Translations – just say no

Translation of a letter from a Cuban Anarchist after the protests

Posted on 2021/07/16 by julesb

There is a lot of turmoil that cannot be fit into a left-right schema. It is a people who are discovering their capacity to be more than a mere mass of support for a retrograde and cynical oligarchy which uses the words “revolution” and “anti-imperialism” to legitimize an ordinary despotism hardly different from any other tyranny. They are a people tired of “revolutionary” and “socialist” inequalities and privileges.

Cuba, in addition to being a museum of the global left, is a society with a state, police, repressors, privileged & marginalized peoples and a bureaucratic military oligarchy as greedy as any other. The fact we’ve had an enlightened and humanistic despot does not excuse him, nor his lasting heirs, from their despotism. A significant portion of the people say they’ve had enough. The American blockade must be lifted, the monopoly of the Castro oligarchy must end. It will be complicated & surely “impossible”, but that’s the most honest perspective I’m seeing.

Our companion Leonardo Romero is currently missing; he is an enemy of the Cuban state for having publicly written on a sign “Socialism yes, repression no!” His disappearance is the true face of this government.

Caption for image: “Anyone who hinders the steady forward march of this brother is the enemy.”

original text at http://www.polemicacubana.fr/?p=15774

our wrath overflows: flyer from an @fem demo

Posted on 2021/06/25 - 2021/06/25 by julesb

I recently attended an anarchist-feminist demonstration that made a strong impression on me. You can read more about the action and the event that provoked it here.

While it would have been bad form to take photos of the many stickers and graffiti I saw, I did collect some of the flyers that were being scattered in the air and (in the case of the following) tucked under the windshield wipers of cars and into mailboxes.

This flyer, signed Φεμινιστα Σγντροφα (Feminist Comrades) was an explanatory message to the fairly complacent middle-class neighborhood in which the demo occurred, and I have translated it from Greek.

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a greek meme

Posted on 2020/09/04 - 2020/09/05 by julesb

hipster: we are the granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn

her grandma: cell phones are satanic

being as i am a lazy caricature of a north american anarchist, i find myself interested in learning modern greek. one fun way i like to learn is by translating political banners in photos and greek memes.
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dissecting good propaganda

Posted on 2020/06/19 - 2020/11/09 by julesb

i don’t believe in electoral politics, but i believe in the power of propaganda– or what we in the bullshit business call “narrative.”

during her initial run for office a few years back, this u.s. politician AOC ‘went viral’ with a very good campaign video. now that she’s running for re-election she has a new, also very good video. i’d probably get kicked off noblogs if i embedded it but you can view it here.

in a twitter thread, austrian antifascist researcher Natascha Strobl provided incisive analysis of elements that make this 30-second blast so suasive. while i personally feel voting constitutes self-harm, i still recognize master-craft *~narrative~* when i see it.

shoutout to @_plafta for providing context and nuance for some of the german idiom… any fuckups are mine

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“revolutionary tourists” in gran canaria

Posted on 2019/09/05 - 2020/06/24 by julesb

Just downriver from New Orleans is a large (though much-reduced) population descended from Canary Islanders. These “Isleños” came to South Louisiana in the late 1700s and have their own rich conflictual history, including a 1926 insurrection. More on that later, perhaps.

What follows, though relatable to many places, concerns the Canary Islands. It’s a (clumsy) translation of a twitter thread about the behavior of “revolutionary tourists” from the Gran Canaria Anarchist Federation, “Combative and neighborhood anarchism from North Africa.”

Now that we have survived August, we are going to talk a little about a type of tourism that a large part of the left does not question: “revolutionary tourism”. In Gran Canaria we have suffered a lot, to the point of becoming “disagreeable”.

Many people from the (Spanish) peninsula, from England, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Greece arrive every summer on the island to “get acquainted.” Is this to see how we work, to share ideas, to attend an assembly, to chat for a couple of hours? Only for a minority. The rest come for something else.

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