Antidote Zine

08/04/2024

Syrian children are still dying trying to reach safety in Europe.

Fadi Abbas Al-Daher

Fadi, who was Syrian, died on Saturday 30th March 2023 in the woods near Marmanchevo.

He was just 17 years old.

As friends of him explained afterwards, Fadi had crossed the border between Turkey and Bulgaria with a group of people on the move.

Shortly before reaching Route 79, a heavily patrolled road approximately 20km from the border, his health rapidly deteriorated.

The local press has reported that the most likely cause of death was exhaustion.

His companions buried his body beneath soil and sticks, marked a nearby tree and reported the coordinates of his body in the hope that his body would be found and returned to his family.

Mission Wings NGO officially reported the incident to the Bulgarian authorities on the Saturday 30th March.

After repeated pressure from concerned people and organisations, the Border Police retrieved the body on Monday 1st April. Fadi is now in Yambol morgue and his family have been informed.

Fadi is not the only person to have been killed by this border. Whilst Mission Wings have been able to provide the identity of Fadi, many other people remain unidentified in morgues.

Due to our work, both in Serbia and Bulgaria, we have heard from several people in the last year about individuals dying in the forest due to cold, lack of water or exhaustion. People are forced to cross the border hidden in the forest, because of the lack of safe ways. There are no official reports, and we believe the authorities are not willing to address this tragedy; rather, it seems they may be exacerbating it.

Lighthouse Reports found 155 unidentified bodies in morgues near the borders along the Bulgaria-Serbia-Bosnia route between 2022-2023.

Their families having no way of finding out what happened to them and no way of being reunited with their bodies.

Fadi died just 10 days after Frontex sent 500-600 more border guards to Bulgaria to bolster the Bulgarian authorities ability to police its borders. These extra enforcements won’t stop people from crossing the border – it will only force people to take more dangerous routes, running an even higher risk of dehydration, starvation, and death by exhaustion and injury.

02/08/2023

Update/last post for real this time: We have changed servers on Mastodon fwiw. Felt like kolektiva dot social really blew it this spring and summer in terms of opsec and transparency after a major incident involving user data in the hands of federal law enforcement, thanks for nothing.

We are now on spore dot social. Very soon that will be the only social media site we ever use. We question the political commitments of other anti-authoritarians still showing their bellies to the fascists on commercial sites run by narcissistic genocidal billionaires.

19/12/2022

Dear faithful readers,

Your friends at the Antidote writers collective are finally getting the hell off these rightwing, socially destructive platforms of death and display.

This page will stay up as is for a time, but search us on Mastodon to keep following our work and if you are interested in a bunch of other forthcoming news and changes!

Love & Rage,
AWC

30/11/2022

Albany antifascist sentenced to twenty years for defending a prone person from a cowardly beating by N***s. The N***s didn't even get hurt that bad, they came back for more. Twenty fu***ng years.

Free Alex Stokes Free Alex Stokes Alexander Stokes Contompasis has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his defense of 2 Black men and himself from a coordinated attack from the insurrectionists the Proud Boys on January 6th 2021 in Albany NY, the most historically politically violent day in our...

30/09/2022

Useful and informative primer for US citizens and non-citizens alike.

Last weekend, an activist from Austin was detained at the Austin airport by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) upon reentry to the U.S. after traveling abroad. They were held for about 3 hours and…

28/09/2022

This is a great portrait of a dangerous überkook N**i f**k

Andrey Loshak on Alexander Dugin’s apocalyptic posturing.

04/09/2022

"Monetized or not, paid for by dictatorial regimes or not, the excess symbolic power that comes with “Westernness” explains how some authors and commentators on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict can get away with the most outrageous gaslighting, at times engaging in outright racism."

The excess symbolic power that comes with “Westernness” explains how some authors and commentators on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict can get away with the most outrageous gaslighting, at times engaging in outright racism.

03/09/2022

A sand sculpture extending 100 meters on the shore of the Gaza Sea honored the 17 Palestinian children killed from August 5-7 in the Gaza Strip.

27/08/2022

"[Russian propaganda creates] a terribly dangerous kind of politics, and it’s definitely not leftwing. It doesn’t help anyone, neither the oppressed nor the poor. It doesn’t help the Palestinians, it doesn’t help the Syrians, nor the Ukrainians. It only makes the left less and less relevant, but more dangerous."

Syrian-British journalist Robin Yassin-Kassab on the connections between the wars in Syria and Ukraine, the failure of the Western left, and ways to deepen democratic institutions.

16/08/2022

Thinking about analysis and strategy in escalating crisis (article from 2015)

Self-organized solidarity and mutual aid initiatives have for months been the only thing preventing complete breakdown and disaster along refugee routes through the Balkans. Now with winter coming,…

12/08/2022

Syrian-American and Ukrainian-American activists talking history, connection, solidarity, mutual aid, and self-organization in the face of war conditions, disinformation, and fascist terror.

The video and audio of this conversation will not be made public, for the safety of participants. Please read and share this transcript!

The violence is there, it’s in the news: here are the numbers dead, here are the potential war crimes, the hospitals bombed, the markets bombed. We’ve become desensitized to this, globa…

30/07/2022

Recommended: this article is accurate and detailed. Further reflections to be had moving through 2021 and 2022 as the counterrevolution has advanced and the terrain has continued to change. But very valuable insights in here that point to possibilities, which might seem in short supply to some right now.

A critical overview and analysis from Unity and Struggle on the George Floyd rebellion. Check out a booklet version here. by: Ever, Lamont and Chino photos: Lorie Shaull, Creative Commons Introduction The 2020 George Floyd uprising was a major event by whatever measure you use. It deepened the gener...

12/07/2022

The Russian Reader has been publishing English translations of progressive, alternative, and leftwing Russian voices and media for years and years. The wordpress site is now censored. All the more reason to boost and repost the information being published there. It's a vital resource that has not ever gotten the attention it deserves, inside or outside of Russia.

The Russian Reader has been blocked, apparently, by Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor and can now be accessed in Russia only via a VPN, according to my friend V. He sent me this screensh…

06/06/2022

This is great and this looks like it'll be a really, really beautiful series of comics. Looking forward to printable pdfs circulating.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/revolution-in-every-country-episode-1-syria-erasing-an-inconvenient-revolution/

FB doesn't like to generate previews for cool things.

04/06/2022

A moving conversation to witness, among writers from Ukraine, Bosnia, and Syria. Much gratitude to all involved in bringing people together in this way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT3FyLhqCSo

h/t Adnan D as usual

17/05/2022

They are prosecuting both humanitarian workers as well as refugees themselves for trying to reach safety ... unsafely. While refusing and preventing safe passage. This deterrent strategy, which amounts to racist mass murder, must also include the silencing and blaming of its victims and their supporters.

https://apnews.com/article/turkey-coronavirus-pandemic-migration-only-on-ap-greece-75f06c4a3c80f2fc1c64810083d6c0da

VATHY, Greece (AP) — On a pine-covered hill above the sparkling blue Aegean lies a boy’s grave, a teddy bear leaning against the white marble tombstone...

11/05/2022

We will be sharing out many of our most recent This is Hell! interview transcripts, and a few more deeply buried gems from our catalog like the one below -- but only on Twitter for now. Give us a follow over there at twitter.com/antidotezine for that and other hopefully insightful stuff.

We'll still be around fb a little -- as little as usual, as little as possible -- a little.

The latest Tweets from Antidote Zine (). Thoughts on blind doctors and good illnesses. Autonomy, Diversity, Empathy, Resistance, Solidarity, Strategy, Trust. CH / USA / The Empire

11/05/2022

Speaking of This is Hell! Radio, over the last eight years our collective has produced transcripts of over 250 of their interviews, since audio formats aren't for everyone. We've just catalogued them, and in so doing ran across a bunch of good old stuff we forgot about. Who else in the US was already talking to Ukrainian leftists and thinking with nuance about the Ukrainian struggle ... in 2014?

AntiNote: As news breaks today of military incidents between Ukrainian government forces and separatist militants in the East, we are once again reeling from the quickly-shifting circumstances in t…

21/04/2022

Video now available from War on Want, also linked in the transcript (post below). Really not to miss.

Ukraine and Syria share histories of struggle; struggles for freedom in the face of terror, violence and authoritarianism.Together, in the spirit of mutual c...

19/04/2022

"Leftist migrants who have suffered at the hands of regimes not aligned with the West often experience a double trauma of nationalist exclusion when they come to Canada: both in terms of the direct cruelty of borders and the racism, nationalism, and xenophobia of the states that those borders delimit, but also the indirect cruelty of voices erased and agency denied, when those migrants’ fights against oppression and injustice at 'home' do not single-mindedly centre the perceived 'main enemy' of Canadian anti-imperialist and anti-war activists."

Vincent Wong on building a socialist internationalism able to do justice to all our contradictory concepts of “home.”

12/04/2022

Of course, to hell with neo-Stalinist fash. That goes without saying. Building a true internationalist peace and liberation movement starts with conversations like this one, coming up on Thursday 14 April.

Register for this live video event - 11am Chicago time

Ukraine and Syria share histories of struggle; struggles for freedom in the face of terror, violence and authoritarianism. Together, in the spirit of mutual curiosity and collaboration, we will explore common questions: What are the realities on the ground right now in Syria and Ukraine? What can we...

10/04/2022

If you don't already, read Mangal Media

"What degree teaches us to make sense of silences and shame that, like groundwater, underlie conventional historiographies and threaten to well up and inundate them at any moment? Rather than neat historical narratives, memories and fragments of our family lives are more like thick descriptions of the state of being. They are stories recorded in our bones, indistinguishable from the body. I am a historian and I believe in telling history. But I also know that I’ve been looking for my own history in the wrong places."

I finally found a thread that leads from the land she came from to the bristled leaves that sprouted from it, to the grazing flocks of sheep that my grandmother tended and whose wool she shore, from there to the yarn she spun, and finally to a story told and recorded.

05/04/2022

From a comrade

"Denial of acts of genocide is a form of complicity with acts of genocide. There is a disgusting amount of it happening today- especially regarding Bucha - in both far right and “left” circles in America, using a pattern anyone who has spoken with Holocaust deniers or ultra nationalists from the Balkan wars is familiar with.

If you are still defending Putin’s attempted recolonization of Ukraine as “anti imperialist,” or are defending the “People’s Republics” founded by far right militias and FSB agents as an “antifascist” project, feel free to delete me from your contacts and forget my name. There’s no possibility of any working or personal relationship between us; I cannot guarantee my peaceful conduct if you make such excuses or defenses in my presence.

If you are siding with the Russian state on this, you are bedfellows with Russian National Unity, the Nazbols, Orthodox Army, Wagner Group, Khadyrovtsy, Slavic Union, the Terek Wolves Cossacks, Eurasianist Party, and Russian Imperial Movement. You are taking the same stance as the far right across America and most of Europe. In such a case, you are no comrade of mine. I will not greet imperialists and fascists with bread and salt."

28/03/2022

Likewise republished Samos Chronicles for the first time in a few years. They are a consistently honest and emotional source we have been proud to include in our No One Is Illegal archive at Antidote. Here a Somalia-born refugee in Athens reflects on racism and insulting double standards.

I am pleased that refugees from Ukraine are being helped. Refugees from Ukraine are seen as people, but refugees like me from Africa and middle eastern countries are not such ‘good’ humans. We are …

21/03/2022

Republished The Russian Reader for the first time in a few years. If you haven't been following them already, please do. The number of platforms transmitting grassroots and oppositional voices (who themselves are facing mortifying repression) is shrinking.

Today, near my building, I saw that my neighbors had painted the “Z” symbol on their cars, this new sw****ka that marks the Russian military equipment going to attack Ukraine. They’re all in favor …

21/03/2022

South Minneapolis has recently been blessed with the initiation of a new irreverent punk newsletter, Space Junk. Its creators are always on the lookout for new topics to cover and people to talk to. They found one of our contributors at a good time (see photos for a fun interview). If you live in the Twin Cities, keep an eye out for this lil rag!