Thaw Your Thoughts This Full Snow #Moonday
This Saturday, February 27th, wrench your eyes away from your screen.
Toss your device aside
And get outdoors beneath the Full Snow Moon for a little late-winter melt of your mental plumbing.
Call it a bit of premature spring cleaning. This #Moonday, it's time to thaw your thoughts . . . and dig deep in search of the grit needed to take the Year of the Ox by the horns.
We're hatching a revamped new Left — and a movement to match — to sweep aside the rabid Right and steer things onto a sane sustainable path. And having had enough of banks, billionaires, tyrants and technocrats, we're launching a #WorldwideGeneralStrike in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
One perfectly timed global ritual can change the course of history. To pull it off, it'll take a clear head and all the guts you can muster.
Are you ready?
Read
the
introduction
to
Adbusters'
forthcoming
book.
The Third Force
The hierarchical, top-down power structures that ruled the world for thousands of years are collapsing before our eyes. The street now has unprecedented sway.
I'm about to give you the codes.
Are you ready?
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In Myanmar, Protestors Took Beatings and Bullets — and Responded with Paint and Poetry
Protestors in Myanmar are bringing a righteous form of beauty to the streets, defying the military regime that overthrew the country's civilian government in early February. Having faced beatings and bullets, demonstrators are responding with spray paint and poetry — vibrant expressions of a civil-disobedience movement not easily cowed by the notoriously brutal junta.
A ubiquitous symbol of resistance among protestors is the three-finger salute, borrowed from like-minded activists in Thailand who in turn adopted the gesture from The Hunger Games. The salute features prominently in the protest art of online collectives such as Art for Freedom, whose mission is to "share art for common use" which promotes the "will of the Myanmar people against the military coup in Myanmar."
Another anti-coup icon, designed by the illustrator known as Kuecool, is an image depicting a young woman dressed in a sarong, wielding a wok in one hand and a spatula in the other. As in much of the protest movement's art, the image's red background represents the party color of the National League for Democracy, whose leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is the deposed state counsellor of Myanmar. Suu Kyi was jailed by the military during the coup.
References to the "Milk Tea Alliance" also feature in countless protest images and social-media posts. The name points to milky drinks popular in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where like-minded activists have launched demonstrations in solidarity with those in Myanmar. (India and Indonesia, too, are sometimes included among the Alliance.)
It's all the visual manifestation of a massive popular uprising intent on resisting dictatorship and restoring democracy. On February 22, a nationwide general strike drew millions into the streets. The crowds included civil servants and doctors, cashiers and oil-rig operators — suggesting that a broad swath of the population is fed up with the junta's injustices. The strike came in the wake of a bloody weekend during which two unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by police, one of whom was 16 years old.
Despite the deaths, the detention of hundreds, and the military's ever-tightening grip on civil society, the movement remains "unbowed, unbent, unbroken."
How to Crack the Global Mind on Six Critical Fronts
On the psychological front,
we expand our concept of human rights beyond our physical bodies into the digital realm. Your data becomes part of your person. Then we launch...
the
— Mental Liberation Front —
(MLF)
and start taking our mental space back by force - hacking into the network and monkeywrenching the algorithms that are manipulating
us.
Then
On the ecological front,
we get Adam Smiths invisible hand working for us instead of against us. We pull off a capitalist reformation - a painful but necessary move towards a new kind global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth...
a
— Capitalist Reformation —
a painful but necessary move towards a new kind global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth.
And Then
On the corporate front,
we launch the mother of all boycotts against one of the most criminal corporations in the world...
— Exxon Mobil —
and wipe it off the face of the earth. Once the mightiest has fallen, the rest will follow and a
Corporate Charter Revocation Movement
will be born.
And Then
On the financial front,
we force our leaders to eliminate all tax havens. We march worldwide for a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all stock market and currency transactions. We push for new rules to cool down insanely feverish bot-run trading.
We propose an elegant idea:
that you must hold a stock for 24 hours after its purchase before selling it.
And Then
On the economic front,
we set up subversive cells in the economics departments of universities around the world, and start disrupting classes, plastering posters and nailing
— Kick It Over manifestoes —
on professor's doors.
We expose the current science of economics as a hindering profession, disastrously out of tune. We pull of a revolutionary leap in economic thinking - a paradigm shift toward a new model that works in the real world.
And
On the political front
no more secrecy...
#WorldwideGeneralStrike
This summer, we strike.
We've had enough of being run into the ground by banks and billionaires, tyrants and technocrats. In our latest issue — AB153: The New Left — we call for mass mobilization around the globe . . . a #WorldwideGeneralStrike in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
Today we're 14,000 strong. Tomorrow we'll be 100,000. The day after next we could amass a billion people . . . enough to spark a sorely needed world revolution in how we live, love and think.
Find a revolt-rousing poster in your copy of AB153. Don’t like it? Make your own . . . show us what you've got. Then hang 'em in windows, in the streets, on boarded-up businesses and under bridges.
In the Year of the Ox it's strike or surrender, gore or be gored. What will you do?
Culture Shop
Are You Ready for the New Left?
We're near the tipping point. But the possibility remains for explosive challenges to the existing order.
In AB 153: The New Left, we hatch a new grand narrative — a set of ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane sustainable future is unthinkable without them.
We're about to give you the codes. Are you ready?
Turn On Music
And Scroll!
266 to 0: Canadian Parliament Says China Is Committing Genocide
Canada's House of Commons delivered an uncontested rebuke to Xi Jinping's Chinese Communist Party by declaring that the Chinese state is committing a genocide of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet abstained from voting.
In heavily surveilled Xinjiang, over one million Chinese citizens belonging to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities — most of whom are Muslim Uyghurs — have been interned in so-called "re-education camps." Scores of reports allege that the camps are hotbeds for ideological brainwashing, slave labor, torture, rape, and attempts to curb minorities' birth-rates — including forced sterilizations and abortions.
"When the Nazis were exterminating Jews, the world did not believe until [it saw] the liberated camps," said Kayum Masimov, a former teacher in Xinjiang, in a news conference hosted by Canada's Conservative Party. "Today the Chinese Communist Party are holding Uyghurs in concentration camps and killing them. Yesterday’s Jews are today’s Uyghurs."
China's embassy to Canada fired back, decrying what it deemed an "anti-China farce" and — in a novel variation on the Soviet quip "and you are lynching negroes" — urging that Canada "reflect deeply on the tragic history of its indigenous people." (A recent government-mandated inquiry found that Canada did, indeed, commit genocide against Indigenous peoples.)
According to Uyghur-Canadian activist Mehmet Tohti, Canada's declaration amounts to the first official recognition of the Uyghurs' genocide by a legislative body. (The U.S. State Department issued a similar declaration earlier this year.)
But official statements are one thing —stopping atrocities is another. Boycott every company, and every brand, complicit in Xinjiang's forced-labor camps. Heckle your representatives until they acknowledge that slavery and genocide have no place in today's world. Press them to take diplomatic or economic action against the genocidal tyrants in the CCP — freeze assets, sanction, whatever it takes.
It's time for BDS to come to Beijing.
#XiXiXi
Facebook, Enemy of Free Speech
This summer, our “White House Siege” raised the hackles of the far right, provoking a rabid reaction on social media. But not long after it launched, Facebook censored the campaign's main hashtag, hobbling our efforts to resuscitate American democracy. Despite our inquiries, the social-media platform has never clarified why it did this.
Our adherence to peaceful protest being reaffirmed in briefing after tactical briefing, it could hardly have been because our campaign violated Facebook's "community standards." None of our WHS-themed posts came close to being "violent and graphic content" — they stood for the exact opposite — let alone any other form of "objectionable content" the platform forbids.
So, what explains Facebook's actions? We can't be sure, but it's not far-fetched to speculate that the WHS was wrongly and ham-fistedly suppressed for the same reason as so much else on the platform. Facebook knows it has a big problem on its hands, with both misinformation and hate-speech flourishing on its watch. But in the absence of regulation, and with too much of it circulating too rapidly to assess properly, Facebook has resorted to knee-jerk, catch-all, and politically motivated censorship.
During these pandemic-plagued times, digital communications have become more crucial than ever to both the discussion of ideas and the organization of dissent. To resist corporations’ policing of internet-based speech, we need to take immediate action — before the digital realm becomes a place where only certain opinions, and certain ideologies, are permitted.
Fight for free speech. Resist the tyranny of Big Tech. Join the Mental Liberation Front to take back your mental space by force.
we
redefine
progress...
... take our
mental space
back by
force.
What's the wildest you've ever felt?
start
calling the
shots
from below...
... create
new ways to
live,
love,
and think.
Want to join our team?
We're looking for a politically savvy Senior Web Editor with at least 5 years' worth of social-media experience to round out our Vancouver office. If you've got the stuff, send us a cover letter with your resume attached.
Check out the full job posting here.
GRAPHIC AGITATION CONTEST!
Attention all visual artists!
Give yourself a break from kissing corporate ass!
Send us your most inspired spoof ads, cartoons, posters, video mindbombs, brand-bustings, logo-fucks, situ-styledetournements and assorted tinkerings with the soft insides of the capitalist doomsday machine.
Send your best stuff to
artdirector@adbusters.org
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Current Issue
Let’s get into something personal right off the hop. Let's talk about resistance.
Resistance is what people feel when they just can’t face what needs to be done. Something important is right in front of them, but it’s so hairy, so scary in its implications on their life, their cozy way of keeping on keeping on, that they can’t deal with it.
Resistance grips us when our very soul recognizes just how much is on the line. Like right now.
Caught in an existential crisis with no obvious way out, we begin to question the hidden coordinates of our reality and start thinking about a new operating system for Planet Earth. We hatch a new grand narrative, a set of ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane sustainable future is unthinkable without them.
And then we deploy them.
In this 200-page mindbomb, we unleash a movement that operates completely outside of geographic borders and political structures — the Third Force — to revitalize the forces of resistance and point the way to a future that computes.
Join Us
Stay tuned for tactical briefings, campaign info and critical intelligence.
Let’s get together, build an empowered global network, share ideas and tactics ...
... and propel the world in brave new directions.
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