onto writes

The California MinuteMen started their operations in Campo, California, one hour east of San Diego on July 16th. They were confronted, disrupted and chased away by a diverse coalition of organizations from San Diego, Los Angeles, Mexico, Portland and many other cities. The Anti-MinuteMen, No Border Camp continues and actions will continue day and night until the MinuteMen leave Campo. On Sunday night the corporate media reported that the MinuteMen had given up after only one day, but later corrected that statement. On Wednesday, the 2nd Virtual Sit-In against the MinuteMen begins. [Read more, complete action summary]

Reports: 150 March in Support of Human Rights | Snipers at campo protest | Physical Borders, psychological divisions | LA indymedia - Report from Campo - Anti-MM action | Minutemen Leave After Clash With Protesters | Original Campo sdimc feature

Photos: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

Audio: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Sonic Attacks Disrupt Border Vigilante Patrol

Video: 1 | 2 | Minutemen Threaten to Shoot Protesters

The Anti-MinuteMen, No Border camp was set up in the desert scrub of Campo, just feet away from the Border Fence. From this base, anti-racists marched to the MinuteMan camps, only to find they had left to avoid the confrontation. From this spot activists intervened in press events the MinuteMen tried to have at the crest of the Pacific Crest Trail, just feet away from our campsite. People also made their presence felt to every MinuteMan car that entered the area, as our camp was just next to the main access road. Camp attendees posted their stories on San Diego Indymedia from the temporary Desert Media Center which was set up onsite.

On July 16th, the camp was joined by over 150 people from around the state and around the country. This larger group marched to the site of the planned MinuteMan meeting, only to find that it had been moved to an unknown location due to pressure. Later in the day, anti-racists and MinuteMen alike were forced out of their campsites by a brush fire. This gave the anti-racist organizers an opportunity to confront the MinuteMen at their regrouping point, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building in Campo, for an intense face to face standoff that was only stopped by police intervention after the MinuteMen retreated into the building. Throughout the night disruption techniques were used to sabotage the MinuteMan patrols, which were met with threats that they would shoot. The camp continued until Monday and actions will continue day and night until the MinuteMen leave Campo. On Sunday night the corporate media reported that the MinuteMen had given up after only one day, but later corrected that statement."

worker bee writes

"Join the SwarmTheMinuteMen.com and Electronic Disturbance Theater Virtual Sit-In Against Anti-Immigrant Websites, from Wednesday July 20th - Friday, July 22nd

To join, click here:

This, the second action coordinated by SWARM [1], is an attempt to move beyond the minutemen [2] - as one group of people working against migrants and migratory movement – to a systemic logic. This logic that pervades American society [3] is canonized in Academia and institutionalized in the US border Patrol. [4]

SWARM the Minutemen writes:

SWARM the Minutemen - Post Action Update May 30th, 2005 (Spanish below)


SWARM would like to offer a sincere thanks to the more than 78,500 people from around the world who joined the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s virtual sit-in against the MinuteMen. It seems that in a time when almost all the space in the United States has been privatized and free speech zones have been reduced to cages topped with barbed wire, the internet can still serve as a commons where people can gather together to create positive social change.

nolympics writes:

"Vigilante Man"

Mike Davis

"The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them -- armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand." -- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s, they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with tear gas and buckshot.

Vigilantes have always been to the American West what the Ku Klux Klan was to the South: vicious and cowardly bigotry organized into a self-righteous mob. Almost every decade, some sinister group of self-proclaimed patriots mobilizes to repel a new invasion from some subversive threat or other.

SWARM the Minutemen writes:

SWARM the Minuntemen invites people from all over the world who oppose racist violence to join the Electronic Disturbance Theatre action on May 27th, 28th and 29th, 2005 to engage in a virtual sit-in on the MinuteMen website during their "Unite to Fight" Summit.

Read on for the Electronic Disturbance Theatre call to action.

"Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

- “The New Colossus,” by the nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"Web site vexing to Minutemen"
By Victor Allen, Tribune

A Scottsdale-based Internet company said Monday it will force one of its Web site clients to stop encouraging harassment of the Minuteman Project or face being shut down. swarmtheminutemen.com is encouraging people to go into the desert border areas to blast their radios or bang pots and pans together in an effort to confuse and harass Minutemen volunteers.

The Web site also prompts site visitors to engage in activities such as sending repetitive anonymous e-mails and fax messages to the Minutemen, and even come up with other ideas to disrupt the project.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Peculiar State

John Chuckman

A lawyer gave a brief opinion piece on Canada's public radio, the CBC, in which he flatly said that criticism of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism.

I guess we should be grateful that people in Canada are much less violent in their opinions than people in the U.S. where one lawyer wrote an essay, published on the Internet, seriously advocating the execution of the families of those who commit terrorist acts in Israel. Another American lawyer, a very prominent one, has advocated protocols governing the legal use of torture in the United States.

s0metim3s writes:

"Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics:
Foucault's Society Must Be Defended"
Mark Kelly, Contretemps

The year 2003 saw the appearance in English of Michel Foucault's 1976 lectures from the Collège de France. Society Must Be Defended contains much to excite Foucault scholars, but this article concentrates solely on the final lecture of the series, which takes quite a different tack from the rest, concerned primarily with the history of the understanding of society and politics on the model of warfare, and brings this history into the present, with a consideration of where this mode of understanding has led in the twentieth century. Central is the consideration of the phenomenon of ‘State racism'.

Bernie Roddy writes:

Texas' 5th Circuit Intent on Allowing Racist Capital Punishment

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas has been battling the Supreme Court over whether racism accounts for various questionable practices in capital cases.

In the case of Thomas Miller-El, 53, ten of the eleven qualified black candidates for the jury were excluded from the jury pool. The only black admitted volunteered that in his opinion simple execution was not sufficient punishment for people who commit murder, that we should “pour some honey on them and stake them out over an ant bed.” One of the three prosecutors in Miller-El’s case was found by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to have engaged in intentional racial discrimination in the jury selection of a black man sentenced to death, Ronald Curtis Chambers.

On Feb. 25, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled eight to one in favor of Miller-El. Nevertheless, the 5th Circuit fixated on the lone dissenter in the Supreme Court decision, that of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and denied Miller-El’s claim.

More recently, Tyrone Williams was one of fourteen indicted in the deaths of seventeen immigrants in a truck near Victoria, TX. U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore required that prosecutors show why of the fourteen eligible for the death penalty (twelve Hispanics and two African-Americans) they had selected only one of the black defendants. When she submitted her request in writing to Attorney General Ashcroft she was accused of trying to punish the prosecutors.

Predictably, Gilmore was overruled by the 5th Circuit. Her concern about the racial biases of prosecutors in Texas will likely be shared by the U.S. Supreme Court, but whether the highest court’s decisions have a serious impact on the conduct of the 5th Circuit is yet to be determined.

Kamonpan writes:

Tsunami’s Double Victims: A Tidal Wave of Discrimination

One of the most striking contradictions in the response to the tsunami’s aftermath on the Andaman coast — the periphery of a periphery — is the treatment of the Burmese migrant workers in Thailand. Hundreds died, an estimated 2,500 are among the missing. Yet these losses have gone unreported in the official government count in Thailand. The many injured and homeless survivors are being excluded from relief aid, treated like human trash. The Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma has called for special centers to be set up to help these discriminated victims of the Great Wave’s fury. [1]