Transcribing the Past

  The 1970's were a dangerous time to be politically active in Italy. Neo Fascist paramilitaries were mounting a prolonged bombing campaign killing many. As an extra sting the fascists often posed as left wing guerrilla's in an attempt to provoke and justify an authoritarian crackdown. There were leftist paramilitaries most well known were the Rosa brigades, but they tended to focus on kidnappings and assassinations instead of bombing public buildings and train stations. After one such bombing  Giuseppe Pinelli a local railroad worker and Anarchist activist was arrested in a dragnet. Whilst in police custody he went through a fourth floor window. The police maintained that he accidentally went through the window of his own accord, but the official story was so full of holes an entire play was written debunking it . In 2001 a new investigation found three members of a Neo Fascist group responsible for the bombing that Giuseppe Pinelli had been detained for. So in a...

    The source zine can be found on the Internet Archive . Letter from the Editor The anarchist response to the emergence of COVID-19 put divisions in the movement into stark relief. On the one hand, many recognized its severity and the resulting need for quarantine, social distancing, and vaccination. There was a strong moral imperative to protect those who were immunocompromised, elderly, or at heightened risk, even if it meant sacrificing some personal freedoms. On the other hand, many decried the state response to the pandemic as authoritarian, the enforcement of vaccine mandates as dictatorial, and the involvement of big pharmaceutical companies in producing and marketing the vaccine as encouraging the capitalist stranglehold on health. As the writer of Anathema put it, “In the name of ‘public health’ all sorts of security measures are coming together to create an authoritarian wet dream” (“COVID-19: A Fork in the Road,” 2020, p. 3). In many cases the...

    Help Anarchists in Ukraine resist the War and Winter Cold! Assembly is an online Anarchist communication group from Kharkiv, Ukraine ( https://assembly.org.ua ). Since the start of the aggression of the Army of the Russian Federation this group has firmly taken a stance in support of Anarchism and Internationalism, under difficult circumstances. Under the bombs of the Russian Federation, they participate in actions of fundamental solidarity and civil resistance without sinking to support for the Ukrainian government. On the contrary, they maintain a critical stand regarding the Ukrainian state and its leaders (whether national, regional or local), have exposed corruption at various levels of the administration and internal war profiteers. Assembly continues to give information to the workers and criticises local bosses who profit from the situation to increase exploitation of Ukrainian workers.  Assembly supports Anarchist, anti-state and anti-war ...

  The CIA is notorious for its operations in Latin America. Its hard to argue that any other organisation has done more to attack and restrict democracy around the world. Their operations to topple the Presidency of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 was the first of many operations carried out that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans, and even managed to get several US citizens killed too. Link:  https://youtu.be/YCWmU9fNzpM  The ideological justification for the death squads and mercenaries that terrorised the continent was of course the claim that Communism would take control of the region. Of course this wasn't true, Communists of various ideologies were always in the minority even in Cuba the rebels who overthrew Batista were a coalition of very different political groups, if anything US hostility to the new regime gave the small Communist faction the opportunity to grow and become dominant. Many of the governments targeted for co...

    The original pamphlet with more illustrations can be found on the internet archive .   Peer Review Issue 01 Transcript What is critical thinking... Some writers and philosophers have approach defining it broad strokes: Robert Ennis, who spent six decades writing about the topic, claimed that critical thinking is simply “reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.” (1991, p. 8). Similarly, Sharon Bailin and her colleagues identified only three characteristics that make thinking critical: (1) it is done to determine what to believe about something, (2) the thinker is trying to meet some standards of adequacy in their thinking; and (3) the thinker does meet those standards to an appropriate degree (1999). Others have focused more specifically on critical thinking as applied to argumentation. Mark Battersby, for example, defines it as “the ability and inclination to assess claims and arguments” (2016, p. 7), and stresses ...