Letter from Tokyo Anarchists to A- Festa
Dear Filipino Anarchists,
July 2006 is 70th anniversary of Spanish Revolution which was a culmination of anarchist movements in history. We are proud to have anarchist events both in Tokyo and Manila in this July.
The political and cultural situations in Manila and Tokyo must be quite different. For our point of view, Filipino activists seem to be more militant than Japanese ones. However, Anarchism itself, which mainly have been theorized and practiced in the Europe and United States, has often been treated as an already fragmented and outdated concept in Asian region, especially in Japan.
However, we see the need for social freedom is one of the basic human nature and there are struggles for freedom and autonomy in every corner of the globe, even though they do not call themselves *Anarchism.*
What we need are not leaders or political parties, but catalysts, which keep encouraging the movement for freedom without giving in the state and capitalism, and pull people out from the position of spectators. Our event in Tokyo will be held to celebrate the releases of Japanese translation of *An Anarchist FAQ* and a DVD of *Pueblo En Armas.* We do not know how those releases affect to our situation. But to do nothing in this reactionary era should be more or less to accept the current situation. We should remember the Spanish Revolution was a culmination of more than 60 years of anarchist activities.
Let us inspire various types of anti-authoritarian activities together as catalysts. We hope our parallel event will give momentum to radical potentialities.
For a World of Direct Action and Mutual Aid,
Anarchism Editing Committee
CIRA-Japan
Irregular Rhythm Asylum
Ciao…
Maybe you know that the next G8 summit will be held in Germany in 2007, in a small village called “Heiligendamm” at the Baltic Sea.
And maybe you already got an impression about the very broad mobilization against the G8 meeting. Many different groups and spectrums are organizing since one year, and there are at least 3 big and important approaches:
- an alliance of 30 NGOs;
- the proposal to make a big alliance like Genoa Social Forum with a first big meeting yet;
- and “dissent”, which includes several groups of radical left, anarchists, antiautoritarian, environmental, antifascist etc. “dissent”had 4 meetings of about 150 - 250 people each.
There had been in August a 10 day preparation camp for the summit which was organized from groups of the radical left. 1.000 people participated. It is becoming clear now that radical left groups will focus on migration and antimilitarism as our own topics against G8.
This shows a very big interest and seems to be an opportunity to bring the splitted up left somehow together…?
There is also since quite a while a bigger international mobilization. One of the “dissent”-workinggroups is the “Infotour Collective”. This group crosses all over europe to inform people about what is prepared yet, who is organizing, which groups plan what, which are the local
conflicts around Heiligendamm, what are police strategies, how is german police equipped, what are the Nazis planning against globalization (they do!), which campains are already started etc.
The Infotour Collective already organized 40 lectures in other countries, such as Sweden, Island, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic and so on.
we would like to link our mobilization also to the further g8 summits 2008 in japan and 2009 in italy. our idea is, that after german summit we make an infotour in japan to tell you about mobilization in western europe since genoa 2001, or maybe since prague imf/ worldbank 2000. we do the tour with comrades from moscow which mobilized for russian summit 2006. we would like to do that tour in autumn 2007. coming back from japan we try to mobilize in europe for the summit in japan.
for this we would like to start NOW making and keeping contacts to japan. could you help us organizing that?
so please spread this mail as wide as possible. and give us a feeback:
- are there already groups in japan thinking about g8 2008?`
- which groups are in japan which might work together with us?
- how big is the anarchist scene; means, do they have groups in all bigger cities? this might make it easier to make contacts for us.
- what do you think about the idea to work closer together concerning the common mobilization against g8?
kisses
m. from infotour collective and gipfelsoli.org
to contact m, try this email: gipfelsoli(NOSPAM)nadir.org
Comment by Admin — September 10, 2006 @ 6:31 am