By Ryan Fatica
Atlanta, GA — Georgia prosecutors have indicted 61 individuals under the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, for their alleged participation in the #StopCopCity movement and for, as they put it, promoting “virulent anarchist ideals.”
The indictments were handed down by a grand jury last week but only made public this morning after being discovered by the Atlanta Community Press Collective. The same grand jury also indicted five individuals on Domestic Terrorism charges and indicted three Atlanta Solidarity Fund activists on 15 counts each of money laundering.
“Defend the Atlanta Forest is a self-identified coalition and enterprise of militant anarchists, eco-activists, and community organizers,” the indictment reads.
“Based in Atlanta, this anarchist, anti-police, and environmental activism organization coordinates, advertises, and conducts ‘direct action’ designed to prevent the construction of the Atlanta Police Public Safety Training Center and Shadowbox Studios (previously known as Blackhall Studios) and promote anarchist ideas.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office is prosecuting the cases, which are filed in Fulton County, where Atlanta is the county seat.
The indictment even includes a short history on anarchism and anarchist organizing principles, at least as the prosecutors understand them. The narrative entitled “Anarchy Background of the Defend the Atlanta Forest” reads like a high school book report on the history of anarchism and is reminiscent of political prosecutions of activists and radicals such as the Haymarket anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, and prosecutions during the Red Scare.
The “major factor in anarchist mutual aid,” explained Georgia prosecutors, “is the absence of government and the absence of hierarchy. Indeed, an anarchist belief relies on the notion that once government is abolished, individuals will rely on mutual aid to exist. In doing so, anarchists believe that individuals will work together and voluntarily contribute their own resources to insure that each individual has its own needs met.”
Prosecutors also explained, at length, that “the anarchist ideology” also includes violence, including violence targeting law enforcement. The indictment did not include any statistics about the number of people believed to have been harmed or killed by anarchists. The number of people killed each year by law enforcement, on the other hand, is well known.
[Photo collage by Unicorn Riot]
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