Category: issue #125 – Autumn 2017

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.

As Slingshot goes to press, our Indymedia comrades in Germany are freaking out, being shut down and dealing with government surveillance. Our comrades in Barcelona are being shot with rubber bullets.

Flipping through the pages of this issue, you will find articles that completely contradict each other. That’s the idea: we aren’t a monolith, we’re a movement. Lots of voices make up this movement, and not everyone is supposed to agree. That’s where our power comes from: holding space for contradiction and internal critique. Being able to see things from different points of view — to discuss, disagree but still be comrades in the same struggle is the only way we can win. May our diverse voices burst up like flowers through the pavement of the corporate oligarchy!

It’s projects like Slingshot that hold the movement together, not because of our propaganda, but because of the great times we share listening to James Brown, The Clash and Gil Scott-Heron on vinyl while we put the pages together. We share stories, go to shows, and break bread. We write what’s in our hearts and make the best art we can. 

While we were making this issue, Sam went to the hospital and discovered his arm was broken — and it had been broken for a month! We all felt pretty bad about it, especially since Sam helped us unload a bunch of boxes of organizers when his arm was totally broken 3 weeks ago… And then, as if that wasn’t enough, Sam got freaking mugged while walking home in Berkeley from layout on Saturday night. Tthe muggers punched him in the face because he was being “too slow.” “I mean, come on guys, I’m not the one mugging me,” Sam said. Everyone in Berkeley is such a critic. Sheesh. 

During layout the clock said 2:25 but it was actually 1:30 am and we were sleep deprived and layout-drunk so a collective member threw the clock down the stairs and then we destroyed every clock in our office with the Homes Not Jails crowbar. Fuck time! Then we all helped sweep up. This is the essence of a collective — we all get to smash things, and we all get to clean up afterwards so that our 5-year old collective member won’t get cut by glass when she arrives the next morning. 

Sometimes we wonder if making Slingshot is worth it, and find ourselves lamenting that we don’t have better quality articles to cover such important topics. But then we find value in the weird and wonderful process of making the paper, and in the overwhelming volume of positive feedback from readers — especially prisoners. And it’s amazing when we talk to people involved in radical projects and spaces all over the world and they say, “Oh, you work with Slingshot? Cool!” 

We regret that this issue includes a sobriety article without an article to counter it. There was an article of tips for doing LSD, but unfortunately it was too incoherent to publish. 

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors, etc. to make this paper. If you send an article, please be open to editing.

We’re a collective but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Davey, Devin, Dov, eggplant, Elke, Fern, Gerald, Hayley, Indiana Joe, Isabel, Jesse, Joey, Joey Provolone, Korvin, Laundro-Matt, Sam, and all the authors and artists!

Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on Saturday, December 10, 2017 at 7 pm at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)

Article Deadline & Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 126 by January 13, 2018 at 3 pm.

Volume 1, Number 125, Circulation 22,000

Printed October 6, 2017

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley CA 94705

Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 slingshotcollective@protonmail.com 

slingshotcollective.org • twitter @slingshotnews

By Arlie Russell Hochschild

We are in the midst of a crisis: signs are appearing of a rise in the US of white supremacy and fascism. I’m old enough to have seen white supremacist violence before. I was a civil rights worker in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. In June of that summer, three of my fellow workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were murdered by Klansmen and, over the course of the summer, dozens more were badly beaten. Since the lives of those three, and, over the years, many others, ended through right wing violence, some called for left wing violence in response. But leaders with greater foresight prevailed and a powerful civil rights movement changed the nation, rewrote its laws, and enfranchised millions of African Americans who previously had never been able to vote. While much remains to be done, the movement itself was extraordinary, and while various strategies were pursued, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, it was predominantly non-violent.

I recently spent five years getting to know, and write a book about, Tea Party enthusiasts in the heartland of the petrochemical industry in the deep South, people who came to believe in Donald Trump. I discovered that they felt themselves to be — and in many ways were — victims. Their wages are often stagnating or declining, many of their jobs have been automated or offshored, and the air they breathe and the water they drink are grossly polluted. The president cleverly offered them scapegoats for their sense of victimhood: Mexicans, Muslims, black Americans, the mainstream press, and the left. Like Hitler and plenty of other demagogues, Trump understood that appealing to that sense of victimhood was his path to power. And at every step of the way, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Rush Limbaugh and others supplied the sound bites and images to reinforce this dark worldview.

When, in a series of skirmishes which broke out earlier this year on and around the U.C. Berkeley campus, an Antifa activist beat an older man wearing in a Trump T-shirt, leaving blood streaming down his face, it was the greatest possible gift to Fox News, and to the Trump/Fox narrative of a victimized right. Who might this anonymous man in the Trump T- shirt be? Who knows, maybe he was one of the estimated six to eight million who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but voted for Trump in 2016. Or maybe he was one the one out of four — other studies say one out of three — white high school-educated voters who say they would have voted for Bernie Sanders had he won the Democratic Party nomination, but when Sanders lost, voted for Donald Trump instead. 46 percent of American voters voted for Trump and they’re not all “deplorable.” If we treat them as people to be attacked and beaten, we’re treating them as contemptuously as did Hillary Clinton when she used that word. But what they are is caught up in a narrative of victimhood and the search for people and causes to blame.

To bash, punch, or kick a man, to smash a window or light a fire is to make the greatest possible gift to Fox News and to Donald Trump and his unsavory brew of KKK members, neo-Nazis and others whose appeal is based on the narrative of victimhood. When we make such people victims of violence, we reinforce that narrative. We rob the movement against racism and fascism of the high ground through which the civil rights movement transformed America. Since we are indeed facing forces that include outright fascists, it’s worth looking closely at how the greatest fascist of them all, Adolf Hitler, came to power. How did he end up as chancellor of Germany in 1933, when, five years earlier, the Nazi Party won less than 3% of the vote? There were many factors, but an absolutely crucial one was that the Nazis were brilliantly successful in provoking the German left into violent street-fighting. Dozens of people were killed on both sides. Hitler was able to appeal to his followers that they were victims of the left, and to the public at large that he would restore order. 

At Charlottesville, of course, the most deadly violence came from the right. Nonetheless, because Fox News and other outlets were able to show some pushing and shoving from anti-racist protesters, surveys show that more Americans thought the fault lay mainly with the “left” or with “both sides” than thought the fault lay with the alt-right. This was a gift to the alt-right. Let that not happen again. Should we show opposition to the forces of racism and white supremacy that we see around us? Of course! There is much to do. Let’s all get busy. Be relentless — but not through violence.

Arlie Hochschild is the author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.