The revolution starts in our communities

Hier kun je discussieren over The revolution starts in our communities.
The revolution starts in our communities
They just opened a squat with Him.
We know most of them.
We used to be friends, a community.
We had the same ideals, the same anger.
We wanted to change the world together.

Before you go on to celebrate the new squat as a success, be aware that it is an insult to some of us. Supporting this squat, with this group, in this constellation, is supporting the continuation of the ignorance, the silence, the violence that has happened to us.

We talked about the big issues, about capitalism, patriarchy, structural violence and how we needed to take a stand against it. How we needed to support each other. How we needed to change within our communities so that something could change outside. We truly believed we could at least change it for us. Have a place that would feel safe.
It would be work. But we would make it!

They opened a squat. A space to dream, to resist and to create. To some it will be a refuge, a home, a hangout, a safe space.
A distraction -
To some it will seem brave, radical, revolutionary, empowering.
Where you see bravery, we see recklessness.
Where you see radicality, we see ignorance.
Where you see revolutionarity, we see hypocrisy.
And where you see empowerment, we see oppression and violence.

CECI N'EST PAS UN SAFE SPACE.

While you are building a home according to abstract ideals, you are ignoring how you have pushed us out of ours. We excluded ourselves, we got kicked out of our lives, of our struggle, we’ve lost city, house, communities, friends, home, family, mind and body.

What does this say about us? About our community? About our activism?
If we are not capable to handle these situations better, if you are perpetuating the violence you are standing against, how do you expect anyone or anything else to change?

It is so easy to be an idealist, a feminist, an anarchist, a whatever-ist, when you get to choose the battles you are fighting. It is so easy to deal with injustices as long as they are far away, theoretical and easy to label. But what when the injustice is happening in your midst? Through your hands or through your passivity. You didn't need to go far, not even to the city centre, to find a cause that would have deserved your attention. But it is easier and certainly more exciting, rewarding and safe to dedicate your time and energy to something topical and brand new, something to distract you from your accountability.

For the longest time, we have kept quiet. To protect you, to protect ourselves. Because we felt that we still had something to lose. Because we are afraid of the reactions and the scrutiny. Today, we no longer want to keep quiet. You left us with nothing but the choice between fear and anger, and we choose anger! We are angry, because this squat is the loud and clear confirmation that we have nothing to lose anymore. That to you, the last year is a closed chapter, a thing of the past. That you are ready to move on as if all the times you have hurt and lost people over the last year were out of your power. But we are still here.
We are still watching and we are still hurting. We are not accepting that you get to reap the rewards for this project without telling the whole story. If you do not address the bad, the really bad and the unspeakable things that happened within this group, then we will.

My dreams exploded when we understood what happened last year. When we realised and remembered all the ways, all the days in which he emotionally or sexually abused us.
My dreams exploded when I understood that we were all alone with this realisation, that you would let us leave and you would stay with him.
My dreams exploded when I understood that you would accept it. That you would not stand
up and talk. That you would remain silent about what happened. That you would protect him.
Because now you know, and you decided to stay.

This squat can never be a safe space, no matter how many guidelines you put in place, no matter how many meetings are held. Because you have allowed the person that many of you know is at the core of the problem, to be at the core of this project. The person who made what used to be our safe space, too, unsafe, unbearable, even detrimental and dangerous for us.
Do not turn this into a failed love story when it is a story of power, domination and control.
By giving him a voice, you have silenced us. We claim that EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL out on the streets and on campus, but within our group, we apply different standards. Out of a lack of knowledge, of skills. Out of convenience or fear. Yet this work needs to be done. This is the battle we didn't choose.

We wish you would have put all this energy you put in the squat into understanding what happened. Into understanding our collective and individual parts in it. To change the way we interact and what we expect from each other.
We wish you wouldn’t consider it to be personal.
We wish you would understand that staying next to him and opening this squat with him
is taking a stand!
We wish you would see how your silence is violent.
We wish you would talk about what happened.
We wish you would have been here to support us.
We wish we wouldn’t have been too afraid, lazy or privileged to avoid doing this work.
That we would have seen how we are part of the problem. How we are reproducing the things we fight against.
We wish we would stop seeing action as more important than community building.
The revolution starts in our communities!

'JUSTICE' AND 'COMMUNITY' ARE VERBS, TOO.

You can tell yourselves that you are working towards something great, something important and righteous, but you have become a caricature of the institutions that you so passionately rebel against.
Where you keep a flawed system running because it works well enough for a few of you.
Where the sensational outputs have become more important than the process, and where the hard care work is always postponed until after the next action.
Where you have to keep up with the ways of those with the most stamina or else move out of the way.
Where hidden agendas determine what is being talked about, and how.
Where, if you raise critique and worries, you are told that they are unfounded and more energy goes into justifying the status quo than reflecting on how to accommodate other perspectives.
Where having a good time is more favourable than conflict resolution.
No true function can arise from basic dysfunction.
You are building on rotten foundations - does that sound familiar to you?

You just opened a squat.
I know most of you.
We used to be friends, a community.
You used to be in my house every day for the past year.
We had dreams.
We wanted to change the world.

Ours is not an isolated story and we need to understand it as the political struggle that it is. These abuses are perpetuated within our spaces and will continue happening as long as we live in the illusion that we are better than this. That we are too feminist, woke and radical.
This will keep on happening as long as we remain silent, as long as we give abusers the benefit of the doubt and preserve toxic hierarchies, as long as we do not learn how to prevent the involuntary self-isolation of our community members. Challenge each other, even if it is hard and inconvenient. Start talking. Take collective responsibility. Start changing.

Your revolution is lost…
Ours starts today!


seems like a good article but

seems like a good article but is it possible to perhaps add information on what does this literally refer to?

or can someone in the comment section provide information on which squat this is about?

It's valid either way, but it might be useful to know.

huh?

What the bleep is this about? Some guy in some squat in some village where they don't speak Dutch? Am I supposed to feel responsible about it?

what is your point?

You seem to perfectly write english... Somehow though, the part where people live in a village or whatever languages they speak, it seems rather unrelated to the topics discussed in the text. Or is that just me? Secondly, this text is about something quite serious. Nobody said you had to feel responsible but if you don't care at all, you could also not respond right?

Or better explicitate your point because it's very unclear to me at least.
But if you're a troll, please don't bother again.
It's not funny.

my point

My point is that this is indymedia netherlands, and nobody here knows what the author is talking about.

It's the author that's a troll

Hey F, Is this about A?

Hey F,
Is this about A? because youre wrng, He is welcome nowhere.

Excuse me?

Technically there are more people who could respond to F, so i guess nobody knows who you're talking to? But i feel like it might be about me. If that's not the case, please consider that it comes across that way. And next time then don't put random initials which can confuse people.

I highly doubt this is not about A (situation seems too accurate), however, why are you insinuating someone by the initial of F wrote this? It looks like a collectively written text. In the author it says nn, not F.
And it also sounds like they do have information about something, perhaps it's about a different city.

F is also my initial and i most certainly didn't write this text.
Instead i asked around 2.30 am, which squat it is about.
But thanks for the cyberbullying. Wtf!?
These experiences have been difficult enough as it is, care to have your laugh about somebody who also finds it funny to be tokenized and ridiculised behind their back?

Also: please do not assume information to be incorrect, just because you didn't know it before. Wasn't that the least we could have learned from all of this?

If you didnt write it, then

If you didnt write it, then why do you feel addressed and offended? it was clearly not aimed at you since you didnt write it, and also i dont see how this is cyberbullying? I do find it interesting that the tone in your response here sounds very similar.

Similar to what? I didn't

Similar to what? I didn't write it.
I explained why i feel adressed rather clearly already (because of the initial)

Are you the only person whose

Are you the only person whose name starts with an f that knows someone whose name starts with an a?

Comment was hidden

Deze aanvulling voldeed niet aan de spelregels.

Concreter

De tekst is onduidelijk en niet concreet.
Over welk pand gaat het? Bestaat het nog?

Als ik het zo lees dan is het te generaliseren over heel de wereld en in iedere squat.
Overal zijn toxische dynamieken en structuren waardoor dromen breken.

Have you tried speaking to

Have you tried speaking to the people involved? who is 'we'?

This is just to cryptic for

This is just to cryptic for me to understand.
I’m sorry.

this was aimed at the author.

this was aimed at the author. As a suggestion to speak to the people at the squat you are talking about (I have no idea what this is about). But I see it a lot that people throw stuff online without actually talking to each other. If you know about something that others do not know about or if you are mad at people for mishandling a situation, maybe take steps to deal with it and speak to each other together? reach out to those you are speaking about and talk with them instead of about them anonymously online. More often than not people either do not know what is going on or are already dealing with it, and a lack of communication with each other makes this worse. Maybe the people you are talking about have also been affected by the abuser's behaviour. What did you or the group making accusations do at the time to deal with the situation? These things are messy and complicated and we should try not to blame each other but instead blame those that are doing the abuse.

Writing cryptic pieces like

Writing cryptic pieces like this seems mostly therapeutic and self-indulgent. If you're not going to inform anyone what this is about, or if there's someone we should protect ourselves from, why bother? Leave it in your personal notebook or recite it at a poetry night.

Nobody is forcing you to read

Nobody is forcing you to read it. Remember what Thumper's mother said, " If you have nothing nice to say (or helpful, or interesting, or constructive) then shut the fuck up"

Indymedia is not your

Indymedia is not your personal diary where you can write cryptic messages aimed at "those who know who they are". You can send those people an email. Indymedia is for action related news and announcements. A warning about specific people can have a place here, but the visitors at indymedia should not all be left with question marks because you dont want to explicitate anything, even though it does possibly sound important for the general piblic here.
Also quite rude to tell people to fuck off from a publuc platform when they simply point out the crypticness af your rant.

It is not my post, but I do

It is not my post, but I do believe that posting such a message (under opinion, to be clear, not news or events) is absolutely within the scope of this site. The post is about a situation that happened specifically to someone inside the movement here in the Netherlands, and they are writing their experience of this betrayal.

There is no rule that says that this experience can only be shared if it comes with names and dates and the burden of proof. If the post makes you uncomfortable or agitated enough to lash out and call someone self indulgent ( quite rude in my humble opinion) then perhaps it might be a good idea to consider why it irritates you so much. Or maybe even better to try to empathize with another human being in YOUR movement who is experiencing trauma and betrayal.

You could also do a quick google search and discover that the headline for the post is a book about transformative justice and be grateful that someone has left you more than one place to start to reflect on why you only wanna hear about action and not consider how trauma and abuse destroy our movements and learn how to potentially change that.

There we have it again: "this

There we have it again: "this is not my post" even though you agree a bit too much and sound the same as the OP.
Like A did. Who everyone hates.

agree

couldn't agree more! thanks for this comment <3
and i also appreciate the fact that this experience was shared with us in this text

You imply i only want to hear

You imply i only want to hear about action. that is not true. I also want to hear about problematic experiences, but the only way this is worthwhile is when its clear what its about instead of a cryptic rant. I think a piece like this is very valuble if we would know about which place this is. So we can be aware and learn from other peoples mistakes. This article just felt like a stab to "those who know" but that doesnt have a place on a public forum.

"Indymedia is for action

"Indymedia is for action related news and announcements"-
It's your quote friend.

"A warning about specific

"A warning about specific people can have a place here, but the visitors at indymedia should not all be left with question marks because you dont want to explicitate anything, even though it does possibly sound important for the general piblic here."
Is also my quote. Thanks for reading.

Hello everyone, I have

Hello everyone,
I have contact with the people who wrote this text. This text is about the squat that recently opened in Wageningen - see here: https://www.indymedia.nl/node/50983

However, this is not an isolated story, it happens again and again and again. Unfortunately, this is not an exception, this does not just happen in one activist circle, wherefore this text is also applicable for other activist circles and we should all be educating ourselves and talking about this!!

Still this is not a personal

Still this is not a personal diary. thanks for clearing this up, should have been clearer to start with. mysteries are what breaks up a movement, opennes is the only way forward

You cannot demand that of

You cannot demand that of victims. What the previous person said is true: it happens everywhere. Awareness of the problem is a start.

Making demands of what is and is not acceptable in starting such a conversation is extremely unempathetic.

It was too vague for anyone

It was too vague for anyone to know what the demand or the problem was, except that somebody somewhere was problematic

The revolution begins in our

The revolution begins in our communities.

There is no demand, it's an opinion piece. Have you ever read a newspaper?

Do turn this into a story of

Do turn this into a story of domination, not control it when a failed story of love and power.

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