FoD writes:

"Festival of Dissent" Prepares for G8 Summit

From Wednesday the 6th to 10th of April, over three hundred people from across Scotland and beyond met in rural Lanarkshire at the “Festival of Dissent!” They met to plan resistance to the G8 summit, to further educate themselves, and to build and discuss better ways of living and working together with their local communities. The public gathering made its decisions collectively and consensually.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Seven Theses on the Anti-War Movement and Student Resistance
Asad Haider

The old SDS dictum, ‘People have to be organized around the issues that really affect their lives,’ is really true… That is to say, that racism and imperialism really are issues that affect people’s lives. And it was these things that people moved on, not dorm rules, or democratizing university governance, or any of that bullshit.” — Mark Rudd, “Columbia — Notes on the Spring Rebellion”

THESIS ONE: The war on Iraq represents, among other things, a crisis in education. It has been proven beyond a doubt that the war was waged on false pretenses, that the consent for the ongoing imperial occupation has been based on the inability of the American public to access real and useful information. Often, when students are exposed to alternative information in progressive classes their reaction is one of frustration. They realize that our education has failed us: we have not been provided with the intellectual resources to understand political questions within the context of history, we have not been trained to practice the public debate and civic engagement that are the necessary precondition of democracy (as argued in Henry Giroux’s writings, http://www.henryagiroux.com). Instead, the academic-military-industrial complex has trained us in the logic of empire, leaving us prey to the invasion of our campuses by the empire’s vultures: military recruiters who promise to make up for the state’s unwillingness to fund our education.

Anonymous Comrade writes

International Anti-G8 Meeting, Tuebingen

Dissent! International Networking Group

From 26th-27th February 2005, people involved in anti-capitalist groups and networks from twenty-three different countries, gathered in Tuebingen, Germany to continue planning resistance to the 2005 G8 Summit.

The meeting declared, "This year's Summit professes to address issues important to us all, amongst them: climate change and poverty. Yet these are issues produced by a system from which the G8 was born and which it attempts to manage. Resistance is the obvious and growing response to the current order. Our aim is not merely to oppose the Summit, but to contribute to the daily struggle to create new worlds."

A number of action plans were developed over the weekend, reflecting the diversity of the perspectives from which those attending were coming.