THE FILMMAKER’S SOCIAL REALISM WAS ALWAYS SUSPICIOUS OF ESTABLISHED POWER ~ Bleart Thaçi ~ Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr died on 6 January at the age of 70, after a long illness. His body of work stands among the most severe and distinctive in late twentieth century European cinema, ranging from the early social dramas Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall and Damnation to the later landmark films Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. Discussion of Tarr has often centred on style and form, on duration, repetition or bleakness, yet his films were shaped just as much by a political outlook formed early and articulated consistently throughout his life. Tarr described himself, without hesitation, as an anarchist. In interviews late in life, Tarr spoke openly about his political formation during his final years of high school. He said that he identified with the far left, recalling that he no longer carried a school-bag, since Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket was enough. He described himself as a committed communist until around the age of sixteen. What followed was a break rather than a conversion. He came to believe that the leaders he had been taught to admire were false communists, concerned with authority and control rather than emancipation. From that point, he distanced himself from communism as it was practised and presented to him. This suspicion of established power remained a constant. Tarr did not move towards liberalism, nor did he align himself with nationalist opposition. His comments suggest a settled distrust of political systems that claim moral authority while reproducing hierarchy. In later public appearances, he spoke sharply about the historical record of communism, at one point remarking that he had never seen a good communist. His political views were shaped as much by circumstance as by ideology, and when plans to study philosophy fell through he went to work at the Óbuda shipyards. Living and working among industrial labourers informed what he later called his social cinema. His earliest films emerged from the Budapest School and the Béla Balázs Studio, an experimental and semi-underground environment that favoured small budgets, amateur equipment and non professional actors. These films focused on housing shortages, unstable employment, the pressure of economic conditions on personal relationships or the wear of poverty on everyday relations. Tarr spoke of being close to working class people and of wanting to record daily life as it was, rather than impose symbolic narratives. Frame from Satantango He often explained that his turn to filmmaking came from frustration with cinema itself. Films, he said, were full of false stories that bore little resemblance to lived experience. Making films became a way of showing conditions as they were, without embellishment or instruction. This approach extended to his working methods. He avoided professional polish, relied on non actors, and resisted narrative forms that dictated meaning from above. These choices reflected a broader opposition to authority rather than an attempt to promote a fixed political programme. As his career developed, Tarr became more outspoken about contemporary politics. He was an atheist and a consistent critic of nationalism. In a 2016 interview, he described Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen as national shames, framing his criticism in explicitly moral terms. His denunciation of nationalism was especially pointed in the Hungarian context (under the aforementioned prime minister), where he became an outspoken critic of the state’s handling of migration and asylum. During the European migration crisis, Tarr wrote a statement that was displayed near a pro-migration exhibition in front of the Hungarian Parliament. “We have brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe with our greediness and our unlimited ignorance… Now, we are confronted with the victims of our acts.” In it, he argued that Europe had helped bring about global catastrophe through greed, ignorance and wars waged for exploitation. He then asked what kind of morality was being defended when fences were built to keep out people displaced by those same actions. In his final years, Tarr continued to speak out publicly, even as his health declined. In December 2023, he was among a group of filmmakers who signed an open letter (alongside Pedro Costa, Aki Kaurismäki, Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, etc.) calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the killing of civilians, the establishment of humanitarian corridors, and the release of Israeli hostages. To remember Béla Tarr is to remember a filmmaker for whom politics was neither decorative nor secondary. His anarchism was not a posture but an orientation that shaped how he lived, how he worked and how he spoke. It remains present in his films as a cinema that refuses obedience, legitimacy, or consolation in the face of power. The post Béla Tarr (1955-2026) appeared first on Freedom News.

AFTER FOUR MONTHS OF ARGUMENTS, SPLITS, MONEY GRUBBING, AND SWP EXPULSIONS, WHAT NEXT FOR THE PLUCKY NEW PARTY NOW ESTABLISHED? ~  Simon and Andy also discuss a big downturn in new homes construction, Ofgem’s punting of the energy infrastructure bill to the public, and Labour’s attacks on refugees—which have had exactly the outcome we all predicted.   The post Anarchist News Review: Now that’s what I call Your Party appeared first on Freedom News.

LABOUR’S WEAPONISATION OF XENOPHOBIC POLITICS NORMALISES CRUELTY AND ENABLES DIVISION OF WORKERS  ~ Simon and Uri talk about the government’s asylum policy abomination, the Pally Action hunger strike, mountains of waste in Oxfordshire, the recent Bristol “Patriots” March, and Maoist violence against Athens anarchists. The post Anarchist News Review: Asylum abomination and Pally hunger strike appeared first on Freedom News.

FAR-RIGHT GLEE TELLS YOU ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT’S ASYLUM PLANS ~ punkacademic ~ Plans announced by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to “shake up the asylum system” have finally achieved what Labour appears to have hoped for: the support of far-right extremists, if not their voters. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson)  has been quick to claim that Labour’s moves have shown that ‘the Overton window has been obliterated’, meaning that far-right politics are now mainstream. Given Yaxley-Lennon epitomises Labour’s own fantasy caricature of the imaginary ‘white working class’, this probably means Labour are getting what they wanted from this with his quasi-endorsement. That and the gushing headlines in the right-wing press. That support though should tell you all you need to know about what these policies mean. This is fascism, which needs to be described unequivocally as what it is. The fact that it is a transnational phenomenon or that electoral politics has not merely failed to stop it but actively enabled it should not stop us calling it out. The plans—which include attacks on those provisions in the European Convention of Human Rights which aim to ensure the right to a family life and to protect individuals from torture—are, put simply, heinous. They aim to reduce refugee status to a temporary affair, with continued uncertainty hanging over refugees for decades, unable to achieve permanent status until they have been in the country for twenty years. And of course, being a policy from Starmer’s Labour, there’s the customary genuflection to AI, which will supposedly be used to verify refugees’ ages, something mooted earlier this year. Labour has rolled out the full fash playlist. Jewellery can be confiscated from refugees to pay for processing them, as one minister gleefully told the press—seemingly blissfully unaware of the horrific echoes such a despicable policy conjures up. Indeed, those with living memory of the Holocaust or with a family connection to it have been amongst the quickest to call out Labour’s plans for what they are. Alf Dubs, who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, was clear that Labour’s plans sought to “use children as a weapon”. It has been a long road to here, and though the rise of the far-right is international, the variant in Britain gives the lie to myths the British state has long fostered about Britain’s status as a ‘welcoming nation’. Indeed, despite much rewriting of history, in the 1930s and 1940s Jewish refugees were often met with prejudice and legalised discrimination if they even made it to England. Claus Moser, ultimately a leading statistician and Establishment figure at LSE and Oxford in the post-war period, was placed in an internment camp despite his family fleeing persecution at the hands of the Nazis four years’ earlier. But history isn’t relevant to technocratic centrist politicians, for whom every political question is merely a cost-benefit analysis of fiscal implications or polling data. As far as elites are concerned, the BBC’s much-vaunted TV series The Nazis: A Warning from History, broadcast the same year Blair came to power, seems to only have reinforced the view that the experience has no relevance for now. Instead, centrists not actively convinced by fascism and far-right politics have resorted to the 1990s playbook of contrarianism and triangulation. But you cannot ‘triangulate’ fascism. As scholars have noted, with a force that wishes to destroy freedom and whole communities, there can be no middle ground. The non-fash press continues to persevere with weasel-words such as “populism” and ‘both sides’ perspectives, as if those doomed advocates of greater social spending and council housing in Parliament were of the same ilk as those wishing to open concentration camps. Otherwise, it seeks to report in the depoliticised language of the ‘game’, the hyper-personalised style that makes a big deal of who’s up and who’s down in Westminster rather than making any attempt to consider why people across the country have embraced far-right politics. This tells us something else, a truth we anarchists know too well: that no salvation is coming from centrist parliamentary politicians or their media outriders. Societies are only so receptive to hate on this scale thanks to their complicity in the destruction of what passed for political choice in favour of an oligarchic dystopia, where the donors pay well and news moguls own Downing Street Those who have fuelled a fire won’t douse it. That task falls to us, and those many outside our movement who also know that the answer to fascist politics—in parliament as in the streets—is a total lack of compromise and a total emphasis on human dignity and solidarity. Institutions cannot do that for us. As one of our predecessors reminds us, we must always and everywhere act for ourselves in practices of mutual aid that know no boundary of border or nationality to combat a fascist menace that is itself international, and which cannot be appeased but which must be destroyed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: UK Home Office on Flickr CC BY 4.0 The post Labour rolls out the full fash playlist appeared first on Freedom News.

LABOUR’S REBRANDING ALIGNS WITH A GLOBAL SURGE IN FAR-RIGHT, ANTI-MIGRANT RHETORIC ~ Blade Runner ~ Labour’s government is celebrating record deportation figures while pushing through draconian new legislation that criminalises migration to an unprecedented degree. The Border Security, Asylum, and Immigration Bill imposes severe penalties: 14-year prison sentences for selling small boat parts or offering shelter to asylum seekers. Even accessing weather or travel information to assist “illegal” journeys is now punishable by a five-year sentence, regardless of where the act is committed. Forced phone seizures, denial of identification, and stripping migrants of modern slavery victim protections have also been legalised. Since taking office, Labour has deported nearly 19,000 “foreign criminals”, the highest figure since 2017. Deportees have been paraded in handcuffs and subjected to public humiliation—tactics reminiscent of Trump-era U.S. policies. The government’s rhetoric frames migrants as dangerous criminals, using counter-terror language to justify heightened surveillance and police-state measures. The Bill also creates a permanent underclass of stateless individuals by denying citizenship to those who arrive via unauthorised routes, such as crossing the Channel in small boats. This could bar 71,000 asylum seekers from claiming British citizenship. Colin Yeo, a leading immigration barrister, warns this policy will trap people in a liminal space without voting rights, excluded from civic life, and at risk of deportation for minor infractions. The government is also offering a contract worth nearly £400 million to manage deportation flights over the next seven years. In January, a Home Office-led crackdown on illegal working saw 509 arrests during 828 business raids targeting nail bars, car washes, convenience stores, and restaurants. Over 1,000 civil penalties—up to £60,000 each—have been issued to companies employing undocumented migrants. Reports suggest Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will join a dawn raid to underscore the crackdown. This hard-line shift is more than a calculated rebranding aimed at stemming voter defections to the far right. It aligns with a global surge in far-right, anti-migrant rhetoric. European and U.S. far-right leaders are strengthening alliances, exemplified by last week’s populist rally under the banner “Make Europe Great Again”. Elon Musk has voiced support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which ahead of Germany’s upcoming elections is now polling just 8 points behind the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) coalition. The British legislation goes beyond the agendas of the Conservative and Reform parties, exposing Keir Starmer’s vision to “Make UK Great Again”. As fascism enters the 21st century, our comrades in the US remind us that rather than seeking safety in passivity, it’s actually safer at the front lines of grassroots resistance, from where we can see clearer what is going on ahead of us. For UK radicals, the smart play in response to Labour’s surge to the right is to avoid the traps of peaceful protest and the failed solutions of mainstream electoral politics, both of which have repeatedly shown themselves to be part of the problem. Instead, the resurgence of far-right movements highlights the failures of electoral democracy and points to the necessity of building a movement grounded in direct action and community-based organising. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: Keir Starmer MP on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The post Do it like Trump—Labour targets migrants appeared first on Freedom News.

FOLLOWING NO NAME KITCHEN AS THEY DO VITAL SOLIDARITY WORK WITH MIGRANTS ON THE BOSNIA-CROATIA BORDER. ~ Ben Cowles ~ Klara, Alberto and I spent the whole day driving around the outskirts of town, sneaking into abandoned buildings that they believed refugees and migrants — or people on the move (PotM) to use a better term — were using as squats. We visited a half-built mansion, parkoured around a disused factory, breathed in the black-mould wallpapering an old mountain-side villa, and held back the spew at a house that smelt worse than the shitpits on the last day of Download. “I remember this place,” Klara said as we traipsed through weeds to reach one of the squats, a small, half-finished bungalow by the side of a road that nature had begun to reclaim. We were in Bihać (pronounced Bee Hatch), a small town in northeast Bosnia, right on the border with Croatia, where thousands of people seeking a better life slam against the walls of Fortress Europe. It was the doghouse, with Amore written across its entrance, that jogged Klara’s memory. She told us she’d been here a couple of years ago. “The guys living here invited us to dinner,” she said as we went inside. There was no carpet on the concrete floor, the bricks were exposed, and weeds crept through the walls. In the corner was a wood burning stove. Three tins of tomatoes sat on a rickety cupboard next to it. “It was one of the nights I recall the most. We cooked together. They taught me how to make bread. And we shared it together here.” Klara and Alberto were in Bosnia with No Name Kitchen (NNK), a solidarity network that supports PotM in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Spain, and Ceuta — a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco. I was there working on an episode of The Civil Fleet Podcast. NNK’s activists base themselves in those countries for around three months, usually, and provide PotM with medical care, food, clothes, legal support if they need it, and company — someone other than a cop or a border guard to talk to. Most importantly, though, NNK records testimonies from PotM about the abuses they have faced at Europe’s borders, then present and denounce these bleak findings in monthly (ish) reports and on social media. NNK’s activists organise themselves non-hierarchically. Each person has what they call a focal point — something they should focus on, like managing the warehouse, recording testimonies, issuing first aid, managing communications/media, etc. But anyone can get involved in any task. Each day I was with NNK’s team in Bosnia went something like this: attend morning meeting to discuss the day’s plans; go to the warehouse to sort and stock up on clothes, food, and first aid supplies; put them in the car, and head out to our distribution zones, keeping an eye out for the cops. Nothing we did was illegal. How is giving someone a pair of shoes against the law? But the cops, under pressure from the European Union, sometimes claimed it was, and threatened to fine or deport NNK’s activists. DIFFERENT AFTERNOONS Europe’s various authorities (be they national governments or the European Union) want PotM to suffer. They want a hostile environment, one that will demoralise PotM and drain them of hope. They hope this will force PotM to go home, or at least to go to some other country. Even the most basic form of solidarity undermines the whole system, and therefore cannot be tolerated. That’s why activists across the continent are being criminalised for helping PotM or saving their lives. The afternoons with NNK in Bosnia were different every day. A couple of times we’d hang out with the men stuck at Lipa Migrant camp — deliberately located up a mountain way out in the countryside. Another time we played basketball and football with the unaccompanied kids, teens, women and families held in Borići camp, which is located in town. We toured the squats on my last afternoon with NNK’s Bosnia crew. “I met them in winter,” Klara said of the people she met in that bungalow in 2021. “They decided to stay until spring. And since they were living outside of town, we asked them, when we found a little puppy at the bus station, if they wanted to take care of it, and they were really happy. “We brought her here, and they made a little house for her and everything. They took care of her for the whole winter.” One of the guys who’d lived there, who we’ll call Denny, spoke English very well, Klara said. She put me in touch with him. “It was amazing, actually,” he said over the phone weeks later when I asked him what it was like living in that squat. “Our house became very famous, actually, with volunteers and other organisations. We were always cooking there. There was a supermarket close to our house. The volunteers brought us fresh food. “I remember teaching Klara how to cook chapatis. It’s a good memory. She was trying to make them round. It was a bit difficult for her and her friends.” Denny fled Pakistan-occupied Kashmir nine years ago when he was 17 years old. He asked that we didn’t discuss the reasons why he had to flee his homeland. But he did tell me how India, Pakistan and China (the three states which occupy it) have oppressed the people there and turned Kashmir into one of the most militarised places on the planet. Of course, many of the problems there stretch back to Britain’s 19th century colonisation of the Indian subcontinent and the 1947 partition of it. But I don’t have the word count, or the knowledge frankly, to get into any of that. Human rights, especially in India-occupied Kashmir, have been severely curtailed and in recent years, thousands of activists, journalists and political figures have been jailed. Denny travelled first to Iran and then on to Turkey, where he stayed for a while. Later, he went on to Greece, Albania and Montenegro before making it to Bosnia in 2021.“I got there in winter,” he told me. “It’s really horrible to survive there in winter. I was happier living outside than in the camps, though I suffered a lot. “Two or three times, I went in the camps, just to see the situation. It was really horrible, how they treat people. They are really far from the cities, and they look exactly like a prison. “You see security all around you. You feel like you are the most wanted criminal in the world, and you don’t know why they put you in there when you haven’t committed any crime.” Eventually, Denny made it to Bihać, the final stop before Fortress Europe’s high-tech border walls begin, and found the abandoned bungalow. The place was well known to NNK’s team and other activist and NGO groups in the town. One day, while he was living there, Klara and her friend Lydia told Denny they had a gift for him. “I loved living there with my dog,” he told me. “Her name is Amore. Lydia, asked me if I had a name for her in my mind. I didn’t, so she said I should call her Amore. I didn’t even know what it meant,” he said. “She told me Amore means love. They brought her to me because they found her at the bus station. She was lost from her siblings and from her mum. They found her on a rainy day. I can’t explain how good it was for me to have a puppy there. It was very helpful. She ate whatever we were eating. It’s funny; once she ate raw potatoes. I took one out of her mouth. I told my friend: ‘Okay, this is too much. We have to train her now’.” “IF NOT, YOU TRY AGAIN” Amore now lives in Slovenia with a friend of Denny’s. “She’s living in Ljubljana,” he said, “with a rich family. So I’m happy that at least she’s got a good life,” he said, laughing at the irony. A lot of PotM lived in that bungalow, Denny told me. “Sometimes there were like 14 or 15 people in the house. Sometimes 10, sometimes six or seven. People were going and coming, you know. People sometimes went ‘on game’ by themselves. We call it a ‘game’ because it’s like, if you make it [across the border] you’re successful. If not, you try again, you know. So that’s why they call it a game. But sometimes people make it over the border, but the police push them back to Bosnia.” Denny went “on game” several times, and in March 2022 made it to Italy, where he now has refugee status, after making it through Croatia and Slovenia. Perhaps surprisingly, Denny looks back on his time in the bungalow fondly. “Our house become very famous, actually, with volunteers and other organisations,” she says. “We got lucky. The police came very close sometimes. They tried to push people back to the camps. But we were lucky. I met people I never imagined meeting and we became friends. We shared everything, like food. We talked about the past, the current situation and the future. “Most PotM have a bad experience, you know, they suffer a lot. They have no hope. We don’t know when we’ll make it to Europe. We don’t know who we’re going to meet or if they’re good people. Most PotM only meet cops, who sometime torture them, sometimes beat them, or sometimes just shout at them.” ~ Ben Cowles runs The Civil Fleet, a news blog and podcast focused on the activist-led refugee rescue and support missions across Europe. You can find it on all podcast services and YouTube. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom The post Haunting old ruins at the edges of Fortress Europe appeared first on Freedom News.