place in other spheres of society. We also try to put a stop to the repressive mechanisms that the state uses against the anarchist movement. We do this by distributing political texts, fliers, and posters, but also by planning direct actions and demonstrations.
\n\nIn 2024, Kyriakos Ximitiris passed away due to a tragic accident in Athens. This also resulted in the arrests of others, who now have been taken to trial. The trial has become known in local media and by many around the world as the “Ampelokipoi case,” with some of the defendants recently being acquitted and released and others convicted and sentenced to many years in prison. Could you explore what this case was about, what happened with the loss of Kyriakos, and the arrests, prosecution, and recent verdicts that followed?
\n\nThe Solidarity Assembly was one of the main support structures that was involved in the “Ampelokipoi case,” with Kyriakos being a member of the assembly up to the point of his death and Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta continuing to be members to this day from inside prison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/2.jpg\")
\nConsequently, it was very important for us to preserve the memory of Kyriakos Ximitiris, show solidarity to all the prosecuted comrades, and build a general political wall of solidarity for struggle, armed struggle, and the choices some of our comrades made and continue to make.
\n\nKyriakos was a dear comrade and friend. He was active in many parts of the movement. He actively demonstrated revolutionary solidarity with political prisoners, engaged in anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and was active in the anti-gentrification movement in Exarchia as well as the anti-fascist movement in general.
\n\nHe had also chosen to participate in armed revolutionary struggle. It was this choice that led to his tragic death at an apartment in Ampelokipoi (a neighborhood in Athens), where an explosion took place under unknown circumstances. This explosion seriously injured his comrade in the movement and in life, Marianna Manoura, and prompted the anti-terrorist unit to devise a non-existent terrorist group, arresting Marianna Manoura, their friend and comrade Dimitra Zarafeta, and three other comrades: Nikos Romanos, Dimitris, and A.K.
\n\nThe loss of Kyriakos and the subsequent hospitalization and imprisonment of Marianna Manoura were grave incidents for the anarchist movement in Greece and abroad. The deeply divided anarchist movement of Athens came together, after many years, to grieve our fallen comrade Kyriakos, and to support Marianna Manoura, Dimitra Zarafeta, and the other three arrested in the case.
\n\nThe movement tried to deal both with the difficult issue of the political defense of armed revolutionary struggle and with critically intensifying state repression. There is a discussion to be had about what went right and wrong in all this, but as the daily mass solidarity gatherings at the courts showed, Kyriakos’ death and the Ampelokipoi case in general remain issues that deeply concern us all.
\n\nFrom the beginning, Marianna Manoura assumed responsibility for helping Kyriakos find a place to process explosive materials that would be used for the revolutionary cause. She made clear there was no terrorist organization and that the other four detained people had nothing to do with the case. Dimitra Zarafeta declared that the accusations by the state against her were false and that she was being persecuted politically, as an anarchist, as a comrade of Kyriakos and Marianna Manoura, and as a person who ideologically supports the choices and actions of Kyriakos. Dimitris, Nikos Romanos, and A.K. all declared their innocence and repudiated any connection with the case.
\n\nThe actual information that the state presented as evidence was either false or completely insufficient even by their own standards. There was none supporting the existence of a terrorist organization. The state presented some normal exchanges of apartment keys and phones between friends and partners relating to Dimitra Zarafeta and Dimitris, and claimed that partial fingerprints of Nikos and A.K. were discovered, among many others, on a plastic bag containing a gun.
\n\nNevertheless, all the accused were detained for 17 months and in the end, Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta were convicted, resulting in a 19-year prison sentence for Marianna Manoura and 8 years for Dimitra Zarafeta. The large sentences, especially for Marianna Manoura, were chiefly due to the application of anti-terrorist legislation. Dimitris, Nikos Romanos, and A.K. were declared innocent and released.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/3.jpg\")
\nIs there an appeal? Will the sentences be served in full?
\n\nMarianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta were recently transferred to the women’s prison of Thiva, since Korydallos prison, where they were held during their pre-trial detention, is only for those awaiting trial. This is an expected but bad development, as they are now much further away from the movement, their families, and their friends.
\n\nAn appeal has already been made, but the second-degree court is not expected to take place any sooner than one to two years from now. Depending on how the secondary court goes, we will then be able to make a better guess as to how much actual time our comrades will have to serve in prison. In general, it is standard that three- to four-fifths of the actual sentence will be served, but there are many legal factors that could affect both the actual sentence and the percentage of it that they will need to serve in prison.
\n\nThe main factor that makes these computations difficult is that since the final days of the SYRIZA administration in 2019, the penal and correctional codes have been constantly changed, making it confusing to determine how each law will affect each individual case.
\n\nWhy did Greek media report differently on Nikos Romanos than on the other defendants in this trial?
\n\nWe do not know if there was a clear intention or plan from the state in this. The comrade, Nikos Romanos, is an important figure not only for the anarchist movement but for large parts of the Greek left as well. His close friendship with Alexis Grigoropoulos, whose murder by a cop in 2008 inspired the biggest insurrection in recent Greek history, and his hunger strike in 2014 made him a point of reference for the broader “progressive” movement. This creates a social pressure that the state takes into consideration, for better or worse.
\n\nAnother aspect that makes his situation different is, in our view, the fact that he proclaimed his innocence, in contrast with the positions that Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta expressed in court. This enabled some parts of the left, which long ago lost its ability to affirm any political choice and stance that the state deems illegal, to support him. In conjunction with the lack of evidence against him, that forced some of the more left-leaning media to try to be a bit more “objective” or considerate of his case.
\n\nAn action in solidarity with the defendants in the Ampelokipoi case.
\nDoes this case have broader implications regarding the Greek state’s approach to repression?
\n\nWe do not think that there was anything really new in how the Greek state handled this case, considering the recent years of escalated repression. Solely because there was an explosion and there were two anarchists in the place where it happened, the Greek state concluded that there was a “terrorist organization.” A pure fabrication. To invent the other members of the supposed “terrorist organization,” they accused the close comrades of the deceased or known individuals in the movement.
\n\nThis is a common method of the Greek anti-terrorist unit, with the courts following suit and engaging in an almost routine pattern: the first-degree court is usually harsher, convicting at least some of the accused for terrorism with lengthy sentences—at least by Greek standards—and the second-degree courts refine the sentences or acquit. There are, of course, notable exceptions.
\n\nOne thing of particular importance in this case are the very high sentences the court handed down, especially for Marianna. This was a direct result of the court convicting both Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta for all the charges, including the one concerning “the supply of a terrorist organization with arms and explosives.”
\n\nThis is an accusation that even the prosecutor argued could not logically be proven for a member of this supposed “organization.” This will be a very important legal and political battle for the second-degree court, in order to shorten our comrades’ sentences.
\n\nWhat is the 187a law? We have seen the Greek state fabricating narratives and creating groups, as they did with the “comrades” case which was recently dropped after five years in the courts. Is this law enabling the state to engage in more repression without evidence?
\n\nFirst of all, the essence of this law is political. It is the law that the state uses to repress the armed struggle movement as much as possible. Using specialized courts with no jurors, harsher sentences, and an ever-growing list of crimes that can be prosecuted under the 187a law, the state aims to suppress and silence the “internal enemy.”
\n\nWith this goal in mind, the anti-terrorist law is intentionally vague, giving both the anti-terror unit and the courts enough leeway to adjust it for each case and fabricate evidence as needed.
\n\nThe law was a direct byproduct of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States. Infamously, it was first used against an accused member of the N17 (November 17th) revolutionary organization. Since then, the Greek state continuously revises and expands it according to the European anti-terror law standards, just like the 129b law in Germany.
\n\nAlthough it began as a law targeting those who enter armed revolutionary struggle, over the last few years, it is used more and more to target a wide range of practices.
\n\nAre many of these cases postponed, or are charges fabricated, in order to drain the movement of resources and time or use trauma and pre-trial detention as a means of punishment without conviction?
\n\nFirst of all, the postponement of cases has been a reality in Greece for as long as anyone can remember. Many times, the defendants choose this, so that the trial will take place long after the event it concerns, in order to make it more difficult for the state to use the trial in a retaliatory way.
\n\nOther times, trials are postponed because the prosecution does not wish for them to happen. In general, the courts are overburdened with cases, and even though the ruling New Democracy party (ND) has taken measures to force the courts to close up cases faster—at the expense of course of what the state calls “due process” and the “rights” of the accused—this is not always feasible for the judges.
\n\nHowever, it is undoubtedly true that the state uses a number of other tools to make life difficult for the accused, with pre-trial detention, restrictive pre-trial conditions, and court bonds being the most prominent of these. And it is also true that since ND returned to power, these are becoming stricter and are used more often.
\n\nAs for fabricated cases, this strategy has been used to target people of interest to the authorities; Nikos Romanos’ involvement in the Ampelokipoi trial is a case in point. We cannot say whether this indicates a broader plan to deplete the movement’s resources; there is certainly a difference of opinions regarding how organized the state and the police are, as well as how much interest they have in long-term operations against the anarchist movement. But again, what is certain is that the legal consequences of both political activism and low-level crime are becoming harsher by the day—thanks to the new repressive laws that ND passed, which are more aligned with European standards, and the “zero-tolerance for crime” slogan that brought ND to power.
\n\nWe have comrades accused of forming a criminal organization to throw paint at government buildings, people appearing many times a month at the police department because they were arrested at a demonstration, and, at the same time, the prison population is at a breaking point due to petty theft and small debts in broader Greek society.
\n\nAn action in Heraklion in memory of Kyriakos Ximitiris.
\nTwo comrades are on hunger strike to defend Prosfygika, a large squatted complex in the center of Athens. Can you explain these hunger strikes? We have usually seen hunger strikes as a last resort. Are these hunger strikes a sign of critical times and heightened repression?
\n\nWe are not the appropriate assembly to discuss this issue, as there are open assemblies to stop the eviction of the Prosfygika community. For our part, we see the squatting movement as an integral part of the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement; this is why the state has become fixated on destroying it with ever increasing intensity over this past decade.
\n\nAristos and Souzon, the two hunger-strikers acting to resist the demolition and development of the Prosfygika squat complex, know this better than anybody. That’s why they put their lives and their bodies on the line, so it is shown in every perspective that they mean what they say, what they believe, and what the community means to them. As an assembly, we support the struggle to defend Prosfygika and we stand in solidarity with our comrades.
\n\nHave surveillance and repression increased in recent years? Has the state readjusted its priorities? Did the COVID-19 lockdown play a role in this, or is it simply a reflection of the times?
\n\nAs we said, repression has increased swiftly over the last decade, coming to keep pace with the European standards. Cameras, drones, and cops are everywhere, with new divisions of police appearing all the time—for public transportation, courts, universities, immigration, and more. Low-level crime and political activism are also punished harshly, and the scope of the anti-terrorist laws expands with every new piece of legislation. Not to mention the additional repressive capabilities that the AI frenzy may provide in a future just around the corner.
\n\nCOVID-19 is one of the big issues that divided our movement. Despite the different takes on how this whole issue was perceived, which we cannot get into here, it is evident that the lockdown was at the very least, a perfect opportunity for the state to take complete control of public space and to accustom society at large to a broad scale of repression. The safety of the population has supposedly become the number one priority, with the police always somehow being the answer to every question.
\n\nThe discourse that was emerged in the COVID period, enhanced by the far-right and aggressively neo-liberal government of ND, seeks to overcome the historically deep mistrust with which Greek society regards the state. At the same time, the pace of economic and legal scandals has risen to an extreme. The state presents itself as the only thing standing between the population and chaos—demonizing anyone who disagrees or “poses a threat to the society.” In the new era of warfare that we have entered, these same arguments are used more and more to justify military equipment upgrades and the direct involvement of the Greek state in the NATO-Israel mass killings and bombings in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/1.jpg\")
\nHouse raids for small charges seems to be frequently be in the news. Are they occurring more often in Greece? How should we understand this?
\n\nHouse raids have always been a tool in the hands of the state, and for good reason. The pressure and fear that they inflict on the people whose privacy is attacked, along with whatever circumstantial evidence and intelligence they can collect inside our houses, are obviously beneficial for the police. They also exert financial pressure on the movement, since in most house raids, the police steal our electronic devices. Again, it is a matter of discussion how well planned or thought out these raids are, especially when they are not organized by the anti-terrorist unit.
\n\nNevertheless, we should mention some recent developments that, if they are permitted to become normalized, will certainly have a grave impact on the movement. On one hand, we have seven comrades who are suspected of “forming a criminal organization that destroys government property” due to some paint that had been thrown many months ago at a government building in Kipseli, a neighborhood in Athens. Usually, when you are a suspect, the cops call you to the General Police Department of Athens to give a statement, under threat that if you do not comply, they will charge you. This is usually an empty threat. This time, however, the cops decided to enter our comrades’ houses, in some cases by force.
\n\nIn another case, three comrades are accused of attacking a court building with hammers and paint. Again, even though there was evidence collected at the scene which, by the cops’ standards, would be more than sufficient to proceed to trial, the cops decided to raid to their houses.
\n\nWhat do you think is behind the Greek state shifting so many resources towards repression, including pushing to expand the Greek military and tighten conscription laws? Is this a broader tendency in the European Union?
\n\nYou answer the question by pointing out that these are issues in modern societies all over the world. War is everywhere, closer to us (as “Europeans”) than it has been since the Second World War, and it seems that will continue. All Europe is re-arming, as the program informs us.
\n\nIn Greece, this is constantly present due to the construction of tension between Greece and Turkey at the eastern borders and the Aegean Sea. That’s how Greece has ended up being one of the countries that contributes the most to NATO financially. [Greece is one of the top defense spenders in NATO, consistently spending around 3.1% of its GDP on defense, which is among the highest in the alliance.] The goal of the Greek state, and every state, is to construct a society that believes in it and is ready to fight for the nation and the bosses. Maybe this also explains the repression directed at many parts of the movement in Greece.
\n\nIt is obvious that Greece is still in an economic crisis (although the government pretends otherwise), so the large amount of money that is spent on the military and police does not address other social needs that are not as interesting to those in power. For example, we have understaffed hospitals and universities, lacking basic provisions and in many cases closing; we have deteriorating public transport infrastructure that is causing more and more “accidents,” with the worst one in recent times being the Tempi train crash.
\n\nThere is also a serious problem with the cost of housing, as well as with the costs of basic needs and products. Life in Greece is difficult, and it will continue to be so unless we come together to fight back.
\n\nIt has been seven years since New Democracy abolished the university asylum policy that originated after the fall of the Junta in the 1970s. How has this impacted the anarchist movement and broader radical communities in Greece?
\n\nAgain, this is a subject regarding which political opinions vary. On one hand, it is true that now it is easier for police to enter university grounds to hunt for people after clashes at a demonstration or to break up a university occupation established by students or political groups. But there is an argument that this is a more general issue that is only exacerbated by the end of the asylum policy.
\n\nSince the right-wing government of New Democracy came to power in 2019, the state has been carrying out an attack on the movement and its symbols; this is much broader than the anarchist movement. The remnants of the left have proven themselves to be completely incapable of defending the political and symbolic ground they won after the fall of the Junta in 1974. To put things in perspective, anarchists always threw Molotov cocktails from inside the universities and the police always had the legal right to enter the universities when this happened, even with the asylum policy in place.
\n\nOne can argue that the main thing that kept police from entering the universities was not a public misconception about a piece of legislation (that obviously would never cover Molotov cocktails being thrown at government workers), but rather what strong and broad political and ideological support there was for the clashes with the police, which was merely represented and symbolized in the idea of the university asylum. It is that support that the New Democracy government has successfully put into question.
\n\nRegardless of how we analyze this subject, this has caused a big problem for the anarchist and student movements. Apart from taking a powerful political tool—university occupations—from the students’ hands, this enabled police to apply repressive measures inside the universities with ease, taking advantage of the cameras, barriers, and private security already in place. Now, discussions about a special police force for the universities are advancing, even though the first attempt to put them in place failed.
\n\nThis also impacts the anarchist movement, which uses universities for assemblies and various kinds of political events, such as events to raise money for persecuted comrades and various political causes.
\n\nLast year, the Trump administration placed multiple revolutionary groups allegedly in the European Union on its terror watch lists, equating anti-fascists and anarchists with fundamentalist groups such as the Islamic State. Two of these alleged groups allegedly originate in Greece. Has that had any effect in Greece?
\n\nThese moves haven’t made a noticeable impact here in Greece until now. Of course, the United States has always offered the Greek state a paradigm for repression, but for now, only extreme far-right groups make these analogies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/4.jpg\")
\nAre there any other cases that you would like to mention?
\n\nThere are a number of cases affecting many comrades, relating to defending squats, solidarity actions with imprisoned comrades, and clashes with the police in demonstrations or in Exarchia. Here, we select, almost at random, a few that have or might have a serious impact on the comrades involved.
\n\nThe newest big case involves eight arrests that took place on May 11, 2026, with the arrestees being accused of various robberies. The case is still open, so the charges—and perhaps the list of defendants, as well—are not finalized. Six of the eight comrades are in pre-trial detention in various prisons in Greece, while two were let out under restrictive provisions.
\n\nThere is also the case of the comrades Yannis Karatsolis and Sofoklis Toutziarakis. The state accused them of forming a criminal organization with five other people in order to perform robberies. Even though the allegations of criminal organization did not stand up in court, as the other defendants were acquitted, Yannis Karatsolis and Sofoklis Toutziarakis received extreme sentences—21 and 23 years, respectively. The aim is now to pressure the second-degree court to reduce these vindictive sentences when it hears the case in October.
\n\nFinally, there are the arrests from the first big demonstration in response to the mass murder of immigrants by the state, when the Greek coast guard sank a boat transporting more than 500 immigrants close to the town of Pylos. The trial was set to take place in May, but was postponed until spring 2027.
\n\nHow can people outside Greece express international solidarity?
\n\nEvery move, intervention, text, poster, or post could make people here feel the solidarity. The continuation of political struggle in every place is inspiring for everyone. And of course, even though the Greek state is not a big one, there are related targets of economic or political interest in many countries, which is a traditional way of showing international solidarity in this movement.
\n\nFor financial support, the main fund is Tameio, which provides economic support to political prisoners on a monthly basis. Over the years, it has become one of the most important structures of the anarchist movement in Greece. In addition, there are many specialized funds for specific cases, usually to cover the legal costs of arrested comrades. These funds can be found on websites like Athens Indymedia and Firefund.
\n\nOne active Firefund campaign concerns the appeal trial for an act of solidarity during the last hunger strike of our anarchist comrade G. Michailidis.
\n\nFinally, to stay up to date with what is happening in Greece, the counter-information options are sadly not very good. The main website that the anarchist movement uses to publish its positions and actions is Athens Indymedia, which is in Greek and does not formally offer non-Greek translation, though you can use a translation-friendly browser to navigate it. The best way to keep in touch is probably by establishing direct contact with the assemblies and individual comrades that participate in the movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/6.jpg\")
\nIn addition, we spoke with one of the “Koukaki Squatted Community” defendants about their situation.
\n\nAround the same time as the conclusion of the Ampelokipoi case, members of the “Koukaki Squatted Community” were also facing trial; however, it was postponed. Could you explain the case and its implications for the broader anarchist movement?
\n\nOur project consisted of three anarchist squats that acted as a revolutionary community in the Koukaki neighborhood of Athens. The reclaimed spaces helped to foster multiple assemblies, various organizing efforts towards the broader anarchist movement, and local mutual aid projects. Our community also offered housing to members of the squat’s assembly and comrades and also to houseless individuals, refugees, struggling migrants, trans people rejected by their communities, and those who are deemed “excluded” by capitalist society.
\n\nThe houses acted as a sort of intentional community, eliminating the need to work to pay rent, so that we could direct all our efforts to resistance and organizing. This brought together an array of revolutionary individuals who were committed to rejecting property and ensuring that having “free housing” via liberated space would enable us to further the struggle for liberation.
\n\nUnfortunately, one comrade was lost in 2018 while hanging a banner in solidarity with political prisoner Marios Seisidis. His death resulted from the general commitment that defined many of those involved in the Koukaki squats. But while we all still face trial and the endless bureaucracy and opportunism of the state, I want to mention our lost comrade, Dimitris, who was an incredible and passionate comrade, to give recognition that his struggle lives on in our commitments and actions today.
\n\nThe Greek state violently evicted the squats in a coordinated assault. One of the three spaces, “Panaitoliou,” was resquatted twice, and “Matrozou” was resquatted three times.
\n\nThree of my comrades and I have been convicted for the defense of the Panaitoliou squat, but will likely not face jail time. We continue to have court obligations, and the constant stress of not knowing our fate takes its toll. At the same time, as the final defense of the Matrozou squat involved a more intense defense effort, multiple comrades remain on trial facing small charges that could potentially add up to years in prison if the state gets its way.
\n\nThis escalation of repression is the result of our efforts to defend our revolutionary community, while having sought, through our actions, to inspire the broader anarchist movement at a time when the state was attempting to destroy all the squats. The state wants to make an example of us in order to discourage the militant defense of occupied spaces. They are trying to break our will. They are dragging us through the courts with charges of using less extreme resistance than that which brought imprisonment prior to the escalated campaign against the squats that the New Democracy administration started when they came to power in 2019.
\n\nFive comrades on trial for militantly defending Matrozou were convicted of two misdemeanors each and originally sentenced to 77 months in prison. However, the sentence was suspended, and imprisonment will depend on the outcome of the current appeal. The prosecution is demanding that that the defendants serve the full sentence. Facing such a sentence for two misdemeanors is legally unprecedented in Greece. The reality is that the two misdemeanors would typically not bring imprisonment. However, because this is related to defending a squat, they will try to make an example of the comrades to demonstrate that the action itself is not what the prosecution seeks to repress, but rather the motivations and revolutionary desires behind the actions—criminalizing their goals and ideas.
\n\nIn the lead up to the most recent trial, multiple demonstrations took place across Greece to support the Matrozou defendants. However, the appeals trial was postponed until November 9. This is the second postponement of the second trial of the appeal.
\n\nNot only is postponing the trial a way of exhausting the defendants, they also hope that it will make the waves of solidarity leading up to the trial fizzle out. The state seeks to isolate the defendants, outwaiting solidarity and public attention, and then to prosecute to the fullest extent possible. They are waiting for a moment when the movement is quieter, when repression is out of the headlines, when people are overwhelmed responding to other repression.
\n\nThe momentum building up to trial was substantial, and this type of solidarity organizing does not come without effort. They aim to continue to force the defendants and the movement supporting them to constantly act in a defensive anti-repressive approach rather than engage in offensive revolutionary organizing, in order to drain our resources and consume our energy.
\n\nThe two misdemeanors are related to paint that was thrown on police officers, damaging their uniforms and allegedly inflicted bodily harm against police. Yet the police did not even bother to show up to the first trial, in December 2025; that is why it was postponed. All the Matrozou defendants face the same charges, accused by eight officers.
\n\nThis case is of political interest to the New Democracy regime. The original prosecutor is a member of New Democracy and in the law firm of Plevris; she also unsuccessfully ran for parliament as an aspiring ND politician. After the original trial, she wasn’t able to continue in the appeals court due to bureaucratic reasons. Yet she continues to escort the police who show up as witnesses and guide them as to what to say—free of charge, and without a formal legal position. She also defended the cops who faced neglect charges for doing nothing to save the queer activist Zackie Oh from being murdered. She even went on television, on a mainstream national morning talk show, and claimed that the defendants went straight from court to prison, despite the fact that the appeal actually prevented imprisonment. Once again, the point of this case is to make an example.
\n\nHowever, the hearts and revolutionary integrity of the defendants remain intact. While we lost our housing years ago, our community lives on in our revolutionary relations and committed support to one another as we overcome repression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/5.jpg\")
Fire to the prison cells.
\nStarting on May 22, a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey catalyzed daily demonstrations outside the facility, creating the most visible flashpoint in the fight against the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since the fight in Minnesota in early 2026. Here, we offer an appraisal of the tactics that protesters have employed outside Delaney Hall, anonymously provided by participants, followed by two interviews exploring the events in detail.
\n\nPhotographs by Talia Jane.
\n\nThe struggle to free the detainees from Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey has become the most significant sustained inside/outside protest movement at a detention center of Donald Trump’s second term. On May 22, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike to demand their release. Supporters immediately mobilized outside to support them. For days, people rallied yards away from the building in which GEO Group holds approximately 1000 detainees captive under contract with the Department of Homeland Security. On May 27, viral videos showed ICE and private GEO Group security bludgeoning protesters outside Delaney Hall and pushing one man under an 18-wheeler, crushing his leg. Nonetheless, protesters bravely pushed back. Over the following days, more people rushed to the facility.
\n\nFor the first week of demonstrations, state and local law enforcement kept their distance. The weekend of May 29-31 marked a shift in the struggle at Delaney Hall, when New Jersey Democratic politicians Governor Mikie Sherrill and Mayor Ras Baraka deployed State Troopers and Newark Police Department to assist ICE and corral the protest. The collaboration of state law enforcement with ICE and GEO Group led to a much larger police presence outside the facility, coinciding with the largest protests outside Delaney Hall yet. In the following analysis, participants in that struggle recount the experiences on the ground Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, offering tactical reflections on how the protesters moved that weekend, followed by strategic reflections for the movement in general.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/3.jpg\")
Chinga la migra. Fuck Border Patrol.
\nFor the first seven days of the hunger strike, a combination of ICE agents and GEO Group employees policed Delaney Hall. On Friday, May 29, Newark Police Department and New Jersey State Police were deployed to manage the protest. Early in the day, Newark Police Department established vehicle checkpoints at the north and south intersections of Doremus Avenue, limiting car traffic to commercial trucks and ICE vehicles. Protesters could access the front entrances of Delaney by foot. By nightfall, the crowd had grown to about 150 people.
\n\nShortly after 9 pm, New Jersey State Police issued the first dispersal order. Ten minutes later, a line of fifty riot police advanced toward Delaney Hall. Protesters dragged steel barricades into the street; state troopers immediately absorbed these and tossed the barriers behind their advancing line. Riot police deployed tear gas in an effort to push back the crowd. From the main driveway, two dozen ICE agents shot pepper balls into the crowd.
\n\nThe riot line parted to let a half-dozen mounted officers into the crowd; they successfully used the horses to push protesters onto the sidewalk and past the south gate, away from the facility. It became clear that this maneuver was preparatory: shortly thereafter, eight ICE vehicles drove through the crowd, past the riot line and into Delaney Hall.
\n\nState police and protesters then entered a stalemate. Police held the road without deploying munitions; the crowd stared them down, but took no new initiatives. After about twenty minutes, once ICE completed its shift change, police covered their retreat by firing flash-bang grenades, tear-gas canisters, and pepper balls into the crowd.
\n\nWith the riot police dispersed, protesters quickly returned to the front of Delaney Hall. A few individuals dragged steel barricades in front of the active driveway. ICE agents immediately emerged, shot pepper balls into the crowd, and dragged the barricades inside the gate. Further up Doremus, protesters erected more steel barricades and reinforced them with paving stones. Despite these efforts, ICE successfully escorted four vehicles out of the facility.
\n\nThe night concluded with no further intervention from state police. One protester used a paving stone to crush the windshield of a parked ICE SUV. A brief skirmish broke out between protesters and a far-right TikTok influencer, after which armed security escorted him inside Delaney Hall. ICE agents stayed behind the retractable driveway gates. The crowd spent the final hours milling about.
\n\nBarricades: Protesters repeatedly deployed barricades with little forethought as to how to make use of them. In some cases, the consequence was that the State Police or ICE were able to immediately seize them. Only later, after failed attempts to deploy barricades directly in front of Delaney, did some people erect a reinforced steel barricade further up the road, out of the direct reach of ICE agents. However, as the crowd remained concentrated by the driveway, several ICE vehicles were able to clear that obstacle with ease.
\n\nIdle Time: Ideally, one should arrive at a protest equipped to take action, with the goal of altering the course of events for the better. Instead of merely attending the demonstration, individuals or crews should actively intervene and inspire others to do the same. The attempts to make barricades, the damage to the ICE vehicle, and the confrontation with the TikToker were gestures in that direction. However, aside from those few instances, which did not galvanize the crowd to action, most of the evening’s activity could be described as “milling around.” The abundance of idle time, especially in the absence of law enforcement, suppressed the crowd’s potential and momentum.
\n\nProximity to Delaney Hall: We should not take for granted the opportunity to be able to get within feet of a facility like Delaney Hall. The detention center sits along a sidewalk accessible to protesters, moderately protected by chain-link fence. After the State Police retreated, there was a multi-hour window during which people could have modified the façade of Delaney Hall. This opportunity diminished after Friday night: new fencing was installed around the driveway, state and local LEO began guarding the facility, and for two days, access to Delaney was blocked altogether.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/5.jpg\")
A barricade protesters built in the days before the local and state police established control around the facility.
\nSaturday night began with a scuffle. By 9 pm, approximately 250 protesters had assembled; the majority of them were equipped with gas masks, goggles, and helmets. They initiated a ten-minute tug-of-war with New Jersey State Police by pushing up against the steel barricade perimeter that had been constructed in front of the facility’s main gate. Eventually, protesters broke the barrier into two sections. The police retreated into the facility’s driveway, but the crowd did not advance on the building. Instead, it stepped back onto the sidewalk.
\n\nSome protesters re-appropriated the barriers to form a barricade in front of a line of riot police forming just south of the facility. As they had the night before, police quickly removed the barriers and shot tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades. The crowd fell back immediately. As the riot line advanced, protesters took up the remaining barricades and managed to push the police line back a few feet by shoving the barricades against the shields of the riot police. This was the only point in the night when the crowd was able to advance. The police broke the barricade at its weakest point—as there were only about a dozen people on the front line and they were spread thin—by bludgeoning protesters and deploying more flash-bang grenades.
\n\nAt the same time, a new unit of riot police marched in via the railroad tracks south of Roanoke Avenue. Filling in behind the existing riot line, they increased its depth by two to three officers and expanded it across the entire road. The rest of the night is best described as a rolling retreat.
\n\nTwo hundred riot police deployed a combination of pepper balls, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas canisters, both tossing the tear gas canisters and shooting them behind the front lines of protesters. Some protesters equipped with traffic cones and water bottles extinguished the canisters and kicked them back at the police; in one instance, protesters redirected the tear gas at the correctional officers loitering in the Essex County parking lot. The crowd continuously threw up barricades—dragging together jersey barriers, planks of wood, and abandoned trash—but were not able to fortify or defend them. Protesters maintained an average distance of 100 feet from the police line.
\n\nAt one point, a convoy of five vehicles was allowed through the checkpoint on Roanoke. The majority passed through the line of riot police without issue. The crowd swarmed the final car, which was tinted out with California plates. It accelerated forward; the police barely opened their line in time to let it through. There was a splash of glass as it passed.
\n\nDuring their final advance, the police line parted to let nine mounted units out into the crowd. They spread down Doremus in a flanking formation, rotating to push protesters onto the sidewalk. Two individuals leaped into the street to disorient the horses by waving makeshift shields and flashing bright lights in their eyes. This worked, albeit only temporarily. The crowd scrambled, then continued in slow retreat.
\n\nThe crowd retreated for ten minutes before the riot line assumed the stationary position that it maintained for the rest of the night. The crowd was spread out and thinning, 100 to 200 feet away from police. Fifteen minutes into this standoff, about 100 feet behind the line of protesters, someone ignited a flaming barricade assembled from tires, traffic cones, and debris. The majority of the protesters dispersed around 12:30 am. Mayor Ras Baraka retroactively instituted a curfew.
\n\nTear Gas: The prevalence of gas masks and goggles prepared the crowd to endure chemical dispersants. The crowd generally succeeded in tracking and neutralizing tear gas canisters. A small team with traffic cones and water bottles reliably followed the canisters and extinguished them; many other people kicked tear gas canisters back at police or away from the crowd. However, the crowd fell back at least 100 feet nearly every time officers deployed tear gas and flash-bangs, as the officers surely intended. It would have been preferable to remain close to the front line in order to retain offensive capacities.
\n\nProtester Barricades: We should appraise the value of a barricade by what it renders possible. Protesters threw up at least three barricades, but none of them significantly slowed the police line, nor were they ever fortified enough to do so. To accomplish that, protesters would have needed to maintain the initiative after deploying the barricades and immediately launch a new offensive. Instead, the protesters hung back after deploying them. Every moment spent in a staring contest with law enforcement is momentum ceded, enabling the state to determine the next move.
\n\nFlaming Barricade: The bonfire was an act of initiative on the part of the demonstrators. However, it occurred too late in the protest, which was essentially over by the time the fire was lit. At that point, the protesters had been pushed as far back as they would be by riot police and had been in a stalemate of inactivity for fifteen minutes. Because this took place at the end of the evening’s events, during a lull in activity, and with a dwindling crowd, it could not regenerate momentum. If fires had been lit earlier, they might have strengthened barricades against riot police and galvanized the energy of the crowd during the peak of the skirmishes.
\n\nProjectiles: The only way to push back a police line is to advance on it. It would have been possible for a few people to collect a few boxes of rocks from the nearby railroad tracks, encourage the crowd to tighten up, and then throw projectiles at the riot line. The crowd likely wouldn’t have regained much ground, but this would have slowed its retreat. Better prepared demonstrators might have packed fireworks.
\n\nFalse Dispersal Order: Near the end of the night, when the fire was burning lower, one individual took a megaphone and informed the crowd that they were being kettled from the rear. This was not true: nothing had changed at the north entrance. A few protesters fact-checked this detail and updated the crowd, but the announcement still induced panic. A number of people chose to disperse, including all of those marked as medics. A basic scouting system could have decreased the crowd’s susceptibility to fear and false information.
\n\nArtwork: Saturday’s activities amounted to a slow, rolling retreat, but the imagery that circulated was evocative and inspiring to those watching the struggle from elsewhere. At one point, anti-ICE graffiti appeared on the corrugated metal wall of a nearby business. Because artwork that appears in situations like this is often immediately broadcasted across the country, it offers an opportunity to offer slogans providing strategic direction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/4.jpg\")
Clenched fists versus police batons.
\nSunday was the first night that the curfew was in effect. The police expanded the vehicular checkpoints of the previous days, reinforcing the Roanoke entrance with multiple squad cars and portable vehicle barriers and blocking off the entire length of the Wilson entrance with zip-tied steel barricades. Foot traffic on Doremus was prohibited.
\n\nAt 8:50 pm, there were roughly 100 protesters gathered at the Wilson intersection. The medics began packing up their supplies. A few individuals spread fear in the crowd, attempting to persuade everyone to disperse. At 9 pm, the police issued a dispersal order. It was unclear whether the intersection lay inside or outside of the half-mile curfew “zone.”
\n\nAround 9:15, a mounted unit of ten state police horses deployed out of the New Jersey Transit parking lot west on Wilson. The crowd rushed towards them. At the same time, riot police deployed from farther down Doremus to form a line across the intersection. The combination of these two forces pushed protesters onto the sidewalk at the southwest corner.
\n\nA third of the crowd dispersed down Wilson, followed by low-flying drones. Officers in vehicles with tinted windows shone bright flashlights at outbound traffic to intimidate the occupants. Police set up additional checkpoints along the exit routes, at first stopping drivers for violating curfew. Ultimately, they permitted these cars to leave.
\n\nRiot police kettled the 64 protesters who remained at the intersection. They were booked at Essex County Correctional Facility, adjacent to Delaney Hall within the curfew zone.
\n\nDispersal of the Medics: A handful of people demobilized the crowd by announcing that medics were leaving the scene. It was not clear whether the medics were speaking for themselves, how or why they made that call, or what their relationship was to those seeking to persuade people to leave. In any case, it is odd that a support role would be treated as a de facto tactical lead: the idea was that if the medics retreated, we should retreat, too. It makes sense that some people would feel less resilient without medics after experiencing everything from chemical munitions to bone-breaking beatings at the hands of GEO Group, ICE, and State Police. Regardless, it is worth considering whether the decisions of medics should determine what everyone else does.
\n\nKnowing When to Call It: It was immediately apparent that the balance of forces was not in the protesters’ favor. When officers issued the dispersal order, less than a hundred people lingered by the barricade, a significant proportion of which were press. The State Police behind the barricade matched the protesters almost one to one. When a bus of riot police arrived farther south, seizing the space behind the protesters, and mounted State Troopers descended from the west, there were limited options. A police force twice the size of the protest took over the whole intersection and announced a dispersal. Police cars started forming perimeters further up the street to close and monitor traffic. While it always feels disempowering to leave, protesters probably should have done so at that point. All other things being equal, when one has the opportunity, it is better to stay out of the bureaucratic legal process in order to keep one’s hands free to fight another day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/9.jpg\")
\nAbove, we suggested tactical improvements that the crowd could have implemented during the specific events of each day. Below, we offer strategic proposals based on recurring dynamics across the days of struggle outside Delaney Hall.
\n\nParticipants in protests should sensitize themselves to the difference between actions that feel productive and actions that advance towards desired outcomes. We should always strive to influence our environment and learn faster than circumstances change. Doing so requires participants to communicate simply and effectively with each other, to take and maintain the initiative, and to take responsibility for maintaining the cohesion of the crowd. So far, the protests outside Delaney have not been able to metabolize lessons rapidly enough to keep up with events. The mis-application of barricades, the repeated slow retreats, and the lack of cohesion in stopping vehicles highlight this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/6.jpg\")
A barricade protesters built in the days before the local and state police established control around the facility.
\nThe implicit objective of the crowd has been to prevent ICE vehicles from entering or exiting the facility. One of the early efforts to break the strike involved transferring suspected leaders out of Delaney Hall to other detention facilities; blocking vehicular traffic presented itself to protesters as an effective response. This same tactic was employed last summer in New York City as part of an effort to prevent the removal of detainees from 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Protesters attempted to create chokepoints by throwing debris into the intersections surrounding the immigration courts as ICE vans were leaving.
\n\nDespite the persistent desire to block traffic, it is not clear what the larger goal is besides making ICE operations more costly in general. The crowd has been largely unsuccessful at blockading entry and exit to the facility. When protesters have surrounded ICE vehicles, they have usually simply banged on the car; on a handful of occasions, they have broken a window. Otherwise, the crowd has been ill-prepared to disable vehicles despite the apparent desire to do so. The crowd’s inability to pivot on the ground is symptomatic of a broader strategic vacuum.
\n\nOne sometimes whispered-about, but largely unspoken desire is to breach the facility and liberate detainees. The appetite for this is apparent, but unrealized; desired, but doubted. It is worth identifying this horizon outright. So long as it remains unspoken, it will be impossible to determine the level of organization that it would take to make this happen or to acknowledge the concrete limits of the current protest tactics.
\n\nJohn Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; the liberation of Assata Shakur; the siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis; the March 5, 2023 raid that damaged the Cop City construction site in Atlanta—such actions remind us what we are capable of. It is our duty to make daring plans together. One year ago, detainees inside Delaney Hall did just that when four people broke through the walls and escaped. It is humbling to fight at the site of a recent jailbreak; it is our responsibility to bring down the walls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/8.jpg\")
Love your neighbor; free the captive.
\nOur movement has more strategic opportunities when we face a disunified adversary. This was the case for about a week as the movement outside Delaney Hall grew. During that time, New Jersey Democrats and DHS agents were openly hostile to each other. Democrats were routinely denied entry into Delaney Hall; they were surprised that ICE treated them as protesters, not colleagues within the ruling class. ICE arrested Mayor Baraka for trespassing, charged Congresswoman LaMonica McIver with assaulting a federal officer, and pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim point-blank.
\n\nDuring that time, New Jersey police were not deployed to Delaney. For a week, protesters clashed directly with ICE and GEO Group without interference from state or local law enforcement. A similar tension between state and federal agencies offered a key opportunity for resistance to the ICE to accelerate during the first two months of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. While the New Jersey governor and mayor did ultimately unite with ICE against protesters for the weekend, they have since wavered due to popular backlash.
\n\nDenouncing New Jersey state police, the Minnesota 50501 chapter posted a graphic on social media reading, “Republicans sent ICE. Democrats sent police. They shoot us all the same. Different states, same mistakes.” Shortly after, the mayor of Newark admitted to excessive and even “unconstitutional” use of force against protesters and suspended the curfew. By June 4, Baraka announced that Newark Police would further scale back their presence at Delaney, stating “It is not the responsibility of the Newark Police Division to secure a private facility. It is a clear contradiction to the City’s position with GEO group to remain there.”
\n\nDemocrat collaboration with ICE is not a foregone conclusion. It is unevenly expressed, occasionally delayed, and takes place despite the opposition of much of the party’s voter base. Any further fractures in the Democratic coalition, especially if they cause even a brief absence of law enforcement, will expand our opportunities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/11.jpg\")
\nAfter the major metropolitan ICE surges of Midway Blitz and Metro Surge, the battles inside and outside of Delaney Hall have once again directed countrywide attention to the struggle against ICE. For now, however, resistance movements lack strong organizational models to enable us to metabolize lessons, strategize, and launch stronger attacks. In the absence of those, people simply converge on spaces where they see combative actions occurring on a regular basis.
\n\nHundreds of people outside Delaney Hall and tens of thousands around the country have demonstrated tremendous courage by confronting ICE directly. Yet just as militants should not arbitrarily limit ourselves to on-the-ground tactical interventions while leaving larger political and organizational tasks to NGOs, we should not let the way that spaces of conflict currently stand in for forms of organization lock us into narrow territorial struggles. Rather than letting pitched battles over specific spaces stand in for collective strategizing, we need to create opportunities for those who have been transformed by this struggle to develop more audacious strategic goals and find the tactics to match them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/2.jpg\")
Protesters conducting a car check early in this wave of protests, before local and state police got involved and shifted the balance of power. The only thing we can ask for from any institution of authority is to stay out of the way.
\nWe interviewed Talia Jane, a journalist who has witnessed many of the protests outside Delaney Hall.
\n\nA year ago, riotous demonstrations took place outside of Delaney Hall as an uprising inside the facility enabled several detainees to escape. What has happened since then?
\n\nOver the past year, volunteers have worked around the clock to provide support to people newly released and the families of people detained at Delaney Hall. Those advocates have been attempting to raise awareness of conditions inside the facility, with little support. It was people detained inside self-organizing in protest against their conditions that set the spark that led to a surge in support.
\n\nThat support soon shifted toward direct action (attempting to block entering and exiting vehicles), which led to ICE agents attacking demonstrators, which sparked an even bigger surge in support. All of this organizing has been happening with a backdrop of growing discontent with ICE’s violent, fascist attacks on neighbors across the country.
\n\nThat served as a powder keg. People had been waiting for things to cross a certain line until the conditions outside Delaney Hall matched scenes they had been seeing in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
\n\nSeveral hundred people at Delaney Hall launched a work and hunger strike. Tell us what you know about the strike and how people have been responding on the outside.
\n\nThe strike has been a point of fixation for DHS, which continues to insist there is no hunger strike. This is intentionally dishonest. The hunger strikers avoided eating as much as possible. I observed one ambulance wheeling someone out, who smiled but looked frail, at day five of the hunger strike.
\n\nThe hunger portion of the strike has now ended, and I’m told that ICE has threatened to pursue charges against those refusing to eat, which would jeopardize their immigration cases. Since then, many more people have been wheeled out into ambulances. Volunteers have speculated that this is due to physical abuse committed by guards and ICE agents.
\n\nOver the past two weeks, hundreds of people have been mobilizing in solidarity outside of Delaney Hall. We’ve seen blockades of ICE vans and barricades. A few days ago, the removal of Martin Soto, one of the detainees on hunger strike, was temporarily halted. Tell us what has been happening in the streets outside of Delaney Hall.
\n\nOutside of Delaney Hall, there has been a battle between the state and the people in a multitude of ways: Demonstrators organically began attempting to block vehicles and barricade access to the facility.
\n\nWith access now barricaded by DHS/GEO Group, demonstrators continue trying to add friction to ICE operations. DHS and FBI agents were documented inside a white tent that volunteers use to provide aftercare to newly released people and families visiting their loved ones. The tent was trashed, with mace reportedly sprayed all over medical supplies—a war crime. Volunteers are continuing to try to clean and repair the space for family and aftercare support.
\n\nAlongside that, people continue to show up around the clock to bear witness, rally in opposition to ICE, and impede vehicles. Initially, ICE was primarily engaging protesters. After they pushed someone into a moving 18-wheeler, New Jersey State Police came in, and immediately escalated to using tear gas, flash-bangs, and horses. One of them stole a photographer’s backpack after breaking her knee and ditched it outside his house. They appear to have plotted to kettle and mass arrest demonstrators, preventing press who didn’t have specific credentials from leaving the kettle. Everyone detained was held for at least 14 hours, some more than 24 hours total.
\n\nAfter that, Newark Police Department was sent to play nice with everyone. They ended up arresting people. Then NPD was pulled out and it was decided that the situation at Delaney Hall was a federal and GEO Group issue, not one that local police should be involved with. GEO Group took to chasing people around, beating them with batons in the street, macing people, and accelerating cars into people. One person remarked, “If they’re doing this in broad daylight, what are they doing to the people inside?”
\n\nTell us more about what you’re seeing out in the streets from ICE agents.
\n\nThe violence isn’t isolated to ICE. It’s like every state or private agency associated with ICE feels emboldened to engage in excessive use of force or plainly outrageous violence because they are collaborating with or acting on behalf of ICE.
\n\nNew Jersey State Police broke a photographer’s knee and stole her gear. GEO Group hit my colleague with a car. People have been singled out, grabbed, and brutalized by ICE for doing nothing. I watched and reported when ICE decided, for no reason other than they felt like it, to escalate from simply sweeping people into the street to dumping tons of mace to using batons and aggressively shoving. NJSP appears to have simply wanted to unleash hell on people, absent any notable instigation, after ICE’s escalations. Now GEO Group is beating people in the street. ICE sets the precedent, these other agencies follow.
\n\nAs the demonstrations have been heating up, we’ve seen a wave of Democratic politicians arrive at Delaney Hall, including the Governor and a Senator, who was maced by police. Talk about this dynamic and how has it impacted the demonstrations.
\n\nThe demonstrators are split into two camps. One camp feels completely indifferent to all politicians, on the premise that the politicians are showing up for their own benefit more than they are for others. The other camp is enamored with the celebrity of politicians, interpreting their visits as a means of advocacy and building power.
\n\nDespite Governor Sherrill appearing outside the facility, she conveniently showed up on a holiday where visits were not allowed—and she has not returned since. Delaney Hall strikers are demanding Sherrill visit them inside the facility. This has become a litmus test for Sherrill that she continues failing.
\n\nThe dynamic is a classic case of spectacle. The prominence of those who visit raises awareness and can generate support among people who support those politicians.
\n\nBut spectacle can serve multiple masters. Speaking of which, far-right streamers have been on the ground more in the last few days, as you have been reporting. Tell us more how that is playing out.
\n\nFar-right streamers have been getting in people’s faces, eagerly documenting people who prefer not to draw attention to themselves. They’re there to generate propaganda, to agitate fascists, and to bleed support for the growing uprising by slandering and mischaracterizing it.
\n\nSome demonstrators ignore them; others try to buffer them; others take more aggressive measures. I suspect the latter will become more common as the streamers increasingly get caught filming things that they know will upset those they’re filming. One of the streamers—I’m not going to name him, because his whole grift relies on name recognition—had his phones taken and broken after he was running up close to people’s faces trying to identify them while verbally boasting about collecting intel in order to dox people. He was boasting aloud while surrounded by protesters, mind you! He and other far-right propagandists have also been desperately trying to infiltrate organizing and support chats in order to slander those involved. It’s annoying and stupid noise that, unfortunately, has the president’s ear.
\n\nPeople are split, as seems to always be the case, between those taking opsec precautions to stay safe and those eschewing them completely in a blend of arrogance and what they seem to believe is a strategic defiance or apathy regarding potential consequences.
\n\nThere’s been a lot of mutual aid organizing and infrastructure popping up at Delaney Hall. Tell us about what’s going on beyond just the protests and confrontations with ICE.
\n\nCosecha New Jersey and the broader Eyes on ICE coalition have been organizing to support people detained at Delaney Hall, advocating for the closure of the facility since it first opened. Their infrastructure grew rapidly as protesters surged to express support, but the foundation was built long ago. People are working to connect newly detained people with legal support and help families meet facility dress code for visitation. They are advocating for detainees to receive proper medical care and serving as a megaphone for the voices locked inside.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/10.jpg\")
\nThey’ve raised funds for people’s commissary accounts and for their families. The volunteer network has stepped up to meet every possible need that may arise, whether that be finding missing paperwork or bandaging up a paper cut. People are coming together to figure out how they can be helpful.
\n\nThe recent confrontations in New Jersey represent one of the largest flash points of anti-ICE resistance since the explosion in the Twin Cities. What do you anticipate in the coming days and weeks?
\n\nI see the state making stupid choices that further intensify the call to resist. I see support networks maturing from uncertain vulnerable spaces to highly functioning machines. I see many, many people becoming radicalized in a way few ordinarily experience. I see those with a greater depth of radical knowledge welcoming in those less informed and raising them up, not gatekeeping or judging. I see people learning a lot of awful lessons about how to withstand a waking nightmare and figuring out how to remain soft and kind despite it and because of it.
\n\nHow can people follow your work and support you?
\n\nYou can support the strikers and their families here. You can find my links here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/1.jpg\")
Celebrating a birthday outside the facility. ICE separates children from their parents. Resistance is a way of reestablishing our shared humanity.
\nTo include information about the events outside Delaney Hall up to the time of publication, we interviewed an anarchist who has participated in the protests in June. The protester chose to remain anonymous.
\n\nCan you describe what has happened at Delaney Hall in June?
\n\nOn June 1, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka held a press conference outside of Delaney Hall in response to what he admitted was “unconstitutional” use of force by officers over the previous nights. A few people tried to disrupt the press conference, but Baraka closed it to the public. Newark police established hard checkpoints leading into the facility, completely closing access to foot and vehicle traffic. He announced that he would lift the curfew from Delaney Hall.
\n\nOn Wednesday, June 3, about fifty protesters gathered in front of Delaney Hall. A “free speech zone” was set up in front of a driveway to the facility that had been closed. Newark PD guarded the other two driveways. NPD facilitated the entry and exit of ICE vehicles, getting into petty shoving matches with protesters who sought to stop cars from entering.
\n\nAt some point, protesters noticed that ICE vehicles were leaving through a back exit. About fifteen people moved to the back of the facility to try to obstruct vehicles there. The back of the facility is a dimly lit street with no foot or vehicle traffic. Suddenly, six unmarked SUVs pulled up on the protesters and fully kitted-out agents leapt from the vehicles barking “GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND!” They did not identify which agency they were from. Several people escaped; the others were briefly detained and then shoved down the road and told to leave. ICE and Essex County Sheriffs arrested one person. Another was repeatedly slammed to the ground by ICE, causing an injury to the protester’s arm. An ICE agent reportedly pulled that protester’s mask back, said “Are you a fucking girl?”, and spat in their face.
\n\nOn Friday, June 5, Mayor Baraka scaled back NPD presence outside Delaney Hall, having officers mostly monitor vehicle checkpoints at the north and south entrances to Doremus Ave. At 7:30 pm that night, the mayor instituted a “ban” on those wearing face coverings or carrying backpacks passing the police checkpoint to protest in front of Delaney Hall.
\n\nOn Saturday and Sunday, June 6 and 7, with Newark PD having scaled back, a few dozen protesters clashed directly with ICE and GEO Group private security outside of Delaney Hall. On Saturday night, a few dozen protesters stood out in the rain and attempted to block ICE cars entering the detention facility. A few protesters have been followed by plain-clothes officers who photograph and occasionally handcuff protesters. These men do not identify themselves with any agency; they have not arrested anyone, only briefly detained those in masks as they leave.
\n\nWhat other strategies besides gathering outside Delaney Hall have supporters of the hunger strike employed?
\n\nTo date, there have not been many other strategies apart from the demonstrations outside Delaney Hall. A few noise demonstrations have been called, one at the Attorney General’s office and one at Mayor Baraka’s house, though the latter was called off after the curfew was lifted.
\n\nThe Democratic governor used the language of “outside agitators” to delegitimize demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, even though people are held there who have been arrested around the region. How have local participants in the grassroots organizing against Delaney Hall related to demonstrators from outside Newark?
\n\nThis has not been a tension on the ground outside the facility. The charge of “not being from here” would be tone-deaf to levy outside a migrant detention center. A handful of people active in the anti-ICE struggles in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis have come here to share lessons from those fights. This has been useful and appreciated by the crowd. We are in a nationwide struggle against ICE.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/7.jpg\")
\nAcross more than a decade of unfinished revolution and civil war in Syria, Syrian activists in exile participated in organizing in other parts of the world. At last, at the end of 2024, the regime of Bashar al-Assad fell, enabling them to begin to return home. One of the projects that Syrian exiles helped to establish is the Peoples Want network, a worldwide network of organizations and collectives seeking to foster an internationalism from below. In the following interview, participants in the Syria group within the Peoples Want discuss the situation they confront in Syria today and describe how they will participate in the Mujawara campaign, a month of events intended to interweave horizontal organizing initiatives around the world.
\n\nCan you give us a brief update on the current political situation in Syria? What is the dynamic on the ground for revolutionaries, social movements, and other popular struggles? How do exiled and diasporic communities factor into these?
\n\nThe fall of the regime enabled millions of people to return to their homes and lands, reuniting families. People are starting to rebuild villages and neighborhoods. Entire towns had been entirely cleansed of their populations.
\n\nSo the first barrier has fallen—people can safely come home—but the second barrier remains: the economy. The majority of people who left are still in camps or in exile, unable to come back. The government is prioritizing attracting foreign investors and monopolizing resources over rebuilding the large areas destroyed by the Assad regime, most of which were very poor. The horrors of the old regime are still present, too, as people discover mass graves and search for the forcibly disappeared, sometimes finding death certificates without finding the remains. Syrians are still waiting for justice.
\n\nWe are also living through economic and ecological disasters. Prices are extremely high, wages very low, and the new government has raised the costs for basic necessities such as electricity and food in an unprecedented disproportional way. At the same time, after years of drought, this year saw heavy rains and storms resulting in violent floods that impacted the wheat season and damaged infrastructure in areas including Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, leading to power and water cuts.
\n\nDuring this period, forces within or allied with the new government have committed two massacres, one on the western coast of Syria in March 2025 and one in Sweida in July 2025. The perpetrators enjoy near-total impunity. Serious clashes between the new regime and Kurdish forces in the northeast in January 2026 forced through the integration of large parts of the Syrian Democratic Forces into the new central government in Damascus. In the provinces of Deraa and Qunietra, the Israeli occupation continues to annex lands and strategic positions. In some areas, we are witnessing systematic sectarian pressure on minority groups via through direct violence as well as political and economic abuse of power, including the kidnapping of women and regular clashes between different ethnic or religious groups with or without the complicity of governmental forces.
\n\nNonetheless, despite everything, the fall of the regime has opened some space for collective organizing. Those who were operating underground have started working publicly; groups functioning informally now want to get more organized, and those doing local work want to connect with other initiatives around the country. We have seen groups including an independent journalist union, agricultural cooperatives, civil peace initiatives, and even a housewives’ syndicate. That represents a gain of the revolution. Today, it is possible to organize protests in the street without barrel bombs falling on your head. The government fears demonstrations and has reversed its decisions following protests about the alcohol ban in Damascus, a contested construction plan in Homs, and the price of wheat. Each time, the government has retreated, showing that it fears even small popular mobilization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/5.jpg\")
“If the farmer is starved, the country is starved.” A protest against wheat pricing in Raqqa on May 22, 2026.
\nStill, this will not last if there is no sustained fight to defend the gains of the revolution against a state increasingly veering into authoritarianism. The new government is building its own surveillance and repression apparatus; there are already cases of arbitrary detention, torture in prisons, and pressure to suspend political activities. The question is why it remains difficult to build an opposition capable of confronting its neoliberal, reactionary, and authoritarian tendencies. The political space is there, but the chief obstacle preventing people from organizing against oppression is not the new government per se so much as the country’s divisions along lines of identity.
\n\nIdentity-based conflicts are extremely strong. Over the past year, opposition movements have often emerged along ethnic and sectarian lines: Druze in the south demanding independence, Kurds in the northeast moving back towards a more Kurdish nationalist project, Alawites demanding separation or autonomy. At the same time, Sunni supremacism among supporters of the government leads to violence and hatred directed at entire communities. Despite the fact that anger at the government’s economic policies is growing across every community including Arab Sunnis, it remains difficult to establish concrete class-based alliances. This is a blessing for the new government: it protects it from any serious opposition, enabling it to present itself as the central balancing force able to restore order.
\n\nThe situation is further complicates by deep divisions within what used to be the revolutionary camp, especially following the two massacres, because some ex-revolutionaries have tried to justify them or downplay the horror. The chief strategic debate today is over how to position ourselves towards a new government that includes many ex-revolutionaries in public office and the new security forces. Some oppose the new government for reproducing the repressive logic of the old regime; others seek to avoid direct confrontations in a time of local, regional, and global instability.
\n\nWe believe that we should fight all expressions of authoritarianism and neoliberal policies whenever possible, while distancing ourselves from a reading of the situation that exclusively focuses on the religious ideology of those who run the state.
\n\nFor those of us who managed to return after the fall of the regime, it is important to learn to understand the context here and listen to those who did not leave the country. The transmission of experience between local activists and those returning from exile will be key, but those who were abroad, especially in Western countries, must not reproduce paternalistic attitudes like “We should teach people how things are done abroad.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/6.jpg\")
\nThe Syrian revolution received less recognition from revolutionaries in other parts of the world than struggles in Rojava, Palestine, or Chiapas have. What lessons have you derived from this? Why do you think that it is important to focus on expanding international networks of support and solidarity?
\n\nThere are a number of reasons why we did not see as much solidarity with the Syrian revolution. First, in comparison with the Kurdish movement, the Palestinian movement, or the Zapatistas, the Syrian revolution was a new awakening, which had to begin to establish international connections from scratch. All of those movements had established solidarity over a long period of time through extensive work and relationship building. In the case of the Syrian revolution, much of this work began after 2011, carried out by Syrians in exile and the diaspora, as Syrians who remained inside the country increasingly had to focus on survival.
\n\nAnother factor in the lack of solidarity for the Syrian revolution is the “campism” that has divided the left in both the West and the Arab world. Campism is the position held by those who see everything through an “anti-imperialist” lens according to which the United States, other Western states, and Israel are the only imperialist actors, or at least, the only imperialists that should be opposed. Consequently, campists invariably defend these nations’ geopolitical competitors—such as Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime (the “axis of resistance”). They ignored or justified the oppression of Syrians, refusing to support the Syrian revolution and backing counterrevolutionary forces instead.
\n\nStill another factor is the lack of a clear discourse and narrative with which to address liberation struggles and leftist groups outside of Syria. The revolutionary movement in Syria was very decentralized. Much of it lacked strong ideological underpinnings, even if various shades of Islamist currents were increasingly present. One lesson is that we can’t count on support from the “international community” that uses the language of “human rights.” We needed to develop a positive project and articulate the kind of change we wanted to make, beyond bringing about the fall of Assad.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/4.jpg\")
Syrians participate in a sit-in in the Bab Tuma neighborhood of Damascus, on March 22, 2026. “The Syrian people are one; do not divide them with discriminatory laws.”
\nIt is often easier to build solidarity and networks based on trust and mutual support in times of relative “peace” in order to strengthen our alliances for the future. This is a time for Syrians inside and outside Syria to connect and deepen our relationships, as we have much to learn from each other, and also to build relationships with others from around the world. We believe that by working together, increasing our knowledge of transnational struggles, sharing our resources, and recognizing each other as actors in a common struggle for liberation, we can strengthen and sustain our movements at home.
\n\nWhat can you tell us about the Mujawara campaign of The Peoples Want and how it relates to self-organized initiatives underway in Syria?
\n\nThe “Mujawara” campaign is not a general slogan about solidarity, but a concrete attempt to build connections between spaces and initiatives that already exist on the ground both within Syria and outside it. The idea is to look for places where something of the spirit of self-organization has survived—houses, farms, social centers, local councils, agricultural initiatives, feminist and youth groups—and to see how we can support them, learn from them, and connect them with other experiences.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/1.jpg\")
\nIn Syria, we started working in a very concrete way: visiting, meeting, discussing, and assessing the spaces we could collaborate with. For example, in a particular city, there is a space run by a local team whose members did not leave the country, with a building and a garden and the capacity to receive people and organize meetings. This space is very close to the idea of “Mujawara”: an independent place rooted in the local environment, based on relations of trust, open to social, political, and cultural activities, and capable of hosting meetings for comrades from different areas. That is why we will organize a gathering there during the month of June as part of the Mujawara campaign. Through this gathering, we will get to know more about the people running the space, and we will invite other groups and places we have visited in Syria to join us. We will cook together, listen to each other’s experiences and struggles, and talk about the role that the Peoples Want network can play in the Syrian context.
\n\nWe have also visited and discussed with other places and collectives. In one city, there is a new initiative started by some old revolutionaries returning from exile: an Arab house that hosts political, social, and cultural activities for adults and children. In June, in this space, we will organize a film screening and discussion about the Sudanese revolution, in the presence of local activists and a Sudanese comrade who is a member of a resistance committee in Khartoum. The opportunity to do this—not only in exile but in Syria—represents the fulfillment of a dream: connecting people involved in the two revolutionary experiences that inspired our manifesto “Revolutions of Our Times” and which serve as something like a political compass for the network.
\n\nWe have visited a place in one of the suburbs of Damascus, a lovely social center with a café and large spaces around it. Political events were taking place there underground before the fall of the regime. In the countryside around Damascus, we have also visited agricultural projects, nurseries, and seed collections connected to question of food sovereignty and the rebuilding of the land after destruction. In the northwest, we have connections with other agricultural and women’s initiatives focused around medicinal plants and local knowledge. Ecological farming initiatives give us a clear example of how politics can begin not only from statements but from the seeds, from the water, from the land.
\n\nIn all these places, we have discussed internal organization and political visions for the future. We did not treat these initiatives with romanticism. Every place and project has its contradictions, its problems, its social and political questions and limits. That is why we do not see “Mujawara” as a stamp of approval that we place on any space, but rather a process of building trust and joint work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/2.jpg\")
A banner for the Mujawara campaign elsewhere on the surface of the earth, displayed by other participants in the Peoples Want network.
\nWhat matters to us is connecting with and supporting self-organized initiatives, not replacing them or leading them. As Syrians, we know that people on the ground are tired of organizations that come with ready-made projects and of funding that creates a donor-recipient relationship. First, we ask: What do you need? How do you work? What is your relationship with the local environment? Can this space receive people from different areas? Does it contribute to building material and political autonomy for people?
\n\nThe connection of “Mujawara” with Syria comes from this: the Syrian revolution itself gave rise to a tremendous amount of experience in self-organization, from local councils to coordination committees, from collective kitchens to field hospitals, from justice initiatives for victims and the disappeared to farming projects and cooperatives. Today, after the fall of the regime, after all of this destruction, it is not enough to say “the revolution continues” as a slogan. The question is: where does it continue? And who carries it in a concrete way? In which house, farm, library, social center, community committee, or meeting between people from different places in Syria will it continue?
\n\nThat is why in Syria, “Mujawara” must be a small but practical step: meetings for collective thinking about how to build a long-lasting mutual support network. The goal is not to announce the “opening of a revolutionary headquarters,” but to contribute to restoring the connections between people, areas, and experiences that years of war and revolution has separated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/3.jpg\")
\nThis is the original call to make June a month of global outreach and connection through the Mujawara campaign.
\n\n\n\n\nJoin us for a month of internationalist organising throughout the month of June! This is a global call to all local places and collectives for gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches and rituals in honor of those who have fallen.
\n\nThe goal is to build new internationalist connections and mutualize our resources to support the creation of new shared spaces by Syrian and Sudanese revolutionaries.
\n
We could begin again with a list. A list of threats, of wars, of uprisings cut short, of incomplete revolutions. A list of all the dead, of all our dead.
\n\nBut why state again what everyone knows, reads, sees, and feels: The world, once again, is devastated by the lust for power and the greed of the powerful.
\n\nSo how do we carry on? We who have known the jubilant crowds, the ransacked palaces, and the power of our tenderness. How do we carry on in the face of horror and powerlessness? How do we carry on as revolutionaries?
\n\nThere are the cynics, the “realists,” who, blinded by the anguish of their own weakness, tell us we must choose. Choose between those who massacre their own peoples and those who believe they can slow their own downfall by declaring war on the world.
\n\nThere are those who give up or stop hoping. Exhausted, resigned. But who may one day stand with us again.
\n\nAnd then there is us.
\n\nUs who weep, us who feel weak, us who sometimes doubt. But us, too, who have not given up. Neither our compass, nor our flame. Neither the hope of avenging our own, nor the hope of seeing a dawn at the end of the night.
\n\nUs who, rather than remain trapped in the shock of the present, search everywhere for those who continue to resist. For we remember that from our uprisings, a force has awakened. And though minds tend to forget, bodies remember.
\n\nUs who see this force still alive in plain sight, carried by a pirate generation shouting in the world’s face that the game is not over.
\n\nIt is this force that our comrades in Nepal have rekindled in the open, in flames that consumed their assembly. It is this force that we have glimpsed within the plenums of Serbia, those gigantic assemblies that, for months upon months, organised the revolt from below. It is this force too that is embodied in the inhabitants of Lebanese villages who remain on their land despite yet another evacuation order from the IDF, as well as in the farmers in Palestine who replant their crops again and again after the bombs. It is this force that we feel within the Sudanese emergency response rooms, born of war to take up the mantle, both at home and in exile, of the powerful resistance committees of the revolution.
\n\nIt is this force that keeps our comrades standing firm in the jungles of Myanmar or Chiapas, in the Ukrainian trenches, and in the mountains of Rojhelat. It is this force that we see flying at the mastheads of those boats setting sail to defy genocidal Israel. It is this force, finally, that drives the crowds in Iran, Minneapolis, Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco, and Madagascar to brave, time and again, the death promised by all these regimes that hate their peoples.
\n\nYes, our strength is real. It is nascent, incomplete, fragmented, but real. Contrary to what counterrevolutionaries on both the right and the left would have us believe. And no party, no supreme savior, will be able to unify it in our place.
\n\nSo the task lies with us: to seek one another out, to recognize one another, and to make visible to the world—and to ourselves—the power that could emerge from our coming together.
\n\nThis is what we call Mujawara. The pooling of our efforts and our resources, through the interweaving of ropes, long and strong enough to allow us to hold together in the face of the challenges of our time. A revolutionary neighboring that we have already begun to weave from all these territories, these places, and popular powers born of our struggles. This Mujawara will not be made of empty talk or grand statements on every tremor our world experiences. It is being built, and will continue to be built, under the radar, in the tunnels of the revolutions to come.
\n\nAnd to inaugurate it, and to begin weaving this neighboring that crosses borders, we will organize, across five continents and throughout the month of June, a series of internationalist actions within all these places born before or in the wake of our uprisings and maintained over the years despite every hardship: neighboring councils, autonomous spaces, social centers, shelters, collective farms, self-managed bookshops, cooperatives.
\n\nAll that will allow us to bring into being, materially and symbolically, this neighboring we need: gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches, rituals in honour of those who have fallen.
\n\nFrom this global mutual aid that we will set in motion in June, new places will rise from the ground, safer paths will be forged, roofs will be repaired, new alliances will be woven, and from all of this, perhaps, wounds will be healed and new hopes will take root.
\n\nThis moment is but a step—yet a decisive one: that of the slow but unwavering construction of a grounded material power, linking across the four corners of the planet the fragments of our nascent strength.
\n\nFrom the places we have grown accustomed to naming:
\n\nTaipei, Mexico City, Nancy, the Beqaa Valley, Berlin, Santiago de Chile, Galloway hills, Paris/Montreuil, Damascus, la Provence, the Limousin mountain
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/06/04/inside-the-clashes-at-delaney-hall-detention-center-a-timeline-from-a-mutual-aid-volunteer", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/06/04/inside-the-clashes-at-delaney-hall-detention-center-a-timeline-from-a-mutual-aid-volunteer", "title": "Inside the Clashes at Delaney Hall Detention Center : A Timeline from a Mutual Aid Volunteer", "summary": "A participant in mutual aid efforts at Delaney Hall Detention Center recounts how the clashes with federal, state, and local authorities unfolded during the hunger strike.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/header.jpg", "date_published": "2026-06-04T13:05:05Z", "date_modified": "2026-06-12T09:15:28Z", "tags": [ "ICE", "police", "politicians", "prisons", "borders" ], "content_html": "On May 22, 2026, amid a surge of hunger strikes in immigration detention prisons across the United States, 300 detainees announced from their cells in Newark, New Jersey that they would not eat and would not toil for their captors until their demands were met. This sparked ten days of protest and furious retaliation from federal, state, and local authorities. What began as a peaceful vigil outside Delaney Hall Detention Center in solidarity with the hunger strikers ended with New Jersey State Troopers encircling, brutalizing, and arresting scores of people.
\n\nThe series of events leading up to the strike and culminating in a marathon of violence has been densely packed. Consequently, the fog of war has obscured key details, including the complex dynamics at play between protesters and mutual aid workers, between experienced anti-ICE activists and the local terrain, between the government of New Jersey and federal mercenaries. Here, a participant in mutual aid efforts at Delaney Hall over the preceding months—who was on the ground for much of this wave of protests—recounts how the clashes unfolded.
\n\nYou can donate to support families impacted by immigrant detention here.
\n\nI am a volunteer with Eyes on ICE New Jersey, a mutual aid collective that has been providing aid and hospitality to the detainees held captive in Delaney Hall—which is one of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in the Northeast—and to the families that travel to visit them.
\n\nEyes on ICE is a coalition of volunteers and a preexisting network of aid organizations, including Movimiento Cosecha, Pax Christi New Jersey, First Friends of New York and New Jersey, Mami Chelo Foundation, and others that have emerged over decades of advocating for those subjected to an increasingly archaic immigration system. Established immigrant justice and faith-based communities with aligned advocacy goals converged on Delaney Hall soon after it reopened in May 2025. Despite the forceful retaliation of federal and local police, the protests continued, only slowing down after the arrests of faith leaders and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
\n\nOver the following weeks, protesters self-organized and refocused their efforts—shifting to assisting detainees and their families through networks of aid distribution, lawyers, and advocates, seeking to catch people before they fall through the cracks. At the same time that the aid group was being built, a ring of concertina-topped mesh-fencing sprang up around the prison. As the weather grew colder, the government of Essex County, the county that holds the detention facility, erected a permanent white tent to house Eyes on ICE. That tent has come to be called the “Radical Hospitality Zone.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/4.jpg\")
The “Radical Hospitality Zone,” where Eyes on ICE volunteers built a space for visitors coming to see people incarcerated in Delaney Hall.
\nVolunteers who do not have professional careers in advocacy participate by helping to maintain a community at the prison gates. Some of us cook or battle inclement weather. Others offer child care, collect donations of groceries and diapers, assist visiting families with transportation, or beautify the tent that houses us with art and music. All of us work together to document the detainees and their captors.
\n\nDelaney Hall Detention Center is situated in one of the busiest shipping hubs in the country. Located directly behind Newark Airport, the private prison shares the same square mile with multiple incineration plants and a busy commercial road. Periodically, a train screams by loaded with trash to be incinerated or animal carcasses for reprocessing at the facility across the street. The prison is about the size of a Costco, with a 1000-bed capacity. It is operated by GEO Group, one of the largest private prison contractors in the world. GEO Group has a poor human rights track record and is quick to dismiss any inquiries or criticisms.
\n\nThe New Jersey Globe reports that the prison is often at maximum capacity; volunteers do their best to count the number of captives inside the tinted windows of the vans that come and go. Some of the people who are released tell us they were arrested just days earlier, usually by accident or as a consequence of racial profiling. Others have been in the system for months,
\n\n\n\n\n“…transferring between detention centers in Louisiana, Texas, and then back to Delaney, seemingly with the dual purpose of keeping them hidden or underrepresented in the legal system, while also creating excuses for GEO Group (owner of Delaney and often the largest private prison company in the states) to run up quite the tab with the obsequious federal government.”
\n\n \n
The facility is built on a filled-in portion of marshland and river. Backfill and debris from old construction form the foundation for Delaney Hall and the rest of the Ironbound neighborhood. The Ironbound is a historically redlined neighborhood, meaning it has long been home to Black, brown, and immigrant communities. Consequently, the Ironbound was zoned for heavy industry, and the 16-mile stretch of land that Delaney Hall sits on has come to be known as “Chemical Corridor” due to rampant environmental contamination from every form of industry imaginable.
\n\nIn short, it is desolate. There are no homes nearby and a single bus line serves the area. This was the arena for the week of state violence that shook the country.
\n\nOn May 22, Gabriela Soto, whose husband Martin Soto was then held in Delaney Hall, announced that a protest had begun within the prison. During the early hours of the protest, she publicly shared a phone call with Martin. The privilege of speaking on the phone with detainees has since been revoked for all families, along with all other forms of visitation. During that call, Martin announced that he had coordinated with up to 300 other detainees to begin a hunger and labor strike to draw attention to inhumane living conditions and lack of due process under the law.
\n\nDetainees in Delaney Hall are forced to do all the work to maintain their own prison, receiving $1 per day in return; they regularly report receiving extremely poor quality food, including spoiled food. There are also consistent reports of mistreatment, unsafe living conditions, medical neglect, and sexual assault. Navigating the legal procedures around their detention is difficult; at best, these are intentionally opaque.
\n\nStarting months before the strike began, Eyes on ICE volunteers and participating organizations received a series of handwritten letters from detainees. In March, a letter arrived captioned with a large “S.O.S.” and undersigned by 300 detainees from across various cell units. They detailed horrendous conditions, rapid transfers and deportation hearings, and other forms of torture. Many called specific judges out by name for their cruelty.
\n\nThe strikers demanded that New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill come to Delaney Hall to meet with them and witness the conditions in the prison. They also called for the very young, very old, and medically infirm be released from the prison; an end to coercive pressure to sign voluntary deportation papers; and a meaningful review of cases and habeas corpus filings.
\n\nGabriela Soto’s announcement precipitated a coordinated call for all Eyes on ICE volunteers and their communities to participate in a 24/7 vigil in solidarity with the strikers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/3.jpg\")
May 22, 2026: the hospitality tent outside Delaney Hall. Gabriela Soto holds a sign she made with her family as she announces the hunger strike.
\nThat vigil began immediately after Gaby made her announcement at noon on May 22. At 2 pm, family members of the detainees who were on strike reported that they were unable to communicate with their loved ones. The detainees typically had access to tablets that could make video calls, but the prison guards had revoked the communication privileges of the units that were on strike in retaliation. This information was confirmed by a person detained in the striking unit 2a/b. About to be deported, he used his final phone time to validate this detail. While other detainees in other units had agreed to the strike, 2a/b was the unit Martin Soto was held in, the unit that had initially announced the strike.
\n\nBy 6 pm, the number of protesters at the vigil had swelled to between thirty and forty people. There were several local media vans on scene. The story garnered a brief mention in the evening news in relation to the other strikes across the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/6.jpg\")
Outside Delaney Hall on the evening of Friday, May 22.
\nAs protesters chanted and sang into the night, detainees could be seen silhouetted in the windows closest to the street—waving, dancing, and placing heart-shaped cutouts against the opaque glass. Their response drove home that the vigil was cutting through their isolation.
\n\nAs the evening went on, a few detainees were released, as usual, one or two at a time, often as a consequence of paying bail. The volunteers carried out their intake process and made sure they were safe and had access to transportation and legal advice.
\n\nThe protest lasted through the night and into the following days without incident. Guards and protesters exchanged insults, but neither side deployed anything stronger.
\n\nOn Saturday, May 23, Gaby shared that her husband Martin, now seen as the primary instigator of the strike, had been offered release if he would call off the strike. According to Gaby, he said, “I don’t want to talk, put me back into my cell.”
\n\nThe alarm system for the building was set off for the day and night, a tactic that Eyes on ICE volunteers have witnessed as a means of psychologically torturing the detainees. The alarm is about the volume of a fire alarm in most high schools, but left on for the entire day and night to prevent sleep.
\n\nThough guards initially denied him entry, Senator Andy Kim was eventually able to enter the facility. He spent several hours inside, speaking to dozens of detainees. In a speech he made afterwards, joined by Representative Rob Menendez, Kim confirmed most of the claims of the strikers, including the poor food and water quality, unacceptable sanitary conditions, and reports of mistreatment and medical neglect.
\n\nAnother night passed without incident as the protesters maintained a continuous presence. On Saturdays and Sundays, the facility is open for visitation and families are allowed in. Families continued to come for regular visitation throughout the weekend, bringing children and elders. This gave a familial air to the protest, with children chalking on the driveway leading to the gates and sometimes leading chants.
\n\nOn Saturday evening, Martin’s cell mates reported that ICE agents or guards came to the room to remove Martin to solitary confinement. Each twenty to thirty or more people inside. All thirty of Martin’s cellmates grouped around him and locked arms, refusing to let him be punished for his role in the strike.
\n\nAt about 4 pm on Sunday, May 24, Gaby approached the prison for a scheduled visit with Martin. Once she was inside the fence but had not entered the facility itself, she saw two ICE agents physically carry her husband out of the prison and throw him into the back of one of the white vans used for detainee transfer. Later, when she was eventually permitted to talk with him, she discovered that guards had lured him into leaving his cell by reassuring him that he was going to be released. He followed them to a second room, where ICE officials attempted to interrogate him, then prepared him for transfer and tossed him into a van.
\n\nA call went out to Eyes on ICE volunteers and to various other leftist and aid groups as far afield as New York and Pennsylvania. Because Delaney Hall receives detainees from a large area, this was not just New Jersey’s fight. The message of Eyes on ICE was simple: “They’re retaliating against the strikers, and we won’t let them disappear even a single one until their demands are heard.”
\n\nElected officials who had been planning a congressional oversight visit that week were notified. The US representative for New Jersey, Rob Menendez, arrived later that night for an unannounced visit. He had visited a week prior but had left with the impression that the prison had been prepared in expectation of his inspection. Menendez was allowed into the gates of the prison, but was barred from entry for fourteen hours while a cleaning crew came to dispose of whatever they did not want him to see. He remained in the courtyard in the rain that whole night, trying to check vehicles for transfers and relaying information to protesters outside the gate.
\n\nThe blocking action started immediately with the legal protection of a federal judge’s court order—put in place pending the review of a previously filed Habeas petition barring Martin’s removal from the facility. With the blocking action in place, protesters formed a barrier from orange plastic water tanks commonly used as construction barriers. About 150 protesters stood behind the barrier by 8 pm on Sunday night.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/5.jpg\")
Outside Delaney Hall on the evening of May 24.
\nAs the night wore on, the crowd thinned to about 75 people, but they successfully stopped each attempted transfer from the facility. Eyes on ICE volunteers attempted to persuade the crowd to respect the property boundaries and refrain from physically obstructing the personal vehicles of GEO Group employees. Newark Police were dispatched several times to escort the transport vans past the crowd; people clearly and calmly explained to them that they were participating in an illegal removal. They disengaged at about 11 pm.
\n\nSpirits were high, but several protesters argued over tactics. Many did not understand why volunteers asked that GEO Group vehicles be allowed to leave. The crowd did their best to inspect non-transport vehicles as they exited, but some protesters wanted to limit all vehicle movement in and out. Volunteers with Eyes on ICE repeatedly explained their reasoning for not wanting to engage with the police. Many volunteers had been present for the previous year’s protests at the facilities’ opening and did not want a repeat incident.
\n\nAt several points, GEO employees lurched their vehicles through the crowd, hitting people and almost pinning one against a barrier.
\n\nAt 1:30 am that night, a light rain began to fall. Protesters were formed in two groups, one by the main gate composed of between forty and fifty protesters and a smaller group of about ten by a secondary unused gate a hundred yards to the south, called gate five. It had been almost two hours since the agents attempted any transports, and the energy of the protesters was settling for a night’s vigil.
\n\nSuddenly, approximately twenty ICE agents stormed from the south gate, armed with pepper spray. They shoved through the newly assembled barriers and sprayed several people in the smaller group of sentries. The ICE agents grabbed those who attempted to defend the barrier and threw them to the ground. One woman in her sixties remained at the barrier; three agents shoved her to the ground, picked her up, and threw her back down with considerable force about ten feet away. She was taken to the University Hospital about an hour later for broken ribs and trouble breathing.
\n\nAs soon as they had cleared a pathway, a convoy of ten unmarked vehicles, mostly Jeep compasses, sped out of the facility headed north toward downtown Newark. Later, a suspicion was confirmed that one of the vehicles carried Martin Soto, illegally transporting him to Elizabeth detention center—a smaller ICE facility.
\n\nOnce the vehicle carrying Martin and an escort vehicle were clear of the main body of protesters, the remaining eight cars turned around in the entrance of the Essex County Corrections Facility, a medium-security state prison right next to Delaney Hall. The feds sped recklessly through the protesters on the street, narrowly missing several. They stopped their cars in a line directly in front of the south gate and deployed from their vehicles, one to two agents emerging from each car. Most agents were armed with telescoping batons, and about five carried large cans of pepper spray (likely MK 38, supplied by Safariland).
\n\nThe protesters at the north gate began responding to the ICE agents. Gaby was taken into the hospitality tent and instructed not to leave, as she was four months pregnant. Some protesters stayed behind at the north gate to ensure that the agents were not acting as a decoy. The rest rushed south. Just as they arrived to find that the crew at the south gate had been beaten and sprayed, the agents resumed spraying. However, the parallel parked vehicles on the street partially screened the protesters, and a truck returning from the port with a large shipping container in tow was stopped, further blocking the spray.
\n\nSome protesters and independent photographers ran into the street to confront or photograph the agents. They were sprayed and chased back to the sidewalk, where agents hit several people with batons and sprayed several more at point-blank range. The entire encounter lasted about three minutes from the ICE agents exiting the gate to the moment they returned to their vehicles and sped south for the night.
\n\nThe pepper spray had severe effects, as most of the protesters that evening lacked adequate PPE.
\n\nRepresentative Menendez maintained that he did not see the agents move Martin from the back of the van that he was believed to be in, but Menendez did not claim to have been watching it the whole time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/2.jpg\")
Graffiti directing people in New York City to show up outside Delaney Hall in Newark.
\nThe events of the previous night marked the escalation that set the tone for the following week. A continuous presence of volunteers and protesters maintained the vigil throughout that night; the following morning, approximately ten protesters remained outside the gates of Delaney Hall. Governor Mikie Sherrill was due to arrive at 10 am to attempt entry and give a press briefing at the facility. Menendez remained inside the gates, still barred from entry.
\n\nAt about 7:30 am, a group of ICE agents could be seen staging down Doremus Ave, the road on which Delaney Hall is located. The agents were joined by a BearCat—a police armored personnel carrier. The roughly twenty agents were armed with pepper spray; the agent in the turret of the BearCat sported a FTC PRO pepperball gun.
\n\nThe agents dispersed the last few protesters and tore down the temporary barriers, lifting them into the dumpster beside the south gate. They then staged in front of the gate, standing across from a slowly growing crowd of protesters and journalists.
\n\nGovernor Sherrill arrived with more media in tow to cover her press briefing. She unsuccessfully attempted to enter Delaney Hall, then delivered a speech in front of the gates. Her speech frustrated protesters, as she offered few details about how the strikers’ demands might be met. She also misrepresented some details of the demands and the operations of the facility, suggesting that she had only a superficial understanding of the conflict.
\n\nThe governor departed by 11 am, and tensions between protesters and ICE agents mounted quickly. ICE agents attempted to clear a path through the crowd for a steady stream of transport vehicles. Senator Kim attempted to intervene, negotiating with the ICE agents and the gathering crowd to allow vehicles to pass if he could check them for transfers. Some protesters continued blocking vehicles. For the most part, Kim was denied access to the transport vehicles.
\n\nWhile Kim stood between protesters and the agents, still negotiating, a transport approached from the gates. The crowd pressed forward and the agent on the turret of the BearCat opened fire indiscriminately. Afterwards, Kim reported that he felt the sting of something hitting him in the back, and then a chemical burn in his lungs and eyes. The agents also deployed pepper spray, striking many people, including Kim and several of his staffers, who required eye flushing afterwards.
\n\nKim eventually gained entry to the facility after personally calling the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayn Mullin. This was possible only because of congress is the source of funding for all DHS operations, which secures them legal power of oversight. Afterwards, Kim was able to confirm that Martin Soto had been transferred.
\n\nAfter the melee, the pressure of the crowd diminished as protesters and volunteers regrouped. Throughout the day, reports returned from family that the strikers were being collectively punishment. Most of the strikers were prevented from communicating with anyone outside, including with lawyers or with commissary accounts needed to purchase supplemental food. Some prisoners were forced to stand for extended periods of time, and many were threatened with transfer. Visitation was canceled indefinitely. The strikers reported that they were frustrated that people outside Delaney Hall were focusing on the conditions in the prison, emphasizing their desire for freedom, due process, and the closure of the detention facility.
\n\nThe agents who had attacked the crowd eventually reentered the facility. The rest of the afternoon and evening passed without incident.
\n\nThroughout the afternoon and evening, protesters built a barricade, tearing up cement bricks from a retaining wall between the prison and the sidewalk. They employed additional scrap metal and refuse from the adjacent train tracks to reinforce the barricade.
\n\nOnce again, at 7 am, ICE agents reinforced by a BearCat deployed from the south gate. Using pepper spray and batons, they cleared a path through the crowd of about twenty protesters. Confrontations between protesters and ICE agents continued.
\n\nBy 4 pm, the crowd had grown to about 60 protesters. As the number of protesters grew, more agents appeared, forming a line. They pulled up three vehicles branded with ICE logos. These vehicles are typically not used for regular immigration enforcement operations; they first showed up in Minneapolis during a retaliatory rampage Greg Bovino led on January 13. They staged the vehicles in front of the gates, with the agents shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk facing the protesters assembled in the street.
\n\nAs the sun set at 8 pm, the shoving match between agents and protesters settled into a 30-minute rhythm in which agents repeatedly lunged forward across the five feet separating the two lines. First, some agents would deploy pepper spray while others charged forward holding their batons horizontally as a bar at chest height. Once in contact with the arm-locked crowd, they would shove people to the ground, often swinging the batons at people’s knees. Sometimes this push coincided with vehicles leaving or entering the south gate, but often, there were no vehicles coming; it was as if they were adhering to a schedule.
\n\nThe agents deploying the pepper spray repeatedly sought to pull protesters’ protective masks and goggles away from their faces in order to spray directly into their eyes and mouths. At first, the medics treating those impacted by the pepper spray were baffled by how long the effects lasted and how resistant the spray was to decontamination with soap solution. They eventually concluded that ICE had switched to a pepper-gel formulation, likely to compensate for the persistently windy conditions on Doremus Avenue.
\n\nThree individuals were marked for capture in the course of the night, and agents repeatedly broke through the line of protesters in twos or threes to chase them down. ICE agents incapacitated one of these individuals with a taser, and slammed the other two to the ground. All three were carried through the prison gates. One of the detainees was a volunteer with Eyes on ICE, marked with a red cross and explicitly operating as a medic. The agents flashed their flashlights at him repeatedly, and one protester reported hearing a confirmation of location and target from the agents immediately before they attempted to detain him. Eight agents surrounded and tackled the medic about twenty yards outside the conflict line, and carried him face down back to the prison.
\n\nLater that evening, all three of the people that ICE had captured that day were left under a bridge about two miles away with all of their possessions. The medic was still marked with his red cross. One of the detainees reported being locked in an unventilated van for almost seven hours with his hands restrained and a possible concussion.
\n\nClashes continued through the night, with the agents using copious amounts of pepper spray. By morning, when many of the protesters had dispersed, the BearCat returned. During an outdoor recreation period, one of the detainees called out to the protesters: “Libertad, libertad, libertad!” Guards were observed mocking the prisoners and attempting to goad them into a confrontation, threatening them with large canisters of what volunteers suspected to be tear gas.
\n\nThe detainees who were still able to call their lawyers reported that the labor strike had forced the prison administrators to clean the bathrooms themselves. The strikers were not allowed to leave their rooms, and there were reports of a strong chemical odor emanating from the ventilation pipes. One ambulance left the facility that evening. One of the hunger strikers was released.
\n\nOnce again, the ICE agents adhered to the 30-minute intervals, repeatedly pushing protesters back, often into heavy traffic. Doremus Avenue serves as an industrial artery, with large cargo trucks comprising much of the traffic. ICE agents repeatedly shoved protesters into the wheels of passing trucks. The agents appeared to be attempting to coordinate their attacks with the passing of traffic.
\n\nThe agents mostly used their batons as barring tools to secure space while other agents swung the batons at the knees of protesters. In the course of the day, several protesters required transport to the hospital, suffering nerve and bone damage from beatings or vehicle strikes. The same woman who had been the first casualty of Sunday night required a return trip to the hospital. She was unable to walk.
\n\nThat evening, protesters intensified their defensive strategy, employing shields constructed from traffic cones. More experienced anti-ICE activists from the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, and Chicago arrived to share tactical experience. Activists from Minnesota reported shock at the intensity of violence on display at the gate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/10.jpg\")
Demonstrators confront ICE agents outside Delaney Hall on Wednesday, May 27.
\nGovernor Sherrill held a press briefing on the afternoon of Thursday, May 28, announcing a need for DHS to step back from crowd control functions at the gate and declaring that the state police would take their place the following day. She also announced the establishment of a “First Amendment Zone” to “protect” the protesters. During the day, prison officials spray-painted a line marking the boundary of the property of Delaney Hall. In fact, apart from the private property of the prison, the entire sidewalk and street is public property, and should legally require no special demarcation regarding where people’s rights begin and end.
\n\nAt about 1:30 pm, advocates and family members began receiving calls from detainees relaying that about forty guards from the Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT) had entered their unit and began beating selected targets among the strikers, with ICE agents joining in.
\n\nThis retaliation occurred when CERT entered the striking unit 2a/b to remove a detainee who had been translating for the strikers’ communications with advocates outside. The strikers, gathered in a common area between cells, locked arms around that person. The agents and CERT team beat them and deployed CS gas in the hallways to drive the strikers back into their rooms. Then they opened each door in the unit and sprayed a heavy dose of pepper spray into the poorly ventilated rooms. Four ambulances carried away severely injured detainees later that afternoon, and nearly all of those in the striking women’s unit (unit 1) were transferred out of the prison.
\n\nThe contact between the line of ICE and the line of protesters replicated the established pattern of the previous day, intensifying at sundown, then becoming less frequent in the early morning as the number of protesters dwindled. During the day, the agents used batons less, opting for direct hand-to-hand confrontation. They would grab demonstrators’ clothing or PPE and use it to throw the protester to the ground. The agents appeared to be rotating on a nightly basis; Thursday night’s agents were visibly larger than their predecessors. They bodily lifted smaller protesters in order to throw them at the ground or into oncoming traffic. They continued to use batons, spray, and pepper balls, but to a lesser degree. Once again, a number of protesters were injured and required medical attention.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/11.jpg\")
ICE agents prepare to brutalize protesters outside Delaney Hall on Thursday, May 28.
\nOn Friday, May 29, reports began filtering in that strikers were eating again. The strikers communicated a new demand that outside medical treatment be offered to the members of unit 2a/b who had been beaten.
\n\nA number of Facebook groups announced a counter-protest at the prison planned for Saturday at 10 am. Pro-ICE counter-protesters had been appearing in growing numbers throughout the week, though never exceeding a handful. They typically arrived during the day and stood with the ICE agents, antagonizing the protesters.
\n\nNewark Police, in coordination with New Jersey State Police, began staging at the two roads intersecting Doremus about a half mile north and south of the prison. They put new barriers in place. The ICE agents were still visibly staged at the mouth of the south gate. An additional line of state and local police formed between the protesters and the ICE agents, facing the protesters. They conducted a few arrests, but much of the day passed without conflict. All non-commercial traffic was blocked from Doremus Avenue, forcing protesters and volunteers to park on the perpendicular roads, Roanoke Avenue and Wilson Avenue.
\n\nAs 9 pm approached, the crowd of protesters, holding steady at about one hundred people, received warning that they would be subject to arrest if they remained. State Police in riot gear closed off both ends of the street. At about 9:30 pm, a third line of State Police in riot gear appeared 300 yards north of the gathered protesters. The protesters formed their own line, facing north, and waited to see what sort of assault was coming.
\n\nAssuming a shield wall formation, the police began shooting mortar-fired tear gas behind the assembled protesters, into the direction that they were ordering the protesters to disperse. The police advanced, attacking the protesters with flash-bang grenades and less-lethal 40 mm foam rounds. Throughout the confrontation, they also used stinger pellet rounds, while ICE agents fired pepper balls from their position on the flank of the retreating protesters. The CS gas was largely ineffective, as the wind was blowing the gas from the south to the north, where the police line was formed. Mounted horse units moved in front of the advancing shield wall and charged the slowly retreating protesters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/7.jpg\")
A photo supplied by a protester showing spent munitions that the New Jersey State Police fired at demonstrators on the night of May 29.
\nState Police fired tear gas directly at independent media journalists, hitting at least one person. Reporters from national media outlets suddenly disappeared into their vehicles and did not film the advance. It is possible they were instructed to do so ahead of time. As the protesters made contact with the shield wall of police, some shoving took place. The protesters eventually dispersed, retreating to their vehicles. Police arrested some of them. It was eventually learned from the police that the goal of the action was to open space for a shift change at the prison.
\n\nThe New Jersey Attorney General released a statement about the clashes between State Police and the protesters, characterizing the protesters as the instigators. Absurdly, they accused the protesters of attacking the police with tear gas, directly contradicting ample video documentation of what actually happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/1.jpg\")
A Department of Homeland Security vehicle damaged during a protest outside Delaney Hall on May 29.
\nNewark Mayor Ras Baraka announced a 9 pm curfew, calling for “order” in the streets. Newark Police erected metal corral barriers in front of their line facing the street and created a separation between the designated spaces for protest and counter-protest.
\n\nOver two hundred people assembled, despite the ban on parking on the entire street. Several hundred police were present as well, from multiple departments, both local and state.
\n\nAll this time, the volunteers at the hospitality tent had been organizing to receive people as they were released, as between one and three detainees had been released each day over the preceding three days. Volunteers also continued organizing peaceful protest events including prayer circles, singing, and dancing. Conflicts continued between volunteers and protesters who wanted to block vehicles. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America had been called to the protest by the Eyes on ICE volunteers, with the request to train and assist in marshalling the crowd.
\n\nAt the most, between twenty and thirty individuals participated in the counterprotest. About eight of them claimed to represent the Proud Boys, arriving in shirts and masks branded with their signature logo. One carried a bottle of bear mace. No physical confrontations occurred and they eventually left at about 2 pm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/8.jpg\")
Outside Delaney Hall on the afternoon of Saturday, May 30. Photograph by Fizzy Fox Photographer.
\nThe rest of the day passed without incident until the 9 pm curfew. Once again, the State Police staged to the north; but this time, they deployed the shield wall to the south of the crowd. They advanced on the crowd the same way they had the previous night, firing tear gas over the heads of protesters while throwing gas canisters and flash-bang grenades in front of them. Horse units deployed again, but this time, the protesters were less willing to give ground.
\n\nPolice pushed the protesters back to the part of the street directly in front of the south gate. At that point, Newark Police were attempting to hold the barrier fences between the police line and the street, perpendicular to the advancing shield wall. None of the local police were equipped with PPE; they began choking and covering their faces with their uniforms as clouds of gas wafted into their line. Protesters grabbed the dividing fence and pulled it away from the police, repurposing it as a barrier between themselves and the advancing shield wall. The Newark Police retreated into the prison gates.
\n\nThis time, protesters clashed more directly with the State Police, pushing back with makeshift shields and holding on to the barriers that they had pulled away from the local police. The police used same crowd control weapons again, eventually forcing the crowd of people north toward Roanoke Avenue. They made about a dozen arrests as the crowd retreated and inflicted severe injuries on several protesters, primarily by means of rubber bullets and other less-lethal rounds but also by slamming their shields into protesters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/9.jpg\")
A confrontation outside Delaney Hall on the evening of Saturday, May 30. Photograph by Fizzy Fox Photographer.
\nAs the line of conflict moved past the hospitality tent, the police targeted several volunteers with Eyes on ICE and its affiliated aid organizations for arrest.
\n\nThe protesters slowly backed down Doremus until they reached the intersection of Roanoke and Doremus, where a second shield wall of riot police was waiting. The police stopped there and faced the remaining protesters for almost half an hour while the protesters led chants and gave speeches. Someone started a fire using the tires and debris scattered over the road. The protesters chanted “When the streets get hot, ICE MELTS! When the streets burn, ICE MELTS!” as they prepared for what appeared to be a kettling action.
\n\nThe confrontation fizzled when a person in a wheelchair, accompanied by someone pushing it, approached the police line and began asking to be let through. Both people identified themselves as press; one was an Associated Press photographer and the other, a New York Times reporter. Both were displaying press credentials on lanyards. The person in the wheelchair informed the police that their knee was broken and they needed to pass the shield wall to reach immediate medical attention. The police were silent.
\n\nThis encounter lasted for ten minutes, with the protesters offering to back up to convince the police to open a passage for the injured person. With no audible instructions from the police, the journalists continued to plead; eventually, the police opened a small hole in their line. The injured person asked several times if it was safe to approach; the police gave no discernible answer. Eventually, without instruction from the police, the two passed through the opening. Police issued warnings to the remaining protesters, arresting and charging a few of them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/12.jpg\")
A fire down the street from Delaney Hall on the evening of Saturday, May 30.
\nFar fewer protesters arrived on Sunday, May 31. The entire street was closed to nonessential traffic. Those who did show up stood at the intersections with Roanoke to the north or Wilson to the south. For the first time, police did not let in volunteers to receive released detainees.
\n\nAt midday, Governor Sherrill held a press briefing, announcing a coordinated effort to cooperate with local police to take over and eventually close Delaney Hall through legal means.
\n\nAs the curfew approached, between fifty and sixty protesters gathered at the intersection of Wilson and Doremus, facing the State Police at the new roadblock. Some protesters pleaded with the police to reconsider their actions, informing them that the protesters were unarmed and holding their hands up to demonstrate this. At one point, people on foot who had traveled to Doremus to visit friends in the Essex County Corrections Facility walked into the middle of the standoff and, not knowing what exactly was going on, joined the protesters. They down sat in front of the protesters, who gave them helmets to protect them from less lethal munitions.
\n\nAll of the medics departed, pleading with the protesters to do the same, arguing that they had sustained too many injuries and arrests to remain in danger.
\n\nAt about 10 pm, the police began firing rubber bullets sporadically. Officers could be seen coordinating to target specific protesters. Some protesters began singing, “All that we are saying is give peace a chance,” hands raised in the air. Police received the order to advance and began rushing toward the protesters, shooting rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades. The protesters turned and ran.
\n\nSynchronizing their movements, the police encircled the retreating crowd with a shield line. They formed a half circle around the protesters, backing them up against a wall. For ten minutes, they periodically picked off protesters at the edge of the kettle. Four police officers seized one of the people who had happened upon the protest while on their way to visit the Essex facility, dragging him into the wall of shields in a seated position. The wall of police closed around him, concealing the officers as they beat and pepper-sprayed him.
\n\nThe police closed in three steps in unison. Then they announced that individuals with “verified” press credentials would be allowed to leave. An officer checked press passes as at least ten independent journalists left the kettle.
\n\nAfter pushing the journalists to a distance of over a hundred yards away, the police mass-arrested the remaining detainees. They made a total of sixty-four known arrests that night, including mutual aid volunteers. All the arrestees were held overnight and released with court summonses after twenty hours in custody. Most of the charges were “disorderly persons” and resisting arrest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/13.jpg\")
Demonstrators use traffic cones to attempt to extinguish tear gas canisters on the night of May 30. We recommend immersing canisters in water to extinguish them; you can learn about how to do so safely here.
\nThe next day, Mayor Baraka announced that he would not be participating in cooperation with the State Police or ICE. He cited the misuse of police force, claiming that it was putting Newark’s own officers in danger.
\n\nGovernor Sherrill also made an announcement, presenting a plan to close Delaney Hall by bringing a lawsuit against GEO Group for illegally barring state inspectors from accessing the facilities’ medical units, bathrooms, and sleeping areas. She characterized the Eyes on ICE volunteers who had been rendering mutual aid and legal assistance to detainees and their families as “peaceful protesters, there for the past year,” implying that the Radical Hospitality Tent was some sort of state-sanctioned, palatable protest center. This is how her remarks were reported on outlets like Fox News. She also announced that she would be handing management of the street over to the Newark Police and withdrawing most of the State Police.
\n\nOn Monday, as a limited number of Eyes on ICE volunteers were allowed back to the tent, they discovered investigative units from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations inside, ransacking it. The agents had overturned everything inside the tent; many items were missing including diapers, an electric cooler, announcements of prayer gatherings posted on a bulletin board, and personal possessions.
\n\nThe hospitality tent still stands, though it will take professional cleaning crews to decontaminate it of CS gas residue. The volunteers are exhausted, but those who were arrested have been released, albeit with charges. Eyes on ICE continues working to ensure some degree of independent monitoring at the detention facility as well as supporting detainees and their families.
\n\nNew Jersey is still reeling from the week of vicious retaliation for the strike from both the state and federal governments. Narratives about the protests are regularly misrepresented in corporate news outlets. Nonetheless, centrists who were mostly sympathetic to the volunteers before this week have experienced collective disillusionment with state authority, especially with their Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill.
\n\nIt remains to be seen whether conditions will improve for the detainees in Delaney Hall. Yet their story has been elevated to a national audience, forcing another discussion about police violence and immigration enforcement. For now, ICE continues to operate from their field office in downtown Newark at 614 Frelinghuysen Avenue.
\n\nAn increasing number of people have been released from the facility, including some who managed to obtain the attention of congresspeople on oversight visits. Many of those released have expressed profound gratitude for the nationwide expressions of solidarity, and the solidarity of the protesters, which they could hear from within their cells. The strike at Delaney Hall has sparked strikes in other facilities around the country.
\n\nVisitation is set to resume soon with new restrictions. The people who stand at the gates of Delaney Hall, day in and day out, will continue to stand there. Many will continue working to dismantle the unjust immigration system, as they did before the opening of Delaney Hall.
\n\nAnti-ICE protesters will regroup and converge on the next flashpoint, wherever that may be. Their numbers will likely be bolstered by new companions from New York and New Jersey, who will add their recent experience defying ICE to the movement’s collective memory. The fight will continue as they refine their tactics and strategies.
\n\nFollowing last winter’s showdown between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the population of the Twin Cities, momentum is picking up on another front: resistance from within detention facilities. At least 51 people have lost their lives in the custody of ICE since Donald Trump took office, twice as many as died between 2021 and 2024. In response to this tragedy, as well as to unbearable conditions and the looming threat of deportation, detainees and their supporters are staging strikes and protests around the country.
\n\nOne of these fights is playing out at Delaney Hall, a federal detention facility located in Newark, New Jersey. The facility closed in 2017, but the private prison profiteering company GEO Group reopened it in February 2025 in return for a billion dollars of taxpayer money.
\n\nDelaney Hall has been a site of conflict for over a year. On May 9, 2025, a confrontation took place between ICE agents and Democratic politicians attempting to inspect the facility. On June 12, 2025, after detainees reported unacceptable conditions and lack of food, raucous solidarity demonstrations took place outside it. During an uprising inside the facility, four prisoners escaped after breaking through a sheet-rock exterior wall.
\n\nThis month, on May 22, 2026, more than 300 detainees at Delaney Hall launched a hunger and labor strike, citing rotten food and lack of medical care and legal resources. In response, hundreds of protesters mobilized outside the federal detention center, building barricades and blockading the exits in order to stop ICE from removing strike organizers from the facility. Federal officers responded by firing pepper balls and other projectiles at demonstrators, tear-gassing protesters, and once again attacking a politician who visited the facility in an effort to report on the conditions within.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/2.jpg\")
\nThe strike in New Jersey is part of a growing wave of actions across the US. In Southern California, at least 20 detainees are participating in a hunger strike at the Desert View Annex, where previous hunger strikes have occurred. Four people have died at that facility since it, too, reopened in 2025. Detainees are also participating in a hunger strike at the neighboring Adelanto ICE Processing Center.
\n\nDetainees held inside Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas have also announced a hunger strike. Last summer, Texan authorities sought to make an example of demonstrators who held a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center, leading to a high-profile case that Trump’s supporters intend to use to set new precedents in repression. The hunger strike currently unfolding at Prairieland highlights why those demonstrators went there in the first place.
\n\nIn New Mexico, Rogelio Bolufé launched a hunger strike to protest employees of CoreCivic, the company operating the private prison, seizing his legal documents. In retaliation for launching the strike, authorities transferred Bolufé to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. The Northwest Detention Center, which is also owned by GEO Group, has itself been the scene of ongoing protests, acts of resistance, and hunger strikes for many years.
\n\nOn May 19, the Tacoma-based group La Resistencia released a statement from detainees, announcing the formation of “La Union de Secuestrados por ICE (USI),” the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. Over 140 members of the USI from both Torrence County and NWDC signed the letter, declaring that they “firmly denounce that the current operations against immigrants are not driven by security concerns… but rather by a system that has turned human suffering into a business.”
\n\nMeanwhile, private prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic are reporting record profits. Following the ignominious departures of the officials previously leading ICE, Trump tapped David Venturella—a former GEO Group executive who previously oversaw contracts for detention centers. Venturella is best known for helping to imprison and then deport the ex-girlfriend of Paolo Zampolli, a Trump associate linked to Jeffrey Epstein. It could not be clearer that what Trump calls “the largest deportation program in the history of America” is above all a means to enrich his allies in the private prison industry.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/5.jpg\")
“The ones who remained with ICE over the past year are there because they want to kidnap children, to pepper-spray grandmothers, to murder mothers like Renee Good and nurses like Alex Pretti. Not just for the money, but for the thrill of kidnapping, torturing, and killing with impunity. Every single one of them. The others already quit.”
\nAt Delaney Hall, hundreds of protesters have been mobilizing alongside family members of those locked inside to support those on strike. They have rallied in support of detainees every day for several days now. According to one report,
\n\n\n\n\nOn Friday morning, at a small rally organized by Gabriela Soto—a rising immigrants’ rights advocate who’s married to Martin Soto, a Peruvian man detained at Delaney since February—several men held at the center spoke to the crowd via video chat.
\n\nOne man said he and the nearly 300 others in his unit at the facility had decided to “stop eating and stop working” indefinitely until the inhumane conditions inside the facility improve. “But that’s not all we demand,” he said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom.”
\n
With pressure building, protests grew over the weekend, pushing a Democratic politician to tour the facility. The senator reported on the horrific conditions inside which include rotten food, lack of access to medical care, and echoed calls for the facility to be shut down.
\n\nMartin Soto is one of the organizers at the center of the strike. He was scheduled to be released on Sunday night. However, it soon became clear that ICE was attempting to move him to another facility in an effort to break the strike. According to another report,
\n\n\n\n\nWord of Martin’s supposed release reached [Soto’s wife] Gabriela, who immediately went to Delaney Hall… While she waited to greet Martin and bring him home, Gabriela instead saw guards put him in the van. Sally Pillay, an advocate with Eyes on ICE NJ, was with Gabriela at the time and previously described the scene to Gothamist.
\n\n“ We ran out [to] the van. [Martin] was banging onto the van. I clearly saw him in the van. He was the only one in the vehicle that they were trying to take out,” Pillay said. “He was still wearing his uniform. He was shackled, but he was banging furiously. He could see [Gabriela]. She was running frantically in and around the van.”
\n\nProtesters outside the fence quickly realized ICE was attempting to move Martin, and they formed a human chain in front of the gate to prevent the van from leaving. Word of the transfer attempt spread rapidly online, and the crowd of protestors grew throughout the evening.
\n\nThe effort forced the van to retreat, thwarting Martin’s transfer temporarily. Minogue declares in the filing that when Martin was brought back inside Delaney Hall, he was thrown to the ground, accused of damaging the transfer van, and placed in solitary confinement.
\n
Further protests took place on Monday, May 25, as demonstrators looking for Soto attempted to block and inspect every vehicle leaving the facility. Then it came out that Soto had been transferred to the Elizabeth Detention Center, also located in New Jersey. According to a filing from his attorney, “[Martin] remains housed in solitary confinement conditions and wildly restricted to access to counsel as well as terminated visitation for his family.” Clashes with federal law enforcement nonetheless continued.
\n\nOfficials in the Trump administration have held to their longstanding policy of blatantly lying about resistance to ICE, with acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis declaring that “There is NO hunger strike at Delaney Hall. There are NO subprime conditions or abuse at the facility.” Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement maintaining that “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.”
\n\nIn another letter from strikers inside Delaney Hall, prisoners addressed those demonstrating outside the prison walls: “We appreciate the support of everyone who is protesting outside the facility. We want you to know that you give us strength and determination to keep going. Please, DON’T GIVE UP!”
\n\nOn Tuesday night, clashes between federal officers and demonstrators intensified as federal agents attempted to move detainees out of the facility, repeatedly pepper-spraying and beating protesters. Nonetheless, protesters held their ground, linking arms and pushing the agents back again and again.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/4.jpg\")
An anti-fascist flag at the barricades outside Delaney Hall.
\nThe clashes taking place in New Jersey represent the first large-scale public resistance to mass deportation since Donald Trump fired Greg Bovino and Kristie Noem in response to outrage over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The new secretary of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, has sought to remove the agency from the spotlight, hoping that keeping a lower profile will diminish popular resistance. Even Stephen Miller, the white nationalist and former college buddy of neo-Nazi activist Richard Spencer, has begun avoiding media coverage in order to dodge pushback against his efforts to build a white ethno-state.
\n\nYet people may not forget ICE so easily. Across the US, people have been mobilizing against proposed ICE warehouse prisons. The fight against Delaney Hall could return ICE to the headlines.
\n\nAs social media pundits and corporate media outlets turn their attention to the upcoming midterm elections, it is crucial to mobilize against ICE detention facilities in solidarity with those locked within them. This is an opportunity to keep the atrocities ICE is perpetrating in the thoughts of the general public—both to ensure that the plight of detainees and other immigrants are not forgotten under this or any future administration, and also because ICE agents will likely form the shock troops of any effort to use force to preserve Donald Trump’s control over the government. We should gather outside Delaney Hall and other detention centers around the country and aid the families of those who are imprisoned within them.
\n\nSupporting the resistance of detainees is a way to show that we cannot be intimidated, that solidarity is ultimately a more powerful force than greed or fear. We must stand together against this autocratic regime, from both sides of the detention centers’ walls, or be defeated and disappear behind them one by one.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/1.jpg\")
\nSome printable materials relevant to the hunger strikes inside ICE detention centers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/support-the-hunger-strikes.png\")
Detainees are engaged in hunger strikes in several facilities. This poster is circulating in support of them.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/usi-kidnapped-by-ice-poster-english.png\")
A printable version of the statement from the Union de secuestrados de ICE (USI)—the union of those kidnapped by ICE. The logo and artwork arrived with the original handwritten statement.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/usi-kidnapped-by-ice-poster-espanol.png\")
“Comunicado Oficial de USI—Union de secuestrados de ICE.” En Español.
\nWe Demand Freedom: Fourth Letter from Delaney Hall, May 31, 2026
\nThey Escalate, We Escalate: A Short History of the Fight against ICE in the Twin Cities
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/3.jpg\")
\n Our comrades at Kaos Editorial have published a Spanish-language book collecting our coverage of Trump’s return to power and popular resistance to the violence of border enforcement, entitled FUCK ICE: Luchas contra la política migratoria de Trump en Estados Unidos.
\n\nYou can order the book online here. You can download a digital version here:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the book.
\nFrom their description:
\n\n\n\n\nThis book is a compilation of texts originally written by individuals associated with the American [sic] collective CrimethInc. They contextualize Joe Biden’s downfall, chart the rise of Donald Trump’s neo-fascism, and analyze the expansion of ICE in the US. This is accompanied by chronicles of the various mobilizations and demonstrations that participants have organized in response to the repeated murders of those who have confronted fascist racism in recent times.
\n
To order copies for distribution, please contact the publishers.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/2.png\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/3.png\") \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/4.png\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/5.png\") \n | \n
You can find the book on archive.org here and on our site here.
\n\nIf you are involved in an anarchist publishing project in Latin America and you want the printer files so you can produce a version of this book for your region, please contact us.
\n\nThanks to comrades from A Planeta and other projects for the assistance with translation into Spanish.
\n\nFrom the introduction:
\n\n\n\n\nA few years ago, amid the fervent crowds taking to the streets of many of the world’s metropolises, it would have been hard to imagine things could get any worse. And yet, that time has arrived.
\n\nThanks to the failure of global social democracy to maintain the bare minimum of the welfare state without any real change, our times are drawing dangerously close to the dark ages of the past. And thanks also to the elites who have rejected the idea of a more humane capitalism or a green transition, the most rancid and archaic form of fascism is making a comeback.
\n
On May 18, 2026, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, two teenagers attacked San Diego’s largest mosque. They murdered three people before killing themselves. This is not just another episode of gun violence; it is an aspect of the joint terror campaign that the Trump administration and its supporters are waging against us from both within the state and outside it.
\n\nAll evidence suggests that the tragedy in San Diego is the latest in an ongoing series of white supremacist shootings. According to news reports, one of the shooters “left [a] suicide note that contained writings about racial pride”; the words “hate speech” were written on one of the firearms used in the attack. Anti-Muslim writings were reportedly found in the attackers’ vehicle. A photo is circulating that shows an “SS” sticker on a gas canister that the attackers used. The attack seems to have been at least partially inspired by the anti-Muslim Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019, which left 49 people dead and almost 100 injured
\n\nThis comes amid a year-long uptick in both autonomous far-right violence and state repression targeting immigrants and anti-ICE protesters. And at the same time, Donald Trump has been promoting the blatantly false narrative that those who oppose this violence are the real threat to the general public. For example, in their “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy,” the Trump administration alleges that “anarchists and anti-fascists” represent one of the “three major types of terror groups” endangering the public, alongside “narcoterrorists”—which, for all intents and purposes, now simply means whichever unfortunate fishermen Pete Hegseth chooses to murder on a given week—and, unsurprisingly, “Islamist terrorists.”
\n\nThe tragedy in San Diego once again shows how the institutions of power encourage far-right terror while seeking to smear anti-authoritarian protesters and social movements as the dangerous ones. In fact, those who are taking action to oppose fascism are the only ones who are responding appropriately to the dangers of our time.
\n\nRacist violence has played a fundamental role in shaping the United States for centuries, from the wave of terror that the Ku Klux Klan used to suppress Reconstruction to the bombing that the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh carried out in Oklahoma City. Today, there is no longer any distance between the Republican Party and the openly fascist street organizations through which it seeks to execute its agenda. Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party works directly with Proud Boys, neo-Nazi “groypers,” and the Christian Nationalist movement, endeavoring to popularize and weaponize anti-immigrant sentiments and conspiracy theories such as the “Great Replacement.”
\n\nPromoted by ruling-class institutions like the Republican Party, reactionary tech billionaires like Elon Musk, and elite propagandists like Tucker Carlson, the “Great Replacement” conspiracy seeks to channel anger originally provoked by the consequences of capitalist globalization and a declining standard of living against poor migrant laborers who are themselves among the worst impacted. This narrative only pretends to challenge the power of the billionaire elites. In fact, it is designed to excuse and defend it.
\n\nThe “Great Replacement” conspiracy continues to motivate horrific violence against working-class people, taking the pressure off politicians and capitalists. The attack in San Diego is only one of many mass shootings that fascists have recently carried out in the US. Alongside it, we can count the massacre that the neo-Nazi Dylan Roof perpetrated in a South Carolina church in 2015, the murder of Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the slaughter of working-class Latinos in Texas in 2019, and the attack on working-class Black community members at a grocery store in New York in 2022.
\n\nThe bloodshed shows no signs of slowing down. This past week, someone murdered a trans student on a college campus in Washington, a man in Pennsylvania was arrested for threatening to carry out attacks, and in Tennessee, where racist politicians have just redistricted to suppress Black voters following the elimination of the Voting Rights Act, a white supremacist live-streamer was arrested after shooting a Black man he had been taunting with racial slurs.
\n\nThese are part of a much broader trend. At the opening of 2025, a veteran blew up his Cybertruck in front of a a Trump high-rise in Las Vegas, leaving behind a manifesto calling for racial violence. In Florida, a Trump-suppporting white nationalist that students reported as part of a local Turning Point USA chapter went on a mass shooting spree at his university. Online followers of neo-Nazi groups carried out numerous school shootings, as did anti-vaxxers and anti-abortion activists, targeting workers at the Center for Disease Control and others.
\n\nAt the same time, neo-Nazi and Proud Boy groups have attempted to attack or intimidate participants in the No Kings and Telsa Takedown demonstrations. Trump supporters have harassed anti-ICE student walkouts, while the state rushed to silence and criminalize those who criticized Charlie Kirk.
\n\nRepublicans are increasingly embracing openly exterminationist rhetoric against Muslims and Black communities. Likewise, they have promoted neo-Nazi conspiracies about Somalian and Haitian communities. Anti-Muslim white nationalists like Laura Loomer have a direct line to Trump.
\n\nThis rhetoric has immediate real-world consequences. According to the LA Times, the San Diego shooting occurred directly on the heels of a far-right smear campaign intended to turn people against Muslims in southern California:
\n\n\n\n\nAmy “Mek” Mekelburg, a social media influencer who frequently propagates anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, had posted on X claiming that plans by the Islamic Society of Orange County to expand would create a “parallel” society and “Sharia enclave” where US laws do not apply, in service of the “Islamization” of Orange County.
\n
The Trump administration directly benefits from far-right violence. They hope that the threat of such violence will frighten people out of taking the streets, out of standing up for themselves. Just as often, however, their strategy has backfired, discrediting Trump and his allies and convincing people that they must come together and take action before things get even worse.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/19/1.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
\nFrom 2016 to 2020, hundreds of thousands of people across the United States mobilized against the threat that the far right posed under the first Trump administration. At the time, Trump and his supporters were doing their best to provide cover and support to the so-called “Alt-Right” while attempting to demonize and prosecute antifascists. After a neo-Nazi murdered Heather Heyer during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, people flooded into the streets in popular mobilizations that succeeded in shutting down the emerging fascist threat. Neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys were consistently out-mobilized; for example, in Portland, Oregon, thousands bravely stood strong in the face of violent attacks from both the far right and the police.
\n\nIn 2023, anti-fascists mobilized across the US again in response to neo-Nazis and other far-right groups attacking drag shows and other queer- and trans-inclusive events around the country. Many helped to organize security for Pride demonstrations and similar community gatherings.
\n\nEvery time that popular community mobilizations have gotten off the ground, they have shown themselves to be more powerful than far-right movements, despite the fact that the latter receive direct financial, logistical, and media support from Republicans and billionaires like Elon Musk. Musk himself spent tens of billions of dollars to take over Twitter for the express purpose of preventing it from serving as a space where people could organize to resist fascism. As soon as he secured control of the platform, he immediately banned us as well as other leading anarchist and anti-fascist accounts. Yet none of these efforts have succeeded in giving fascism the upper hand in the streets, even to this day.
\n\nNow that the Trump administration is losing ground, once more, we will likely see them return to their playbook of fomenting street violence, seeking to tie down their opponents in struggles that do not engage the state itself. They are doing everything they can to shift public attention from the gruesome brutality of ICE agents to the supposed threat represented by anti-fascists. Yet as Trump and his cronies become less and less popular, being among their most visible enemies will afford opportunities, as well.
\n\nWe cannot protect ourselves by attempting to stay out of harm’s way—if we cede the streets to them, we will only see their joint campaigns of ethnic cleansing and political repression intensify, backed by billions of tax dollars stolen from us and the ill-gotten fortunes of powerful tech giants. As Trump continues to lose popularity, he will become more violent and unpredictable; we recall how in 2020, Trump goaded US Marshals into shooting the anti-fascist Michael Reinhoehl down in cold blood. Nonetheless, resistance is our best hope. The only way out is through.
\n\nWe must convey to the general public that white supremacist mass shooters and ICE agents are part of the same project, and only mass action can defeat them. This was true in the Twin Cities last winter and it remains true today. As data centers, ICE concentration camps, and Flock surveillance systems proliferate, we must articulate and demonstrate what solidarity and community defense means in practice. We can do this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/19/2.jpg\")
\nIn the following analysis, Ayman Makarem of the From the Periphery media collective reviews a century of colonial violence in Palestine and Lebanon to illuminate the current Israeli occupation and what it would take to resist it.
\n\nYou can watch a video version of this essay here.
\n\nFor the third time in my relatively short life, Israel has invaded my country. They have made it clear that they want to establish a long-term occupation of Southern Lebanon. This is not the first time that this has happened; several\nmedia organizations and social\nmedia accounts have published timelines of Israeli invasions and attacks on Lebanon. These timelines usually focus on major flashpoints like the 1982 or 2006 invasions, but fall short of demonstrating the full breadth and continuity of Israeli violence targeting Lebanon. Lebanon’s encounter with Zionism goes much further back than most know, predating the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
\n\nLet’s start with Moshe Dayan.
\n\nMoshe Dayan was an early Zionist leader, born to settler parents in Palestine in 1915. He was present at practically every major landmark event in the Zionist colonization of Palestine. He joined the Haganah—a Zionist militia in Mandatory Palestine—at the age of 21, participated in crushing the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, and fought in the 1948 war, expelling swathes of Palestinians during the Nakba. From the 1950s until his death in 1981, he moved between high-level positions within the military and then within successive Israeli governments, serving as Minister of Defense in the late 1960s.1
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/14.jpg\")
Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense, circa 1967.
\nDayan encapsulates a lot about the state of Israel. A number of quotes attributed to him indicate considerable self-awareness about what he and his colleagues were doing. The words of early Zionist leaders like Dayan cut through the smokescreen of contemporary Zionist propaganda. Here, he describes the foundation of the state of Israel:
\n\n\n\n\n“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is, a Jewish state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”2
\n
He said this as a person proud of his accomplishments. For those who know the history of Palestine and its encounter with Zionism, that story is very familiar—it’s just notable that it’s coming from a Zionist leader. However, Dayan also said things that reveal parts of the history that are more obscure, parts that are muddied by the tendency to focus on major flashpoints like the Nakba or the Six-Day War.
\n\nFor instance, in the early 1950s, when he was a Commander of the Southern Command, Dayan developed a policy of dealing with what they called “infiltrators”—in some cases, expelled Palestinians trying to return home or collect things that were left behind when they were forced off their land; in other cases, unorganized Fedayeen militants who would “infiltrate” their own homeland and carry out operations against the nascent Israeli state. This is how he described his policy:
\n\n\n\n\n“Retaliation is the only method that has proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side. If we try to search for that Arab, it has no value. But if we harass the nearby village… then the population there comes out against the infiltrators… The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective… There are no other effective methods.”3
\n
There’s another term for what Dayan describes: terrorism. Or still another: war crimes. Dayan’s words shine a light on the periods between the major ruptures, a history that is often forgotten. Between 1949 and 1956, there were tens of thousands of “infiltrations” every year, and Israelis carried out hundreds of bloody retaliatory raids in other parts of Palestine, specifically Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in Jordan and Lebanon.4
\n\nIn 1955, to put an end to the returnees and attacks from the north, Moshe Dayan, then Chief of Staff under Moshe Sharett’s government, proposed a plan that shocked even his Prime Minister:
\n\n\n\n\n“All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.”5
\n
This is precisely what the Israelis did 23 years later in 1978, when Dayan himself was Foreign Minister. A few years earlier, in 1974, Moshe Dayan had summarized his goals thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon.”6
\n
Moshe Dayan speaking to the press as Minister of Defense in 1974.
\nIt is difficult to not see the parallels with what the Israelis are saying today. It has now been two and a half years since the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, and Israeli leaders have made statements like this over and over again. Since March 2 of this year, Israel has displaced\nover a million people, claiming\nthey will never be allowed to return, destroyed\nwhole villages, invaded with ground troops, destroyed hospitals and schools, killed\nentire families, killed\nmedics, and journalists, and academics. Put these together and they spell out one word: genocide. Their main targets are Shia Lebanese.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/5.jpg\")
Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, killed by Israel on April 22, 2026 in a double-tap strike.
\nWith full US backing, the Israeli government is pursuing a policy of genocide in Lebanon. In the last two months, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued not one, but two red-flag warnings of genocide in Lebanon.
\n\nThis is an existential war on Lebanon. It has been going on for decades, but now it is reaching its logical end. The Israeli government aims to tear Lebanon apart, to dismantle its capacity to exist. To understand any of this, we have to examine the joint history of Lebanon and Zionism.
\n\nThe term Lebanese Entity many not be as familiar as the term Zionist Entity, but it emerges from an analysis of the formation of the state of Lebanon that recognizes the colonial relations that formed it and its many structural and exclusionary flaws. These aspects make Lebanon particularly vulnerable to exploitation by the Israelis as well as other regional powers. They have kept Lebanon in a state of perpetual crisis since its foundation.
\n\nHere, we will outline a chronological history of the two entities and how they intersect. As an aid, we offer this timeline, which includes Israeli attacks on and invasions of Lebanon alongside key regional events throughout the period that are essential to understanding this history.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/israels-long-war-on-lebanon.jpg\")
Click on the thumbnail to access the timeline at full scale.
\nWhat Lebanon is experiencing today is not just the consequence of Hezbollah’s actions or the Iran War or the presence of Palestinian resistance in Lebanon; it is the culmination of decades of continuous assaults by the state of Israel on our sovereignty itself. We must understand Lebanon as a key vector of the European colonization of this entire region, which the state of Israel has extended and expanded.
\n\nWe begin this story in the midst of the First World War with the secretly drawn up Sykes-Picot\nagreement, which mapped out Britain and France’s ambitions in case of a victory over the Ottoman Empire—a victory that came to pass a few years later. What followed remains one of the classic examples of white men carving up Indigenous land in Asia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/7.jpg\")
The French mandate of Lebanon and Syria.
\nBoth the Lebanese and Zionist entities emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Both had previously existed as ideas but only became manifest at this point. Lebanon as a state was devised in this period by the French. Palestine, for its part, was taken over by the British, who openly declared their intention to create a Jewish Homeland in Palestine for European Zionists. The key document here is the Balfour\nDeclaration, which was drafted the same year as Sykes-Picot.
\n\nThe region that the two colonial powers carved up had been known for centuries as Bilad al Sham, which is often translated as “the Levant,” but more precisely translates to “the countries of the left.” If you consider the Arab Hejaz [the western coastal region of Saudi Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located] to be the center, which it was for centuries of Islamic rule beginning in the 7th century, when you look east towards the sun, Bilad al Sham will be on your left, and Yemen (from the Arabic word Yameen, “right”) on your right. Colloquially, al Sham is also an Arabic name for Damascus, as it was one of the most important cities in the region.
\n\nFor hundreds of years, Bilad al Sham passed from the hands of one ruler to another. Then, in 1918, European forces conquered the land for the first time since the Crusades. This is where our story really begins.
\n\nIn 1920, in collaboration with local Maronite elites in Mount Lebanon, France created what is known as Greater Lebanon, a colonial state under French supervision. Before this, the name “Lebanon” referred to the Mount Lebanon range. To this day, older British people sometimes call Lebanon “The Lebanon,” like “The Ukraine” or “The Gambia.” It’s because those names referred to a geographical location rather than a state.
\n\nGreater Lebanon was an expansion of Mount Lebanon to include areas around it, specifically the coastal cities of Beirut, Saida, and Tripoli, as well as Akkar to the north, Bekaa to the east, and Jabal Amel to the south. The idea was to separate Lebanon from Syria and the rest of Bilad al-Sham in order to create a viable state led by a majority Christian Maronite population, as the latter was friendly to the French. Annexing those other territories ensured enough farmland, access to ports, and surplus populations for this new state. It also meant access to key water sources such as the Litani River.7
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/23.jpg\")
Lebanon was created as an expansion of Mount Lebanon via the annexation of the coastal cities—Akkar to the north, the Bekaa to the east, and Jabal Amel to the south.
\nThe British Historian, Patrick Seale, summarizes thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“[Greater Lebanon] was intended as a haven for the predominant Maronite community, France’s main clients, but, in terms of geopolitics, it was also conceived as a French fortress in the eastern Mediterranean, which could be used against European rivals as well as against Arab nationalists of the Syrian interior.”8
\n
This is the origin of the Lebanese entity. A Maronite Christian state built to advance the strategic interests of France in the region.
\n\nDuring this same period, another ethnostate was slowly being constructed south of Lebanon. But instead of allying with an existing local community, the British opted for settler colonialism, aiming to make European Zionists the dominant force in Palestine.
\n\nThe contempt that these white, colonial Europeans felt towards Indigenous populations was clear not just in these actions but also in how they described what they were doing. For example, in response to objections to using the new technology of aerial bombardments against civilian populations, Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922, is reported to have said
\n\n\n\n\n“We must reserve the right to bomb ni**ers.”9
\n
Those were the people who were now in charge of Mandatory Palestine. At that point, Zionist colonists had already been settling in Palestine for almost 40 years, though very slowly. With support of the British, that migration increased dramatically, and it soon became evident to the local Palestinian population that the British were giving favorable treatment to the new European Jewish communities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/16.jpg\")
A newspaper cover from Palestine with a cartoon depicting Balfour supporting Jewish migration and industry in Palestine, as well as the disenfranchisement of local populations.
\nExamining maps from 1918 and 1920, we can see the beginnings of the conflict over the southern part of Lebanon. The first map broadly depicts the future state of Israel, as well as Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria, without any defined borders whatsoever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/22.jpg\")
A map from 1918. Those red lines are actually train lines; there are no borders on this map. Though hundreds of miles of railway once ran through Lebanon, they were rendered inoperable by the Lebanese Civil War. The last trains ceased running in the 1990s.
\nThe map from 1920 shows three lines that could define the northern border of the future state of Israel. The first is the Sykes-Picot line; the second is the “suggested” border, extending into Southern Lebanon; the third represents a “Maximum Demand” border engulfing all the territory up to and including the Litani River.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/21.jpg\")
A map from 1920.
\nSykes-Picot wasn’t the final agreement between the French and the British. In 1923, the two powers drafted a more detailed accord, the\nPaulete-Newcombe agreement, defining the borders between Mandatory Lebanon and Palestine more precisely. This agreement moved the borders, placing several Lebanese villages under the authority of the British Mandate. Britain took over about 20 Lebanese villages—including Malakiyya, Saliha, and Hunin, all of which were inhabited by Shia Muslims.
\n\nOver the next twenty years, the colonization of Bilad al-Sham met ongoing resistance. The largest effort to oppose the colonial process during this period was the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939. The British, alongside Jewish settler militias such as the Haganah, employed a tremendous amount of violence to crush the revolt. Yet the rebellion was so powerful that in order to crush it, the British stationed more troops in Palestine than they had in the entire Indian subcontinent.10 Afterwards, they expelled its surviving leaders to neighboring countries.
\n\nWar gripped the region over the following years; it was one of the theatres in which the European powers contended in the Second World War. Lebanon was one of the few places where the British and French fought each other directly. During this period, Allied Forces armed and trained Jewish militiamen like Moshe Dayan; this ultimately left them far better equipped than the national armies in the region.11
\n\nIn the midst of the war, in 1943, after the Vichy Government was defeated in Lebanon, Lebanese elites declared independence from France. But it wasn’t a bitter breakup; they maintained a very friendly relationship with their former colonizers.
\n\nJust after the end of the Second World War, Zionist militias stepped up their own campaign for independence in Palestine. They did so by carrying out terrorist attacks against the British, most notably the 1946 King David Hotel bombing.12 By May 1948, when the British Mandate of Palestine was set to expire, the British were eager to wash their hands of the conflict they had been instrumental in creating.
\n\nThis led to what Arabs call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from Palestine, with at least 100,000 heading to Lebanon. The villages mentioned above—Malakiya, Saliha, and Hunin—were among\nthe destroyed villages whose entire populations were expelled into\nLebanon.
\n\nLebanon participated very little in the war that ensued, known as the first Arab-Israeli war. In most locations, even within Lebanese territory, the Lebanese army withdrew, refusing to fight the Zionists. The only town that saw the Lebanese army resist was Malakiya, a Lebanese village with a predominantly Shia population that had been turned over to British Occupied Palestine. The Lebanese army successfully fended off assault after assault in Malakiya, lost the town, recaptured it, and thereby demonstrated that fighting back was possible. In the end, the Lebanese army only withdrew from Malakiya after intense international pressure.13 An Israeli kibbutz has stood in its place ever since.
\n\nThe Shia Lebanese inhabitants of Malakiyya, like those of the other permanently cleansed villages, became refugees in Lebanon. In fact, they had the\nsame legal status as Palestinians in Lebanon until the 1990s. To both the Zionists who perpetrated the Nakba and the bureaucrats of the Lebanese entity, the Shia of Jabal Amel were no different from the Palestinians.
\n\nZionist forces also carried out attacks in Southern Lebanon, notably during Operation Hiram. Not only did they invade the country, they also committed numerous massacres against Lebanese civilians, such as the\nHula massacre in November 1948, in which they killed approximately 60 civilians. Their forces reached deep into Lebanese territory, as far as the Litani river. Finally, in 1949, Lebanon agreed to an armistice with the state of Israel, which brings us to our first ceasefire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/13.jpg\")
A memorial in the Southern town of Hula with the names of all the martyrs of the Hula Massacre.
\nThe state that was founded through this ethnic cleansing, known to many as the Zionist entity, went on to be an expansionist, ethnonationalist, armed garrison state. This is clear to a lot of people today. But not as many people understand the nature of the state of Lebanon.
\n\nThe defining feature of the Lebanese entity is the political system of sectarianism. In 1943, the ruling Christian Maronite and Sunni elite drafted the\nNational Pact, stipulating that Lebanon should have a Maronite Christian President, a Sunni Prime Minister, and a Shia speaker of the house—an agreement that remains to this day. At the time, the President had tremendous executive power and the Speaker of the House was largely symbolic. Other posts in the government were likewise divided up along sectarian lines, with a majority going to Christian Maronites.
\n\nIt is a mistake to imagine that Lebanon has this sectarian system because of its many religious communities. The sectarian system is not simply an organic expression of the sectarian divisions in the country. It is a system that enabled the local elite from the main sects, with the Maronite elite on top, to become mediators between the colonial powers and the local populations. The Lebanese Marxist intellectual Mehdi Amel offers a concise description of this system:
\n\n\n\n\n“Sectarianism is the particular historical form of the political system through which the Lebanese colonial bourgeoisie exercises its class dominance within a relation of structural dependency on imperialism.”14
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/12.jpg\")
Mehdi Amel, Lebanese Marxist intellectual, 1936-1987.
\nThat might sound like Marxist word soup, but in fact, it is incredibly precise. This system means that different posts in the Lebanese state are divided among the sectarian elite—whether Christian or Muslim—with a disproportionate number of those positions going to Maronite Christians. That elite politics offered continued access to European finance, which came to form the backbone of Lebanon’s economy to the detriment of local productive economic activities like industry and agriculture.15
\n\nAt the level of everyday life, it means that, as citizens, we only exist to the state as members of one sect or another. When I vote in elections, I have to go to my father’s village, and I can only vote for Druze or Christian candidates, because they are the main inhabitants of my area. I don’t exist as a citizen, as an individual, but as a Druze from a specific area. This is somewhat similar to the current system in the state of Israel, where universal citizenship does not exist and the state reduces people to their ethnicity. Ultimately, this system disenfranchises the vast majority of people; it is not even representative.
\n\nThe sectarian system in Lebanon went through several crises in the 1950s and 1960s. But the greatest threat to its existence emerged a decade later: the Lebanese National Movement of the 1970s.
\n\nWe can divide the chief obstacles to the fulfilment of the sectarian system into three distinct aspects of Lebanese society. First, the existence in Lebanon of an entire sect, comprised predominantly of agricultural communities in the South and East, that had practically no representation within the sectarian or oligarchic system: the Shia. Located mostly in the South of Lebanon, in a region known as Jabal Amel, these communities also suffered an economic blow following the creation of the state of Israel, as their economy relied heavily on trade.
\n\nSecond, the real divisions between people were not based on sect, or religion, but on class—and the sectarian elite had no serious plan to deal with the contradictions of colonial or capitalist class divisions, let alone the feudal divisions that still existed.
\n\nMehdi Amel summarizes these first two issues in the same text quoted above:
\n\n\n\n\n“The foremost obstacle was the mass of toilers who belong to the downtrodden ‘sects’ and live either in the countryside or in the clutches of poverty in the capital. As their voices were raised, so did their acts of resistance. They demanded the system be changed, whether by putting an end to sectarian hegemony without destroying the system itself, or by putting an end to the system entirely.”16
\n
And the third major obstacle to the system was the introduction to Lebanon of over 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had been forcibly expelled from their country, most of whom were Sunni Muslim. Not only did this mess up the carefully arranged demographic balance within the country, it also forced Lebanon to reckon with the fact that it is not an island separate from the rest of the region.
\n\nAlmost immediately after their expulsion, unorganized Palestinian Fedayeen militants began carrying out operations against the nascent state built on the ruins of their homeland. Palestinian refugees also tried to return to their homes.17 In Lebanon, the army moved quickly to block these attacks and returnees, fearing Israeli reprisals. They did this by placing\nPalestinian refugee camps under what amounts to martial law, controlling movement and political activity.
\n\nThis was the context in which Moshe Dayan made the statement quoted above about annexing Lebanon up to the Litani river to put an end to these cross-border raids by Palestinian militants. In the end, they didn’t have to do that, as the Lebanese armies proved quite effective in suppressing Palestinian efforts.
\n\nAt the same time, Israel was occupied in conflicts with Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinian territories they had failed to capture in 1948.
\n\nA few key events led to the Israelis focusing more on Lebanon. The first was the Palestinian\nRevolution of 1965, which saw the creation of Fatah, the first serious attempt for Palestinians in exile to unify and organize around armed struggle. The largest organization was the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was mostly based in Jordan at that time but had a strong presence in Lebanon too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/17.jpg\")
A rally involving Palestinian fedayeen militants circa 1965.
\nThe next major development was the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, and with it, the crushing of the hope that Arab nationalist regimes would liberate Palestine. Then, in 1970, Black September in Jordan saw the Jordanian army wage a war against Palestinian militants and expel them to Lebanon. That was when Israel really turned its focus to Lebanon. Wanting to quell assaults from the north, the Israelis begin implementing a multi-pronged strategy.
\n\nFirst, they attacked targets in the areas from which they suspected that assaults might emerge. This went hand in hand with indiscriminate bombing campaigns that did not differentiate between civilian and military targets.
\n\nSecond, Israel intentionally carried out attacks on civilians in order to try to turn them against Palestinian militant groups. For instance, in 1974, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire called the “Olive Truce” in hopes of enabling Lebanese farmers to harvest their olives. Israel violated it after just three days, carrying out ground raids and aerial bombardments.18
\n\nMoshe Dayan had summed up this policy of collective punishment in the 1950s:
\n\n\n\n\n“We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set a high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying… It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce ‘the policy of strength’ toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.”19
\n
And the third strategy that the Israelis implemented in Lebanon was to court Lebanese Maronite collaborators—both in Southern Lebanon and in Beirut. Already in the early 1970s, the Israelis were arming the Phalange, or Kataeb, a far-right Maronite party founded by Pierre Gemayel in 1936 in the image of the Nazi party in Germany.20
\n\nIn response to these conditions and contradictions, in 1969, leftists in Lebanon formed what became known as the Lebanese National Movement. This proved to be the greatest threat to the sectarian system to date. The Lebanese National Movement was an explicitly anti-sectarian, pluralistic movement with strong socialist currents; it was allied with the PLO. They understood that the Lebanese struggle against the sectarian oligarchal system had to be connected with the struggle for Palestinian liberation against Zionism.21
\n\nThe Maronite elite, organized mostly within the Kataeb Party, hated all of this because they had a lot to lose. They blocked any change to the system. The first efforts to change it took the form of political maneuvers; when those failed, armed struggle erupted. This was the backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon, which ignited in 1975. As future president Amin Gemayel put it,
\n\n\n\n\n“We have tried to save institutions from any change. Although violence leads nowhere, it has helped us at least to save what could be saved. It was violence to conserve the system.”22
\n
For its part, Israel had already been supporting the Phalange for years, hosting meetings with their leaders, training their soldiers, and sending them weapons. They preferred the continued domination of the Maronite Christian elite to anything else: not only because of their mutual antagonism to the Palestinians, but also because in many ways, the sectarian system that elevated the Maronite elite to power mirrored their ethnonationalist system more than the pluralistic, leftist, and pro-Palestinian tendencies represented by the Lebanese National Movement.
\n\nWhen war broke out in Lebanon in 1975 while all other fronts functionally closed, Israel turned its full attention to Lebanon. They continued to fund the Kataeb, even though—or because—the Kataeb were massacring Palestinians. In 1976, Israel created what they called the “Good Frontier” in Southern Lebanon as a buffer zone.23 There, they installed Saad Haddad, an officer who defected from the Lebanese army to serve as Israel’s viceroy in South Lebanon. In this collaboration with Saad Haddad, the Israelis could finally fulfill the fantasy that Moshe Dayan had described twenty years earlier.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/18.jpg\")
The collaborator Saad Haddad on a tank in Southern Lebanon with Lebanese and Israeli flags.
\nThree years into the war, in 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in what they called Operation Litani. The Foreign Minister of Israel at the time was Moshe Dayan himself. Many people think of this as the beginning of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon—a period that saw Haddad’s forces commit numerous massacres in the South and solidify his hold in this newly-created buffer zone.24 But Israel’s presence in the rest of the country was short-lived. On October 10, the United States, then under Jimmy Carter, forced a ceasefire deal on Israel, which withdrew. Yet the occupation of the South continued, and so did the resistance against it.
\n\nThat ceasefire played out exactly like the ones we’ve seen more recently. Israel continued bombarding Southern Lebanon and arming their fascist Maronite Christian proxies across the country, while both the Lebanese people and the PLO acted with restraint. Eventually, this became unsustainable. On July 15, 1981, the PLO finally began firing rockets into Israel; Israel responded by carpet-bombing populated areas in the south, attacking Tyre’s port, and setting fire to an oil refinery.
\n\nOn July 24, the US brokered another ceasefire. Again, the PLO abided by it, while Israel violated it repeatedly. Then, on June 6, 1982, when the ceasefire had been in place for almost a year, the Israeli military invaded Lebanon. This time, their excuse was an assassination attempt targeting the Israeli ambassador to the UK, even though the group behind the attempt was openly opposed to the PLO. In fact, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had already been planning the invasion for months.25
\n\nThe 1982 invasion took place on a much larger scale than previous Israeli assaults. It was the first time they crossed the Litani River. The Israelis besieged Beirut and, after bombarding the city and cutting off electricity and water, managed to force a ceasefire on the PLO.26 As part of that ceasefire, the PLO agreed to evacuate Beirut, fulfilling the primary stated aim of the Israeli invasion. But the Israelis didn’t withdraw, because another aim of the invasion was to ensure the election of Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Kataeb Party, as president of Lebanon.
\n\nOn August 23, with Israeli tanks in the streets, Bashir Gemayel was elected president, a terrifying prospect for the Palestinians and the Lebanese left. Two weeks later, Gemayel was assassinated in a car bombing outside his headquarters. The assassin was later identified as a Lebanese Maronite, Habib\nShartouni, a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.
\n\nNonetheless, many who were loyal to Gemayel quickly blamed Palestinians. Christian fascist militias under the protection of the Israelis committed the most notorious massacre of the war, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which the Israelis aided their Christian allies in killing over 2000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
\n\nFollowing this horrific massacre, resistance against the Israeli occupation increased dramatically. Alongside other pressures, this compelled Israel to withdraw from Beirut in September 1982. This was the first time an Arab\ncapital liberated itself from Israeli occupation through armed struggle.
\n\nDuring this period, the Americans created the Multi-National Force, which entered to enforce the ceasefire between the PLO and Israel. In September 1983, the US sent 2000 marines into Lebanon to ensure the success of the Lebanese government under Bashir’s brother, Amine Gemayel.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/15.jpg\")
A badge of the Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) with flags of all the participating powers.
\nOn October 23, 1983, two truck bombs targeting the headquarters of the US marines and the French battalion center inflicted many casualties. The former was the single largest loss of life for American marine forces since the Battle of Iwo Jima during the Second World War. The attack was claimed by a group nobody had heard of at the time, which later revealed itself as Hezbollah, the party of God.27 The US and the rest of the Multi-National Force were forced to leave Lebanon the following year, in large part because of these attacks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/4.jpg\")
The aftermath of the bombing of US marine barracks in Beirut, 1983.
\nIn 1985, Israel “withdrew” from Lebanon; in reality, the buffer zone in the South remained, where Israeli soldiers and settlers could move freely. This continuing occupation led to the rise of Hezbollah, whose guerilla fighters carried out attacks targeting Israeli troops and their proxy militia.
\n\nIsrael’s first major attempt to crush this\nresistance took place in 1993, when they unsuccessfully attempted to push them north of the Litani river. They attempted the same thing with a 17-day assault in 1996, “Operation\nGrapes of Wrath.”
\n\nThe Lebanese civil war went through many phases, ending in 1990 with the signing of the Taif Accord. But the core issues that ignited the war were never addressed, nor the issues that arose during the fifteen years of fighting. What started as a demand to end the sectarian system descended into sectarian chaos, and was ultimately resolved with some shifting of sectarian quotas and power divisions among the sectarian elite. The chief losers of the war, the Palestinians, were blamed for the war and lost almost all of their political and military presence in the country.
\n\nThe occupation of the south ended in 2000, after the resistance forces that emerged in response to that occupation—most notably Hezbollah—made it untenable. But one territory became a major sticking point, the Occupied Shebaa Farms, which the Israelis captured from Syria in 1967. Hezbollah claimed that this territory was Lebanese, arguing that the Israeli withdrawal remained incomplete.28 Others saw this as an effort to continue to validate Hezbollah’s existence as an armed resistance group after the withdrawal of occupation forces.
\n\nThus began a six-year low-level cross-border conflict, culminating in the 2006 July War. Israel once again invaded Lebanon, destroying infrastructure including oil depots, vital bridges, and the country’s only international airport. They were demanding the demilitarization of the entire region south of the Litani river. The conflict ended with a ceasefire deal brokered by the UN, stipulating that UNIFIL forces should expand their deployment as far as the Litani river.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/1.jpg\")
The destruction of a bridge in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes in 2006.
\nThe intervening period saw a relative calm between Lebanon and the state of Israel, with few clashes and attacks. At the same time, Israeli jets, reconnaissance planes, and later drones flew over our heads continuously. Between 2007 and 2022, Israel violated\nLebanon’s airspace over 22,000 times—about four flights a day.
\n\nThis was also a period of uprisings and violence in Palestine, specifically in Gaza. After the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel blockaded Gaza. Every few years, the Israelis bombarded Gaza—what they called “mowing\nthe lawn.” Israeli settlements in the West Bank expanded throughout this period. Israelis focused on consolidating hegemony over the territories they had occupied since 1967 while making threats against Hezbollah and Lebanon.
\n\nFor their part, Hezbollah expanded from simply being an armed resistance group to become a player in the Lebanese political scene and regional affairs—for example, getting involved in the Syrian Civil War.
\n\nThat was the climate leading up to 2023. Three years after the United Nations declared that Gaza was on the way to becoming uninhabitable, Hamas’s armed wing carried out the October 7 attacks, igniting the regional war that continues today. Hezbollah responded the following day by opening up what they called the Support Front, firing rockets into northern Israel.
\n\nThis fighting simmered until September 2024, when Israel dramatically escalated its attacks on Lebanon, beginning with the notorious pager massacre. In the weeks that followed, Israel displaced over a million people, massacred civilians, killed much of Hezbollah’s top leadership, and targeted weapons depots belonging to the group. On September 30, they invaded Lebanon, again with the claimed intention of pushing Hezbollah back behind the Litani River. On November 27, they reached a ceasefire agreement stipulating that Hezbollah will disarm below the Litani River and tasking the Lebanese government with overseeing this. Israel remained in five\npositions in the South, claiming that it would withdraw if Lebanon fulfilled its obligations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/2.jpg\")
The destruction of homes by Israeli attacks, 2024.
\nDuring this ceasefire, the UN estimates that the Israelis violated the ceasefire\nover 10,000 times, while Hezbollah violated it once—a single time—in response to Israeli attacks. The Israeli violations included near-daily air strikes, assassinations, demolitions of homes, and ground raids.
\n\nThen, against the backdrop of the US/Israeli war on Iran, Hezbollah fired six rockets into Israel, precipitating the new escalation that we are witnessing today. There are many theories as to why they did this. Initially, Hezbollah claimed it was to avenge the killing of Ali Khamanei the previous day, and that it was a response to fifteen months of daily Israeli bombardment during the supposed ceasefire. Some suggest that the decision to resume bilateral hostilities offered a way for them to break out of the dynamic in which Israel treated Lebanon as a free-fire zone with zero deterrence from Hezbollah, the Lebanese state, or the so-called international community. Others argue that it was a reckless attempt to reclaim legitimacy after the defeats that Hezbollah suffered in 2024.
\n\nRegardless, we are here now. The Israelis are in Lebanon and they aim to stay. They want to create a “yellow line” in Southern Lebanon, yet another\nbuffer zone. Many people see this as a land grab that could potentially establish permanent Israeli settlements there. Others believe that Israel is setting the stage for a massive resource grab—targeting not only the fertile agricultural area but also the waters of the Litani River. Based on the full-scale demolition of the villages they have captured, as well as the last two years of ecocide in the south—for example, Israel\nusing white phosphorus munitions to poison the land—it is safe to say that the Israeli military is trying to fulfil the threat that Moshe Dayan made in 1974: “We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/19.jpg\")
Israel has regularly used white phosphorus munitions in Southern Lebanon.
\nThe Israelis are trying to ethnically cleanse the entire south. Although Lebanon and Israel agreed to a new ceasefire on April 16, the Israelis have not stopped their assaults. They are wantonly destroying whole villages, making sure that life is impossible, let alone return. This raises the prospect of a prolonged displacement crisis on top of the many other crises afflicting Lebanon at the moment. This is the familiar theme of Israel’s one-sided “ceasefires,” in Lebanon as in Gaza. For the Israelis, a ceasefire is a chance to recoup, plan, and establish new facts on the ground in the areas they’ve seized. They view this as a single, continuous war, now lasting the better part of a century.
\n\nIsrael aims to destroy Lebanon. That will not change if Hezbollah disarms. The situation is pushing the country towards civil war, especially with the current government being so focused on disarming Hezbollah—both as an end in itself and in hopes of somehow deterring Israeli aggression. Civil war in Lebanon will advance Israel’s aim of fracturing and weakening the Lebanese state.
\n\nWhat are people in Lebanon supposed to do? What are the propositions on offer? Is there any feasible way to end Israeli assault and enable displaced Lebanese people to return to their homes in the south?
\n\nLebanon is at a crossroads. Two camps are forming and neither is speaking to the other. One camp, led by President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, is pursuing direct negotiations with the Israelis. They have committed themselves to the goal of monopolizing\narms in the hands of the state, while deferring anything to do with Israel to the so-called international community. The other camp, led predominantly by Hezbollah, is pursuing a course of armed struggle. Continuing on the path it set out over four decades years ago, its main strategy is continued reliance on the Islamic Republic of Iran and the military strategy of the so-called axis of resistance.
\n\nTo the former camp, the sole problem is Hezbollah: supposedly, once Hezbollah is disarmed, Israel will stop bombing us and pull its troops out of the country. To the second camp, the only recourse is directly resisting the invading Israeli army and continuing the military confrontation with Israel. Each is accusing\nthe other of treason for working on behalf of a foreign power.
\n\nThose critical of the current government accuse it of sacrificing Southern Lebanon for the sake of the rest of the country. Those critical of Hezbollah accuse them of sacrificing the rest of the country for the south. This division has a corresponding sectarian aspect as well. Added to the polycrisis in Lebanon, especially the grueling economic collapse which many claim to be one\nof the worst in a century, globally speaking, all of this is indeed a toxic recipe for civil war.
\n\nHow do we stop Israel from bombing us? How do we get them out of Lebanon? How do we reign in the militant fascism and brazen expansionism that has become mainstream in Israeli society and politics? How do we protect ourselves from the growing imperialist mania of the US empire? Apart from arming Israel to the teeth, the US has not yet gotten involved in Lebanon directly—but if history is any indication, it very well might at some point.
\n\nIt is difficult to answer these questions—not least because most of them have very little to do with us. Israel has become a deeply sick society, with poll after poll showing continued majority support for the genocide in\nGaza, the war on\nIran, the war on\nLebanon. Settlers backed by the army are conducting wholesale pogroms in the West Bank. There seems to be no internal or international mechanism to stop their expansionist and genocidal ambitions.
\n\nI left Lebanon in 2021. I left for many reasons, but the one that made remaining there unsustainable was that I saw this war coming. I was constantly terrified by the sound of Israeli warplanes overhead. I could see the growing fascism in Israeli society for what it was—a lust for domination and expansion. Israel has never declared its borders, and it’s been clear for a long time that they want to take over Gaza and the West Bank. Then what? Will they start demilitarizing their society? No. The dominant force in Israel, both politically and socially, is the need for an external enemy so they do not turn on each other. This is a recipe for violent expansionism with no internal brakes. Today, the fire that the Israelis lit in Gaza is spreading to Lebanon. Where it will stop?
\n\nI am on the record criticizing Hezbollah. The party has played a role in all of this. It has allied itself with reactionary and corrupt forces, both in Lebanon and in the region. Its military backing of the Assad regime—a significant departure from its stated goal of resisting Israel—made it unpopular in the region and may be the reason why the Israelis breached its security apparatus in the last two years. Its distinctly sectarian form of resistance and foreign backing contribute to significant strategic weaknesses.
\n\nHezbollah has proven unwilling or unable to make its case to the rest of the country. There are many valid reasons why a lot of people in Lebanon do not trust Hezbollah. A key event that contributed to this distrust, which is not well known outside of Lebanon, was the\nbrief civil war of May 2008, when Hezbollah and its allies turned their arms against pro-government parties, leading to weeks-long street battles reminiscent of the civil war.
\n\nYet in this context, I wonder about the utility of focusing on these issues. These are problems that must be discussed within the country. But the situation has changed, and we must update our analysis accordingly. Israel will not leave if Hezbollah is disarmed. History demonstrates that very clearly. The situation in Gaza shows that very clearly. The statements of Israeli leaders make that explicit.
\n\nThe fact is, Israel has been assaulting Lebanon since before Hezbollah existed. Hezbollah only exists because of Israel’s occupation. If they do successfully disarm Hezbollah, another group will form, because occupation breeds resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/20.jpg\")
Israel’s Yellow Line in Lebanon, a so-called “security belt” where the Israelis have stationed troops and are systematically demolishing villages.
\nHow do we stop the Israelis from bombing us? This question grips me every single day. But the most sober-minded people I know are just as perplexed as I am.
\n\nTo attempt to understand logic of the Lebanese government and the shortfalls of its approach, we can consult an essay that was published in the Lebanese daily L’Orient–Le Jour on April 6, 2026. The title is “Neutrality,\na Viable Lifeline for Lebanon.” This paper reflects the perspectives of some of the commentariat in Lebanon are saying, and the article represents a rare elaboration of the strategy that the Lebanese government is currently pursuing
\n\nThe essay begins with this short preamble:
\n\n\n\n\n“The imagery of our army evacuating posts in the south while leaving behind villagers unwilling to abandon their homes in the face of Hezbollah-Israeli conflict and Israeli incursions raises an important question: what is the role of a state that cannot defend its borders from invasion and occupation?”
\n
This question summarizes the basic contradiction. The government’s plan is to replace Hezbollah in the south with the national army, with the idea that the latter will protect civilians—but the author takes for granted that in fact, the army cannot do this. As we saw last month, the army\nwithdrew immediately when the Israelis began invading. So in fact, there is no basis for the argument that monopolizing violence in the hands of the state will bring order and protection, even though that is the premise of the path that the government is taking.
\n\nThe writer continues:
\n\n\n\n\n“The reality is much simpler: no army in the region can win at war with Israel; no proxy group can sell victory beyond survival; and Lebanon cannot function as a governable country—no matter how sophisticated its military capabilities—unless we dislodge ourselves, entirely, from regional war.”
\n
But how could the Lebanese state dislodge Lebanon from the geopolitics of the surrounding region?
\n\n\n\n\n“… that requires adopting a policy too often misunderstood: neutrality. Neutrality is neither dismissing the Palestinian plight by throwing morals away nor equating anything with Israeli crimes. It is demanding that Lebanon no longer pay an enormous price for hosting the Arab-Israeli conflict, or in this more recent round, the Iranian regime’s survivability.”
\n
The phrase “hosting the Arab-Israeli conflict” is particularly confusing. What could that mean? Where should it be “hosted”? How do we change “hosts”? The closest thing to a historical answer is the events of Black September (1970-1971), when Jordan violently expelled Palestinian groups to Lebanon. After that, in a sense, Jordanians did stop paying the aforementioned “enormous price,” but they simply pushed that cost onto Lebanon. How could Lebanon offload that onto some other polity? Surely the author isn’t suggesting that the Lebanese government should expel both Palestinians and its own citizens into Jordan or Syria?
\n\nSpeaking of the “Arab-Israel conflict” as if it is a timeless abstraction makes no sense. The very language is the rhetoric of Zionists. Framing the war on Lebanon as the “Arab-Israeli conflict” ignores Lebanon’s particular history with Israel, presenting this war as the consequence of abstract Arab antagonism toward the state of Israel rather than a continuous, intentional, and carefully orchestrated expansion on the part of the Israeli state.
\n\nIt is arguably true, as the author claims, that “no army in the region can win at war with Israel.” The failure of Arab states and societies to develop different means of engaging with this problem over the last several decades is one of the reasons we have arrived here. But this war has been imposed on us. It’s not our choice. The alternative, as we have seen time again, is surrender, occupation, humiliation. Or rather, the alternative to war is war by other means.
\n\nArmed resistance liberated the south of Lebanon in 2000—specifically, a strategy of asymmetrical warfare. They didn’t need to defeat the Israeli army, just as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria didn’t need to defeat the French Army,29 just as the Vietcong didn’t need to defeat the American army.
\n\nWhat could a “policy of neutrality” mean? The proposal implies that the Lebanese government has the agency to determine what happens, but also, that neutrality is both possible and desirable in the face of a genocidal force. What mechanisms would serve to assert this neutrality? Are there any historical precedents to suggest this is even possible?
\n\nThe writer’s sole example is the 1960s, when he claims that Lebanon was neutral and it worked. This claim is purely ahistorical. At the time, Israel was occupied elsewhere, fighting against Egypt. That was before the Palestinian revolution of 1965, before the crushing of Arab nationalism in 1967, before Black September in 1970, before the Arab-Egyptian peace treaty of 1977. It was only after those developments, when all other Arab states had been pacified and Palestinian militants had been expelled from those regimes, that Israel shifted the full force of its attention to Lebanon.
\n\nThe period the writer refers to as a period of neutrality was also a period of harsh repression targeting Palestinians in Lebanon. Until the Cairo Agreement of 1969, they were living under what amounted to martial law.
\n\nThis is a recurring theme throughout the region that the writer neglects to mention: neutrality comes at an internal cost. With substantial portions of the population opposing Israel, with many wanting to fight it militarily, the only way for states to prevent this is to crack down on their own populations via violent means. We can see this in Egypt’s authoritarian regime, in the Palestinian Authority, and in many other governments across the region. Instead of employing violence against the aggressor, Israel, these states turn that violence inward to repress those who would defend themselves as well as those who are moved to act in solidarity.
\n\nThose are in fact the stated ambitions of the current government in Lebanon. The president, Joseph Aoun, was elected on a platform of promising to monopolize arms in the hands of the state. However, it is clear that the Lebanese government cannot do that. The risk of civil war is too great.
\n\nSo the writer proposes that Lebanon should be occupied by a new international force that would replace the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL):
\n\n\n\n\n“Where UNIFIL is unable to deliver, an alternative security arrangement should fill the void. Greater powers must support Lebanon in its desired transition away from permanent war…”
\n
Without going into any detail about who those “great powers” might be, he confidently declares that they will ensure Lebanon becomes “neutral” and that “neutrality” will be:
\n\n\n\n\n“Lebanon’s shield—denying Israel a foothold on any single square meter of our geography. It remains our strongest defense.”
\n
Why does the writer believe this? How could anyone believe this? This is not dealing with the material realities at all. Look at Syria, where the Sharaa administration is attempting to demonstrate its “neutrality.” That hasn’t stopped Israel from occupying more Syrian land, bombing the country on a regular basis, and fomenting sectarian conflict.
\n\nThe writer’s only historical argument is that the siege of Beirut in 1982 ended after the expulsion of the PLO and the introduction of the Multi-National Force. He ignores the fact that it was popular armed resistance that liberated Beirut. He ignores the fact that even after the Israelis withdrew and the Multi-National Force remained, there was fierce resistance against the latter as well, eventually compelling them to retreat. He ignores the fact that even after the Israelis withdrew from Beirut, they continued to occupy the South of Lebanon for eighteen years, and that that occupation only ended after fierce and consistent resistance. Finally, he ignores the fact that the 1982 siege began as a violation of a 1981 ceasefire agreement. What would a new “international force”—inevitably, an American or European force—do to guarantee security for Lebanon when the Israelis violate international law day after day, year after year, decade after decade, with complete impunity?
\n\nThe idea that what Lebanon needs is more imperialism is absolutely ridiculous.
\n\nAfter what we’ve seen the “international community” do in regards to Gaza, trusting them like this is delusional. Yet this seems to be the plan of the current Lebanese government. That is the premise of the current direct talks between Lebanon and Israel, which presumes good faith on the part of Israel (and the US) where there clearly is none. Lebanon has no leverage in this context. This is asking too much of people who have no cause to trust the US or Israel or the so-called international community—especially now with the US under Trump, who has demonstrated a complete disregard for international law. Are we supposed to work with the Board of Peace—the same people who suggested turning the entirety of South Lebanon into the Trump Economic Zone? Is this the viable alternative to Israeli occupation?
\n\nThis type of thinking is pushing Lebanon towards civil war. It insults the inhabitants of Southern Lebanon, portraying them at best as deluded by Hezbollah or at worst as complicit in dragging the rest of the country into a conflict. Are they not Lebanese? Do _they_ not deserve sovereignty? Do they not deserve protection?
\n\nThere are no easy answers as to how to accomplish protecting them. But it is certain that the kind of wishful thinking represented by the article in L’Orient–Le Jour is removed from reality and history. It serves no one. It can only perpetuate the confusion of the current moment and deepen the rifts that are already tearing apart the thin fabric of Lebanese society.
\n\nThe government’s strategy is unpopular, dangerous, and doomed to fail. Resistance to the occupation is necessary; it is also a right under international law. Hezbollah is facing issues of legitimacy in the country, in many cases for very legitimate reasons. For example, one of the reasons that the author of the aforementioned article in L’Orient–Le Jour opposes Hezbollah is because Hezbollah killed his father. A lot of Lebanese politics boils down to longstanding sectarian conflict like this. That is the result of being ruled by a coalition of warlords for the last fifty years.
\n\nMany people are saying that there needs to be space to form a popular resistance movement similar to the Lebanese National Movement of the early 1970s. Such a movement would have to combine a program of anti-sectarian social cohesion, a revolutionary political program to overcome the sectarian oligarchy plaguing the country, a progressive economic program moving away from a financialized dependence economy, and an armed wing (whether of state or non-state forces) that could defend their communities from Israeli aggression. It would also have to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation.
\n\nThis is another form of wishful thinking. Who would organize this? With what resources? Lebanon has been a playground for imperialist powers for so long now that it is difficult to imagine how any form of organizing could overcome that. Nonetheless, in view of the fundamental contradictions within the Zionist colonization of Bilad al-Sham and the colonial, capitalist, and exclusionary core of the Lebanese entity, nothing less will suffice. We can still attempt to think positively, to identify what we can fight for, not just against. That is the essential thing missing in this moment of despair and humiliation.
\n\nIsrael wants to destroy Lebanon. We must all resist that by any means necessary. That means setting our priorities straight, it means unifying, it means forming communities based on common struggle. It means aiming for liberation, not just sovereignty. It also means forming connections of solidarity with other communities across the region and the world.
\n\nThe beast that is setting upon Lebanon is global and our only hope is global resistance. The fire that started in Gaza is spreading now to Lebanon. But it will not stop there. It will consume all of us—all of you, as well—unless we extinguish it.
\n\nMoshe Dayan, Story of My Life, 1976 ↩
\nFrom an address given to Technion University students (March 19, 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha’aretz (April 4, 1969), quoted in The Question of Palestine (1980) by Edward Said, p. 14 ↩
\nBenny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 177. ↩
\nIbid, p. 28. ↩
\nAvi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 146. ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 142. ↩
\nKamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions_,_ 1987 ↩
\nPatrick Seale, Post-colonial Syria and Lebanon, 2007 ↩
\nFrancis Stevension, Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson, 1973 ↩
\nIllan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p. 15 ↩
\nIbid, p. 38 ↩
\nIbid, p. 25 ↩
\nFawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2007, p.113 ↩
\nMehdi Amel, On the Sectarian State, 1986 ↩
\nHisham Safieddine, Banking on the State: The Financial Foundation of Lebanon, 2018 ↩
\nMehdi Amel, On the Sectarian State, 1986 ↩
\nBenny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 28 ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 160 ↩
\nPart of a funeral oration Dayan gave in 1956 for a soldier killed on the front. ↩
\nFawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2007, p. 102 ↩
\nIbid, p. 187 ↩
\nIbid, p. 191 ↩
\nIbid, p. 206 ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 242 ↩
\nIbid, p. 260 ↩
\nIbid, p. 278 ↩
\nDavid Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, 2010, p. 192 ↩
\nJoseph Daher, Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, 2016 ↩
\nMahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria 1830-1987, 2002 ↩
\nBen Morea has passed away. Known for his participation in Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s, he withdrew from the city and pursued a path into revolutionary animism. In the following eulogy, Tasos Sagris of Void Network recounts Ben’s subsequent visit to Exarchia, the Athenian neighborhood famed as a hotbed of anarchism.
\n\nToday, the Exarchia that Tasos describes has also changed. To mourn a person is to mourn an entire vanished world. Yet, as Tasos explores, there is a silver thread that connects Ben’s life and the legacy of Exarchia to our own present and possible future.
\n\nBen Morea is dead, motherfuckers.
\n\nTo many of us in Void Network, Ben was not simply an old revolutionary from another era, nor a nostalgic remnant of the American counterculture. He was one of those rare human beings who attempted to transform rebellion into a total form of life—to erase the borders between self and other, poetry and insurrection, art and survival, to bring global social revolution to the streets of the metropolis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/1.jpg\")
Ben Morea.
\nWe met him in April 2016, when my sister, Georgia Sagri, invited him for a series of talks and meetings at Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a space in the center of Athens bringing together art, politics, and the sciences. He was a beloved friend of hers from her years in New York. She enthusiastically introduced him to many different people—not only anarchists but also artists and other creative people from the Athens underground scene.
\n\nI enjoyed a long day and night walking around Exarchia with Ben. It was during a high point of the anarchist solidarity movement with refugees and migrants, when more than ten occupied buildings across the neighborhood housed over a thousand displaced people fleeing the wars and wreckage of the global order to seek a better future in Europe. Exarchia was no longer simply the legendary neighborhood of anarchists, punks, radical students, and street riots; it had become a fragile liberated territory where the uprooted of the Earth attempted to survive collectively in the face of the violence of borders, police raids, fascists, poverty, and abandonment.
\n\nWe walked endlessly through the narrow streets. We passed the occupied refugee squats where children played on the rooftops under torn flags, living in buildings powered by improvised, illegal electricity connections. We passed assemblies in smoky rooms filled with comrades speaking ten different languages. We walked through old cafés where anarchists argued all night about revolution, defeat, and desire while armored riot police waited at the entrances of the neighborhood like an occupying army.
\n\nI brought him to the Free Social Center Nosotros, which Void Network participated in for fifteen years, and to the self-organized political spaces scattered across Exarchia. I translated for him the slogans painted on the walls and the posters announcing demonstrations, solidarity kitchens, anti-fascist patrols, underground concerts, assemblies for imprisoned comrades, open discussions on gender, social collapse, and insurrection. He looked carefully at everything—not with the cold curiosity of an intellectual tourist, but with the trembling attention of someone recognizing fragments of a long unfinished dream.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/13.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nPerhaps what moved him most was not the militancy itself, but the atmosphere of collective survival. The defiant beauty of people who possessed almost nothing yet continued building common spaces in the ruins of austerity and social collapse. Young anarchists sharing food and ideas with refugees from Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Congo, illegal kitchens feeding hundreds every day, people from many different countries dwelling together. Abandoned buildings transformed into living organisms of solidarity as artists, dropouts, migrants, junkies, fugitives, students, and political outcasts attempted to create another form of life.
\n\nFor Ben, this was not activism as moral duty. It was the continuation of a war against alienation that had begun decades earlier in the streets of the Lower East Side.
\n\nThat night, as we were walking through Exarchia, he stopped and looked at me with an expression I will never forget and said:
\n\n“Tasos, I feel so happy that now I can die.”
\n\nI asked him what he meant.
\n\n“Everything we did so many years ago, so far away, has taken root here. Exarchia is what we were fighting for with the Motherfuckers!” Since the early 1960s, from the days of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, he explained, he had dedicated his life to creating liberated social zones in New York and across the United States. Spaces where people could escape the prison of normality to invent new forms of collective existence. Free territories where art was no longer separated from life and revolution was no longer separated from everyday experience.
\n\nNow, decades later, on the other side of the planet, he had encountered another generation continuing the same struggle in different historical conditions. Not the white American dropouts of the psychedelic era, but refugees, migrants, precarious youth, and anarchists surviving the catastrophe of neoliberal Europe.
\n\n“Now I can die happy,” he told me. “We are winning.”
\n\nWe continued walking through the streets of Athens, surrounded by the graffiti, the helicopters, the police sirens, and the burning memory of all unfinished revolutions.
\n\nThat same night, in the center of the city, Ben Morea gave what was for many of us an unforgettable historical speech. For hours, he answered questions from anarchists, freaks, radical artists, and young rebels who gathered around him with the hunger of people seeking lived experience. He spoke about the birth of the counterculture as if describing an underground war. He told stories about riots, communes, outlaw survival, collective madness, criminality, revolutionary theater, the attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol as a strategy to block the spread of heroin in freak communities, sabotage, psychedelics, fugitives, and impossible dreams with a mixture of tenderness and levity.
\n\nMost of those stories would be impossible to summarize here. Perhaps they can only survive the way all insurgent knowledge survives: passed from mouth to ear to mouth, from generation to generation, like a secret fire moving through the darkness of this world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/16.jpg\")
\nBen Morea belonged to a generation that understood something that has almost been erased from the collective political imagination today. They grasped that revolution was not merely a program for the future but a transformation of everyday life in the present. Not an ideology to be consumed, not an identity to perform, but a dangerous reorganization of existence itself.
\n\nBefore the museums, universities, and fashion industries domesticated the aesthetics of revolt, before rebellion became a commodity circulating through social media and cultural branding, Morea and the comrades around Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker attempted to dissolve the separation between art and life completely.
\n\nThey did not want radical art, but radical existence.
\n\nFor them, art could not remain imprisoned inside galleries, theaters, literary circles, or intellectual prestige. A painting that did not attack the conditions of everyday alienation was merely decoration for the ruling class. A poem that did not open breaches inside consciousness was simply another dead object circulating in the market of culture. Even revolution itself risked becoming another form of bureaucracy if it lost contact with desire, ecstasy, madness, and collective imagination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/7.jpg\")
\nThis was one of the deepest contributions of Ben Morea and the Motherfuckers: they understood that capitalism does not survive only through economic exploitation or police violence, but through the colonization of perception itself. Through the production of obedient identities. Through the management of desire. Through the reduction of life to work, consumption, and passive spectatorship.
\n\nLong before the language of contemporary critical theory existed, they were already attacking the society of separation with their bodies, their actions, and their forms of collective living.
\n\nThey stole food and distributed it freely.
\n\nThey occupied spaces and defended houses with open doors where anybody could be free at any time.
\n\nThey organized street theater as social attack.
\n\nThey disrupted cultural institutions.
\n\nThey transformed everyday gestures into acts of refusal.
\n\nThey attempted to create temporary liberated zones in the heart of the metropolis where people could experience forms of relations outside commodity logic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/2.jpg\")
\nIn this sense, Ben Morea was not only an anarchist militant. He was a poet of social space creating poetry inscribed directly upon the nervous system of the city.
\n\nDuring those years, the streets of the Lower East Side became laboratories of anti-capitalist imagination. Runaway teenagers, junkies, artists, political fugitives, radical musicians, criminals, undocumented people, trans and queer outcasts, psychedelic heads, and street gangs all collided in an unstable ecosystem where counterculture and insurrection became inseparable. It was dirty, chaotic, often self-destructive, and filled with contradictions, but it carried an intensity almost impossible to imagine today within the managed sterility of contemporary urban life.
\n\nWhat terrified American society was not simply the riots or the political extremism. It was the appearance of human beings who no longer desired to be integrated into the existing order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/8.jpg\")
\nThe Motherfuckers represented a direct attack upon the American dream because they rejected the entire psychological architecture of normality: career, patriotism, private property, productivity, family discipline, social obedience. They transformed dropping out into a collective weapon.
\n\nThis is why they remain important today.
\n\nNot as a romantic relic of the sixties, but because the central conflict of our era remains exactly the same: will human life be completely reduced to economic functionality or can new forms of collective existence emerge against the machinery of control?
\n\nAnd perhaps this is why Ben recognized something familiar in Exarchia.
\n\nBecause despite all the historical differences, he once again entered a territory where people were attempting—however imperfectly—to reclaim life from the structures managing it, refusing ideological purity and political branding and living together in political and social antagonism against the establishment.
\n\nCommunal kitchens / Occupied buildings / Illegal assemblies / Underground art / Collective risk.
\n\nFriendships formed inside repression / People discovering each other again through struggle instead of competition.
\n\nThis was always the real battlefield.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/6.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/5.jpg\") \n | \n
The dominant culture constantly tries to convince us that capitalism is natural—to accomplish this, it destroys every social experience that could generate another perception of reality. Isolation becomes normality. Competition becomes common sense. Fear becomes social organization. Human beings cease to imagine freedom because they cease to experience collective power.
\n\nThe Motherfuckers and other anarchist and autonomous movements across the world have sought to explore the opposite possibility: that people can become ungovernable when they rediscover themselves and each other outside institutional mediation.
\n\nFor this reason, the system always attempts to neutralize rebellious movements in two ways simultaneously: through repression and through cultural absorption.
\n\nPolice attack bodies. The spectacle attacks memory.
\n\nEvery radical gesture is eventually transformed into style, merchandise, or harmless mythology. The revolutionary becomes an icon. The outlaw becomes an aesthetic reference. The living experience of revolt is emptied of danger and returned safely to society as entertainment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/10.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nBen Morea refused this domestication until the end of his life. He disappeared. This disappearance was itself a political gesture. Unlike so many public revolutionaries who slowly transformed themselves into celebrities, academics, or nostalgic commentators of their own past, Morea withdrew from visibility almost completely. Hunted by the state and exhausted by the implosions that destroyed much of the revolutionary energy of the sixties, he turned away from the machinery of political spectacle.
\n\nBut he did not surrender to normality. He did not “grow up.” He did not reconcile with the world. He did not moderate his politics or his passions. Instead, he moved toward another frontier of existence.
\n\nFar from the metropolitan centers of visibility, consumerism, and ideological production, Ben Morea spent years living close to Indigenous communities and spiritual traditions across North America. Not as an act of exotic escapism, but as part of a search for forms of knowledge and relation that industrial civilization has almost annihilated.
\n\nBen Morea speaks at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University on April 23, 2024, describing why he and his comrades had occupied the same university almost six decades earlier: “It wasn’t just to stop the war, it was to replace the ideology that created the war. The idea of occupation, a colonialist mentality. Not only did we want to stop the war, we wanted to end the mental state that would allow the war to become a reality.”
\nMany Western revolutionaries speak endlessly about liberation while remaining trapped within the same colonial mentality they claim to oppose: domination over nature, domination over time, domination over imagination, domination over the body, domination over meaning itself. Morea began searching elsewhere. In Indigenous cosmologies, communal memory, ritual practices, and non-Western understandings of land, he encountered another dimension of resistance—one far older than the modern revolutionary tradition. A resistance not centered solely on seizing power, but on preserving relationships with the Earth, the ancestors, the spirits, and collective forms of life against the expanding desert of industrial capitalism.
\n\nThis journey lends an almost mythic quality to his later life. He never became a new age guru or a “spiritual leader”—he probably hated such descriptions. For us, he embodied a rare continuity between revolt and transformation of the self. He remained, until the end, a human being searching for freedom beyond the categories offered by the dominant civilization.
\n\nAnd perhaps this is why his presence affected so many younger anarchists decades later. Because beneath the stories, the legends and the historical aura, people sensed something increasingly rare in contemporary political culture: he had truly risked his life for another world, and he had never psychologically returned from that journey.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/12.jpg\")
\nToday, in an era where even dissent is rapidly transformed into consumable identity, the legacy of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers becomes important again not as historical nostalgia but as a living provocation. Because the catastrophe they fought against did not disappear. It expanded across the entire planet.
\n\nThe Metropolis they saw emerging in the 1960s—the society of alienation, surveillance, spectacle, and emotional paralysis—has now become almost total. Capitalism no longer simply exploits labor. It occupies attention, emotion, sexuality, language, memory, and imagination itself. Human beings are increasingly transformed into isolated economic units permanently connected to systems of consumption and digital control while simultaneously disconnected from collective experience, from nature, from physical community, and from any deeper sense of meaning.
\n\nThe result is a civilization filled with information but emptied of presence, a society of communication without encounter, visibility without intimacy, opinion without lived experience, a planetary loneliness managed by algorithms and pharmaceutical industries.
\n\nInside this landscape, the radicalism of the Motherfuckers acquires new force precisely because it was always more than merely ideological. They were fighting against a model of existence. The battlefield they fought on remains the central battlefield today.
\n\nA contemporary revolutionary cannot simply imitate the aesthetics of the sixties. The costumes, slogans, and mythology of past revolts are useless when they are disconnected from the historical necessity that produced them. What matters is the impulse beneath their actions: the refusal to allow capitalism to define the limits of reality and human possibility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/15.jpg\")
\nTo live “against the wall” today means refusing psychological integration into the machinery of fear and passivity.
\n\nIt means defending spaces where people can still encounter each other directly outside commodified relations. It means rebuilding forms of solidarity in societies designed to fragment every collective bond. It means fighting against the war, the apartheid, the genocide, the environmental and psychological destruction, protecting zones of human unpredictability inside a civilization obsessed with management and control.
\n\nThe liberated territory is not only the occupied building or the street confrontation. It is also the communal kitchen / the underground art space / the collective garden / the occupied university and the collective house / the public assembly and the secret meeting / the barricades, the fires on the streets, the smell of benzine on my hands, and to hold you in the mist of the tear gas / the pirate radio station / the neighborhood organization of mutual aid / the friendship that survives a political defeat / the refusal of narcissism and permanent digital mediation / the defense of the imagination against the dictatorship of cynicism.
\n\nBecause cynicism has become one of the primary weapons of Power.
\n\nThe system no longer asks people to believe in a beautiful future. It merely asks them to stop believing that anything other than a dystopian future is possible. This emotional exhaustion produces populations that continue obeying not because they are convinced, but because they feel existentially defeated.
\n\nThis is why every authentic community of resistance becomes dangerous. Because it immediately threatens state power militarily and existentially, and because it reawakens suppressed human capacities: trust, collective joy, solidarity, courage, eroticism, care, spiritual intensity, and the experience of shared risk.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/18.jpg\")
Spirou Trikoupi, a squat in Exarcheia that housed nearly a hundred migrants from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Kurdistan, and elsewhere. The squat was run by a regular weekly assembly and featured a bar, a library, and classrooms for children. Police brutally evicted it in August 2019, kidnapping the migrants at gunpoint and taking them to detention centers and concentration camps.
\nThe Motherfuckers understood that revolution without the transformation of everyday life becomes just another authoritarian structure. But they also understood the opposite danger: that counterculture without social struggle degenerates into narcissistic lifestyles and harmless bohemian consumption.
\n\nThis conundrum remains unresolved today. On one side, we see political movements emptied of poetry, desire, and imagination, reproducing the same emotional misery as the system they oppose. On the other side, we see cultural scenes obsessed with personal expression while completely detached from material struggle and collective responsibility.
\n\nBen Morea and his friends, among them Osha Neumann and many others, represented a rare attempt to hold these two dimensions together: insurrection and beauty, fury and tenderness, collective discipline and ecstatic freedom. Perhaps this is why his words in Exarchia carried such emotional force for me. He recognized that despite all defeats, despite repression, cooptation, and exhaustion, fragments of that old dream still survive wherever people attempt to create living communities of resistance in the ruins of capitalism. Not perfect communities, not ideological utopias, but temporary breaches in the social machinery. Places where people can breathe differently.
\n\nAnd perhaps this is the deepest lesson that his life can offer younger generations of anarchists, artists, and revolutionaries today: that resistance is not only the struggle against oppression. It is also the defense of human intensity against the civilization of emotional death.
\n\nTo remain capable of wonder in a world organized around despair.
\nTo remain capable of love in a culture built on contention.
\nTo remain capable of collective imagination inside systems designed to isolate consciousness.
\nTo continue creating free spaces even as history appears to collapse around us.
This was the invisible thread connecting the streets of the Lower East Side to Exarchia decades later.
\n\nNot a political model or an ideology frozen in time, but the persistence of a dangerous human desire: to live differently / to feel differently / to relate differently / and through this transformation of everyday existence, to open cracks in the apparent inevitability of this world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/11.jpg\")
\nPerhaps this is what Ben Morea understood better than most of the revolutionaries of his generation: that the struggle for liberation is not only about changing institutions. It is about protecting the possibility of another kind of human being from extinction.
\n\nBen Morea’s life leaves behind no doctrine, no party line, no strategic blueprint that future generations could mechanically reproduce. Perhaps this is precisely why his presence continues to resonate so deeply today. He reminds us that the most powerful revolutionary experiences escape institutionalization and refuse to solidify into ideology. He belonged to a generation that believed that history could suddenly open upon new horizons. That everyday life could be reinvented. That human beings could escape psychologically, existentially, and materially from the systems shaping them.
\n\nMany of those dreams were defeated. Others were absorbed by capitalism and transformed into style, fashion, or harmless cultural memory. Entire fragments of the counterculture were commodified and sold back to society as entertainment while the economic and technological machinery of domination expanded to a planetary scale.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/14.jpg\")
\nAnd yet something survived. Not the mythology of the sixties, the romantic image of rebellion, the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but a certain irreducible human force. A refusal.
\n\nA refusal to accept alienation as destiny.
\nA refusal to reduce existence to work and consumption.
\nA refusal to abandon collective life even in periods of historical darkness.
\nA refusal to surrender imagination to the administrators of reality.
This refusal passed through many forms across the decades: through communes, occupations, pirate radios, underground newspapers, autonomous social centers, Indigenous struggles, anti-fascist networks, street riots, collective kitchens, night attacks, artistic experiments, migrant solidarities, and invisible friendships formed in the margins of defeated movements.
\n\nBen Morea carried this force through his entire existence. Even his disappearances were meaningful. In a civilization obsessed with visibility, self-promotion, and political branding, he chose opacity, distance from fame; he chose to protect the living intensity of revolt from becoming another spectacle to be consumed. This choice gave his life a rare integrity. He remained dangerous because he never fully allowed himself to become socially legible. And perhaps this points toward one of the deepest lessons emerging from his trajectory: that revolution is not an identity.
\n\nIt is not a subculture, a career, a scene, or a posture of moral superiority. Revolution, at its deepest level, is a transformation of relations—with others, with the body, with desire, with fear, with nature, with the self and with time itself. This is why the most meaningful revolutionary moments are often experienced not as political obligation but as sudden expansions of life.
\n\nA collective meal inside an occupied building.
\nA forbidden conversation lasting until dawn.
\nThe preparation of explosives in the living room.
\nA street filled with people refusing fear together.
\nA neighborhood defending migrant residents from fascists and police.
\nA city without government.
\nA temporary experience where the loneliness imposed by capitalism suddenly cracks open and another form of existence becomes thinkable.
These moments are fragile. Often temporary. Sometimes tragic. But they leave irreversible marks inside personal and collective consciousness. Once someone has experienced this intensity, normality itself becomes unbearable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/9.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nPerhaps this is why so many people who met Ben Morea across generations felt affected not simply by his ideas but by his presence. He carried within him traces of another relationship to reality—one shaped by collective risk, existential commitment, and lived rebellion rather than intellectual abstraction. He belonged to that increasingly rare category of revolutionaries who understood that freedom is not a future paradise guaranteed by historical progress.
\n\nFreedom exists only when people create it together in the present. Even if briefly. Even if imperfectly. Even when the entire world appears to move in the opposite direction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/17.jpg\")
\nToday, as authoritarianism rises globally, as surveillance penetrates everyday life and war industries reorganize the killing machine, as genocide in Palestine and ecological collapse accelerate, as social existence becomes increasingly mediated by automatic behaviors and algorithms, the temptation to despair has become enormous. Many people retreat into cynicism, private survival, digital paralysis. Others seek refuge in ideological certainties that cannot address the spiritual and emotional devastation that contemporary capitalism is inflicting.
\n\nAgainst this landscape, Ben Morea’s life stubbornly demonstrates that human beings remain capable of creating liberated social spaces even within catastrophe. Small territories of intensity, lovers of Total Freedom, moments of collective beauty, communities of resistance, experiments in chaos.
\n\nThis is how I choose to understand the meaning of the phrase he whispered to me while we were walking through Exarchia: “We are winning.”
\n\nThe state had not collapsed. Capitalism had not been defeated. History had not fulfilled the dreams of the sixties. But somewhere, on another side of the planet, amid crisis, migration, repression, and social devastation, new generations were still attempting to continue the unfinished work of liberation. The fire had not been extinguished. It had simply changed languages and places.
\n\nWe fight to defend the human capacity for insurrectionary imagination, to preserve tenderness against brutality, collectivity against isolation, poetry against the administration of existence, living memory against the spectacle, and freedom against all the visible and invisible walls surrounding human life.
\n\nBen Morea is dead.
\n\nBut somewhere tonight, in occupied demolished buildings, underground gatherings, spontaneous conversations, illegal raves, and secret psychedelic ceremonies, in hidden bars and collective kitchens, in street riots, acts of solidarity, existential poetry, abstract paintings, in impossible dreams, fragments of his spirit continue moving silently through the darkness of this world.
\n\n—Tasos Sagris / Void Network
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/3.jpg\")
\nA Life in Rebellion—Ariel Uesseler
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/4.jpg\")
\n ![flyer](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/35.jpg\"){kind=link}