The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Category: Campaign of the week

Aequa​

Community Centre in Wedding


30/10/2020

The aequa Community Centre is in danger of closing. Please help save this vital community space by donating or by sharing our campaign.

aequa is a community of people united by our shared vision of a world in which everyone can thrive. Despite diverse experiences and perspectives, we are brought together by our desire to learn, and to share what we have learned on our individual journeys. We exist to build and support movements that meet people’s material and emotional needs. We do this through collective education and by creating alternative support systems based on interpersonal exchange. Together, we explore both our individual potential and our collective power.

Much of that work happens at aequa Community Centre in Wedding — a space we took over in March 2020. Finally, we had a space of our own — for workshops, community organising, film screenings, a library, a garden, marketplaces, open mics, late night studies, early morning conversations and so much more. The timing was challenging, but we have seen so much grow here already, and we are not deterred from our mission!

If this resonates with you, we’d appreciate your support! Stay connected, support each other and stay well this winter.

Support the Aequa financial appeal here.

Sudan Uprising

Taking the Sudanese revolution further


16/10/2020

Our group, SudanUprising Germany was founded in January 2019 to support the Sudanese revolution. Next week we are launching a new initiative, the #EndJanjaweed campaign. Through it, we aim to end Germany and the EU’s immoral support for migration control and externalized borders in Sudan, and by extension, its complicity in the rise of the Janjaweed militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The word “Janjaweed” is from the Darfur region of Sudan. It refers to militias that are accused by Darfurians and human rights groups of committing genocide, war crimes and mass rape. The RSF has terrorized IDPs, women, migrants, and protestors around the country.

EU policy, led by Germany, has been a key factor since 2015 in the violation of refugee and migrants’ rights in the Horn of Africa. The EU channels its money through a “cooperation framework” called The Khartoum Process. The RSF were tasked by then dictator Omar al-Bashir of intercepting refugees and migrants at the borders. Though al-Bashir is gone, there is evidence that the Khartoum Process not only remains but may be expanding.

SudanUprising Germany’s new website (live from 18/10 on) is the best way to stay informed about the campaign and how to support it.

Anticolonial Berlin

Providing a voice for the marginalized


09/10/2020

Our goal is to connect and amplify the colonised and marginalised, to share strategies for organising and visions for the future. We want to offer a platform and space for activists in anticolonial struggles around the world to meet online. We also aim to link struggles between regions and metropoles, and to form common goals.

Last year, the launching of the Anticolonial Month in Berlin garnered astounding reach both in online space and physical attendance. The forums and workshops focusing on themes within the framework of anticolonial discourse were very well attended, with attendees and speakers alike highly engaged in discussions and debates. It culminated in one of the biggest migrant and people of color demonstrations in Berlin, which also coincided with the demonstration of Kurdish people against the Turkish invasion of Rojava.

This year we are continuing the work that has started last year, which deemed to carry out activities that strengthen, articulate and make visible the work of immigrants in Berlin, the current capital of European imperialism, in an anti-colonial perspective.

The anti-colonial month this year starts on the 10/10 with the anti-Columbus kundgebung with infostands that is being organized by Latin Americans, from 14h to 18h and will go until the 15/11 (date of the Berlin conference when Africa was divided among european countries).

Due to the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the activities this year will be carried out online. These activities and events will be in the form of lectures, forums or online workshops. In this regard, we are inviting all interested organisations to propose activities and send us so we can add to the calendar, popularize it through our platform and networks. In the end, we will do an assembly to discuss the process.

We propose some thematic axes for the different weeks of the anticolonial month, these are transversal themes that can unite the agenda of different collectives:

  • Indigenous peoples and the struggle for ancestral territories

  • Incarceration and state violence

  • Racial capitalism and migration

  • Repression exports: arms exports and military training

The School for Unlearning Zionism

Rethinking the Zionist narrative


02/10/2020

The School for Unlearning Zionism is a space in which knowledge that does not belong to a hegemonic discourse is shared. We hereby invite you to participate in our October program.

The School for Unlearning Zionism originated in Berlin (as a place between Tel Aviv and Ramallah), from a group of Jewish Israelis seeking to be part of a movement for equality in Palestine/Israel and to deconstruct systems built on inequality, oppression, and exploitation.

The October Program

Throughout October our school doors will be open and we invite you to join in the practice of unlearning Zionism. Together we will listen to lectures, reflect and exchange thoughts, watch movies, and participate in various workshops in Hebrew and in English.

The October Program is dedicated to (re)negotiation work in the face of the Zionist narrative (with its many meanings and political consequences). Unlearning Zionism begins, for us, with the recognition that knowledge is created within systems of power and continues with working towards forming spaces based on visions of equality – between the river and the sea – and beyond.

Berlin gegen Nazis

Uniting the anti-fascist fight in Berlin


We are many

Since 2014, BERLIN GEGEN NAZIS has been keeping people in Berlin up to date on creative ways of getting involved in the protest against right-wing extremism, racism, and anti-Semitism.

BERLIN GEGEN NAZIS is a platform mobilizing and informing a continuously growing network of more than sixty partners from the full spectrum of contemporary arts, culture, economics, sports, children’s and youth services, unions, non-profits, and charities, self-organized migrant’s initiatives and their protagonists and alliances.

BERLIN GEGEN NAZIS provides hands-on support with developing creative campaigns for successful protest events and helps with suggestions on how to make taking a stance against extremism, racism, and anti-Semitism an everyday reality.

Employing the full variety of common social media channels as well as their own custom-made smartphone app with integrated mapping technology, BERLIN GEGEN NAZIS informs about current events, news, and developments of registered right-wing extremist demonstrations or planned counter protest events, with thoroughly researched and fact-checked reports in several languages. Live reporting and documentation of successful protest events by BERLIN GEGEN NAZIS help to foster the visibility of the city’s democratic civic culture.

BERLIN GEGEN NAZIS supports those who wish to live in a city courageous to show its solidarity with humans and human rights once public space is threatened by the contempt of neo-Nazis, racists, or anti-Semites.