Industrial Workers of the World

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." -Warren Buffet, the worlds richest man.

review of recent her-his-ourstory of squatting in Australia.

http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1632

Five killed as riot police end sit-in January 20, 2009

FIVE people died in a fire today as riot police tried to break up a sit-in by apartment block residents. Firefighters said they found the bodies in the five-storey building in the Yongsan district of Seoul, South Korea not far from the US Army's Yongsan military base. Some 40 people had been staging a protest against a redevelopment project. 1400 helmeted riot police were mobilised to end the protest, media reports said, and 25 people were arrested. Police commandos were thrown into the scene only 25 hours after the initial staging of the protest. A team of 100 commandos landed on the roof in a shipping container to break up the protest by people who had camped for days in the five-story building in Seoul's Yongsan neighborhood, Seoul police said.

The protesters were tenants and small business owners pushing for better compensation from construction companies redeveloping buildings in the area, a tenants' rights group said. How can this happen in a democracy?" Yang Mi-ok, a member of the tenants' association, said outside the building as she denounced police over the deadly crackdown. One of the dead was the former owner of a watch shop who had been forced to vacate the building. Another was the manager of a now-defunct restaurant, said Kim Jang-ki, a member of the Tenants Association who said he knew both men.

Residents left white chrysanthemums, a traditional Korean symbol of grief, at a makeshift mourning site outside the building. According to the national Yonhap news agency, the country's national human rights commission was also to investigate whether the police action had violated the protestor's human rights. Police have been criticized for attempting to take the protesters down by force without making any efforts to negotiate or make settlements. Prime Minister Hang Seung Soo expressed his regret about the deaths on Korean television.

More & pix: http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2009/01/21/200901210036.asp http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2009/200901/20090120/article_388685.htm http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24937151-5005961,00.html http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/01/200912043919100822.html

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"One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass ; but . . . [only] idle talkers . . . regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior between men [and women]; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another . . . We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society" – Gustav Landauer