99 – Personal experiences of State Repression

Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast with your host, Nicole Rose, from the

Solidarity Apothecary.

This is your place for all things plants and

liberation.

Let's get started.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism

Podcast.

So this episode today is a kind of introduction to state repression from my own

experiences and sharing my story of repression from.

Which is, like, written in the Herbalism and State Violence book.

And, you know, I say this at the end of the episode, but I just want to say it at

beginning that, like, this is,

you know, my own unique context in the sense of, like, being a white person in England and

Wales and being a CIS woman and, yeah, being active in a kind of, like, social movement.

It's not talking about repression in terms of, like, daily state violence, like the,

you know, classism and racism and the border regime and like, all the other things that I

talk about.

Anna, in the Herbalism and State Violence

book, like, this sort of section focuses specifically on repression as, like, a tactic

to stop movements achieving, you know,

kind of liberatory goals.

And. Yeah, so I just want to premise that.

That it's my own experience.

And I know that might be, like, alienating to some people.

Well, I'm sure to lots of people, but I know that other people,

like, from,

you know, maybe who are from the UK for example, or have a similar background to me,

might find it kind of.

Yeah. Validating, or you might feel some resonance.

And. Yeah, just that, like, the state is violent in all forms, like, all over the

world, whether that's torturing prisoners in Belarus or sexually assaulting prisoners in

Palestine.

You know, like, there is just, like, no end to

the violence of the state and like, multiple different forms of repression.

And. Yeah, this is just like one.

One context, which.

Yeah,

anyway, that's.

That's my disclaimer.

And, yeah, just, I guess, like, content warning.

I do talk about all the things.

Well, I kind of briefly touch on all the

things, but I don't explicitly go into prison very much, but I talk about,

you know, arrests and raids and things like that.

So, anyway, thank you for listening.

Please don't forget to check out the Hawthorne

offering that is open for application for another week.

Actually, check that before you, because I'm not 100% sure when I can publish this, but

it's open from the 6th of the applications, close from the 6th of August.

So please get your applications in before then.

And I can see my baby coming up the path, so I better go.

But, yeah, thank you for listening.

Hello.

Okay, so this is the introduction to State Repression from the Herbalism and State

Violence Book and it starts with a quote from the book Nietzsche and Anarchy Psychology for

Free,

Ontology for Social War by Shahin and it says whenever we seriously threaten the state and

capital, they will turn on us with extreme force.

From the outset, we need to build the capacity and skills for combat to support our struggle

and to support life.

We need to create our networks of care.

In this section of the book I give some insight into some of the tactics of state

repression and where herbal solidarity is an option to support people's bodies and nervous

systems as they endure and try to resist resist whatever the state has in store for

them.

One definition of repression is that it is the process by which,

and this isn't quotes, the dominant hegemonic order attempts to maintain power by

destroying, rendering harmless or appeasing those organizations,

people, groups or ideologies that potentially threaten their position of power or privilege.

Hegemonic, in simple terms means the powers that have dominance.

For anyone involved in any kind of social struggle, you will see state repression in

practice,

heavy policing on demonstrations, character assassination in the media,

lengthy court cases and prison sentences, new laws and legislation to criminalize whatever

campaign is in the headlines.

As with all subjects covered in this book, how this violence is distributed is racialized,

classed and gendered, and intersects with all other forms of oppression.

State repression also operates to different extents and with different state tactics

around the world.

In Russia, political dissidents may be hung upside down and tortured with cattle prods.

In Iran, women organizers may be raped and burned by police and their proxies.

In Mexico, people may be murdered and disappeared.

In Spain, people may be imprisoned far from their families for decades.

Wherever there is a state or a group of people trying to maintain power through force, they

will respond with violence and repression whenever that power is threatened.

Unfortunately, many social movements commonly have a kind of amnesia, not learning from

history or remembering the generations before them that suffered repression at the hands of

the state.

Anyone organizing for social change needs to be versed in the tactics of repression in

whatever territory they live and organize in.

For someone involved in anti repression work, I regularly see groups and campaigns fall by

the wayside,

almost shocked that they've been arrested or that the state have been planning operations

against them.

Even if you use quote unquote legal tactics or quote unquote peaceful protests, if you

threaten power in any way you will attract repression.

Therefore, developing infrastructure is vital.

Whether this is a local anarchist Black Cross

chapter that can support people in prison,

or groups offering know your rights training for street actions, security, culture

guidance, computer security or media training.

Anti repression action comes in many forms and can build movements with greater resilience to

inevitable state repression.

Okay, so my experiences of repression.

Growing up in a very macho animal liberation movement, it was extremely taboo to talk about

the social, emotional or bodily impacts of repression.

Whatever we were going through was nothing compared to the animals.

And showing we were somehow being harmed was like awarding the state with a victory.

Yet over the years, I saw the shock and impact of years of ongoing repression take its toll

on even the most dedicated and defiant of organizers.

The state effectively crushed our campaign to close down Europe's largest animal testing

company.

I learned that a small group of people can achieve a lot, but ultimately we will always

come up against the power of the state.

This is why I'm an anarchist.

I know that it will take an entire social

revolution to challenge that kind of state power.

Individuals, targeted campaigns and collectives can be crushed, but whole

movements or entire populations of resistance are harder to break.

Likewise, the commitment and vision of liberation remains strong in people's hearts

despite many decades of state repression.

My own experiences would have been radically different with organized political and social

support.

Now that I'm organizing support for others, it amazes me that I went through most of the

repression I experienced alone, especially before prison.

No one collected me at the police station, no one organized a support group, no fundraising

or donations.

After my livelihood and home was smashed to

bits.

No help with understanding all the legal paperwork, no political solidarity.

Instead, the opposite.

A lot of hostility.

That our campaign had attracted the repression and we were, through our militancy, to blame.

Lack of support is a common dynamic that makes experiences more traumatizing.

animal liberation movement in the UK was thriving.

Breeders of laboratory animals were being shut down left, right and centre.

Through grassroots campaigns and direct action.

People were sabotaging fox hunts en masse.

The fur industry was destroyed through raids.

The Animal Liberation Front was in full effect.

It was accepted that prison was inevitable for people in the movement.

And many people moved in and out of prison on generally shorter, although sometimes longer,

sentences.

It felt like power was on our side.

Somehow the police and the state couldn't keep

up with this wild grassroots movement and the phenomenal public support behind it.

I started my first animal rights group when I was 10 years old.

@ school,

I spent my weekends scrambling my bus fare together from my paper round to get to

Bristol, the nearest city, and get a lift to local and national demonstrations.

I saw people tear down fences on demos, police charge at us on horses, and friends have their

ribs cracked by police attacks right in front of my eyes.

As I grew up and policing became heavier, I saw tactics change to shorter and faster

mobile demos and more covering up of faces and anonymity.

Above ground actions were being pushed into a more underground style and the security risks

blurred between them.

By the time I was 16 years old, my first

boyfriend went to prison after a home demonstration.

At 17 years old, my next boyfriend was sentenced to a year for a fray.

After an altercation with and fox hunters.

It became absolute normality for friends and loved ones to be in prison and prison visits,

calls and letter writing became a regular part of my week.

I got my own house raided for the first time at 17, laughing it off as part of the macho

environment the movement raised me in.

When I was just 19 years old, the police smashed through my door on the quote unquote

big charge.

Huntington Animal Cruelty, the grassroots campaign to close down Huntington Life

Sciences.

This is Europe's largest animal testing company that murdered over 200,000 animals

every year.

This was one chapter in a wave of organized state repression that lasted over 10 years.

The charge was conspiracy to blackmail, which means making unwarranted demands with the

threat of menaces.

The premise of the charge was that because HLS

is a legal company,

our demands for people to cease trading with them were quote unquote unwarranted.

And the menaces were the tactics we were using that included phone calls and emails to

demonstrations to property damage.

On a personal level, the police destroyed the

house my ex and I were renting in the valleys of South Wales.

Smashing up the banister, breaking the bath, pulling up the carpets.

The landlord saw us on TV and kicked us out.

I came out of the police station alone while my ex was held for longer and found that our

foster dog hadn't been taken into kennels like the police said they would do.

And instead he was left alone in the kitchen with no food or water,

shaking when I found him.

His response to loud noises, his changed

temperament and tendency to cower and shake for months afterwards, taught me a lesson in

traumatic stress and how non human animals can show us the impact of an experience more

obviously than we can observe it in ourselves.

Three others were directly reminded to prison, while the rest of the group had strict bowel

conditions, not allowing us to speak to our friends, publish content on the Internet and

all kinds of other legalistic restrictions.

Court dates were constantly pushed back over and over again,

leading to constant uncertainty and stress.

Two years of court hearings ensued, then finally a major trial where everyone was found

guilty of conspiracy to blackmail.

The state got what they wanted eventually.

12 of us were in prison, with the longest

sentence being 11 years.

I received three and a half.

As I share more in the prison section of this book, I went to prison as a 21 year old and

served just under two years in total.

Despite many people in the movement saying we should quote, unquote, treat prison like a

holiday.

In all honesty, it was violent and traumatizing and one of the most dehumanising

experiences of my life.

But the repression was not over.

On release from prison in England, you have a

license, which means if you are released early from prison, generally kind of halfway through

your sentence, but it's not guaranteed and it depends on the length and type of your

sentence,

you will have a set of conditions you have to adhere to,

otherwise you will get recalled back to prison.

These conditions vary from living at a certain address to not having intimate relationships

without permission.

Due to the political nature of our case, I had a ream of conditions about not interacting

with anyone concerned with animal welfare overnight.

I was not allowed to speak to nearly all of my friends for fear of going back to prison and

this lasted for nearly two years.

The loneliness was designed to make us pro social again and disconnect us from political

struggles.

It was incredibly effective at ensuring most

people in the case did not return to grassroots organising.

We were also given ASBOs antisocial behaviour orders.

A repressive mechanism developed to target working class communities to restrict their

antisocial behaviour, such as drinking in parks.

In our case, if we campaigned around vivisection again, we would face up to five

years in prison and three people from the campaign were given lifelong ASBOs.

This ASBO was triggered when we were released from prison, which meant by the time it was

over,

we had been living with these restrictions for over a decade, where returning to prison had

been constantly over our heads.

The many tactics of state repression.

It wasn't until somehow we emerged from the personal fallout of repression that it became

possible to really grasp the bigger picture of what had been happening in the movement.

We were on the crest of a wave of intensified repression.

It wasn't just the mass arrests, house raids,

prison sentences or physical violence on demonstrations and mass policing efforts.

We'd learned that the State had spent 2.1 million on the operation to end the campaign,

including putting 12 of us under surveillance for nearly two years beforehand.

The murky world of undercover informants, relationship sabotage and media slander also

came to light.

New legislation specifically targeting campaigns against animal testing had been

enacted in Luo, which would be used to later target groups that dared to still challenge

vivisection.

An entire police unit, the National Extremism

Tactical Coordination Unit,

had been developed specifically to influence the media, with press releases documenting the

campaign in an effort to persuade the public that our actions were rooted in quote,

unquote, extremism and terrorism.

The personal impacts of repression and this is from a book called OS A Crime Called Freedom.

Sorry if I've pronounced that wrong.

It's a really amazing book, by the way.

The state treats delinquents en masse as a social danger, but demolishes them one by one.

In my herbalism, PTSD and traumatic stress course, there is a module all about trauma and

common trauma dynamics.

These explore what can make an experience particularly traumatizing or more

traumatizing.

Loneliness, isolation and lack of support are some of the largest factors through

repression.

It was the lack of support that carried the

biggest weight for me.

I felt betrayed, lost and alone.

There was no one at the police station waiting for me on release.

There was no organised support group that could help with fundraising or actions outside

the court.

Living on benefits without a safety net or a family with money meant that every time there

was a court appearance, it was literally a choice between travel expenses and eating that

week.

It was enormously stressful to manage the fear and anxiety of thinking I was going to get 12

years in prison, which was the sentence others had received in a previous blackmail case.

I left home at 16 and didn't finish formal education or A levels at college.

I'm also dyslexic, and legal work feels incredibly intimidating.

I had no idea how to approach the folders and boxes worth of case papers and legal

paperwork.

I didn't know what to advocate for with the

solicitors or how the whole thing worked.

People told us they were scared to be associated with us.

They were afraid to be pulled into the web of repression.

This is why no one called to check if my partner or I were okay.

The feeling of betrayal still flows through me, and it's hard to feel any political

affinity with the animal liberation movement after these experiences.

People blamed us for bringing the repression on ourselves, that we went too far,

that it was our fault, that the whole movement had been impacted.

Even within the group of defendants, we were legally disallowed from communicating with

each other,

which compounded the isolation and led to dirty tactics like defendants distancing

themselves from you to achieve shorter sentences.

Overall, it was a **** show.

And what did this all create? It led to the destruction of many

relationships.

It highly impacted my nervous system,

leading to years of constant fight or flight and activation that was hard to unravel.

Prison itself caused me to develop PTSD and being haunted by nightmares and intrusive

thoughts and flashbacks for many years before being able to access treatment and support.

I developed chronic health issues and a vivid understanding of how trauma shapes the body.

These experiences were all on top of a very challenging childhood with many of the trauma

dynamics repeating themselves.

Ultimately, it created a feeling of loneliness and alienation socially, emotionally and

politically for many years before I was able to process, integrate and heal from these

experiences,

mostly by throwing myself into anti repression efforts to make sure no one felt alone like I

and others had at the time.

The Movement Effects of Repression While I often speak about the importance of anti

repression work because of the traumatic impacts of repression and on the individual,

a bigger purpose to it all is because repression takes its toll on what we are

trying to achieve as movements.

In our case it meant that the murderous vicinity that was HLS remained open and the

animals continued to be tortured for other campaigns.

It may mean that sacred mountains get destroyed, prisons get built or people get

deported.

Whatever we are fighting for, repression aims to render us ineffective.

It aims to not only prevent groups from achieving their goals, but commonly carries

the aim to completely destroy or end groups, campaigns and movements.

In our case, we later learned the police called it leadership decapitation.

They wanted to cut the head off our movement, which tells you something about the violence

of their actions.

Repression creates a broad culture of fear and can commonly lead to the pacification of

movement tactics.

For example, this may involve the co option of militant tactics and radical visions for

change into more legalistic forms of organizing.

This may involve funneling energy into parliamentary quote unquote democracy and

lobbying,

or even the focus on consumer choices and corporate relationships as happened with

radical veganism which was once very intersectional and focused on direct action

and eventually evolved into green capitalism whereby the focus is less on what we do and

more on what we buy.

Energies may also be co opted into what is known as the not for profit industrial

Complex.

The group Incite Women of Color Against Violence published the book the Revolution

political goals are often co opted to serve government grant making and foundation

interests.

Instead of building movements, the focus shifts to building NGOs.

I'd highly encourage anyone involved in social change work of different kinds to read the

book and explore these tensions.

Likewise, repression leads to the destruction of relationships and loss of comrades.

People step back from organizing either through fear or lack of support.

They burn out and drop out, disappearing from movements due to trauma and chronic health

issues and a general lack of collective care.

We can never build powerful movements for change if we fail to take care of each other

and leave people behind.

Herbalism is a beautiful offering to help tend to people's frightened hearts, exhausted

bodies, and fractured spirits when they are enduring repression.

This is what this part of the book explores and this is what this podcast series explores.

So yeah, that's just like a general little introduction to my experiences of repression.

And you know, I put in a lot of disclaimers at the beginning of the Herbalism and State

Violence book about privilege and class and whiteness and how I'm operating in like a very

specific context which,

you know, is still valid and will resonate with a lot of people like from England and

Wales, for example, the so called us.

But yeah, I just.

This repression is really talking about like movements for liberation and it's not talking

about just like the unrelenting violence right in the world where that is inflicted by the

state.

So anyway, I just wanted to give that little extra disclaimer.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.

You can find the transcript, the links, all the resources from the

show@solidarityapothecary.org podcast.