What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression
What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression

Author: Victor Serge

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1644213680

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This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. With a new introduction by Howard Zinn collaborator, Anthony Arnove. “Victor Serge is one of the unsung heroes of a corrupt century.” —Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective. “Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

Political Repression in U.S. History
Political Repression in U.S. History

Author: Cornelis A. van Minnen

Publisher: Vu Boekhandel/Uitgeverij

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789086593194

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The authors of the essays in this book amass considerable historical evidence illustrating various forms of political repression and its relationship with democracy in the United States, from the late-eighteenth century to the present. They discuss efforts, made mostly but not only by government agencies, to control actions and expressions of dissent, criticism, unpalatable truths, political opposition, or, indeed, any kind of opinions that threatened or inconvenienced powerful and privileged groups in the United States. The authors examine the justifications and multiple means of political repression, and identify individuals and social groups that have been victims of repressive attitudes and policies, because of their political ideology or opinions, or because they represented diverse racial, ethnic and religious minorities. This volume, then, is a contribution to the discussion about the paradox of the historical and ongoing existence of political repression in the United States, within a democracy which theoretically guarantees individual rights and freedoms based on equality under the law.

Abolition Democracy
Abolition Democracy

Author: Angela Y. Davis

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9781609801038

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Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Life During Wartime
Life During Wartime

Author: Kristian Williams

Publisher: AK Press

Published: 2013-09-09

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1849351317

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"Together, the writers sound a sobering warning: the American government is an iron fist in a velvet glove whose purpose remains preserving the status quo and enriching the rich."— Publishers Weekly What happens when the techniques of counterinsurgency, developed to squash small skirmishes and guerrilla wars on the border of Empire, blend into the state's apparatus for domestic policing? In Life During Wartime, fifteen authors and activists reflect on the American domestic security apparatus, detailing the increasing militarization of the police force and the re-emergence of infiltration and counter-intelligence as surveillance strategies, highlighting the ways that the techniques and the technologies of counterinsurgency have been applied on the home front, and offering strategies for resistance. Includes contributions Kristian Williams, Will Munger, Walidah Imarisha, George Ciccariello-Maher, Beriah Empie, Elaine Brown, Geoffrey Boyce, Conor Cash, Vicente L. Rafael, Alexander Reid Ross, Evan Tucker, Layne Mullett, Sarah Small, and Luce Guillen-Givins.

Vagabond Witness
Vagabond Witness

Author: Paul Gordon

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2013-05-31

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1780994788

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Victor Serge was the first and the greatest witness of the twentieth century. An anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, an exile, Serge once said that people judged history, but they did so without knowing what really happened and who the actors really were. All his work - novels. reportage, poetry, criticism - was an attempt to show what really happened, and why. Serge never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him to exile in Mexico, where he would die isolated and in poverty, he recalled, 'The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working...no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps.' ,