Dear friends & comrades,
It's been a busy few weeks in Magan-djin, especially for folks involved in the Justice for Palestine struggle here in the city. A few weeks ago saw the River to the Sea fun run, complete with Kath-and-Kim themed costuming and other 80s and 90s kitsch. In true activist spirit there were a few more walkers than runners, but Radio Reversal's most energetic producer Jonathan Sriranganathan did manage a very impressive jump-suited jog to the finish line (beaten only by an even more energetic 10 year old.)
Perhaps the most impressive commitment to the 1980s theme, however, has come from the Premier himself, who has taken up the invitation to recreate the 1980s by adopting Joh Bjelke-Petersen era policing practices, fascist rhetoric and repressive law-making across the board.
Here on the Radio Reversal podcast, we've been looking at this current moment to try and make sense of the many horizons on which communities are resisting this emboldened and insurgent fascism. We've kicked off a bunch of new investigative series looking at some of the sites of fascist organising that are coming into stark relief in this moment, and foregrounding the ways that communities are rising up to meet them.
Episode 28: Disability Justice in a time of fascism: interrogating ideas of psychosis and the carceral infrastructure of mental health care w Belle from Only Human
Across the world we are seeing a rise in fascist aesthetics around bodies. The increasing ubiquity of GLP-1s is fuelling an insurgent fatphobia, while tradwife content creators continue to profit from a nostalgic fantasies of women's return to the home. Transphobic and queerphobic ideas and discourses are increasingly emboldened, along with white supremacist and racist logics of border control and colonial assimilation, driven by a fascist preoccupation with the reproduction of the straight, white nuclear family as the building block of the white nation.
Into this mess came the announcement in May this year that the federal government would be massively cutting the funding to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, kicking people off the scheme, intensifying and tightening eligibility criteria, and asking states to fill in the gaps left by services that would no longer be provided by the NDIS.
We wanted to start investigating some of the ways that ideas about disability are being discussed and circulated in this moment, and how disability justice movements are meeting the growing challenge of fascist ableism.
In this first episode in our disability justice series, I caught up with friend and fellow 4zzz radio producer Belle to talk about Belle's experiences navigating a diagnosis of bipolar. Belle talks us through her experiences with bipolar and psychosis, and why psychosis remains so heavily stigmatised even within disabled community. We interrogate some of the ways that Belle's experiences of psychosis have shaped her broader politics around systems of policing and prisons, and why the dominant response to psychosis is still fear, suspicion and threat. Belle talks a bit about disability justice and the intersection between the health system and carceral logics, as well as the importance of access to (potentially) life-saving systems like the NDIS.
Episode 29: Introducing the NOlympics 2032 Committee
In this episode, Nat & Anna discuss the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games, and why being a host city is, overwhelmingly, a bad thing for the city as a whole, and an even worse thing for a city's poorer and more marginalised inhabitants. We draw on John Rennie Short's idea of "event capture" to look at the ways hosting a mega-event redirects urban processes (further!) away from more just modes of planning and transformation, the ways mega-events drive further dispossession of First Nations Peoples and displace poorer residents, and the ways even fairly limited checks and balances around social and environmental protections, and transparency and accountability in the planning and governance system get dodged, or overridden. All in service of an event that will cost billions and that will not even break even.
This episode kicks off a new investigative series for us - the NOlympics Committee - digging into the extensive evidence base for why hosting the Olympics is bad for cities. We'll be exploring the history and politics of the Olympics, the narratives that are used to justify and legitimise this kind of public spending, and the relationship between these kinds of mega-events and other forms of oppression, dispossession and exploitation. Keep an eye out for the second episode in this series dropping next week, and talking in more detail about the violent dispossession of the Goori Camp Embassy and the ongoing struggle for Barrambin, and our third episode, coming up in a fortnight, which looks at the clear intersections between mega events like the Olympics, security theatre, and fascist nationalism.
Episode 30: Six Words for a Free Palestine feat. Dana Endelmanis
Close to a hundred police officers were present last Sunday at the Six Words for a Free Palestine protest, organised by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin as part of the #Notourlaws campaign. At least seven people were arrested during the event, including Sam Woripa Watson (who is still recovering from broken ribs and other injuries sustained when he was violently detained and held hostage by the Israeli Occupation Forces as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla).
Our dear friend and proud unionist Dana Endelmanis was another of the people arrested during this protest, and she had some pretty harrowing experiences during her detention in Roma St Watchhouse, including mandatory strip searches and additional surveillance as a result of her refusals to disclose private information regarding her health and medical history.
We caught up with Dana on this week's radio program to hear a bit more about her experiences in the watchhouse and what drew her to get involved in the Six Words for Freedom action.
Episode 31: Refusing Political Censorship (from every river to every sea)
In this episode we look at some of the legal and political tools being used to repress and silence pro-Palestinian free speech and political expression in this moment. First up, we hear from Rouba Rayan, a Palestinian lawyer and human rights advocate who is an organiser with Justice for Palestine Magan-djin and a legal observer with Action Ready Qld. Rouba talks us through the current attempts to challenge the legal validity of the new "prohibited expression" laws in queensland which criminalise two Palestinian liberation expressions: "from the river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada." Rouba talks about some of the legal arguments against this legislation, and why these legal challenges are an important part of the broader struggle against political censorship and silencing of Palestinian speech. In the second part of the episode, we catch up with friend of Radio Reversal Dr. Jordy Silverstein to talk a bit about the current Royal Commission into Anti-semitism and social cohesion. Jordy is an anti-zionist Jewish activist and organiser and a historian of Jewish history in so-called australia. She talks about how the structure of the Royal Commission forecloses any discussion of anti-semitism experienced by anti-zionist Jews, and accepts the controversial conflation of zionism and Judaism.
Keep your eye out for our next newsletter with more of this content coming your way over the coming weeks, including new episodes in our NOlympics 2032 series, our Disability Justice series, and more.
And a reminder to please consider joining us as a paid subscriber to help us keep conversations like these on the air! We want to dedicate as much time as possible to amplifying the work happening on the ground in communities who are on the frontlines of the fight against emergent and resurgent fascism on this continent, and to do that, we need your help!
Yours in solidarity,
Anna (for the Radio Reversal collective)
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