Several weeks ago, we learned that Inge Viett had died. She passed on May 9, at the age of 78. We offer the following notes to English-speaking readers, so that they can know something of this former guerilla and her legacy. Inge Viett was a central participant in armed left
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Kersplebedeb: NEW RELEASE: Remembering the Armed Struggle: My Time with the Red Army Faction
Available for pre-order. Shipping in late March. Margrit Schiller was an early member of the Red Army Faction, the West German urban guerrilla group. In 1971 she was captured and charged with a murder she did not commit, and upon her release she returned to the underground, being captured again
Continue readingKersplebedeb: Rote Zora
PM Press has several titles relating to militant currents within the German left of the 1970s and 80s. Two volumes document the history of the Red Army Faction, the pamphlet Prison Round Trip was written by former Movement 2 of June member Klaus Viehmann, and Fire and Flames is a classic account of the German autonomous
Continue readingKersplebedeb | Kersplebedeb: Lumpen: The Autobiography of Ed Mead
More than a memoir, Lumpen: The Autobiography of Ed Mead takes the reader on a tour of America’s underbelly. From Iowa to Compton to Venice Beach to Fairbanks, Alaska, Mead introduces you to poor America just trying to get by—and barely making it. When a thirteen-year-old Mead ends up in
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Inside Canada’s Five-Year-Long Anti-Terror Investigation of a Group of Quebec Communists
On November 30, 2004, a bomb buried under two bags of sand went off, shaking the foundations of a hydroelectric tower near the Quebec-US border. Two years later, a car bomb decimated an oil executive’s car outside of his home, northwest of Montreal. Read the rest of this article on
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Out: The Making of a Revolutionary
Convicted of the 1983 U.S. Capitol Bombing, and “conspiring to influence, change, and protest policies and practices of the United States government through violent and illegal means”, Laura Whitehorn, an out lesbian and one of six defendants in the Resistance Conspiracy Case, spent 14 years in prison. “OUT” is the
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Arm the Spirit Archive
For those of you unfamiliar with Arm the Spirit, it was one of the only publications devoted to reporting on the armed resistance movements in the 1990s. There were a very few magazines and newspapers with this purview at the time, and yet in the days before the internet they
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Two Aspects of Power: Consciousness and Physical Force
Left: A Freedmen’s school, a place of learning established by New Afrikans who had escaped the slave-system in the south of the united states. Right: a mob of euro-americans burns a Freedmen’s school to the ground. It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Armed Confrontation in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s
La Belle Epoque(1984 Wellington, metro Charlevoix)Saturday, June 30, 1PM traduction anglais-français disponible After the surge of protest that was the sixties, all around the world radicals were drawn to new forms of action and experiments in an attempt to cope with the movement’s ebb. In West Germany, the armed struggle
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: [May 14 in Toronto] From Protest to Resistance: West Germany’s Red Army Faction in the 1970s and 1980s
The Red Army Faction was one of the best known, and most vilified, urban guerilla organizations of the Cold War period. Emerging from West Germany’s radical student movement in the 1960s, the RAF bombed U.S. military bases and police stations, carried out kidnappings and bank robberies, and assassinated financial, military,
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Nehanda Abiodun, Political Exile
Recommended reading: Jake Krzeczowski’s blog post about Nehanda Abiodun, a political exile living in Cuba; “They say I and others were involved in expropriations of armored trucks, that we were also engaged in the ‘liberation’ of Assata,” Abiodun said. “Personally they say I was involved in the expropriations and aiding
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Gabriel Kuhn Reviews David Gilbert’s "Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond" (Oakland: PM Press, 2012)
The following review is reposted from the Alpine Anarchist: David Gilbert mentions the documentary film The Weather Underground by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, released in 2002, on the very first page of his book Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond. Gilbert relates how the film has
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