“As to the seventy-five years I am not really worried, not only because I am in the habit of not completing sentences or waiting on parole or any of that nonsense but also because the state simply isn’t going to last seventy-five or even fifty years” – Kuwasi Balagoon, December 9, 1983
“To my friends and supporters to help them make sense of all these events that have happened so quickly. Certain human cultures have been waging war against the Earth for millennia. I chose to fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, saguaros, cliff rose and all things wild. I am just the most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have made a jail break – I am returning home, to the Earth, to the place of my origins” – William “Avalon” Rodgers, December 21, 2005
Memory is a weapon – one we too often neglect to brandish in our battles. It is easy, trapped as we are in the tides of progress, to forget what and who came before us, who burned paths that serve now as trail markers for insurgents.To forget is to be lost in a forest. To forget is to have no history.
The act of remembering is a defiant gesture. Against our lobotomization by technology. Against the sterilization of history by the state’s schools. Against the pacification of revolutionary lives by official history and its narratives of progress. Against the amnesia that would erase the examples of those who paid for freedom with their lives. To begin to fight this society, its rotten authority, and its poisonous ideologies, we should first remember.
December hangs heavy upon us, but also lights inextinguishable fires.
We mourn Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15 year old anarchist murdered by police in December 2008 in Athens, whose death set off weeks of open war against the Greek state.
We grieve for Sebastián Oversluij – “Angry” – irrepressible anarchist killed on December 11, 2013 by a bank’s paid dog while attempting to expropriate money in Santiago, Chile.
We seethe with rage over the December 1986 prison death of Kuwasi Balagoon – former Black Panther, soldier in the Black Liberation Army, and New Afrikan anarchist.
We burn the night to call forth the spirit of William “Avalon” Rodgers, earth liberationist who committed suicide on the 2005 Winter Solstice while in jail on charges of bringing fire to the pillagers of the wild.
To honor these fighters, we do not just cry. We do not merely fold our hands and lament the brutality of the state against our comrades. We do not flinch in fear over their deaths. We act. We keep alive their struggles by continuing to fight. Whatever our means, whatever our context: through intransigent revolt our comrades’ hearts still beat.
For Alexandros & Angry
For Kuwasi & Avalon
For all things wild, peace by piece
