Burnin’ all illusion tonight: the revolutionary struggle against colonial violence continues.
In the wake of the police murder of 17-year-old, Nahel M, in Nanterre, the working-class youth of France and its external colonies have set the empire brilliantly aflame with their incandescent rage.
President of the Rich, Macron, has called out his 45,000 dogs of class war, reportedly firing live ammunition and other lethal projectiles into crowds of protesters. In polite response, nearly 80 police stations have been attacked and the sacrosanct capitalist private property regime is burning. This is all unfolding against the backdrop of the ongoing nationwide strikes rejecting the punishing neoliberal baton being thrust down the throats of French workers.
Here in Australia, state slayings of Indigenous youth, such as Kuminjayi Walker in Yuendumu, continue to be perpetrated with impunity by a heavily militarised police force recruited and equipped from the leftovers of the Australian-assisted imperial occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Kuminjayi’s killing by cops was one more brutal moment in a very long, dark history of colonial violence in this country.
There have been at least 516 Indigenous deaths in police custody just since the last “commission of enquiry” in 1991. Prior to this, the 1984 murder of an Indigenous youth, John Pat, in the north-west of the country, had set the wheels of anticolonial resistance into motion only to be continually suppressed by force, the utterly futile promises of official enquiries and continuous state assaults on Indigenous people and their lands.
In the face of this, the Australian Indigenous community itself and assorted allies have been tireless in radical grass roots organising against police violence since the very beginning.
In 1984, we invoked the international solidarity between Indigenous youth and the anticolonial uprising of Irish youth being targeted in police “shoot to kills” in Derry and Belfast.
Forty years later we again invoke that love and solidarity against state violence.
All power to the radical imagination of the anti-colonial working class!
The Surrealist Group in Australia
Anthony Redmond Michael Vandelaar Leon Marvell Tim White July 2 2023