Radical Cross Stitch

Check out this cool action from the Revolutionary Craft Womyn of Addington in solidarity of the ANZAC Ploughshares who gained access and casued serious damage to the Waihopai Spy Base in New Zealand. Waihopai is a key component of the global US spy system known as Echelon.

Here’s the report from Aotearoa Indymedia:

We all had a wonderful time, drinking cups of tea, holding banners, and giving biscuits and short lectures on NZ-US warlinks to friendly tourists. Green MP Nandor Tanczos joined us for a cuppa briefly, who was randomly cycling past.
We got far more mainstream media attention than expected, guess the quirkiness of our action and topical nature of issue got them interested. This reflects how effective the ploughshares action was in bringing this issue up for public debate. Hopefully our attempt to bring US military base at Harewood into mix had some effect too.

We signed three cards for Sam, Adrian and Peter to express our heartfelt appreciation for their inspirational non-violent direct action,

Much love,
from one of the revolutionary craft womyn of Addington

And they managed to get some mainstream press coverage

An obsessive cross-stitcher, an expert crocheter and a quilting guru talked politics over cups of tea yesterday morning.

I reckon ten bonus points for getting nana-core into the article!

And of course my absolute maddest respect to Sam, Adi and Peter for their awesome courage in this action. Not only have they brought attention to the blatant hypocrisy of the New Zealand Government for not being a part of the invasion of Iraq, yet actively being a part of the intelligence gathering to fight this senseless war. They also succeeded in directly acting to stop the functionality of the facility. It was only a day and only a million dollars in damage which is a drop in the military industrial complex ocean. But the symbolism of their action was priceless.

Kia kaha crew, rage and solidarity.

xox