Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy. “Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.” -“How I Came to Be a Victim of Molotov Cocktail Friendly Fire and Lived to Tell the Tale,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in *Rolling Thunder #1.” My friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power: “In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The communists defected—often en masse—to the Nazis and the social democrats held out a little longer but ultimately dissolved their organizations.” In May 1933, when he was twenty years old, he learned that he was about to be prosecuted for having broken a Nazi’s nose in a street brawl. Rather than face trial in a judicial system controlled by Nazis, he immediately obtained a passport and boarded a train for Holland that same night at 8 pm. Some years later, the rest of his family died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. This story succinctly illustrates a surprisingly common phenomenon. Had my friend’s grandfather not participated in open confrontations with Nazis from the very beginning, had he kept his head down and avoided trouble, he probably would have remained in Berlin and met the same fate as his relatives. By taking the offensive, he put himself in harm’s way—but paradoxically, in the long run, that worked out better than playing it safe. Likewise, participants in the guerrilla underground of the Jewish resistance were among the only ones to survive the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In organizing to meet the Nazi threat head on, they developed a robust relationship to their agency, and this served them well when the only way out was to organize a daring escape from the besieged and burning ghetto through the sewer system. For members of targeted groups, the initial impulse is often to withdraw, to go into hiding. Yet when it comes to both individual and collective self-preservation, it can be wiser to act assertively at the beginning, while it is still possible to influence the course of events. Even if this goes badly, it can be better to bring the conflict to a head immediately, before one’s adversary becomes more powerful. If nothing else, this strategy has the virtue of making it impossible to lull oneself into a false sense of security while the threat increases. It doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, it’s safer in the front. Anarchists marching on the so-called “Summit of the Americas” in Québec City, April 2001. It was noon on April 20, 2001. My comrades and I had assembled alongside hundreds of other anarchists and anti-capitalists at Laval University in Québec City to march on a transcontinental summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” In the center of town, behind miles of protective fencing and thousands of riot police, George W. Bush and his fellow heads of state were plotting to override labor laws and environmental protections to enrich their patrons at our expense. The sun was shining. More and more people were arriving at the departure point. One group even rolled up a catapult. The police were nowhere to be seen. Still, I was anxious. Most of my experience of violence was subcultural—fighting skinheads, hardcore shows. I’d never taken on an army of police before. At a meeting the preceding evening, a local organizer had told us that it would be impossible to reach the fence around the summit—there were just too many cops with too much armor and weaponry. As the crowd began to make its way out of the university towards the street, I consulted with a more experienced comrade. “Should we hang back and see what happens?” I asked. “If we want to be able to see what’s happening, we’ll have to be in the front,” he answered, matter-of-factly. We marched directly to the fence surrounding the summit and tore it down. The police could not stop us. The “Free Trade Area of the Americas” was never ratified. Washington, DC, January 20, 2005. My friend’s advice served me well four years later, on the day that George W. Bush began his second term. That night, following the daytime march against the inaugural ceremonies, a second march surged through the neighborhood of Adams Morgan, smashing banks and corporate businesses and attacking a police substation. Some participants dropped an enormous banner across a building façade reading “From DC to Iraq—with occupation comes resistance.” We were attempting to compel the Bush regime to end the occupation of Iraq, which inflicted countless civilian casualties and later contributed to the catastrophic rise of the Islamic State. As the march dispersed, a comrade and I found ourselves among a number of people walking through an alley. Ahead of us, police officers appeared at the exit. We could have turned around and run the other direction. But then we would have been at the back of the crowd, unable to see what we were running towards. “Run, run forward,” I said to my companion. We were already running. We dashed past the cops just as they closed their line across the mouth of the alley. “Don’t let any more of them out,” I heard one bark to another. We were the last ones to escape. The police had blocked the alley from the other side, as well. They forced the people behind us to kneel in the snow for hours. Years later, the detainees won a settlement from the city, but it was better to get away. Denver, August 25, 2008. On August 25, 2008, in Denver, during the demonstrations against the Democratic National Convention, a couple hundred people gathered for a march that had been announced but never organized. We were still protesting against the ongoing occupation of Iraq and against capitalism in general. Armored police were positioned in groups of a dozen each all around the park and the surrounding streets, outnumbering the young people sitting around with black sweatshirts in their laps. A vehicle was supposed to deliver banners, but a rumor reached us that police had detained the driver. Yet just when it seemed certain that nothing was going to happen, a few young folks pulled up their hoods and began chanting. Who are these people? I recall wondering. What are they thinking, masking up and linking arms with hundreds of riot police surrounding them and undercovers at their elbows? What can they hope to accomplish? Nonetheless, the other people who had gathered for the march regrouped with them and they began marching out of the park. They only made it as far as the road, where the nearest squadron of police formed a line blocking their path and showered them with pepper spray. No protest had occurred yet, I had heard no dispersal order, and already the police were using chemical weapons. A comrade and I watched all this with dismay. There were still about two hundred of us, but the police were closing in from all sides and the crowd was disoriented and uncoordinated. It was a recipe for disaster. We were at the back of the crowd. But the back can become the front—it’s just a question of initiative. My comrade began shouting out a countdown. Others joined in, instinctively. Counting together concentrated our attention, our expectations, our sense of ourselves as a collective force capable of concerted action. And then thirty of us were sprinting over the grass away from the police line. Seeing this, the rest of the crowd fell in behind. In a few seconds, hundreds of people were running across the park to the intersection at the far side of the lawn, where police had not gathered yet. Now the energy in the air was electric, in contrast to the malaise and uncertainty of a moment earlier. We passed through the intersection, into which some enterprising young people pulled a municipal sign reading “Road Closed”—and suddenly, we were approaching the business district. The same principle served us well later in the evening when we saw a line of riot police fanning out across an intersection a block ahead. Without pausing to confer, my comrade and I bolted towards them. We reached the line of police and dodged between them before they could block our path. They had orders to create a barrier, not to chase us. We were safe. Washington, DC, January 20, 2017. On the morning of January 20, 2017, another comrade and I joined the march in downtown Washington, DC opposing the inauguration of Donald Trump. In the decades that had passed since Bush’s second inauguration, police all around the country had militarized, receiving bigger and bigger budgets even as politicians claimed there was no money available for anything else. This time, the streets were crowded with 28,000 law enforcement personnel. There was open conflict with the police as soon as the march got underway. The wail of police sirens, the deafening explosions of flash-bang grenades at close quarters, the acrid scent of pepper spray, the roar of police motorcycles, the sizzle of adrenaline—it was a terrifying situation, but the demonstrators around us were giving as good as they were getting. The idea was to set a template for resistance on the first day of the Trump administration, sending the message to everyone that no one should passively accept the intensification of tyranny. The longer we were in the streets, the more dangerous it got. When we passed Franklin Square again, doubling back on our tracks, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before we were surrounded. In downtown DC, between the intersections, the streets are like long stretches of canyon between the cliff faces of the buildings. I knew the police wanted to box us in and kettle us. Every time we passed through an intersection, I glanced at the intersections a block away on either side to see if police were shadowing us on the parallel streets, preparing to cut off our exit routes. Every time we moved out of an intersection into another stretch of canyon, I watched the intersections ahead and behind for police. Whenever we were moving between intersections, we were vulnerable. As we approached 13th Street, police on motorcycles passed us on the sidewalk on our left, attempting to overtake us and seize the intersection ahead. We were still hundreds of feet from it. I urged my companion to run ahead with me, and we sprinted past front of the march, past the bike cops and motorcycle cops, who began ramming their vehicles into the people immediately behind us. When the cops saw that a few of us were already at their backs, they gave up trying to form a line and once again focused on racing ahead of us. Police hate to be outflanked—they can’t risk being surrounded themselves. The clash at the intersection showed that the march was no longer in control of the territory around it. It was time to make our exit. We ran down an alley on our right shortly before the next intersection. A hundred others did the same. Those who continued forward were blocked by a line of police at the next intersection, and turned around only to discover a much stronger police line blocking them from behind. For two long minutes, the crowd paused in confusion and dismay. Some people towards the back of the march had already taken off their gear and were hoping to pass as civilians in order to make their way out of the area, not realizing that they were already trapped from all sides. The participants at the front of the march kept their gear on and linked arms. Someone called out “We’re going to do a countdown!” They counted down quickly from ten to one and charged directly at the police line ahead of them. The person at the very front of the charge held open a flimsy umbrella as they all ran blindly forward. Somehow, the umbrella protected them from the answering stream of pepper spray. Fifty of them broke through the police line and escaped. The ones who lingered, waiting to see whether the charge would break through before joining it, remained trapped in the kettle. Someone later posted a humorous comment on social media to the effect that the cheat code for the J20 Protest Simulator was to be always running at the cops holding a hammer. But there was something to it. Afterwards, watching police footage released to defendants in the subsequent court case, we saw that even after the police and National Guardsmen had tightened up their line, one enterprising individual had escaped simply by sprinting as fast as possible directly at them and ducking between two of them. Everyone who was detained was charged with eight felonies apiece—up to eighty years in prison—for the crime of being mass-arrested in the vicinity of a rowdy march. A few took plea deals, but everyone else stuck together, establishing a collective defense plan and confronting the legal system head on. In the end, after two trials at which all the defendants were declared not guilty, all of the remaining defendants saw their charges dropped. Years later, all of them received payouts from the state to settle the resulting lawsuits. It sounds like a metaphor, but I mean it literally as well as figuratively. Whether it’s a march or a court case, sometimes it’s safer in the front. The Block Cop City. Several years later, I was in Atlanta for the Block Cop City mobilization. Protesters had been trying to stop the construction of a multi-million-dollar facility to further militarize the police. In retaliation, the police had murdered one person and arrested a large number of people at random, charging them with terrorism and indicting sixty-one of them on trumped-up racketeering charges. Before the action proper, there were two days of deliberations at a local Quaker community center. Everyone was on edge. The goal was to try to march into the forest and occupy the construction site. Would we all be arrested? Would we, too, be charged with terrorism and racketeering? The discussions went in circles as people fruitlessly attempted to predict what would happen and negotiated their own risk tolerance. It was decided that there would be three self-organized blocs within the march: essentially, the front, the middle, and the back. Officially, this distinction was not based on anticipated risk, because the organizers could make no promises about what the police would do. But no one was able to consider which bloc to join without panning back to larger questions. How much do I fear the violence of the police and the judicial system? What am I prepared to sacrifice for this movement? Only the bold few who had made peace with their fears and committed to taking the front of the march seemed at ease. Even with the “middle” bloc, there was a lot of agonizing and bargaining going on. “I’ll be in the middle, but not at the front of the middle…” That night, I explained to my family what to do if I didn’t come home from the demonstration. Both of my romantic partners, independently of each other, asked me whether it was really that important for me to participate in this particular march. Couldn’t I just leave it to the younger activists? It’s safer in the front. I remembered this saying from earlier mobilizations—but thinking it over, I wasn’t so sure. How could it be safer to charge directly into police lines? The slogan distilled lessons drawn on my own experience, but heading into yet another dangerous situation, I was dubious. On the morning of the mobilization, we assembled at the park. Despite a few festive flourishes, the atmosphere was somber: a few hundred people risking injury, arrest, and prison time for the honor of an embattled movement. Many people had decided to stay home at the last minute. We marched out of the park in a column, everyone assiduously sticking to their particular position in the risk tolerance spectrum. As long as we were marching down the narrow pedestrian walkway, this made sense, but it made less sense when we emerged onto the main road and advanced towards the construction site. We should have fanned out to present a broad front as we approached the lines of police and armored vehicles blocking the road, but no, the crowd stretched out into what was almost single-file line, like lambs lining up for slaughter. Nonetheless, the ones at the front picked up speed, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and pointing their umbrellas forward to block the cops’ view as they charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line. The rest of us dragged along behind, holding the positions we had committed to holding—no less, and no more. The people with the reinforced banners pushed the first line of cops back until it was reinforced by a second line. Even then, they didn’t relent; they kept on pushing forward against the police. The cops lashed out with their batons, but went on losing ground. The bloc at the front of the march stuck together, protecting each other, acting deliberately. Maybe they were afraid, but it wasn’t fear that was determining their actions. Looking on from behind them, I was terrified. I was grateful I wasn’t in the front, having to make decisions. Police batons are scary, jail time is scary, felony charges are scary, but the truly frightening thing is responsibility. People will accept a lot of negative consequences in their lives just to avoid responsibility. And unfortunately, it’s impossible: try as we might, there is no avoiding the fact that as long as we are able to make decisions and take action, we are responsible for ourselves. That is true whether you position yourself at the front or at the back, or even if you don’t show up at all. I watched the front-liners ahead of me push both lines of police back until they reached a third line comprised of futuristic stormtroopers. No sign of the stormtroopers’ humanity was discernible beneath their military gear; not even their eyes were visible. They had completely removed themselves from the human community. The stormtroopers pulled out tear gas canisters. I watched in disbelief as they tossed the canisters one after another over the heads of the ones at the front into the middle of the march—into the midst of those of us who had hoped that others would run risks on our behalf, who had intended simply to be an appendage of others’ agency. Perhaps it would have been safer in the front, after all? Then everything vanished in a poisonous white haze. We staggered blindly back in disarray, choking and coughing. But the stormtroopers had gassed the rest of the cops, as well, and the other cops were not wearing gas masks. They, too, had retreated. Against all odds, the battle concluded in a draw. In the end, the only person who was arrested that entire day was someone who had opted to play a support role far from the site of the action. They were detained in a vehicle near the park from which we had set out. No one was charged with terrorism or racketeering. In all our anxiety, we had forgotten the greatest risk of all: that we might do nothing, that we would let ourselves be cowed into abandoning the streets. With so many people already facing outlandish charges, marching on the construction site was a risky proposition, but permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere. Sometimes you can only find out what the risks are by taking a chance. This time, we had gotten lucky—but in a way, we had also passed a test. Anarchists at the May Day demonstration in Bandung, 2019. Photograph by Frans Ari Prasetyo. It’s not really safer in the front. Staying home is safer—at least, it’s safer until the long-term consequences of abandoning the streets set in. Then nowhere is safe, and it turns out it would have been better to take some smaller risks earlier on. The anti-fascists who went to Charlottesville in August 2017 to confront the “Unite the Right” rally were putting themselves in harm’s way. One of them was killed; several of them were severely injured. But if they had stayed home, if they had permitted fascists to establish control of the streets, the whole world would have become more dangerous. The likelihood that we may be forced to fight the same battle all over again today does not take away from the fact that they won us eight years of relative safety. Even when all really is hopelessly lost, it is generally better to act boldly, sending a signal flare of hope across the generations, the way the Communards and the Kronstadt rebels did. In so doing, you at least preserve the possibility that others will be inspired to continue attempting to build the world you desire, so that one day, your dream might be realized—even if without you, at least due in part to your efforts. But that’s not where we are today. We face powerful adversaries, but the majority of people, including many of their supporters, have good reason to oppose them, as well. If we bring people together, if we demonstrate effective ways to fight back, putting our own risk tolerance at the disposal of larger struggles, many more people will eventually join us. There’s no reason to hasten into glorifying martyrdom or accepting defeat when the future is unwritten. Not everyone can be in the front all the time, of course. It can be exhausting. But the front isn’t a spatial location. Understood properly, it doesn’t necessarily require a particular kind of physical ability or skillset. It’s a way of engaging with events, of remaining focused on our agency, taking the initiative wherever we can rather than just reacting to our opponents’ initiatives. Everyone can open up a new front of struggle by identifying a vulnerability in the ruling order and going on the offensive. The more fronts there are, the safer we all will be. Facing the second administration of Donald Trump, many anarchists and anti-fascists don’t know where to begin. During the previous Trump administration, we fought hard against an adversary that was much more powerful than us, and won—only to find victory snatched from our hands by cowardly Democrats, who eagerly took over where the Republicans left off, disappointing so many people that Trump was able to return to power. But that is not a reason to give up, this time around—it just shows that all along, we were right about the nature of power, and we owe it to the world to demonstrate a real alternative. In countries ruled by fascism or other forms of despotism, the majority of people do not necessarily support the authorities; they have simply become dispirited, accustomed to passivity. Much more so than liberals, anarchists are used to being outnumbered and outgunned, to fighting against incredible odds. While Democrats make excuses for the fascists or even embrace their agenda, we should demonstrate that it is possible to take ambitious, principled action to resist it. If you feel despair, if you feel defeated, if you catch yourself dissociating or focusing on what our oppressors are doing rather than on what you can do yourself—that is territory that the enemy has claimed within you. Give them nothing without a fight. Stay focused on your agency. Every hour, every day, wherever you are positioned, there is always something you can do. Take care of yourself and those around you. Keep your eyes out for opportunities and seize them. We are in a fight—but it is a fight that we can win. It’s safer in the front. The umbrella charge on January 20, 2017. Further Reading We Fight because We Like It: Maintaining Our Morale against Seemingly Insurmountable Odds

It’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead. Here, we review the events of 2024 and our own contributions to the fight for a better world. A year that began amid genocide in Palestine and war in Ukraine and Sudan is concluding as Donald Trump prepares to return to power. This has grim implications in the United States, where Trump has explicitly promised to carry out “the largest mass deportations in US history,” but also elsewhere, as Trump may attempt to seize new territory, permit Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to resume invading Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing, and make deals with other fellow autocrats at everyone else’s expense. From this vantage point, we can see that we have been living through the rise of a new reactionary nationalism that is now positioned to supplant neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm. It has been gaining power almost everywhere—from Russia to Italy and Germany, from Brazil to Indonesia. It is clear now that the Biden era did not interrupt the rise of autocracy, but simply represented a stage of its rise, during which liberals demonstrated that they, too, were eager to militarize the police, fund genocide, and normalize extrajudicial violence—even if that meant preparing the way for an authoritarian regime that will do away with democracy as they knew it. For decades now, we have been fighting on two fronts against neoliberalism and fascism. These are challenging conditions: winning a battle is no guarantee that we will not have to fight that battle again and again, and every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms. That makes it all the more important that the ways that we fight demonstrate our values and reflect the sort of life we consider worth living. As 2025 begins with an explosion in Las Vegas and an attack in New Orleans, it looks like we are in for a bloody period. As we have already seen in Trump’s aggrandizement of various murderers and, on the other side of the battle lines, in the support for Luigi Mangione, this era is shaping up to be a clash between different kinds of violence. It is not the future we would have chosen, but the story is not over and there may be better days yet to come. This year, the challenge will be to fight as hard as we have to in order to defend ourselves and our communities while nourishing the parts of ourselves that are imaginative, that are tender, that can not only desire a better world but believe it into being. We will have to do these things in the midst of turmoil, rather than waiting for more peaceful times. We can do this. Happy new year, dear comrades. Footage from an anarchist demonstration outside a jail on New Year’s Eve, 2024. Resisting the Police State The militarization of the police continued throughout the Biden era, creating the conditions for Trump and his supporters to ratchet up state violence even further. Seeking to document the proliferation of “cop city” police militarization projects, we published an incomplete list of such projects around the country, along with a report from a protest against one of them in Lacey, Washington. Not surprisingly, the rate at which police murder people has also continued to increase. When police in New York City attacked a person they accused of dodging the fare on the subway—opening fire, shooting the suspect, a police officer, and multiple other people who happened to be in the station—we reported on a collective fare strike action that people organized in response. Finally, in a massive history and analysis, we explored the history of the Stop the Sweeps campaign in Austin, Texas, aiming to distill lessons about autonomous organization to aid revolutionaries elsewhere in future struggles against police violence and dispossession. Climate and Capitalism The floods of May 2024 inflicted the most damage of any climate event in Brazilian history. Similar catastrophes occurred in Spain and elsewhere around the world. We circulated reports from anarchists who responded to these disasters, including anarchists in Appalachia who experienced Hurricane Helene. Panning back to show these events in context, we published an article by Peter Gelderloos exploring why the strategies that mainstream environmental movements are employing to halt industrially-produced climate change are intended to fail. Finally, we designed two posters—”Capitalism Is the Dance of Death” and “Capitalism Thrives on Death.” We mass-produced a sticker version of the former. Solidarity with Palestine Throughout 2024, the Israeli government continued its project of carrying out a genocide in Gaza to make way for its colonial ambitions. We have published several perspectives from people in the region making the case for an anti-colonial understanding of the situation and exploring what it means to act in solidarity with Palestinians. When students at Columbia University and Barnard College set up an encampment in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide at the hands of the Israeli military, we immediately circulated coverage from within the movement, as well as a thorough history of the campus occupation movement of 2008-2010. We did the same thing when students at Cal Poly Humboldt campus occupied a building in solidarity, precipitating a showdown with police from throughout the region that raised the bar for campus occupations with a bonk heard round the world, a bonk for the ages. As the Gaza solidarity movement established campus occupations around the country, we documented them—from the University of Texas at Austin to the the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as far away as Mexico City. Speaking of Austin, we also published a guide to running an announcements-only Signal thread based on the experience of organizers in Austin. In “Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement,” we explored the strategic questions that emerged in the course of the occupations—questions that still face us today. A banner seen at a Gaza solidarity encampment in Mexico City, featuring the titular character from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, The Little Prince. The text reads “Until that which is essential becomes visible.” Sidebar: The Wall Street Journal On May 2, the editorial collective of the Wall Street Journal published a hit piece implying that our publishing project was behind the Gaza solidarity encampments across the United States. The New York Post followed suit the next day, copying the homework of their brighter and more industrious classmates. Not much brighter, mind you. To hear the Wall Street Journal tell it, you would think we were the ones pulling the strings behind the entire solidarity movement. But remember, Columbia University is a walled fortress. Security guards check the IDs of every single person who comes in and out. The only people who could initiate any kind of solidarity movement at Columbia were Columbia students and faculty, and that is exactly what happened. We publish reports from participants in movements like the one that broke out at Columbia, but we are not the ones radicalizing them. The violence in Gaza started that process—and the police did the rest. Capitalist genocide enthusiasts have only themselves to blame for the pushback that they are experiencing. We used to consider the Wall Street Journal to offer reliable journalism. Morally, of course, they were completely bankrupt—their whole project is to justify the tremendous disparities in wealth and power that capitalism produces. But if your raison d’être is to advise capitalists regarding their decisions in the market, you generally have to stick close to the facts, lest you give bad investment advice. Not so anymore, apparently. This time, they intentionally misrepresented the situation, bending the truth in order to drum up outrage and fear according to the format set by Fox News and even worse outlets. And this was not some rogue columnist, but the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal itself. This represents the best they are capable of, the highest priorities of the paper and its owners. Their coverage functioned as an offensive operation on the terrain of discourse, truth be damned, intended to discredit student protesters and make a target out of anarchists in general. The explicit death threats that the troglodytes who read their coverage sent us were an inevitable and presumably intentional consequence. In any case, they will do nothing to discourage us from playing our part in resisting genocide. On the contrary. Elsewhere in the Mideast In response to simplistic readings of the situation in the Mideast, we published a statement by Iranian exiles arguing for a consistent opposition to the Iranian government as well as the Israeli government and all the other forces complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. We also published a text about how Kurdish protesters in Turkey succeeded in preventing the autocratic Turkish government from annulling the municipal elections of March 31 in order to install its own representatives in positions of authority. When the Syrian revolution finally got underway again, we presented perspectives from participants in the revolution in western Syria alongside a report from anarchists in Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria. Finally, we published the reflections of a Russian anarchist volunteer in northeastern Syria. He described watching the Russian mercenaries exit the country after inflicting years of atrocities—hoping that one day, he might see the same soldiers lay down their arms in his homeland, too. Amid widespread suffering and peril, his anecdote represents a glimmer of hope. History cannot remain frozen forever—and all tyrants eventually fall. The Return of the Far Right In the background of all of these events, the buildup to the 2024 elections was like a ticking time bomb. For those who were paying attention, it was clear that the Republicans were likely to win. In a time when increasing disparities in political and economic power are driving many voters to seek a strongman to represent them, the Democrats doubled down on presenting themselves as the party of the status quo, permitting their own ossified bureaucracy to throw the election to their rivals. We identified this problem in July. Yet some were still surprised on the night of November 5. The truth is, the Democrats are responsible in many ways for the problems we face today, and no half measures can avail us in this situation. At the same time, the return of Trump will only intensify the crises we face. We immediately set out to mobilize in response, calling on people around the country to host assemblies and festivals of resistance in order to create the kind of connections that people will need to protect each other. As we see it, based on the experiences of the previous Trump era, resistance is our only hope to put a limit on how far this slide into authoritarianism can go. Further Afield Similar struggles are coming to a head all around the world, now. For example, for several years, locals and environmentalists have fought against the Tesla “gigafactory” outside Berlin—the biggest factory producing electric cars for Tesla in all of Europe. In March, we published an interview with a participant in a forest occupation blocking the expansion of the factory, alongside a translation of a communiqué by a clandestine anarchist group that carried out an act of sabotage that shut down the Tesla factory for at least a week, costing the company hundreds of millions of euros. As Elon Musk expresses his commitment to outright fascist politics more and more explicitly, forms of resistance are especially inspiring. Our correspondent in Argentina sent us a report on the opening of the reign of Javier Milei, titled “Six Months in a Neoliberal Dystopia”—a vivid picture of the rival forces and visions contending for the future everywhere. In August 2024, a wave of protests rocked Indonesia in response to political machinations aimed at anointing a successor to President Joko Widodo. We interviewed anarchist participants in different parts of Indonesia. Elsewhere, in Georgia, a protest movement erupted against the government’s shift towards Putin’s authoritarian regime and the grip of foreign economic powers upon the Caucasus in general. We published a report from the streets and an analysis of the causes and stakes of the protests. And More We didn’t spend 2024 just reporting on social struggles and analyzing geopolitical conflicts. We also published more thoughtful, personal texts, such as this meditation on love for Valentine’s Day and this personal narrative from the front lines of the opioid epidemic. For Steal Something from Work Day, we agitated in support of workers with sticky fingers, arguing that workplace theft should be understood as the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution in our time: The United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it. For April Fool’s Day, we published an extended rendering of the old CrimethInc. lightbulb joke. In a further ironic development, this text was earnestly translated into Spanish and Basque by a comrade in Basque Country who was not familiar with the concept of April Fool’s Day. “How many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb?” I asked. “We’re not here to change things for people,” said the insurrectionist. “The light bulb has to change itself.” “‘Communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself,’” quoted the communist. “It is ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of things,’ which is to say, the darkness.” “So if we change the light bulb, it was communism that did it?” objected the insurrectionist. “Talk about gaslighting.” “Lenin says ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrocution of the whole country,’” the communist answered. Film This year, we completed our documentary about the 2019 uprising in Chile, “Fell in Love with Fire.” Following up our earlier coverage of the Chilean uprising, this film offers an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. In addition, we published footage of a play that the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective performed at the Zapatista encuentro in January, supplementing accounts of the journey to the encuentro and the gathering itself. We also produced a video walkthrough to accompany our guide, “How to Host a Haunted House.” History To celebrate the back-to-back birthdays of Louise Michel and Mikhail Bakunin, we published a narrative account of Michel’s exile in New Caledonia, followed by a virtual tour of Bakunin’s birthplace and family home, Priamukhino, including the museum documenting his life and the lives of his relatives and friends. Revisiting queer resistance to the Nazis in search of tactics and inspiration for our own times, we published “Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld.” To pass on the memory of more recent historical events, we published retrospectives on Reclaim the Streets, Occupy Wall Street, and the anarchist resistance to the fascist gathering in Charlottesville in 2017. In order to enable our slain comrades to continue to address the living, we published the diary of Dmitry Petrov, in which he offered an eyewitness account of the revolution of 2014 in Ukraine. We also contributed an introduction for a book documenting the life and times of Aleksei Sutuga, a Siberian anti-fascist who passed away in 2020. Obituaries On February 6, 2024, the billionaire Sebastián Piñera perished in a helicopter crash. Considering how many Chilean radicals met their deaths from helicopters during the dictatorship, Piñera’s death hangs in history as an unsurpassable example of poetic justice. At the end of February, we received an email from a person who signed himself Aaron Bushnell. He had written us to explain his reasons for setting himself on fire at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. In communication with his friends, we published their memories of him. He seems in all regards to have been an exemplary individual. Aaron Bushnell. Tragically, the anarchist Luciano Pitronello, also known as Tortuga, who had cheated death in 2011, passed away as the consequence of a workplace accident in August. We published a eulogy in his memory. Speaking in Tongues This year, we have published material in Arabic, Basque, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese, among other languages. As of now, we have over 200 articles available on our site in Spanish and Italian, and over 100 in German, French, and Portuguese. For a full listing of all the material we have published in languages other than English, you can start here. In addition, we work with people around the world to keep our works available in print in other languages and regions, as well. For example, this year, our comrades in Brazil did new print runs of three of our books in Portuguese: Recipes for Disaster, Expect Resistance, and Days of War, Nights of Love. We take internationalism and the project of building bridges between different communities and struggles very seriously. It is an honor to work with and learn from our comrades all around the world. If we can build vibrant connections and circulate new ideas and tactics as they emerge, we may prove more resilient than the global capitalist order that has created so many challenges for itself as well as for us. Stormy seas ahead. Appendix: New Print Material All of the following releases are available in our tools section. Please print and circulate them yourself! Posters and Stickers Click on the image to download the sticker. Click on the image to download the poster. Click on the image to download the poster. This is also available as a sticker. Zines Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine.

In the following analysis, we explore the responses to two different extrajudicial killings as a way to understand the different forms of violence that are coming to the fore in our society right now. In the appendix, we offer an incomplete roundup of various responses to the shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Just about every day, more than fifty people are shot and killed in the United States. On December 4, 2024, one of them was Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the most profitable health insurance corporation in the country. In the weeks since, we’ve all heard a great deal more about that particular CEO than about any of the hundreds of other people shot and killed this month. At the same time, there has been an outpouring of support for the attack, despite the efforts of media platforms and employers to suppress it. On December 13, president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president-elect JD Vance invited Daniel Penny to join them at the Army/Navy football game—solely on account of his having randomly murdered a Black person and been acquitted.1 Here, we see some of the most powerful political figures in the world attempting to drum up enthusiasm for extrajudicial killings—provided that they target the marginalized. We must understand the popular response to the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in the context of a society in which life is increasingly cheap. After the far right lionized George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse; after millions participated in a countrywide uprising demanding that police stop killing Black and brown people, only to see politicians across the political spectrum double down on supporting police, with the consequence that police have continued to murder people at a steadily accelerating pace; after bipartisan support for the genocide in Gaza; after hundreds of school shootings, hundreds of thousands of opioid overdoses, and millions of COVID-19 fatalities, not to mention the countless avoidable deaths resulting from the for-profit health and insurance industries—is it really so startling that one person took a shot at an executive? What is startling is that in nearly every other case, the killers have targeted those less powerful than themselves. Trump’s decision to host Daniel Penny is a literalistic fulfillment of Frank Wilhoit’s dictum that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” By contrast, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO suggests that the law cannot always protect the in-groups from the out-groups. But this is not just a question of violence aimed down the social hierarchy versus violence aimed up it. We are talking about two entirely different kinds of violence. Let’s call them sacrificial violence and retribution. Sacrificial Violence What is sacrificial violence? According to René Girard, writing in Violence and the Sacred, When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. Girard is part of a long tradition of European anthropologists whose speculations boil down to a series of just-so stories about humanity.2 But we don’t have to buy into his entire framework to recognize what he is speaking about here: The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice. Sacrificial violence, in short, is scapegoating carried through to the point of murder, functioning as a ritualized means of preserving a society in which there are tremendous unresolved internal tensions. If left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into “proper” channels. And who makes for an ideal scapegoat? All our sacrificial victims […] are invariably distinguishable from the nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance. The considerable importance this freedom from reprisal has for the sacrificial process makes us understand that sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of vengeance. This equation explains why ordinary bigots seek their targets among the most marginalized—those no one will avenge. But Girard’s framework goes further, showing how this can help to protect the state in times of crisis. Perhaps this explains why Trump was able to win the 2024 election by promising to carry out gratuitous violence against undocumented people and trans people. Carrying out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” as Trump has explicitly pledged to do, will wreck the US economy. It will deliver no material gains to the vast majority of his supporters, who benefit from the underpaid labor of the undocumented and the resulting cheapness of commodities. From a purely economic perspective, exploiting the labor of the undocumented inside the borders of the United States provides more advantages to Trump’s supporters than deporting them ever could. By any measure, it’s a waste of resources: deporting a million people in one year will cost eighteen times more than the entire world spends annually on cancer research. In other words, mass deportations are a costly luxury indulgence that Trump’s supporters regard as worth the expense because they experience the need for violence so intensely. The same goes for the desire to see violence enacted—both judicially and extrajudicially—against trans people and against women as a whole. The mendacious propaganda falsely claiming that trans people are carrying out mass shootings or that undocumented immigrants are contributing to a crime wave is not received by its intended audience as cool-headed statistical inquiry, but rather as an indulgence of their desire to do violence to the truth itself as a step towards doing violence to those that they imagine can be harmed “without fear of reprisal.” They have not been misled by erroneous reporting; their desire for violence has created a market for falsehoods. As we argued during the first Trump administration, Trump did not become popular by promising to redistribute wealth, but by promising to redistribute violence. This redistribution of violence creates a pressure valve for a whole host of resentments. To quote Girard, once more: The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a champion. Why are societies driven to desire sacrificial violence in the first place? If it is true that sacrificial violence serves to channel rage away from those who provoke it, then we can infer that the more injustice there is in a society—the more that people are oppressed and exploited and humiliated by those who have more power and more privilege than they do—the stronger the urge for sacrificial violence will be.3 This brings us back to Trump’s decision to fête Daniel Penny. In a time when there is increasingly widespread anger, the role that sacrificial violence plays channeling violence away from those who are responsible for harm is essential for maintaining the stability of the prevailing order. This is the world of The Hunger Games, become real. What would all these angry people be doing if their rage was not satiated via violence against those more vulnerable than themselves? Retribution Retribution is fundamentally different from sacrificial violence. For its target, it seeks the person who is most responsible for a particular injustice, regardless of where that person is situated in the social hierarchy. As a general rule, those who are most responsible for injustice are usually among those who possess the most power—otherwise, how would they have the opportunity to do so much harm? The average person in the United States has considerably more to fear from corporate executives than from undocumented immigrants. It is the powerful who are able to pose the greatest threat to others: this is practically self-evident, despite the efforts of billionaire-owned media and social media platforms to humanize the wealthy and dehumanize the poor. When we see people fixating their rage on the powerless amid the worst inequality in generations, this is a dead giveaway that they have been hoodwinked. It is telling that the populist movement around the wealthiest man to ever become president of the United States is presented as a “revolt against the elites” even as it rallies people to worship oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. There is no longer any way to rally people without at least pretending to have a go at some subset of the ruling class. It is terrifying to realize that one’s enemies are considerably more powerful than oneself. It is much easier to take out one’s misfortunes on those who are even worse off. Easier—and utterly pointless—and despicably cowardly. The shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare galvanized such a powerful response because it posed the question very clearly: should violence be enacted against the most vulnerable—or against the most responsible? It spoke to millions of people because, across the political spectrum, all of them understood that insurance profiteers are responsible for their suffering or for the suffering of people they empathize with. Precisely because it was legible as retribution, the shooting illuminated that injustice has been taking place on a mass scale. Commenters on Youtube discussing their feelings about the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Girard cautions us against vengeance, arguing that a single act of retribution can set off a chain reaction: Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal… The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy. It would put the very existence of this society in jeopardy, at least. Of course, a society in which capitalists are able to amass billions by ruthlessly exploiting everyone else—a society that can only remain stable by targeting more and more people for sacrificial violence—already involves a certain amount of jeopardy. Indeed, what the capitalists fear most is that this single act of vengeance might come to involve the whole social body, that it could initiate a chain reaction. This is why Luigi Mangione, the person accused of shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is being charged with the same crime on both state and federal levels, and with terrorism besides. Is Girard right about the risks of vengeance? We can grant that many people hold sincere but erroneous beliefs about who is responsible for their suffering, quite apart from the inclination towards sacrificial violence that the powerful seek to foster for their own protection. But is it better to inhabit a society in which the powerful can inflict any amount of death and suffering on the powerless without fear of consequences, up to and including outright genocide? Is that really the best way to protect society? We can also grant that it is far better to resolve conflicts to the satisfaction of all parties than it is to descend into interminable blood feuds.4 But the state does not actually exist to resolve conflicts. The judicial apparatus and the hundreds of thousands of police who serve it exist to ensure that conflicts need not be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. They exist to force unsatisfactory outcomes on people, almost always to the advance of the wealthy—thereby perpetuating the conditions that stoke the desire for sacrificial violence. If, indeed, Girard is correct that sacrificial violence is always directed against those who can be “exposed to violence without fear of reprisal,” then it stands to reason that retribution is the only way to hold it at bay. Opposing retribution and accepting sacrificial violence in its place is not a means of averting bloodshed; it is simply a means of ensuring that bloodletting does not threaten the social order. Today, the vast majority of us are closer to being among those who can be killed “without fear of reprisal” than we are to becoming executives whose deaths will be mourned on nationwide media—and the less we act in solidarity with each other, the truer that will be. If we do not wish to risk one day being subject to sacrificial violence ourselves, we must become capable of forging common cause with those who are worse off than us in order to defend ourselves from those who seek to exploit and oppress us. In the absence of effective collective models for self-defense and social change, retribution hangs in the popular imagination as the only remaining way to take a stand against injustice. Sacrificial violence corrupts and debases all who derive relief from it; by contrast, retribution at least expresses a forlorn longing for a world without injustice. As Girard himself admits, It is precisely because they detest violence that men make a duty of vengeance. Beyond Martyrdom In the iconography of sacrificial violence and retribution, the scapegoat and the martyr are twin archetypes. The former is sacrificed to stabilize the existing order, the latter serves to sanctify a new order by giving his life for it. By sacrificing himself, the martyr demonstrates that the new order has a transcendent value—that it is worth more than life itself. These archetypes are thousands of years old; their influence on us is deeper than we understand. Of course, most people are only drawn to martyrdom as a spectator sport. Martyrs’ sacrifices often prove most useful to those who have no intention of risking their own lives for any cause. The popular response to the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare shows how disillusioned millions of people are with capitalism and its beneficiaries, but this response is also a symptom of widespread despair and demobilization. The shooting aroused such an outpouring of pent-up frustrations precisely because these people have not been able to figure out what they themselves can do to put a stop to injustice and exploitation. It is up to us to show that there are ways to resist injustice and exploitation that do not end in martyrdom. If we do not popularize collective models for bringing about social change, if we leave people to choose between passivity and martyrdom, the vast majority will choose passivity. Those who approve of neither sacrificial violence nor retribution had better demonstrate an effective alternative. Arguing against retribution without doing anything to change the conditions that provoke it can only set the stage for even more sacrificial violence to occur in its place. Make no mistake, as economic and ecological crises intensify, we are going to see more and more sacrificial violence—and more public figures will come to view it as necessary, even if they dare not call it by its name. Trump’s violent rhetoric is not a temporary excess; it is just the most visible manifestation of a mechanism that has already resumed the essential role that it plays in stabilizing the social order during every era of unrest.5 As anarchists, the spiritual economics of guilt and punishment that underlies the framework of retribution is foreign to us. Calculating culpability and meting out suffering is the work of the state, its judiciary, and its God; we have other ambitions. We do not wish to see the guilty punished as an end unto itself—we seek to do away with the means via which they oppress. We would pass up the fulfillment of any vendetta if we could thereby bring about the abolition of capitalism, even if that meant permitting every former billionaire to walk free. We don’t seek to goad others into becoming martyrs on our behalf. We aspire to model the sort of courage, humility, and care we hope that others will express alongside us so that together we can change the world. But until we succeed, there will be sacrificial violence—and retribution. Graffiti seen in Seattle, Washington. Appendix According to a survey, over 40% of young people polled deemed the assassination of Thompson “acceptable.” Photographs of graffiti, banner drops, and altered billboards expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person currently being charged with the murder of the CEO, have gone viral and generated headlines. The December 4th Legal Committee is helping to run a fundraising campaign in support of Mangione’s legal defense; interviews with spokespersons Sam Beard and Jamie Peck have been featured on outlets such as CNN, drawing hundreds of supportive comments. As of this writing, the online fundraiser has raised over $186,000. Here follows an incomplete roundup of graffiti, posters, corporate media interviews, and demonstrations addressing the shooting of Brian Thompson or expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person accused of carrying it out. Pacific Northwest A poster seen in Portland, Oregon. Graffiti on a freeway in Medford, OR California A banner appeared in Turlock, California. Two banners appeared on the bridge connecting San Francisco, California. Graffiti seen in Riverside, California. Billboard redecorated in Inland Empire, California. Graffiti seen in Hollywood, California. Graffiti seen in San Diego, California. Freight train graffiti photographed in the Bay Area. Southwest “Deny, Depose, Defend,” graffiti in Las Vegas, NV. Graffiti seen) in Tucson, Arizona. Central -A stencil seen in Austin, Texas. - Also in Austin, on December 21, _ and circulated the following report: Today, six Luigis took a couple banners to a highly trafficked foot bridge in downtown Austin and danced to the Mario theme song. Pedestrians cheered, wrote letters to Luigi, and even took photos with the banners. Letters ranged from heart-wrenching stories about family members being denied healthcare to love letters. The overall reception was extremely good. Flyers were handed out that called out the largest health insurance company in Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield. They read: “On December 4th, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down. The bullet casings told the story: this was act of vengeance against UnitedHealthCare, who denies over 30% of health insurance claims—a company emblematic of a system that kills. Every year, over 50,000 Americans die from lack of insurance. 38% percent of us avoid necessary care because we’re scared of the cost. One in twelve is drowning in medical debt. Health insurance companies aren’t doctors. They don’t heal—they profit by restricting access to care. While we ration medications, delay appointments, and worry about bills, they rake in billions. We get sicker and they get richer. This violence isn’t on the evening news. It’s buried beneath their marketing, their endless paperwork, their fine print. But make no mistake: this is violence. And they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Texas’s largest insurer, denies one in five claims while pocketing $18 billion in revenue. Whether Thompson’s death filled you with joy or horror, it ripped the mask off. The truth was laid bare: these companies are complicit in widespread suffering. Think about the last time you or someone you love worried about a medical bill. Put off care because of the cost. Cut pills in half to make them last. You’ve felt the violence they inflict. Now, the media and government scramble to spin the narrative, calling working-class mother Briana Boston a “terrorist” for uttering “Deny, Defend, Depose” when her claims were denied. We must remain clear headed: a small group gets rich off our illness. The solution is just as simple: abolish these corporations and nationalize health insurance. Single-payer healthcare works everywhere else in the developed world, where people live longer and healthier lives. Texans, by contrast, die three years younger, victims of private healthcare. The only question left is this: When will we stop waiting and take what is ours?” Austin, December 21. Midwest Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois. More graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois. A banner displayed in Chicago, Illinois. Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas. A banner seen hanging in Chicago over Lake Shore Drive. Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois. In addition, a rally in occurred Indianapolis, Indiana. From a report: Today, we protest against Elevance Health not in its role as a distinct actor in the health insurance market, a single agent in the hall of mirrors of contemporary capitalism. Elevance operates in just the same manner as UHC in the way it ranks bodies and judges some to be worthy of care and the rest simply not worth the time or effort. In this manner, the only difference between the two is a matter of degrees in subdomains. We believe it is necessary to oppose this system of broad ranking of life expectancies in an age of depreciating life expectations. It is necessary as a precondition to a life worth living. We believe that everyone is worthy of care. We believe that everyone deserves access to a healthy life according to their own standards. Both Elevance and UHC stand as barriers to this possibility. This is why we oppose them. Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Southeast Graffiti seen in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Graffiti seen in Richmond, Virginia. A sticker seen in St. Petersburg, Florida. A banner drop photographed in Atlanta, Georgia. Northeast Posters appeared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Graffiti appearedin Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A banner displayed Vermont. Graffiti appeared in Baltimore, Maryland. Several instances of graffiti appeared around New York City, as well as CEO “Wanted” posters. A noise demonstration also took place outside of the Ziegfeld Ballroom. One participant said, “You know the theme of the event tonight is the roaring ’20s. In the roaring ’20s, there was a lot of wealth and inequality, just like now. So while they’re drinking champagne and thinking about glamor, we’re thinking about the people that we love who are poor, who are sick, and who can’t afford healthcare.” Artwork in Santiago, Chile. When they invited him to the football game, Penny had just appeared on Fox News describing the “guilt” he “would have felt if someone did get hurt”—making it explicitly clear that he did not consider Jordan Neely to count as a human being. ↩ For example, Girard argues that desire emerges imitatively and that this inevitably provokes violent tensions between people, as it causes them to compete for the same scarce objects. One might counter that while some of the things that people desire are indeed subject to scarcity, imitative desire could also give rise to cooperation, producing abundance in place of scarcity and diminishing the impetus towards violence, sacrificial or otherwise. In short, Girard does a compelling job of describing the role of sacrificial violence in afflicted societies, but he does not succeed in proving that it is inevitable. ↩ This explains why some of the new voters that Trump picked up in the 2024 election are immediately adjacent to the demographics he is pledging to attack: positioned near the margins, on the receiving end of injustice, they feel the urgency of violence more than most. ↩ There is a longstanding tradition, stretching back to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, of works of philosophy and literature claiming that state power and its attendant centralized judicial system were invented in order to put an end to the cycle of violence that Girard claims is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of retribution. In the Icelandic tradition, the equivalent work is probably Njáls Saga, which recounts blood feuds and conflict resolution across a half century in the days before Iceland had a centralized government. Centralized state governance took hold in Iceland much later than in ancient Greece, however, so we can compare the myth presented in the Oresteia with the reality of Icelandic history. In fact, centralized government did not spontaneously emerge in Iceland as a means to resolve conflict; rather, once conflicts between various local parties became irresolvable, the king of Norway was able to take advantage of the opportunity to bring Iceland under his control and impose his rule upon it. If this example is any indication, the reality is precisely the opposite of the myth: those who cannot resolve conflicts among themselves will eventually be subordinated to the state, which is itself the result of unresolved conflict that has metastasized into a permanent condition, not the solution to unresolved conflict. ↩ In order to supply the American public with sacrificial violence, the previous generation of Republican politicians repeatedly invaded Iraq. That was a kinder, gentler time, when sacrificial victims were chiefly sought outside the borders of the United States. Just like today’s war on the undocumented, those invasions were justified with discernibly false pretenses and scaremongering. The result was sort of drunken spree from which politicians of both parties emerged with regrets, having completely destabilized the Middle East and made the world a considerably more dangerous place. ↩

The toppling of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was many years overdue. Yet the tragedies in Syria are not over. Israel has bombed hundreds of locations around the country and seized a considerable amount of land in the southwest, while Turkish proxy forces are threatening to attack northeastern Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing. As in 2019, when Donald Trump gave Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the green light to invade the country, we call on people around the world to engage in solidarity actions to discourage the world powers from permitting this to happen. To humanize at least one of the countless people whose lives hang in the balance here, we offer the reflections of a Russian anarchist volunteer in northeastern Syria who has participated in the revolutionary experiment in Rojava for many years. He describes watching the Russian mercenaries exit this country where they have inflicted so much harm, hoping that one day, he might see the same soldiers lay down their arms in his homeland, just as Assad’s mercenaries have. For more updates on the situation in northern Syria from anarchist internationalists on the ground, you can follow this Russian-language telegram channel or consult the website of Tekoşîna Anarşîst. I am composing these lines sitting on the cold and dusty floor, leaning against the wall. I really want to sleep. Over the past two weeks, I have lost all sense of what time it is—I have not often had the chance to be on the surface. Sleeping on a thin mattress in a common room is not the routine I am used to. We often fall asleep at different times. Sleep is interrupted by people walking from room to room, information being transmitted by phone and radio, alarms being raised because of possible SNA1 attacks on our position. To freeze under a swath of open sky, straining my ears over the beating of my own heart—can I hear Turkish drones in the sky? Are there artillery salvos, are there missiles flying? And so I sit here, hugging my machine gun and wrapping my face in a scarf. And the long hours of waiting drag on. Of course, I think a lot about the situation that has rapidly unfolded in Syria. I can’t shake the feeling that we are on the brink of a major war. Yet here, the view of the quiet villages occupied by pro-Turkish fighters on the other side of the front line can be deceiving. Everything looks calm; the fields between us are empty; nothing moves. In reality, this is the result of several years of war. The balance of precautions that has developed over this time: traps, mines, surveillance cameras and patrols on both sides—all of these narrow the possibilities for offensive action. Realizing this, I feel an invisible tension that stretches to the horizon in the direction of the enemy. This situation is periodically shaken by the arrival of artillery shells and gunfire. The people at the other positions around us are in a similar situation. There is a city behind us, and pro-Turkish fighters can try to break through us straight to it. Everyone in our position is ready to defend against any attack. In contrast to the daily reality on our part of the front, we are able to watch the news. Events are developing at breakneck speed. The Assad regime has fallen, Manbij is under attack by the SNA, Deir ez-Zor is in the hands of the SDF2 to prevent the Islamic State from capturing the city—and now Shehba has been surrendered, Deir ez-Zor has been handed over to HTS,3 there is fierce fighting in Manbij and the subsequent retreat. Almost a million people have been forced to leave their homes due to new hostilities. Israel has been bombing military infrastructure throughout Syria. A lot of contradictory and incorrect information is circulating on various channels. It is clear that information warfare and psychological war are being waged. This is intended to influence people’s perceptions of the situation, to shape the discussions and the general mood as well as the coverage that other media outlets provide, not to mention its effects on the participants in the events themselves. The news about the adoption of the green-white-black tricolor with three red stars as the flag of the new, post-Assad Syria occasioned special discussions among us. The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North-Eastern Syria considers itself part of this Syria. In view of the history of this flag, which became a symbol of the revolution in the country and the banner of the uprising against Assad in 2011, this move is not surprising. There are also contradictions. HTS took this symbol into circulation. But it does not belong to them. Now an opportunity has opened up to make the project of democratic confederalism a possible option for all of Syria and beyond. Politically and in many other ways, Rojava is stronger and richer than HTS. The latter has just had a wave of success, while in Rojava, we have experience and a well-developed idea. The SDF would also prefer a political solution to the situation in Syria. Commander-in-Chief Mazloum Abdi said that no one wants war here except for the pro-Turkish proxies. Watching all this, some quick and perhaps naïve thoughts flash through my head. Footage from cities liberated from the regime shows people celebrating the fall of the regime. I have noticed that there are almost no women visible among them. This seems like a significant contrast to what many of the rallies and marches in Rojava look like. The thought has also crossed my mind that it could become possible to see previously inaccessible places in Syria. After many years of dictatorship, traveling from Rojava to Damascus, for example, without “special routes” has seemed impossible. And what about the millions of people who were born and raised here? What about the Kurdish population, who for a long time were not even granted passports? What about those who were born after their parents were forced to emigrate from Syria? Or the generations who have known nothing but Assad’s rule and war? These reflections bring me back to the situation in Russia. Witnessing the broad Syrian opposition, millions of people watching what is happening with hope, packing their bags to return home, it is difficult not to think: what will it be like when the same thing happens in Russia? The Assad regime was guaranteed by Putin’s power; its fall has already completely changed the position of the Russian army here. Following the soldiers of Assad’s regime, who realized that they were no longer in danger from the old order and abandoned their equipment, weapons, and positions, the Russian army is also leaving. I watched with special feeling as the Russian columns passed by me at one of the positions. I peered into the faces of the soldiers, trying to understand whether they realized that all these years, they had been terrorizing the population with bombings, they had surrendered Afrin to the Turkish army, they had kept Assad’s regime alive—and now all this is over. Russian military aid to the Syrian dictatorship has ended. I do not think that those soldiers realized that they were looking into the eyes of a man from the same country as themselves, but who chose the other side of the barricades. As will probably happen in Russia one day, the fall of the regime here has created a space that must be filled by a new political system. HTS, the former Al-Qaeda in Syria, which is doing its best to appear “presentable,” is unlikely to be able to organize a new state without a quick collapse or a new crisis. Although they overthrew Assad, HTS is not a liberation force in terms of its values. Perhaps in Russia, we will also see the regime collapse thanks to forces that are far from the values ​​​proclaimed by the Rojava experiment. Women’s liberation, the coexistence of various ethnic groups and other identities, each with their own autonomy, communes—today, in the Russian Federation, these are not especially popular topics, even in the opposition milieu. Whatever the character of the force that overthrew Assad, it will stir up hope in the hearts of millions. It will also open the door for new ruling elites and their interests. Hope and enthusiasm are in short supply in the fight against Putin’s regime today, but they are necessary for success. Sometimes, we will have to endure deep contradictions and disappointments. In between my reflections, everyday affairs, and the organization of defense, our daily life is not without familiar things. An Arab comrade, who has been through almost all the fronts of the defense of the revolution, pours sugar into the teapot with full ladles, laughing and saying, “Dims” (Kurmanji for “syrup”). A cat named Myshka wanders among us, and we joke that she is part of the defense. A comrade next to me diligently writes Arabic script and shows her work to the Arab comrades, who patiently check her spelling. Sunrise is coming. We are ready, the strong sweet tea is invigorating, and a new day is ahead. Events are moving very quickly—every couple of hours something new and unexpected happens. What awaits us today? I don’t know. But the thought that we are standing in defense of the revolution and its ideals together with people of all ethnicities and ages from around Rojava, that each and every one of us is making a contribution, gives me strength and clarity. I hope that Rojava’s survival will bring victories to our anarchist movement, which, in my opinion, can learn a lot here in Syria. Syrian National Army, a proxy force serving the Turkish government. ↩ The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the military of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. ↩ Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups from northern Syria. HTS evolved out of Jabhat al-Nusrah, which began as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. ↩