At 9:04 a.m. on January 18th, 2023 Manuel Teran, who will be referred to as Tortuguita from this point on, was murdered by the DeKalb County Sheriff Department for the crime of standing in way of the destruction of one of the five remaining old growth forests in so-called “Georgia”. The purpose of its destruction is for police to build a fake town to practice killing more people for refusing to be killed silently.
Before we go further we share our grief, mourning, and love with those who know Tortuguita, as they live in our hearts now and forever.
This, however, is not surprising. In fact, it is exactly what we expect a greater deal of going forward. The act of enacting death upon others is what the police exist to do, but to do so on behalf of capital, and specifically extractive capital, is the very history of the police in the so-called “United States”. From the Coal Wars we have seen the police use machine guns and drop bombs on the people who they claim to be the same citizens they “protect and serve”. This is because those they protect and serve are coal barons, oil tycoons, fracking bosses, and Monroe Doctrine perpetuators of genocide.
To say that we expect it does not negate the reality that we must still resist it. This is something that cannot be resisted passively, to protest meekly and wave placards. It is to be resisted with our very lives if necessary. They are killing all of us regardless, by one degree at a time. As Tortuguita shared,
“Am I scared of the state? Pretty silly not to be. I’m a brown person. I might be killed by the police for existing in certain spaces. [But] fear is the mind killer … you can’t let the fear stop you from doing things, from living, from existing, from resisting.”
The State sanctioned murder of people like Tortuguita is not unique, as we must remember. In the Amazon Indigenous militias have formed to fight illegal logging, as the police are happy to look on and let this destruction occur, and often themselves assassinate individuals such as Zezico Guajajara (an Indigenous Land Defender). The defense of the Atlanta Forest is a global issue. It is happening in our backyards every day. From Wet’suwet’en Land, to 1492 Land Back Lane, to Indigenous Land Defenders in the Amazon, to the Hambacher Forest. These are our yards, because there are no borders on this planet, and there are no nations. There are those who use these fictions to justify violence and extraction, but they are nothing more than that. Fiction. Invented in the minds of kings and rulers to rule and kill, and now used to murder and do violence to those who demand that the killing of our shared planet must cease.
So we, in turn, must speak and act upon the Defense of the Atlanta Forest as if we live in it. We do. We must say things that are dangerous to say, because there is nothing left to do but to say and do dangerous things as they have sentenced us to climate collapse. As they weather the storm in bunkers and yachts and boardrooms. As they unleash fascist ideology on transgender people, as they sentence those with uteruses to death, as they steal every last thing they can to hoard it for themselves in these waning days of Babylon.
We don’t invite you to spend countless hours sitting on your phone, scrolling through horror after horror unsure what you can do. Instead, we invite you to find people who know these truths as well. We invite you to become dangerous, through the sheer acts of kindness that are necessary for such a harsh reality. We invite you to safely learn how to use tools, be they farm implements to feed one another, or firearms to protect one another. We invite you to shift your reality to one of a society of mutual aid, to intimidate the soldiers of capital by your very existence.
We invite you to live with Tortuguita and Willem Van Spronsen and John Brown and Fred Hampton in your soul.
We invite you to remember that there are those of us who are already doing this and that you are not alone.
We invite you to Defend the Atlanta Forest. To Defend Your Atlanta Forest.
