The Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America announced their endorsement of Valerie Thomason, candidate for Assembly District 10. LVDSA played a significant part in Bernie Sanders’ sweep of the Nevada caucuses in 2020 and the election of the Progressive Slate that took over Nevada’s Democratic Party leadership in the spring of 2021. Thomason’s endorsement is the chapter’s first of its kind since its members adopted a more stringent endorsement process in the summer of 2021. LVDSA says it commits to turning out volunteers for Thomason’s campaign as it looks to lead a significant ground game for the Assembly District 10 seat.

Valerie Thomason is a Teamster, single mother, and organizer within the community. If elected, she would become Nevada’s first openly democratic socialist state legislator. Her campaign’s top priorities include rent control, universal childcare, and strengthening unions. She was an organizer for the Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, a Clark County Democratic Party Board Member from 2021-2023, and has served on the Steering Committee of LVDSA. Thomason has also earned endorsements from Run for Something and People’s Action PAC alongside Congress Members Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other left-wing legislators. Learn more about Valerie Thomason at valfornevada.com.

Quotes:

• LVDSA Co-chair Shaun Navarro: “From her work on the Bernie campaign, to leadership in LVDSA and now with the Teamsters, Val has proven her commitment to her community and fighting for the working class  in Las Vegas. She not only has our endorsement but she lives the values that LVDSA is all about.”
• LVDSA Co-chair Anthony Lambert: “Val is a fantastic organizer and a great representative of our values. She understands what the working class is going through, and she’s not going to bend to corporate lobbyists or toe a moderate line.”
• Candidate Valerie Thomason: “I’ve been a member of the Las Vegas DSA for a long time. I am incredibly proud of the work we’ve done together and of the things this organization has accomplished. I believe that this is another step towards building real power for working class people in Las Vegas and I am thrilled to not only be endorsed but to work together towards this future.”

Editorial note: The Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America may be short-handed as “LVDSA”, “Las Vegas DSA”, or “Las Vegas Democratic Socialists”.

South by South-Which Side Are You On?

by Gumbo V.

Over two dozen artists who were scheduled to perform at South by Southwest in Austin, TX have announced that they are boycotting the festival in solidarity with Palestine and in protest of SXSW’s ties to military contractors. The artists include Squirrel Flower, Eliza McLamb, Proper, TC_Superstar, Mamalarky, The Curls, and many others, as well as author Dr. Devon Price.

The boycott announcements began flooding social media on Tuesday, 5 March 2024, just days before the festival was scheduled to kick off. The day before, the United Musicians and Allied Workers, a non-profit organization consisting of musicians and fellow travelers struggling for better pay and working conditions, announced their own demands of SXSW in solidarity with the Austin for Palestine Coalition’s  “War Mongers out of SXSW” campaign. The Austin for Palestine Coalition consists of Austin-based organizations including Austin Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation – Austin, Jewish Voice for Peace – Austin, the Palestine Solidarity Committee at UT Austin, and Austin With Palestine.

Austin for Palestine Coalition’s “War Mongers out of SXSW” campaign began on 21 February 2024 with an instagram post articulating a list of demands and a call to action:

We are protesting the inclusion of Raytheon (RTX), its subsidiary Collins Aerospace, and BAE Systems at the South By Southwest festivals and conference. Raytheon (RTX) manufactures missiles, bombs, and other weapon systems for the Israeli military to use against Palestinians. Collins Aerospace provides crucial components for military aircraft used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). BAE Systems has supplied weapons and equipment used in the occupation of Palestinian territories. We urge that SXSW take the following actions:

We are protesting the inclusion of Raytheon (RTX), its subsidiary Collins Aerospace, and BAE Systems at the South By Southwest festivals and conference. Raytheon (RTX) manufactures missiles, bombs, and other weapon systems for the Israeli military to use against Palestinians. Collins Aerospace provides crucial components for military aircraft used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). BAE Systems has supplied weapons and equipment used in the occupation of Palestinian territories. We urge that SXSW take the following actions:

1. Disinvite Raytheon, Collins Aerospace, and BAE Systems from the festival
2. Reevaluate the inclusion of agencies in the Department of Defense in events and discussions hosted by the festival.
3. Use its platform to raise awareness about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and advocate for peace, justice, and the protection of human rights.

The campaign began as a targeted email campaign directed towards the SXSW board of executives, including Co-President and Chief Programming Officer Hugh Forrest, Co-President and Chief Brand Officer Jann Basket, Chief Logistics Officer Michele Flores, Vice President of Film & TV Claudette Godfrey, and Chief Culture & People Officer Autumn Nicole Amuesca.

A material analysis of the festival’s conditions included understanding whose labor SXSW profits from, and how that labor might be wielded to amplify demands. Members of the Austin for Palestine Coalition representing Austin DSA and the Austin chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation thus reached out to United Musicians and Allied Workers and the Austin Federation of Musicians local 433 to determine how organized labor could stand in solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

This is far from the first time that artists have protested SXSW. Just last year, UMAW and AFM 433 began their Fair Pay for Fair Play at SXSW campaign due to stagnant pay rates for artists for over a decade. The stakes are even higher in 2024, as the entire world watches a genocide be livestreamed in real time and the companies that manufacture weapons to perpetuate it are invited to speak about their “innovations” at SXSW’s opening Startup Crawl on 8 March. In April 2021, SXSW was acquired by mass media conglomerate Penske Media Corporation, and the organized labor behind SXSW’s cultural legacy have drawn direct connections between the corporatization of SXSW, the festival’s refusal to pay artists a fair wage and provide labor protections, and its platforming of genocidal military-industrial companies.

Penske Media Corporation (PMC) is owned by founder Jay Penske, heir to father, Roger Penske’s, transportation company Penske Corporation, Inc. known for its truck rentals service and racing investments. Jay Penske has been compared to Rupert Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst for his amassing of media holdings, including Rolling Stone, Variety Magazine, Deadline, IndieWire, and over two dozen other brands. The comparison is especially prescient as both media moguls are notorious for their mass accumulation of capital at the direct expense of their workers, Murdoch for his forced displacement of the working class Wapping neighborhood of London and Randolph Hearst for being the target of the 1899 Newsies Strike

There is no small irony in the corporatization of South by Southwest. The shift towards being a “capitalist carnival for the young and energetic” has been decried for many years and is part and parcel with Austin’s rise as the so-called Silicon Valley of the South. Regardless of its corporatization, however, one is left to wonder: what place do military contractors and the U.S. Department of Defense have at a music and film festival?

As stated above, the musicians’, cultural laborers’, and Austin for Palestine Coalition’s demands are quite simple:

1. Remove and deplatform the companies with public and explicit ties to the Israeli genocide in Gaza;
2. Reflect on what the festival has become such that the U.S Army, DoD, CIA, NSA, and many others have decided to make it a vessel for cultural warfare; and
3. Use the global platform of SXSW for moral and material good

To contact that SXSW board with these demands at the click of a button, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/WarMongersOutSXSW
For more information about the Austin for Palestine Coalition, please visit https://austin4palestine.org/ and come to the Falasteen Street Museum during SXSW outside of Austin City Hall from 5pm-9pm on 8-10 March and 15-17 March!

The post Musicians, Culture Workers Boycott SXSW for Platforming Genociders first appeared on Red Fault.

by Sara G.

Tuesday night, we celebrated. At Hotel Vegas, as a live band played, we ate tacos and toasted democracy. The crowd chanted “four more years” as our District Attorney José Garza took the stage for his acceptance speech upon winning reelection with a remarkable 33% lead.

José campaigned on supporting survivors of sexual assault, prosecuting wage theft and abusive cops, and offering community-based justice solutions. His opponent Jeremy Sylestine didn’t speak about the issues, but a dark money group from Dallas called Saving Austin spoke for him. Fearmongering mailers featuring a dark hand clasped over a child’s mouth were sent to the most progressive districts in Austin. A group of bikers from Pflugerville followed volunteers for José from house to house to intimidate them on Sylestine’s behalf, much like they did during council member Mackenzie Kelly’s 2020 campaign. Silicon Valley billionaires donated heavily to Sylestine, and conservative media celebrities like Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Libs of TikTok threw their weight behind his campaign. Austin’s most famous proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, Elon Musk, even tweeted his support, only to delete the tweet in shame once he saw the results. In total, Sylestine raised over $1.2 million compared to José Garza’s $200,000.

On José’s side, we had the power of people. José has a strong labor background, serving as  Executive Director of the Workers Defense Project and working with the Department of Labor and the NLRB. He received strong endorsements from local labor unions. Volunteers from our chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, labor unions, University Democrats and other community groups all pitched in to spread the message of how crime has decreased with José Garza as DA. In one weekend, DSA knocked on over 1,400 doors for José. Where they had the money, we had the people.

Together we have proven that you can run as an open socialist, you can have all of the money of Silicon Valley, local billionaire elites and national right wing demagogues against you, and you can win. By building a mass movement from the bottom up, we can take on any opponent.

The post

José Garza Wins Overwhelming 2:1 Victory in DA Race

Working Class Ally Thumps Proxy for the Right

first appeared on Red Fault.

On February 25th, Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire in protesting the genocide of the Palestinian people. With his last words, he shouted “Free Palestine” three times, until collapsing into the flames around him

This January, Salt Lake DSA renewed its participation in the national boycott campaign of Israeli and Zionist foods called No Appetite for Apartheid, launched by the Palestine Solidarity Working Group in 2022, which is itself part of the Apartheid Free Zones campaign and the larger BDS movement launched by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. We are canvassing local stores to see if we here in Utah can help add to the number of Apartheid Free stores nationwide, which will support the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. See the chapter calendar for biweekly meetings and canvassing update, follow the guidelines in the one-pager below, and join us!

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The post Still No Appetite For Apartheid! first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

In the early twentieth century the vast majority of mass production industries were unorganized in the United States. Efforts to replicate the success of the United Mine Workers, brewery workers, and the garment trades were largely unsuccessful until the 1930s when the Congress of Industrial Organizations changed everything. Fragile Juggernaut tells this story with a narrative that spans from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1950s. Andrew Elrod joins us to discuss why this history is important and what organizers can learn from it today.

by Jay P., Electoral Coordinator

Today, March 5, is our primary election here in Travis County.

Who’s voted for our chapter-endorsed candidate, District Attorney José Garza? Have you?

There’s a list of voting locations available at votetravis.org. The good news is, if you have been to any of them, odds are that you had minimal wait time.

If you haven’t been yet, here’s some bad news: turnout through the early voting period was below 6% of registered voters in Travis County.

Here’s some good news: Travis County has got all the voters we need to win, they just happen to have been sitting on their asses this whole time. Travis County Democrats have stood by past electoral efforts towards goals like humane workplace safety regulations, criminal justice reform in 2020, and last year with the police oversight passed with Yes on A/No on B. 

Back to the bad news: as of last Friday, roughly 20% of people who voted in the Democratic primary were GOP crossovers and therefore obvious, rock-solid locks for the opponent. 

This is at least 5,800 votes the opponent had, as of last week. The right is aware that the top of our ballot is rotten. They know that local races rarely make noise in an uncontested presidential primary, and they think they can win it on the cheap. The sole candidate running in the GOP primary has said people should vote for the opponent. How the two differ in any particular way, he has not said.

Their strategy has been relentless, defamatory, and disgusting. You’ve probably seen their attack ads, but you may not have heard about the grotesque intimidation and harassment of our canvassers by the opponent’s supporters. If what they have said and done has been enough to give you pause, if you haven’t done anything yet, then I’m sad to report that they got you. If this situation holds, I can see the coverage on March 6th: “Local reformer has a few good years,” “Back to Business,” “DSA in Disarray: Lots of enthusiasts, short attention spans”. I’m not too proud to say these imagined headlines have been screaming at me for weeks.

Some history: in 2020, we worked in coalition to elect a candidate who represented a courageous and meaningful break with the past. This coalition began in 2017 as our campaign with local labor, the Worker’s Defense Project, and other community groups to win paid sick leave. In his original campaign for District Attorney, not only did José promise and pursue accountability for the violence and recklessness exercised by the Austin Police Department, its leadership, and others in response to the 2020 racial justice protest; he has overseen a double-digit drop in violent and property crimes, making Austin one of the safest big cities in the country (no matter what you heard from the online right). 

We have achieved this by focusing the office’s resources where they matter most: at the root causes of crime, especially violent crime, in our community. He has endorsed and supported ambitious mental health and criminal diversion programs because we know they work where the incarceration first (incarceration-only) policies of the past haven’t and won’t. He has partnered with local trade unions to connect people with apprenticeship opportunities that can address the same poverty and day-to-day insecurity of being without a good job and a strong union to back you up against the bosses. And the bosses, finally, let’s never forget the bosses—I am certain they would love to see our home-grown Economic Justice Enforcement Initiative go up in smoke, and not have to worry about a top prosecutor who cares about wage theft, workplace safety violations, and the kinds of labor abuses they get away with in other jurisdictions across the country and cost the workers tens of billions of dollars per year. For us, for the multiracial working class of Austin, these are priorities we’ve been working for years to realize, and while much remains to be done, we are immensely fortunate to have a dedicated fighter for that working class in office.

The opponent offers none of this. The opponent has never once said he would protect Travis County’s right to seek and obtain abortion, he has never once said he would protect trans kids and their families seeking lifesaving care. He has said nothing about our priorities for the enforcement and prosecution of justice here in Travis County, and so we must assume the worst.

They have money, they have the apathy of demobilized Democratic Party voters, but we can overcome—because we have people. We are the only ones who can save us, now and always. We need to step up and be comrades for our comrade, who’s given so much to make our cause a fact on the ground.

I said we’ve got people, so let’s see them. We need you to stop reading, open your phone, and find three friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers who haven’t voted yet. Tell them how to make a plan to vote: every location citywide is open from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Let them know which forms of ID are accepted at the polls (there are seven types). Offer to give them a ride if they need it, and no matter what, let them know what’s at stake in this election. 

Who are our comrades today? If you’re ready for this fight, this is only one way, but a vital and necessary way, to show your solidarity today.

The post Who’s Voted? Have you? first appeared on Red Fault.

by AJ

The following article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Detroit Socialist Editorial and Writers’ Collective or Detroit DSA as a whole.

‘Those governments remain determined to persist in their ignoble and dishonorable role as allies of a truly murderous regime.’ Oliver Tambo was not talking about the U.S. veto of the United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Tambo, president of the African National Congress, was talking about the U.S. government’s boycott of U.N. sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1986. The parallels between the movement to end apartheid in South Africa and the calls to end apartheid in Israel today do not begin or end with Security Council resolution vetoes.

In the 1980s, President Reagan supported South Africa’s apartheid government as an ally in the Cold War “fight against communism,” designated Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as terrorists, and supplied weapons to the South African army. Meanwhile thousands of Americans were arrested at protests outside the South African Embassy, many thousands more joined the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, refusing to buy South African goods or support companies that did business with South Africa. Additionally, artists and athletes from all over the world joined cultural and sporting boycott’s, such as Arthur Ashe and Harry Belafonte’s Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid.

Similarly, successive Presidential administrations have viewed Israel as a strategic ally in the Cold War and the “War on Terror,” sending more than $318 billion in weapons to the Israeli Defense Force in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. President Biden continues to place this political ideology over the lives and human rights of the Palestinian people, while the American people take to the streets, blockade ships, trucks and weapons manufacturers, and protest cultural events to make their opposition to the genocide of Palestinians heard across the country.

Looking back at the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa gives hope that this moment, with all its horror and pain, is an opportunity for true global solidarity. To remember that as all our liberation was bound up in the liberation of Nelson Mandela and all Black South Africans, today, all our liberation is bound up in the Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation and genocide. Whether we are Jewish, Muslim, Black, White, Arab, Indigenous, Latinx and/or Christian we face a choice between supporting regimes built on separation, militarization, surveillance, and fear or demanding a new paradigm based on mutual aid, respect, and peace in the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, and indeed here in the land between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

The export/import exchange between the U.S. and Israel is not limited to physical weapons. The two governments have a collaborative relationship that extends to ideas about policing, borders, border walls, checkpoints, surveillance tower design and implementation, and cyber, drone and communications surveillance tactics and how the U.S. treats the movement of people inside and outside its “borders.” The Congressional Research Service 2023 report on U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel found that Israel’s defense industry “now ranks as one of the top global arms exporters,” selling nearly 70% of their missile defense systems, spyware, and cyber surveillance systems around the world. In 2019, in addition to sending $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel, the U.S. purchased $1.5 billion in weapons and surveillance products from Israel.

Many of the weapons and tactics that Israel uses to terrorize Palestinian people are deployed by the U.S. along the U.S./Mexico border. On the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona, surveillance towers, developed and built by Israel’s Elbit Systems, watch residents as they go about their daily lives. That may seem like a long way from us here in Detroit, but we should beware. As Bobby Brown, senior director of Customs and Border Protection at Elbit Systems of America, told The Intercept’s Will Parrish, “the company’s ultimate goal is to build a ‘layer’ of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. ‘Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country.’” The Mexicanization of the U.S./Canada border that began after 9/11 continues today, and while border militarization and surveillance systems may not yet be as visible as the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints and Elbit’s towers in Arizona and Texas, we should be under no illusions that they are not there. To resist the proliferation of invasive border surveillance technologies is our intifada.

Is this what we want our tax dollars spent on? Taking just the $5.3 billion in 2019 U.S. military aid and payments for weapons systems to Israel and dividing that equally between all 50 states, Michigan would receive $106 million. That is enough, in one year, for 5,300 Detroiters to receive $20,000 home repair grants. The current ten-year Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Israel, valued at a minimum of $38 billion, divided between the states would give each state $774.5 million that could be spent on education, infrastructure and environmental projects, as well as home repairs. To recapture that money is our liberation from leaky roofs, drafty windows, and concrete heat islands.

Importing the Israeli government’s ideas about borders creates emotional and relational barriers in addition to physical ones. It divides families, neighbors, and communities. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a complicated system of visas, permits, walls and checkpoints keeps Palestinians separated from families and friends and prevents building community between Palestinians and Israelis. In Dearborn, in the wake of 9/11 an invisible border wall was erected by the Department of Homeland Security separating families into “those who stay in [Middle Eastern Country]” and “those who stay in the U.S.” One of the wall’s many “bricks,” Operation Green Quest, made people sending monetary gifts as small as $50 to family members in Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, or Iraq vulnerable to federal enquiry, detention, and deportation [1].

Meanwhile Michigan’s anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) law also seeks to criminalize those who refuse to allow their money to be exported to support genocide and apartheid. To move freely and support our families, neighbors, and communities financially and emotionally is our intifada.

The Israeli State uses violence and intimidation to suppress Palestinian elections, arresting and detaining candidates, sabotaging election campaign events, and preventing access to polling stations. Here in the U.S. Zionist election interference has become increasingly aggressive as politicians and their constituents have become more uncomfortable about supporting the oppression of the Palestinian people. This is particularly true here in Michigan, where in 2022, AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee), a lobbying group with deep ties to the Israeli government, funneled more than $8 million through its Super PAC to try to unseat Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Andy Levin. In Levin’s case their efforts paid off. In the upcoming election cycle AIPAC has offered $20 million to a number of candidates if they will run against Tlaib in 2024. So far all have declined. To shake off AIPAC and Israeli government interference in our elections is our intifada.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers re-enact the violent removal of Indigenous people that U.S. settlers perpetrated on Indigenous people across North America. In the U.S. dispossession and abuse of Indigenous communities continues, from mining on Oak Flat to the Enbridge Line 5 tunnel project and Mayor Duggan’s planned Solar Farms here in Detroit. To be free from colonial land appropriation projects that extract natural resources and destroy our human, animal, and plant relatives’ homes and habitats is our liberation.

It took the combined energy and engagement of millions of regular people around the world for South Africans, black and white, to shake off the oppression of apartheid. Since the start of the genocide in Gaza thousands of Detroiters have marched, prayed, learned and educated each other, called their elected officials to pass “ceasefire resolutions,” and amplified the voices of Palestinians at cultural events, in public spaces in Detroit, Dearborn, Ferndale and Hamtramck.

It will take all our ongoing collective commitment to support Palestinians and Israelis in rising up against the Zionist forces that devastate their lives and land today. In the 1970s, a group of Aboriginal activists in Australia made a simple statement to define solidarity. They said, “If your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.” Truly our liberation is bound up with Palestinian liberation. Let us work together. Globalize the Intifada!

[1] Howell, Sally, and Andrew Shryock. “Cracking Down on Diaspora: Arab Detroit and America’s “War on Terror”.” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2003): 443–62. Accessed September 12, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3318184.

The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to metrodetroitdsa.com/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities!

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Viewpoint: Globalize the Intifada was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Sara G.. 

Austin Socialist News Bulletin – February 2024

Austin DSA has been hitting the pavement! Every weekend this month, we’ve had at least two canvasses, either for our endorsed candidates or for our Schools for All Campaign. The primary election on March 5th will decide our District Attorney, but we have more work to do campaigning for Mike Siegel for City Council and to support our public schools. We remain committed to doing everything within our power to stop the genocide and provide aid to Gazans, and continue working in coalition with Palestinian and Jewish activist groups in Austin as part of the Austin for Palestine Coalition. 

In the past month…

• The Democratic primary is on Tuesday, March 5th. We’ve had numerous conversations with voters as part of block walks for District Attorney José Garza.  The Republican money machine has gone into full force behind José’s competitor, with mud-slinging television ads and mailers. Early voter turnout has been low, and large numbers of Republicans are voting in the open democratic primary to try and defeat José. José’s advantage is people power, so we will continue to canvass and phonebank to reelect him in a landslide.
  
  
• At the end of January, the Texas AFL-CIO became the first state labor federation to call for a ceasefire after October 7th. Young Active Labor Leaders (YALL) held a teach-in about Palestine before the vote, and union members did a lot of internal organizing before the vote to activate their fellow members.
  
  
• DSA members participated in the Texas United Against Genocide in Palestine statewide rally, with a special march to the capitol for Texas labor, and later in the Hands Off Rafah rally. We have also continued writing op-eds and contacting every city council meeting to demand a city-wide resolution calling for a ceasefire.
  
  
• We created a pledge for Austin shoppers to sign saying that they won’t buy goods made in Israel. Once we have enough signatures from consumers, we can begin discussions with grocers to remove those items from their shelves.
• More than 100,000 democratic voters in Michigan cast votes for “uncommitted” in protest of Biden’s persistence in funding the Israeli military. DSA supported the campaign through phone banks and is now launching similar campaigns in WA and MN.
  
  
• We’ve continued to support Starbucks Workers United with a Valentine’s Day sip-in as a teach-in. On February 28th, the union announced that Starbucks has agreed to start discussing a collective bargaining agreement and returning cash tips and other benefits to union members.
  
  
• We joined the line at the Worldwide Flight Attendant day of Action at Austin Bergstrom airport.

The post

Austin Socialist News Bulletin

February 2024

first appeared on Red Fault.

On Sunday February 25, fellow peace activist and active-duty member of the US Air Force Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. His last words echo in our ears: “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what the people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.  Free Palestine! Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” He also stated that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.”

Colorado Springs DSA recognizes Aaron’s sacrifice and the deeply empathetic pain that precipitated it. Aaron clearly held foremost in his thoughts the tens of thousands of civilians and children that have been murdered by Israel since October 7th. This death count continues to climb at an alarming rate, facilitated by American funding and weaponry, despite the fact that the majority of Americans – of all religions and ethnicities – support an immediate ceasefire. We hope that Aaron’s sacrifice will wake our elected officials up to the atrocity that most of them have been supporting and continue to support through allowing the United States to continuously veto U.N. ceasefire resolutions, allowing President Biden to bypass congress in sending weapons to Israel that make the genocide possible, and continuing to supply the Israeli apartheid government with billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money. We encourage all people of conscience to amplify Aaron’s message of peace and freedom as loudly as possible and call on all elected and unelected actors who are complicit in genocide to cease aiding and abetting the fascist colonial settler state of Israel.

We would also like to push back on the weaponization of psychological vocabulary as a cudgel against any message that is potentially disruptive to colonial and capitalist ideology. Despite the recurring tendency of the ruling class to pathologize people, actions, and ideas that threaten their hegemony, we have every reason to believe that Aaron was steadfastly principled, articulate, and clear-headed in his choice to use his dying act to communicate his message as powerfully as he knew how. He spoke with conviction and integrity, continuing a long history of nonviolent extreme protest in response to extreme circumstances. A genocide is an extreme circumstance, and all principled people who are paying attention can recognize what drove Aaron to martyr himself, even without taking that path themselves. All attempts to dismiss Aaron as “mentally ill” are rooted in a disagreement with his central message: stop the genocide and free the Palestinian people immediately. To be willing to die for others is an act of extreme love, not of insanity. Colorado Springs DSA will keep Aaron in our hearts and draw from his strength and solidarity with the Palestinian people in continuing to call for an immediate permanent ceasefire and a free Palestine.