S1E104 - This Year in the Apocalypse 2023

Episode Summary

This month on Live Like the World is Dying, we have This Year in the Apocalypse where Margaret and Inmn go over some broad strokes of 2023, from the genocide in Palestine, to anti-trans legislation, to the state of the environment.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: This Year in the Apocalypse: 2023

**Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for it feels like the end times. I'm one of your hosts, Margaret Killjoy, and the other host is

**Inmn ** 00:22 Inmn Neruin. And we're here to talk to you about the dumpster fire that was 2023.

**Margaret ** 00:29 Oh, come on, it is generalized far beyond dumpster fire at this point. Dumpster fire is like a nice contained thing. And you can push it in front of a line of cops. And so this is our annual year in review, as compared to our usual month in review, this one is for an entire year. It is for the year 2023. And it is coming to you in 2024, which we think makes sense. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. And the reason that you haven't heard jingles for us on other shows on the network isn't because they don't like us, but because we haven't recorded a jingle in a really long time. And that's on us. And we're terribly sorry. But here's a jingle for a different show.

**Margaret ** 01:37 And we're back. Okay, so we have a lot to cover today, because we're covering an entire year. We're not going to get into every single story. If we missed your favorite story, it's because we don't care about it. And you should yell at us on Instagram. [said jokingly like she doesn't mean it] However, a lot of really fucking crazy shit happened in the past year. And I think that 2023 will stand as a...see change for society at large accepting that things are not going back to the way they were. In a lot of ways I think 2023 will stand as important of a year in history as 2020. 2020 obviously brought us COVID. But 2023 brought us: one, an ongoing genocide--I mean, unfortunately those happen quite often--but there's one happening in Palestine right now as we record this that has been...its effects are being felt all throughout the world as people try to reckon with their own governments' complicity in the ongoing genocide. Also, 2023 just destroyed every climate record. And really marked a time when we can no longer pretend like climate change not just isn't coming but isn't here, because climate change is here. And when I first started the show, it was like "Haha, what if everything went as bad as I would say." And actually things are going--well, not worse than I expected--they're going about as I expected but way worse than scientists expected. We'll talk about that later. First, we want to start with some impromptu--we didn't plan enough--in memoriam. In 2023, we lost a lot of really amazing people and we lost more people, of course, then we'll be able to give time for today but we're going to talk about four anarchists who died this year whose memories will live on. And that's one of the beautiful things about being involved in a movement is that the work that you do is felt and reverberates throughout history. I don't have a great summation of how important all of this is because it's heavy. First, on January, 18th 2023 Tortuguita was killed by the Atlanta Police Department. Tortuguita was a Venezuelan eco-anarchist who was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which I am kind of guessing everyone who's listening to this is at least somewhat aware of--we'll talk a little bit more about it later, but not really focus too much on it--and, if so, you probably remember when Tortuguita died, but we just want to remember them again. Next, August died.

**Inmn ** 05:07 Yeah. August Golden was a musician, activist, and just fucking rad person who was living in Minneapolis and on August 14th was shot at a punk show in Minneapolis. And, you know, to the best of stories that I've heard, at least, was possibly specifically targeted for having told some creepy fucking dudes to leave the show. And....

**Margaret ** 05:46 That's what I've heard too.

**Inmn ** 05:51 And, yeah. I knew August a little bit and--not very well and not in years--but every.... There's just been this really overwhelming outpour of like, like, love and celebration of that person's life since August. And yeah, we'll miss you. And then in December, we lost a pretty prolific anarchist writer.

**Margaret ** 06:24 That's right. On December 6th, 2023, Alfredo Bananno died. He was 86 years old. It's still sad when people die in their 80s but it's.... Alfredo Bananno got to do his fucking life. And he's primarily remembered as the [emphasis on "the"] insurrectionary anarchist writer. There are many, many other insurrectionary anarchist writers but in particular, his work "Armed Joy"--and a lot of other works, honestly--have been incredibly influential on anarchism in general. And I really recommend that people, even if you don't identify with insurrectionary anarchism--I don't personally identify as an insurrectionary anarchist, but I love the insurrectionary anarchists tendency as I love all of our tendencies. All of the ones that are actual tendencies, unlike those fake ass ones. I...I really highly recommend reading Bananno's work, even if it's just to challenge your own conceptions, if you're coming from a much more organizationalist perspective. And yeah, he was a Italian anarchist who just fucking did it all and just kept going for a long time. He's been arrested a bunch of times. He spent a year and a half in jail just for publishing "Armed Joy" and if you haven't read it, you should read an anarchist piece--it's short--that got someone to spend a year and a half in jail literally just for writing it. So that is him. Yeah. And then finally, we lost Klee.

**Inmn ** 08:06 Yeah, on December 31, or 30th--I've heard different things--Klee Benally joined his ancestors. Klee was a writer and land defender, musician, podcast host, and just overall incredible and amazing person. Klee was about to be doing some book talks for his book, "No Spiritual Surrender," which is out from Detritus [pronounced with a short I sound] Books, I think.

**Margaret ** 08:45 [Marget corrects with a long I sound]. Detritus.

**Inmn ** 08:47 And this is like how I can't say the word foilage [realizes they said it wrong, corrects] foliage. I can't say foliage.

**Margaret ** 08:56 I've never tried. It's never come up in my life

**Inmn ** 09:03 Sorry, Gourd. Klee was just like...I met Klee a few times. Especially when I was younger, in Arizona and like I have probably never felt like so challenged by someone and someone's writings in really good and important ways. And like I don't know