A-Infos (en) Brazil, Amazonia CCLA: Interview with ERA, an Iranian and Afghan anarchist organization (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Today, we continue our series of international interviews with 
organizations, collectives or isolated individuals who play a role in 
the political and social development of our ideas. ---- The partnership 
of Iran and Afghanistan, with the anarchist organization ERA, operates 
in a complex and hostile national context. For this reason, we wanted to 
give a voice to these comrades and for this voice to be heard on a wide 
scale, because if we usually consider the practice of anarchism to be 
difficult in the current period, there are contexts in which action 
clearly becomes an act of great courage.

Therefore, we are very grateful to these people for answering our 
questions with such goodwill and availability, knowing that any exchange 
of messages can be dangerous and amount to heavy prison sentences... or 
worse.

CCLA: What are the main fighting fields that you have already developed 
and those that you plan to develop in the near future?
Era: Our initial nucleus was formed outside of Iran on December 15, 
2009. And in 2018, we formed the Union of Anarchists of Afghanistan and 
Iran. And after that, we formed the Era Anarchist Federation. We 
(Federation and other anarchists), like all anarchists in the world, we 
have a practical or intellectual presence in all movements (women's, 
labor, student, environmental, animal protection, etc.) in Iran and 
Afghanistan and, naturally, we have our own direct or indirect actions. 
We had hope and still have to be able to form an anarchist federation 
for Arab countries together with Arab anarchists, considering that Iran 
and Afghanistan together are populated by several million Arabs. 
Furthermore, we hope that one day we can form a Turkish anarchist 
network with anarchists from countries of Turkish origins, considering 
the presence of a population of several tens of millions of inhabitants 
of these origins in Iran and Afghanistan.

The struggles of women in your country are very well known and talked 
about. Does your organization have female colleagues? If so, how do they 
contribute to the ongoing struggle?
In short, a significant part of our comrades in Iran and Afghanistan are 
women and LGBTQI+. The ongoing struggles in Iran are in two main areas: 
one is the civil and public struggle to say no to the mandatory hijab 
and the repression for non-observance of the mandatory hijab by a large 
part of women in Iranian society, to which our comrades are also 
associated as a small part of Iranian female society. The second field 
of struggle is the secret struggle, which includes most of the struggle 
of the Federation's companions. in Afghanistan, since August 15, 2021. 
When the government handed over power to the Taliban, we witnessed the 
presence of Afghan women protesting. Two days later, on August 17, they 
took to the streets against the presence of the Taliban and, after that, 
the protesting women formed dozens of campaign groups against the 
Taliban. And we continue to support the struggle of women protesting 
against the Taliban, and the danger of excluding women from the presence 
of Afghan society is very serious, and our fellow Federation members 
have supported these struggles in many ways.

Religion (as a human institution of oppression in the name of God) is a 
central theme of anarchist reflection and criticism of the power it 
represents. What do you think about this and how can you position 
yourself in relation to this issue?
Gods don't exist, we exist. Religious oppression is not oppression and 
exploitation of gods, but of people, of a class of people. This class of 
oppressors is the priestly class, a proprietary class that possesses the 
original and most exclusive property of all: the sacred, the divine. The 
sacred can be anything: land, knowledge, craft, custom, ritual, thought, 
feeling. Anything. However, the clergy class does not work, does not 
produce anything; the clergy imagine, ponder, demand, order, chastise 
and punish. We are the ones who work, strive, worry, sweat and sacrifice 
to fulfill their desires and turn their imagination into reality. The 
clergy create ethereal coins for us to speculate and gamble to gain a 
good and fulfilling life now, eternal happiness in the afterlife, or 
good karma for the next reincarnation. The outcome of our bet doesn't 
matter; the clergy who benefit from our work are always the big winners 
in the end. It doesn't take long to realize that religion created 
nothing; everything religion has has been taken, sabotaged, 
appropriated, stolen and corrupted. Most of our ancient and profound 
communal and anarchist customs, rituals and histories are now distorted 
into a complicated, artificial and contradictory mess of half-truths 
just to reproduce religion.
Yet after centuries of religiously fabricated consent, we seem to have 
forgotten. Now, many see religion as an integral part of our cultures, 
rather than the saboteur and thief that it truly is. The lower echelon 
priests and faithful are doing the heavy lifting for the upper echelon, 
some with inspiration to rule once in power, others to do good in the 
world, and others to bring about change. So religions old and new are 
presenting themselves as the next big thing, the solution, the 
salvation. Then there are the spiritual, those whose relationship with 
religion has deteriorated but have not radically freed themselves from 
concepts of the divine and sacred, protecting and reproducing religion 
once again. It's as if we are describing capitalism or the state, but 
religion predates both. Perhaps religion is the institution that 
introduced other forms of hierarchy into reality. Many people do not 
want to face these facts about religion, insisting that there are true 
egalitarian religions. But power reveals, and it revealed that religion 
would be authoritarian whenever it was given the opportunity, whenever 
it finally eroded the community's resistance to authority, everywhere, 
every time. We, at the Era Anarchist Federation, cannot afford to 
justify religion with the same excuses that liberals use to justify the 
State and capitalism. For us, the supreme leader, the congress, the 
judges, the lawyers, the police, the military, the landowners, the 
bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, are a big bunch of rapists, 
misogynists, child murderers and many others of these are mullahs, part 
of the clergy class. This is the reality of a theocratic state. In the 
face of all this, our position is simple: overthrow the theocratic 
state, overthrow its ideology, overthrow its religion and salt the 
ideological soil from which these nightmares grew so that no one will 
ever live through these eras of terror again.

What organizations are you connected with on a regional level? Is it 
difficult to create tangible solidarity relationships?
In these 15 years, we have had a type of transversal and case-by-case 
cooperation with various anarchist groups in different parts of the 
world, including in Iran and Afghanistan. The possible formation of the 
two anarchist networks we mentioned could lead us to the next 
sustainable movements. In fact, this is a joint regional organization 
that enables more concrete cooperation.

Do you have any relationship with the rebel Kurdish community in Syria? 
What do you think of their struggle, which is generally based on 
refusing a statist solution?
In the past, we helped with the possibility of some Iranian anarchists 
participating in the struggles in Rojava. We are in contact with some 
Syrian anarchists abroad and we are also in contact with Rojava-related 
Kurdish activists abroad. Naturally, we support the struggle of the 
Kurds of Rojava with the same explanation you gave and for us it is a 
point of hope from the real examples of non-governmental societies. Such 
as, for example, the struggle of the Zapatistas in Mexico or the free 
commune of Barbacha in the Kabylia region, in Algeria, which are areas 
of interest. Especially for anarchists.

In theoretical terms, which line of organization would you adopt, more 
synthesizing (Faure or Volin) or more platformist (Makhno and Arshinov)? 
Do these differences in organizational terms make sense to you?
We are not platformists and we are syntheticists, but in the field of 
organization, we naturally have our own organization. The Era Anarchist 
Federation, as a synthetic federation, does not only cooperate with 
various trends that follow religion, capitalism, nationalism and 
pacifism and, therefore, is formed by various self-organizations in the 
form of groups, collectives, networks, unions and individuals with 
independence of action, thought and organic and complex relationships. 
In this way, from individualists (and anarcho-individualists, who often 
see themselves as individuals in relation to the federation) to 
anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-primitivists, through 
anarcho-transhumanists and so on, they consider their activities to be 
related and are members of the Era Anarchist Federation.

Currently, on an international level, what do you think of the support 
you receive from other organizations? Which one do you most relate to?

The support we received. It was from the international anarchist 
movement, which has been very different, and whenever we needed specific 
help, individual anarchists and anarchist organizations spared us no 
help. In fact, anarchists on a global level actually act as a single 
body, and the simple fact of being an anarchist is enough to connect 
anarchists to each other, and the fact that we are in different 
geographies with different languages does not prevent anarchists from 
cooperating with each other. with others. Our communication at any point 
depends on the activity we carry out together, but we must find a way to 
establish permanent communication with a part of the anarchist movement 
in all corners of the world.

Finally, do you have any requests to transfer to organized Brazilian 
anarchist movements? How can we help you?
Naturally, these interviews, their translation and publication are 
considered a contribution to the anarchist movement in Iran and 
Afghanistan, as is the interview we will soon do with you, comrades, 
about our anarchist movement in the region. The world will be 
transferred. This interview with you led us to think about more 
continuous cooperation with part of the anarchist movement. We just have 
to see how we can create the foundation for this. In the end, we would 
like to thank you for planning this interview with really good questions.

https://cclamazonia.noblogs.org/post/2024/04/24/entrevista-com-a-federacao-anarquista-era-ira-e-afeganistao/
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