Workers Solidarity Movement

The WSM will be at this years Belfast Anarchist Bookfair at the Catalyst Art Gallery, come along to our stall - one of over a dozen, see below - to pick up some good anarchist reads from Ireland and to say hi.

10th Belfast Anarchist Bookfair
Catalyst Arts
Ground Floor, 5 College Court, BT1 6BS Belfast
9th September 2017 1pm – 7pm

The alt-right have just carried out an ISIS style attack on anti-fascist protesters in Virgina killing at least one person and wounding 19.  In the video you will see the car accelerating at speed down an empty street into protesters that are 50m away at an intersection, it ploughs into them without slowing down.  Towards the end of the video the car can be seen reversing back up the street at speed with its front bumper hanging off.  At that point it has hit people and other static cars, pushing them forward into yet more people 

Video of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home. pic.twitter.com/MUOZs71Pf4

— Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) August 12, 2017

You are invited to a public conversation on anti-fascist resistance with a visting long time anarchist and anti-fascist from the USA and a panel of other anarchists from the US.

Teachers Club 35 Parnell Square, Dublin
7:45 Thursday 24th August

Recently anti-fascists mobilised in Dublin to cover far-right propaganda in the city centre and send a clear pro-freedom and humanist message. 500 stickers welcoming refugees, denouncing Nazism & fascism, sexism, and homophobia, supporting a pregnant person's right to choose, and so forth, were emblazoned on the social canvas.

This was partially in response to a fascist group attempting to launch in Dublin a couple weeks ago, in an esteemed lineage of micro-sects which the same begrudgers have failed to get off the ground in this country, forgetting to turn up to their own meeting while 50 anti-fascists turned out. However, they were very proud to attach 4-5 fascist stickers to Dublin lampposts (which were all scratched off promptly).

Several hundred people marched through the streets of Derry 23 July to demand the immediate release of Derry political prisoner Tony Taylor, interned without trial by the British State for 500 days. In marking this occasion of his 500 day of incarceration Anarchists in Derry joined with the relatives, friends of Tony Taylor including other a number of republican organisations, socialists, trade union and human rights activists, the largest seen in the city for a number of years.

From the Anti-Racism Network Ireland:

If you want to cringe hard, watch the Fine Gael PR team's latest attempt to make Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney look human.  The comments section is uplifting and worth a read, another case of an arrogant elitist organisation thinking they can put out any auld waffle without a kickback from the people they abuse [1].
 

Thoughts and rambles from a new WSM activist, an open invitation to the pissed off masses - Does the state of the world today make you despair? Perhaps you know deep down there's something wrong, that the constant stream of hate and fear pedalled by a media owned by a handful of billionaires is bringing out the worst in humanity? But wasn't it partially our own governments fault for selling guns and bombs to these warmongering states you ask? In, say for example, the Middle East? Maybe dropping countless bombs on civilian targets contributed to the huge flow of innocent refugees towards Europe and western countries?

Every year in either Dublin or Belfast the pro and anti choice movements come head to head around the so called ‘Rally for Life’.  This year it was Dublin’s unwilling role to play host to the bigot parade.  It mattered more years than many as a referendum on the hated 8th Amendment that bans abortion is promised for next year.  It could be that the next Dublin bigot parade scheduled for 2019 will come after they have suffered a major defeat.

Saturday saw the annual anti-choice parade and yet again RTE reported a grossly inflated figure of the number marching.  They headlined it as ‘tens of thousands’ and in the body of the article quoted the organisers claiming 70,000 without further comment, appearing to endorse it.  As we are going to show below at the very least that’s a tenfold exaggeration, in fact by our count about 5300 people took part.  And while that estimate might be out by 10 or even 20% its physically impossible for it to be out by up to 1500% as that would require ten people too fit into a one meter square space.

We use the same counting methodologies (see below) for almost every demonstration that takes place in Dublin, from huge anti water charges protests to smaller but still significant ones on a huge range of issues.  We do these sorts of counts more than a dozen times a year.  We don’t always publicise the numbers we reach - organisers always tend to overestimate somewhat, most often guessing a figure that is twice what actually attended.  Generally we agree with what the demands of a demonstration are so we don’t want to appear to undermine it by publicly providing real numbers.  But we do count, we do use those counts internally in the WSM and we often communicate them directly to organisers.