Getting Better.

Luke and Oleg.

The thing about fascist violence is that the consequences don’t just end after the event itself.  The ramifications can continue for years and years.  Such has been the case for two anti-fascists The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund has supported in the past – one in Portland, OR. and another in Helsinki, Finland.

Luke is a well-respected OG antifa in Portland that is hated by area neo-nazis.  So much so that they ambushed him on the streets in 2010 and shot him, leaving him partially paralyzed.  Luke has been fighting since then to literally get back on his feet.  In 2017, we made a contribution to his crowdfunder to help him access alternative therapies that were otherwise unavailable to him.  We were ecstatic to hear that his condition has improved dramatically since then and in a recent blog post on his crowdfunder Luke seems confident he’ll make even further strides with the right physical therapy.   Unfortunately, physical therapy isn’t cheap so Luke reached out to see if he could get some more help with that.  He could and we did!  We want Luke focused on getting stronger and healthier and not on how he’s going to pay to do that.

Meanwhile, 5000 miles away from Portland: Oleg is a Russian anti-fascist living in Helsinki, Finland.  Like Luke, Oleg was an active and well-known antifascist in his home town and was brutally attacked by the fascists in 2004, leaving him with a permanent brain injury.  That injury requires some very expensive medication to mitigate the symptoms of and in 2016 we helped Oleg take care of that bill.

Despite the attack and his injury, Oleg continued to speak out against neo-nazis and they, in turn, never stopped targeting him.  When it became increasingly apparent that his enemies were collaborating with the police to come after him and his family, Oleg wisely decided to flee Russia entirely and has claimed asylum in Finland – again with our support.  Two years later, when he needed more assistance paying for his medical needs, we covered them.  This week, we’ve also helped cover the costs of sponsoring his family to reunite with him in Finland.  We hope nothing but the best for all of them.

If you’d like to support Luke’s recovery, you can contribute to his crowdfunder here.
If you’d like to help Oleg reunite with his family and settle in their new home, please contact us and we can tell you how best to do that.
If you understand that supporting other anti-fascists means doing whatever we can to make sure they’re okay, no matter how long it takes them to recover from being attack by neo-nazi thugs, then you should make a contribution to the Defence Fund today.

 

Louise Leads The Way.

Louise Thundercloud.

If you were a mixed-race indigenous woman in her senior years experiencing homelessness, you of all people should get a free pass from having to confront entitled white supremacist goons in your spare time.  No one’s going to think bad thoughts if you don’t turn up to shut down a Proud Boys event in another city, because you probably have enough to deal with in your life already.

But then you wouldn’t be Louise Thundercloud.

Despite the fact that most of us would succumb to a wheezing panic attack if we had to contend with even 10% of what Louise’s daily life must look like, there she was in Philly in November, out with an army of antifa & Gritty cosplayers to shut down a Proud Boys event.  Which they did successfully, but not without costs.  For Louise, the price came when Philly kkkops attempted to kettle her & her comrades and exact some revenge for stopping the white supremacists from gathering.  As she made her escape, Louise took a really bad fall and smashed her head pretty badly, leaving her with a concussion, broken teeth, and a dislocated wrist among other injuries.

Louise has been in near-constant pain ever since and required some pricey medical and dental intervention, so her friends set up a crowdfunder to help raise the money she needed to get better.  The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund was honoured to be able to top it off and get them to their initial fundraising goal.  We look forward to seeing Louise’s smiling face back in the frontlines of the fight very soon!

Never Let Them Have The Streets

It’s 2019.  We’re all quite aware of what happens when you let violent bigots march in the street to demonize religious minorities without opposition.  Luckily, hundreds of thousands of us are willing to stand in the streets against them and demonstrate exaclty what no pasarán means.  London knows this more than just about anywhere in the world, from the Battle of Cable Street to present day.

So when Islamophobic charlatan/multi-millionaire/convicted scam artist/former leader of a grooming gang Tommy Robinson Stephen Yaxley-Lennon declared that he & his slavering followers would march against Muslims there on December 9th, Londoners rose up to make sure this wasn’t going to go off as the bigots had planned.  Led by an anti-fascist feminist coalition, the Islamophobes were outnumbered and outwitted all day long.  Unfortunately, the Met could not let this opposition succeed without attacking the anti-fascists and in the end three of our own were arrested.

One of the three is a proud member of Brigata Ultrá Clapton – supporters of London antifa football club Clapton CFC – and reached out to us for assistance with his legal costs, which we were happy to help with.  You can do the same by donating to their crowdfunder right here.

A Conversation With “Genocide Jimmy”

Neo-nazi/Anti-Semite/snappy dresser “Genocide Jimmy” Marr

Imagine living in a small community in Oregon that counted among its townspeople colourful characters like “Genocide Jimmy” Marr – a man that has gained international notoriety not for us fashion-forward tendency to wear wrinkled earth-tone clothing several sizes too large and held up by massive grandpa suspenders, but rather for driving around the state with the most racist signs imaginable on his pickup truck.  You probably could not be able to just let this go without have a frank discussion with the man, now could you?

Such was the case for four Corvallis, OR. anti-fascists who chanced upon Genocide Jimmy and his mobile hate crime of a truck in a parking lot and attempted to engage in him a frank & earnest discussion about his problematic beliefs.  Fascists like Genocide Jimmy, not having a lick of logic or reason to back up their bullshit, don’t usually fare very well in such situations and predictably Mr. Marr made the encounter into a physical assault pretty quickly, and injured three of the four people confronting him (all of whom happened to be trans women).  But Genocide Jimmy himself did not come out of it unscathed and last we heard was still in the hospital due to an undisclosed medical concern that arose around the time this encounter took place.

Of course the police became involved, and when they saw that one side was their good ol’ pal “Genocide Jimmy,” who they also know from his staunch endorsement of the racist front group Blue Lives Matter, they decided to arrest the four people Mr. Marr assaulted instead of the other way around.

Cops & the Klan literally go hand-in-hand.  “Genocide Jimmy” Marr gets a handshake from local law enforcement for his “Blue Lives Matter/Jew Lies Matter” signs in June 2016.

A crowdfunder has been established to help our four friends defend themselves against the charges they’re facing as a result of confronting this fucking kkklown and the Defence Fund was happy to kick in to help them out.  If you can’t imagine seeing this truck around your town without doing or saying anything about it, then you’d do well to make a donation yourself.  If you think backing up people like our four friends in Corvallis is important & necessary work, then you should make a donation to the Defence Fund today!