If you're in the asheville area, there will be a vigil at Pack Square in downtown at 6pm tonight, Sunday the 24th of August for those who've lost their lives at the hands of pigs, such as Michael Brown, the unarmed black man gunned down by pigs in Ferguson and A.J. Marion, gunned down by asheville pigs who've just been cleared of charges. https://www.facebook.com/events/696569130391969/
This episode features two conversations. The first is with Ben Turk, anarchist, playwrite and prison abolitionist. We chat briefly about the upcoming North American Anarchist Black Cross conference in Colorado, about what folks can expect if they go and how to support the event. https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/ek5vc/ab/f3E260
After that, a conversation with Alexander Abbasi. Alex is a palestinian-american from Los Angeles, an activist in the BDS (That's boycott, divest and sanctions movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine) and a student at Harvard's divinity school. We talk about decolonization, the uprisings in Ferguson, the struggle to liberate Palestine from the occupation by Israel and what solidarity and liberation might look like.
Initially, when I (Bursts) contacted Alex for this conversation I was attempting to suss out what anarchists in Palestine had to say about the seige of Gaza by Israel, the national question, what Anarchism looked like to them and what how that might differ from the U.S. context. That's a conversation I'm still looking to have. Alex was kind enough to have a conversation but it went in a different, albeit worthwhile direction as is clear when one listens to the questions that I ask. While Alex is not as familiar with anarchism as we would have liked and we don't agree with everything that he says, we (The Final Straw) do feel like he had a lot of great stuff to say and we feel like the conversation was very much worthwhile. We hope that you enjoy it. The second half of it will be featured in an upcoming episode and will be linked here soon.
The playlist can be found here: http://www.ashevillefm.org/node/10049
One should be able to cut this episode for rebroadcast down to 59 minutes by erasing prior to 35 seconds and after 59:35