my fave anarcho-bro posted a week ago, little bit scattered tho, quickly switched to gaza

In 1871, France was using New Caledonia as a penal colony, about 20 years after conquering it. 1871 is an oft-remembered year for revolutionary movements in European and settler countries, because of the Paris commune. After holding out for two months, the communards were overrun, with over ten thousand killed, 40,000 captured, 15,000 tried, many executed, imprisoned, or sentenced to hard labor… and over a thousand deported to New Caledonia.

One of the most inspiring exiled communards was Louise Michel, an anarchist who I think did an exemplary job of balancing the needs of education, organization, healing, and fighting against the existing system. She became famous in the Commune for rabble-rousing, inspiring people to take action, running a school for the children, healing the wounded, and fighting in the trenches. Her book on the Paris Commune is one of the most valuable texts on anticapitalist struggle from the 19th century. Yet for some reason, it hasn’t been translated into English. Translators! Where are you at?

The timing felt relevant though, reading about a surge in Kanak rebellion right as Michel’s birthday was coming up on my calendar: Louise Michel was one of the communards exiled to Kanaky, to so-called New Caledonia. The time she was there was a time of active resistance by the Kanak to French colonial rule. Michel supported the independence fighters and documented some of the resistance. She also writes about how the greater part of the socialist exiles opposed or even helped suppress Kanak resistance, and took Kanak servants to ease their time in exile.

Fascinating bit of history

This isn’t only a historical drama, but a split that continues to the present day, when the majority of the Left refused to fully break with colonialism and the anticapitalist currents most favored in academia still have a colonial view of the world—that noxious idea of progress (whether historical or universal, dialectical or humanistic)—baked into their theories and their telling of history.

and to gaza:

Earlier in the week, the Israeli military demolished all the houses and structures of a Bedouin community of 500 in the Negev desert, outside the Gaza strip. The settler military also uprooted their olive trees, a systematic attack on the ecology and self-sufficiency of locals. Some Bedouin communities in the Negev have been forcibly evicted hundreds of times by Israel. The pro-genocide jewishpress.com celebrated the evictions, claiming they were “years overdue” and that the “illegal squatters camp” was “generously compensated”. Zionist paramilitaries expelled over 80% of the Bedouin, the Negev’s indigenous inhabitants, when they created the white supremacist ethno-state in 1948.

But, “Repeat a lie often enough…” seems to be the practical philosophy of mainstream media. One lie they constantly repeat is that this is an “Israel-Hamas” war. They erase Palestinians from the headlines while Israel erases Palestinians from the face of the earth. The media ignore all the undisputed evidence of how Israel is deliberately targeting civilians, how the results of the Israeli war is to kill and traumatize and displace Palestinians en masse, and how most of the leading Israeli politicians have gone on record to announce their intentions not to stop until there is no more Palestine. And yet, with each new attack, the media obediently publish Israeli denials, claims of an “accident” or accusations that the houses or people targeted were connected to terrorism, as though this were newsworthy, as though Israeli claims had any weight at this point.

Historical amnesia is the media’s M.O. They are structurally and intentionally incapable of establishing patterns, because a pattern can lend itself to people putting together a critical analysis of the world they live in.

Hope he gets better