Anarchist Black Cross

USA: Anarchist Prisoner Eric King Released to Halfway House After Ten Years

Posted on 2023/12/17 by darknights

Following nearly ten years of incarceration and numerous attempts by the State to frame, murder, and break him – anarchist prisoner Eric King has now been released and is headed to a half-way house “for several weeks,” reports supporters.

Imprisoned for taking direct action in solidarity with the Ferguson uprising, Eric King survived everything from COVID, to attacks by neo-Nazi prisoners, and years of abuse from guards. In a statement from 2016, King stated:

I stand by my actions. After seeing what happened in Ferguson, so close down the road, I was disgusted by the lack of mobilization in my city. Three hours away people were fighting for their lives and we weren’t even taking to the streets. We were doing nothing. My act as a very personal display of my anger and rage toward the state as well as an act of solidarity to everyone in Ferguson. We never know our own strength until we are tested and even with my ridiculous sentence I feel at least proud to have been able to stand strong and refuse to cooperate with the state.

In 2022, Eric King was victorious in court against a frame-up attempt by guards, after they attacked him in a supply closet and attempted to slap him with an additional 20 years in prison.

Currently there is a fundraiser set-up for Eric to help him with his post release. Eric is also one of the co-editors of the new book, Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, published by AK Press, sales of which benefits the Anarchist Black Cross warchest program and Eric King’s family.

Eric’s bravery and courage in the face of years of torture and abuse is a testament of our collective ability to resist and weather the horrors of state repression. For future updates, be sure to check out the Support Eric King page, here.

UK: Letter for the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners August 23rd – 30th by Imprisoned Anarchist Toby Shone

Posted on 2022/08/03 - 2022/08/03 by darknights

Letter for the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners August 23rd – 30th by Imprisoned Anarchist Toby Shone, UK

“Does this rising generation know that those who inaugurated the 8 hour day were put to death at the command of Capital?”
Lucy Parsons, The Haymarket Martyrs, November 1926

“Although we are not reformists, the struggle to obtain improvements in one’s immediate situation (wages, housing, health, education, occupations etc) sees the anarchists present, but they do not see these struggles as ends in themselves. They push the exploited towards this form of struggle so that they can develop the elements of self-organisation and refusal of the delegate which are indispensable in order to develop direct action at all other levels.”
Alfredo M. Bonanno, What are Anarchists?

Despite being in prison, news occasionally reaches me of the many repressive operations and terrible circumstances that our comrades are confronting. That’s why I am in agreement with the proposal once again put forward by the Anarchist Black Cross for a week of solidarity at the end of August. This date is chosen to mark the State murder of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. We cannot give in to resignation or become complacent in these times. It is more important than ever to explain and make accessible the anarchist analysis and to put it into practice immediately.

Anarchism is internationalism, self-management, mutual aid, solidarity, and direct action: incisive, voracious and alive. That’s why our spaces are raided and evicted, our publications seized, our communities hunted, beaten, imprisoned and killed around the world.

During my interrogations, the Counter-Terror cops at one point focussed on the International Week of Solidarity with anarchist prisoners, accusing this event of supporting terrorism, glorifying terrorism. That’s because part of their strategy is to try to illegalise the Anarchist Black Cross. Their aim is to destroy all solidarity and counter-information structures which spread information about and provide material support for the legal cases of anarchist comrades who are locked up. Continue reading “UK: Letter for the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners August 23rd – 30th by Imprisoned Anarchist Toby Shone” →

Chile: Text of anarchist comrade Mónica Caballero from San Miguel prison

Posted on 2021/10/12 - 2021/10/12 by darknights

This week marks 8 years since various groups of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) and different individuals around the world raised the initiative to maintain a week of international solidarity with imprisoned anarchists, and that this week coincides with the day on which the anniversary of the legal murder of anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco by the U.S. government in 1927 is commemorated.

The official history written by the powerful plus the progressive democratic left and a part of anarchism have been especially concerned with creating a victimized image of Sacco and Vanzetti and far from any illegalist practice. All this based on the recognition by the American judicial apparatus that within the criminal process that condemned Sacco and Vanzetti there were many irregularities and that they would be legally “innocent” (information that became known many years after the murder of the comrades). Probably the comrades had no relation with the expropriation of South Braintree, which is important to know and make visible, as it is also important to emphasize that Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists of action, who propagated anti-authoritarian ideas and exercised different illegalist practices.

In the territory we call the USA in the early 1900s there were several informal anarchist groups dedicated to expropriations and to the spread of ideas antagonistic to domination. Nicola and Bartolomeo actively participated in one of these groups, specifically in the one surrounding the newspaper “Cronaca Sovversiva”. These last elements “the official history” has omitted them as in the same way they have taken special care not to remember the international solidarity that the comrades had during the year 1927. There were many demonstrations of repudiation in different localities of the political/legal/police process, as well as explosions in the name of Sacco and Vanzetti, one of the best known being the action that destroyed the Italian consulate in Buenos Aires.

It is not by chance that those who sustain the Power and its false critics use and make up the history related to Sacco and Vanzetti, certainly it is not the first time and it will not be the last.

The repressive apparatuses of the State break with their own legality constantly: they create montages, rape, torture and a long etc… These practices, for those of us who position ourselves as enemies of the hegemony of Power, should not surprise us… Trusting in the democratic legality of the State is not part of my political construction. This does not mean that I intend to naturalize the abuses exercised by the powers of the State on a daily basis; making visible is not the same as being a victim.

I see a week of solidarity specifically with anarchist prisoners as one more occasion to make visible what happens behind the high walls. Prison for me is yet another scenario of confrontation, which is felt in the smallest and most everyday things.

The first step I took in a prison was a long time ago, since then I have never stopped feeling the solidarity of my comrades, that solidarity I have had in a fraternal embrace or in a beautiful seditious light in some icon of Power.

94 years after the legal assassination of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, nothing and nobody is forgotten.

Those who fight against Power do not cease to be remembered.

Source: Publicacion Refractario