Content:

Join us for an event at Haymarket House with author Peter Gelderloos in conversation with Timmy Châu about his new book, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us, from Pluto Press. This event is cosponsored by Pilsen Community Books, Pluto Press and Haymarket.

There is an apparent lack of options for effective resistance in the face of ecological crisis, police repression, and white supremacy. Here, Peter Gelderloos brings to life some of the conflictive and subversive events of the last couple of decades in a radical new criticism of nonviolence.

The book weaves history, vignettes, interviews, and personal reflections to show how our movements cannot pass on lessons learned from one generation to the next. Learning from the antiracist rebellions triggered by police murders from Minneapolis to Bristol and the climate campaigns that often fail to center an anticolonial consciousness, we can understand nonviolence as a symptom of social amnesia, an inability to remember our places in this world and what we have learned from past episodes of resistance. Cautioning against future waves of pacification and forgetting, this book urges us to collectivize memory and develop methods to fight for survival.

'This striking book reveals collective memories of freedom struggles, despite attempts to distort or steal our inheritance'—Joy James, editor of Beyond Cop Cities

'As more and more people are mobilizing against war, genocide, poverty, and extraction, this book is right on time'—Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid

**We ask that all in-person attendees wear masks in the event space during the program for the health and well-being of the speakers and other guests. We will have a reception afterwards with light refreshments and books available for purchase.***

Speakers:

Peter Gelderloos is a writer and social movement participant. He is the author of The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Non-Violence, and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation. He has contributed chapters to anthologies Keywords for Radicals and Riots and Militant Occupations. His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Greek and Serbo-Croat.

Timmy Châu is a community organizer based in Chicago. He is an active participant of social movements and student of abolitionist and anti-imperialist resistance.